Abstract
Like Fichte, Schelling strives to overcome Kant’s dualisms. Unsatisfied with Fichte’s appeal to the I’s activity, Schelling attempts to derive both the subject and the object from what he takes to be a higher ground, which he calls the Absolute. Although the Absolute is necessarily opaque to consciousness, he proposes two methods of philosophical investigation: a negative philosophy that examines the development of the world as it is comprehended by reason, and a positive philosophy that apprehends the Absolute on its own (nonrational) terms. Schelling thus presents us with two alternatives: either the ground of consciousness is ignored in favor of consciousness itself, or it can be known directly, but without using reason to understand it. In appealing to nonrational intuition, he attempts to transcend the limits of reason and make claims about the basis of existence, but because they transcend the limits of reason, those claims cannot be rationally justified. Schelling is grappling with the epistemic problem of how consciousness can understand its own origins, but in doing so he runs afoul of Kant’s critique of metaphysics.
Who is able to describe the first stirrings of a nature that lacks consciousness, a nature that does not know itself? Who can unveil the secret birthplace of existence?
F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1813)
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Notes
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A15/B29.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 40.
F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 58.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–1861), I/3:284. Subsequent references to Schellings sämmtliche Werke will be abbreviated as SW.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B406–32.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 29.
F. W. J. Schelling, Grundlegung der Positiven Philosophie: Münchener Vorlesung WS 1832/33 under SS 1833, ed. Horst Fuhrmans (Turin: Bottega D’Erasmo, 1972), 99–100.
Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 22:34.
F. W. J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 169. Hegel makes a similar criticism of Jacobi.
See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3:251–53.
J. G. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 46–50. Fichte’s appeal to intellectual intuition is not completely misguided. He is trying to distinguish self-consciousness (transcendental apperception) from the consciousness of representations in inner sense (empirical apperception). The latter and not the former is subject to conditions for the possibility of experience, and thus self-consciousness is more like a direct intuiting than a representation.
See Robert B. Pippin, “Fichte’s Alleged Subjective, Psychological, One-Sided Idealism,” in The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 147–70.
Günter Gödde, Traditionslinien des “Unbewußten”: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1999), 58–59.
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 21.
Schelling says that only some people are able to do positive philosophy, because only some people apprehend their own freedom: “The positive philosophy is genuinely free philosophy: the person who does not will it may leave it alone” (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, II/3:132). Here Schelling echoes Fichte’s claim that only some people are able to understand and think along with the Wissenschaftslehre: “The kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends upon the kind of person one is …. Someone whose character is naturally slack or who has been enervated and twisted by spiritual servitude, scholarly self-indulgence, and vanity will never be able to raise himself to the level of idealism” (J. G. Fichte, “[First] Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (1797–1800), trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994], 20). For both of them, an absolutely free act is a crucial first step in philosophical contemplation, so it makes sense that it would be something that cannot be instilled in others. One must accomplish it oneself.
S. J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2012), 137.
F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, ed. and trans. Douglas W. Scott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 32.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 61.
Michael Theunissen, “Die Aufhebung des Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 83 (1976): 22.
Quoted in Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), 165–66.
Both Kant and Schelling offer some kind of compensation for the limitations of reason, with practical postulates and revelation, respectively. However, Schelling claims that we are capable of a kind of direct spiritual awareness or intellectual intuition beyond reason, something that Kant expressly disavows. The debate about whether Schelling can be properly called a metaphysician exceeds the scope of this chapter. Although Schelling’s relation to pantheism and metaphysics is complicated, he goes beyond the limits of the critical philosophy to establish a speculative (Christian) account of reality. See Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
and John Laughland, Schelling Versus Hegel: From German Idealism to Christian Metaphysics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
Jason M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 110.
Andrew Bowie, “The Philosophical Significance of Schelling’s Conception of the Unconscious,” in Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, ed. Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78.
Vincent A. McCarthy, Quest for a Philosophical Jesus: Christianity and Philosophy in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986), 219.
See also Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 72.
For critical assessments of Freud’s treatment of Dora, see especially Patrick J. Mahony, Freud’s Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996);
and Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic, 1992), 146–67.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), §16.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 366–67.
Tom Rockmore claims that Freud rejects the idea of a psychic reality that can be discovered, on the model of chemistry or astronomy. Instead, we only have access to the unconscious indirectly, through interpretation: “it is possible to know psychic mind-dependent reality, although in knowing one does not know psychic reality as it is other than as a construction and then as a reconstruction” (Tom Rockmore, “Freud’s Dream Theory and Social Constructivism,” in Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis through Philosophy, ed. Jon Mills [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004], 28). Rockmore uses this position to defend the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Despite its empirical unfalsifiability, “cognitive objectivity is corroborated … within the analytic situation in the interaction between analyst and patient” (31). On the internal validity of the narrative that develops within analysis, see also Cavell, Psychoanalytic Mind, 83–103.
There is a debate in the secondary literature about whether neurotic repetition is irrational. Some theorists claim that such behavior can be accounted for using ordinary explanations that appeal to reasons, because a neurotic’s behavior makes sense given her (admittedly misguided) beliefs. Examples of the two sides of this debate include Peter Alexander, “Rational Behaviour and Psychoanalytic Explanation,” in Philosophers on Freud: New Evaluations, ed. Richard Wollheim (New York: Jason Aronson, 1977), 305–21; and Theodore Mischel, “Concerning Rational Behavior and Psychoanalytic Explanation,” in Philosophers on Freud, 322–31.
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 93.
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© 2013 Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe
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Altman, M.C., Coe, C.D. (2013). Schelling: Methodologies of the Unconscious. In: The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137263322_4
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