latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to
Aristotle and the Gnostics. In the first period the absolute for Schelling
is creative nature; in the second, the identity of opposites; in the third
it is an antemundane process which advances from the not-yet-present of
the contraries to their overcoming. In neither of these advances is it
Schelling's intention to break with his previous teachings, but in each
case only to add a supplement. That which has hitherto been the whole is
retained as a part. The philosophy of nature takes its place beside the
completed Fichtean transcendental philosophy, with equal rights, though
with a reversed procedure; then the theory of identity assumes a place
above both; finally, a positive (existential) philosophy is added to the
previous negative (rational) philosophy.
%1a. Philosophy of Nature.%
Schelling agrees with Fichte that philosophy is transcendental science,
the doctrine of the conditions of consciousness, and has to answer the
question, What must take place in order that knowledge may arise? They
agree, further, that these conditions of knowledge are necessary acts,
outgoings of an active original ground which is not yet conscious self, but
seeks to become such, and that the material world is the product of these
actions. Nature exists in order that the ego may develop. But while Fichte
correctly understood the purpose of nature, to help intelligence into
being, he failed to recognize the dignity of nature, for he deprived it of
all self-dependence, all life of its own, all generative power, and treated
it merely as a dead tool, as a passive, merely posited non-ego. Nature
is not a board which the original ego nails up before itself in order,
striking against it, to be driven back upon itself, to be compelled to
reflection, and thereby to become theoretical ego; in order, further,
working over the non-ego, and transforming it, to exercise its practical
activity: but it is a ladder on which spirit rises to itself. Spirit
develops out of nature; nature itself has a spiritual element in it; it
is undeveloped, slumbering, unconscious, benumbed intelligence. By
transferring to nature the power of self-position or of being subject,
Schelling exalts the drudge of the Science of Knowledge to the throne.
The threefold division, "infinite original activity--
nature or
object--individual ego or subject," remains as in Fichte, only that the
first member is not termed pure ego, but nature, yet creative nature,
_natura naturans_. Schelling's aim is to show how from the object a subject
arises, from the existent something represented, from the representable a
representer, from nature an ego. He could only hope to solve this problem
if he conceived natural objects--in the highest of which, man, he makes
conscious spirit break forth or nature intuit itself--as themselves the
products of an original subject, of a creative ground striving toward
consciousness. For him also doing is more original than being. It would not
be exact, therefore, to define the difference between Fichte and Schelling
by saying that, with the former, nature proceeds from the ego, and with the
latter the ego, from nature. It is rather true that with them both nature
and spirit are alike the products of a third and higher term, which seeks
to become spirit, and can accomplish this only by positing nature. In the
Science of Knowledge, it is true, this higher ground is conceived as an
ethical, in the Philosophy of Nature as a physical, power, although one
framed for intelligence; in the former, moreover, the _natura naturata_
appears as the position once for all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as
a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing
intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to
reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds.
Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially
identical: "That which is posited _out of_ consciousness is in its essence
the same as that which is posited _in_ consciousness also." Therefore
"the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the
preliminary stage, not the antithesis, of spirit; history, a continuation
of physical becoming; the parallelism between the ideal and the real
development-series--these are ideas from Herder which Schelling introduces
into the transcendental philosophy. The Kantio-Fichtean moralism, with
its sharp contraposition of nature and spirit, is limited in the
_Naturphilosophie_ by Herder's physicism.
"Nature _is a priori_" (everything individual in it is pre-determined by
the whole, by the Idea of a nature in general); hence the forms of nature
can be deduced from the concept of nature. The philosopher creates nature
anew, he constructs it. Speculative physics considers nature as _subject_,
becoming, productivity (not, like empirical science, as object, being,
product), and for this purpose it needs, instead of individualizing
reflection, an intuition directed to the whole. To this productive nature,
as to the absolute ego of Fichte, are ascribed two opposite activities,
one expansive or repulsive, and one attractive, and on these is based the
universal law of _polarity_. The absolute productivity strives toward an
infinite product, which it never attains, because apart from arrest no
product exists. At definite points a check must be given it in order that
something knowable may arise. Thus every product in nature is the result
of a positive, centrifugal, accelerating, universalizing force, and a
negative, limiting, retarding, individualizing one. The endlessness of the
creative activity manifests itself in various ways: in the striving for
development on the part of every product, in the preservation of the genus
amid the disappearance of individuals, in the endlessness of the series of
products. Nature's creative impulse is inexhaustible, it transcends every
product. Qualities are points of arrest in the one universal force of
nature; all nature is a connected development. Because of the opposition in
the nature-ground between the stimulating and the retarding activity, the
law of duality everywhere rules. To these two forces, however, still a
third factor must be added as their copula, which determines the relation
or measure of their connection. This is the source of the threefold
division of the Philosophy of Nature. The magnet with its union of opposite
polar forces is the type of all configuration in nature.
With Fichte's synthetic method and Herder's naturalistic principles
Schelling combines Kantian ideas, especially Kant's dynamism (matter is
a force-product),[1] and his view of the organic (organisms are
self-productive beings, and are regarded by us as ends in themselves,
because of the interaction between their members and the whole). The three
organic functions sensibility, irritability, and reproduction, on the other
hand, Schelling took from Kielmeyer, whose address _On the Relations of
the Organic Forces_, 1793, excited great attention. The concept of life is
dominant in Schelling's theory of nature. The organic is more original than
the inorganic; the latter must be explained from the former; that which is
dead must be considered as a product of departing life.
No less erroneous
than the theory of a magic vital force is the mechanical interpretation,
which looks on life merely as a chemical phenomenon. The dead, mechanical
and chemical, forces are merely the negative conditions of life; to them
there must be added as a positive force a vital stimulus external to the
individual, which continually rekindles the conflict between the opposing
activities on which the vital process depends. Life consists, that is, in
the perpetual prevention of the equilibrium which is the object of the
chemical process. This constant disturbance proceeds from "universal
nature," which, as the common principle of organic and inorganic nature, as
that which determines them for each other, which founds a pre-established
harmony between them, deserves the name of the world-soul. Schelling
thus recognizes a threefold nature: organized, inorganic, and universal
organizing (according to Harms, cosmical) nature, of which the two former
arise from the third and are brought by it into connection and harmony. (As
Schelling here takes an independent middle course between the mechanical
explanation of life and the assumption of a specific vital force, so in
all the burning physical questions of the time he seeks to rise above the
contending parties by means of mediating solutions.
Thus, in the question
of "single or double electricity," he ranges himself neither on the side of
Franklin nor on that of his opponents; in regard to the problem of light,
endeavors to overcome the antithesis between Newton's emanation theory and
the undulation theory of Euler; and, in his chapter on combustion, attacks
the defenders of phlogiston as well as those who deny it).
[Footnote 1: Schelling terms his philosophy of nature dynamic atomism,
since it posits pure intensities as the simple (atoms), from which
qualities are to be explained.]
Schelling's philosophy of nature[1] proposes to itself three chief
problems: the construction of general, indeterminate, homogeneous
matter, with differences in density alone, of determinate, qualitatively
differentiated matter and its phenomena of motion or the dynamical process,
and of the organic process. For each of these departments of nature an
original force in universal nature is assumed--gravity, light, and their
copula, universal life. Gravity--this does not mean that which as the force
of attraction falls within the view of sensation, for it is the union of
attraction and repulsion--is the principle of corporeality, and produces
in the visible world the different conditions of aggregation in solids,
fluids, and gases. Light--this, too, is not to be confounded with actual
light, of which it is the cause--is the principle of the soul (from it
proceeds all intelligence, it is a spiritual potency, the "first subject"
in nature), and produces in the visible world the dynamical processes
magnetism, electricity, and chemism. The higher unity of gravity and
light is the copula or life, the principle of the organic, of animated
corporeality or the processes of growth and reproduction, irritability,
and sensibility.
[Footnote 1: This is contained in the following treatises: _Ideas for a
Philosophy of Nature, 1797; On the World-soul, 1798; First Sketch of a
System of the Philosophy of Nature, 1799; Universal Deduction of the
Dynamical Process or the Categories of Physics_ (in the _Zeitschrift für
spekulative Physik_) 1800. In the above exposition, however, the modified
philosophy of nature of the second period has also been taken into
account.]
General _matter_ or the filling of space, arises from the co-operation of
three forces: the centrifugal, which manifests itself as repulsion (first
dimension), the centripetal, manifested as attraction (second dimension),
and the synthesis of the two, manifested as gravity (third dimension).
These forces are raised by light to a higher potency, and then make their
appearance as the causes of the _dynamical_ process or of the specific
differences of matter. The linear function of magnetism is the condition
of coherence; the surface force of electricity, the basis of the qualities
perceivable by sense; the tri-dimensional force of the chemical process, in
which the two former are united, produces the chemical qualities. Galvanism
forms the transition to living nature, in which through the operation of
the "copula" these three dynamical categories are raised to _organic_
categories. To magnetism as the most general, and hence the lowest force,
corresponds reproduction (the formative impulse, as nutrition, growth, and
production, including the artistic impulse); electricity develops into
irritability or excitability; the higher analogue to the chemical process
as the most individual and highest stage is sensibility or the capacity
of feeling. (Such at least is Schelling's doctrine after Steffens had
convinced him of the higher dignity of that which is individual, whereas
at first he had made sensibility parallel with magnetism, and reproduction
with chemism, because the former two appear most seldom, and the latter
most frequently. Electricity and irritability always maintained their
intermediate position.) With the awakening of feeling nature has attained
its goal--intelligence. As inorganic substances are distinguished only by
relative degrees of repulsion and attraction, so the differentiation of
organisms is conditioned by the relation of the three vital functions: in
the lower forms reproduction predominates, then irritability gradually
increases, while in the highest forms both of these are subordinated to
sensibility. All species, however, are connected by a common life, all the
stages are but arrests of the same fundamental force.
This accentuation
of the unity of nature, which establishes a certain kinship between
Schelling's philosophy of nature and Darwinism, was a great idea, which
deserves the thanks of posterity in spite of such defects as its often
sportive, often heedlessly bold reasoning in details.
The parallelism of the potencies of nature, as we have developed it by
leaving out of account the numerous differences between the various
expositions of the _Naturphilosophie_, may be shown by a table:
I. UNIVERSAL NATURE. II. INORGANIC NATURE III.
ORGANIC NATURE.
(ORGANIZING)
3. Copula 3.
Organization
or Life. |
___^___ /Chemical \ G |
/Sensi- Man.
/ \ |Process (3d| a |
|bility. __^__
2. Light 2._Dynamical_|Dimen- | l | |
/ \
(Soul). _Process_. < sion) | v |
|Irritabi- Male
b. At- \ (Determi- |Electri- | a
|_|lity. (=Light)
traction.| nate |city (2d Di->n
|Animal.
>1. Gra- matter.) | mension.) | i |
| vity 1. Indeter- |Magnetism | s
|Repro- Female
a. Re- | (Body) minate |(1st Di- | m
|duction (-Gravity)
pulsion / _matter_. \ mension.) / \
Plant.
%1b. Transcendental Philosophy.%
The philosophy of nature explained the products of nature teleologically,
deduced them from the concept or the mission of nature, by ignoring the
mechanical origin of physical phenomena and inquiring into the significance
of each stage in nature in view of this ideal meaning of the whole. It asks
what is the outcome of the chemical process for the whole of nature, what
is given by electricity, by magnetism, etc.--what part of the general aim
of nature is attained, is realized through this or that group of phenomena.
The philosophy of spirit given in the _System of Transcendental Idealism_,
1800, finds itself confronted by corresponding questions concerning the
phenomena of intelligence, of morals, and of art. Here again Schelling does
not trace out the mechanics of the soul-life, but is interested only in the
meaning, in the teleological significance of the psychical functions.
His aim is a constructive psychology in the Fichtean sense, a history of
consciousness, and the execution of his design as well closely follows the
example of the _Wissenschaftslehre_.
Since truth is the agreement of thought and its object, every cognition
necessarily implies the coming together of a subjective and an objective
factor. The problem of this coming together may be treated in two ways.
With the philosophy of nature we may start from the object and observe how
intelligence is added to nature. The transcendental philosophy takes the
opposite course, it takes its position with the subject, and asks, How
is there added to intelligence an object corresponding to it? The
transcendental philosopher has need of intellectual intuition in order to
recognize the original object-positing actions of the ego, which remain
concealed from common consciousness, sunk in the outcome of these acts. The
_theoretical_ part of the system explains the representation of objective
reality (the feeling connected with certain representations that we are
compelled to have them), from pure self-consciousness, whose opposing
moments, a real and an ideal force, limit each other by degrees,--and
follows the development of spirit in three periods ("epochs"). The first
of these extends from sensation, in which the ego finds itself limited, to
productive intuition, in which a thing in itself is posited over against
the ego and the phenomenon between the two; the second, from this point to
reflection (feeling of self, outer and inner intuition together with space
and time, the categories of relation as the original categories); the
third, finally, through judgment, wherein intuition and concept are
separated as well as united, up to the absolute act of will. Willing is
the continuation and completion of intuition;[1]
intuition was unconscious
production, willing is conscious production. It is only through action that
the world becomes objective for us, only through interaction with other
active intelligences that the ego attains to the consciousness of a real
external world, and to the consciousness of its freedom.
The _practical_
part follows the will from impulse (the feeling of contradiction between
the ideal and the object) through the division into moral law and resistant
natural impulse up to arbitrary will. Observations on legal order, on the
state, and on history are added as "supplements." The law of right, by
which unlawful action is directed against itself, is not a moral, but a
natural order, which operates with blind necessity. The state, like law, is
a product of the genus, and not of individuals. The ideal of a cosmopolitan
legal condition is the goal of _history_, in which caprice and conformity
to law are one, in so far as the conscious free action of individuals
subserves an unconscious end prescribed by the world-spirit. History is the
never completed revelation of the absolute (of the unity of the conscious
and the unconscious) through human freedom. We are co-authors in the
historical world-drama, and invent our own parts. Not until the third (the
religious) period, in which he reveals himself as
"providence," will God
_be_; in the past (the tragical) period, in which the divine power was felt
as "fate," and in the present (the mechanical) period, in which he appears
as the "plan of nature," God is not, but is only _becoming_.
[Footnote 1: With this transformation of the antithesis between knowledge
and volition into a mere difference in degree, Schelling sinks back to the
standpoint of Leibnitz. In all the idealistic thinkers who start from Kant
we find the endeavor to overcome the Critical dualism of understanding and
will, as also that between intellect and sensibility.
Schiller brings the
contrary impulses of the ego into ultimate harmonious union in artistic
activity. Fichte traces them back to a common ground; Schelling combines
both these methods by extolling art as a restoration of the original
identity. Hegel reduces volition to thought, Schopenhauer makes intellect
proceed from will.]
An interesting supplement to the Fichtean philosophy is furnished by the
third, the _aesthetic_, part of the transcendental idealism, which makes
use of Kant's theory of the beautiful in a way similar to that in which the
philosophy of nature had availed itself of his theory of the organic.
Art is the higher third in which the opposition between theoretical and
practical action, the antithesis of subject and object, is removed; in
which cognition and action, conscious and unconscious activity, freedom and
necessity, the impulse of genius and reflective deliberation are united.
The beautiful, as the manifestation of the infinite in the finite, shows
the problem of philosophy, the identity of the real and the ideal, solved
in sensuous appearance. Art is the true organon and warrant of philosophy;
she opens up to philosophy the holy of holies, is for philosophy the
supreme thing, the revelation of all mysteries. Poesy and philosophy (the
aesthetic intuition of the artist and the intellectual intuition of
the thinker) are most intimately related; they were united in the old
mythology--why should not this repeat itself in the future?
%2. System of Identity.%
The assertion which had already been made in the first period that "nature
and spirit are fundamentally the same," is intensified in the second into
the proposition, "The ground of nature and spirit, the absolute, is the
identity of the real and the ideal," and in this form is elevated into
a principle. As the absolute is no longer employed as a mere ground of
explanation, but is itself made the object of philosophy, the doctrine of
identity is added to the two co-ordinate disciplines, the philosophy of
nature and the philosophy of spirit, as a higher third, which serves as a
basis for them, and in Schelling's exposition of which several phases must
be distinguished.[1]
[Footnote 1: The philosophy of identity is given in the following
treatises: _Exposition of my System of Philosophy, 1801; Further
Expositions of the System of Philosophy, 1802; Bruno, or on the Divine and
Natural Principle of Things, 1803; Lectures on the Method of Academical
Study, 1803; Aphorisms by way of Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature,
Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature_ (both in the _Jahrbücher für
Medizin), 1806_. Besides these the following also bear on this doctrine:
the additions to the second edition of the _Ideas_, 1803, and the
_Exposition_, against Fichte, 1806.]
Following Spinoza, whom he at first imitated even in the geometrical method
of proof, Schelling teaches that there are two kinds of knowledge, the
philosophical knowledge of the reason and the confused knowledge of
the imagination, and, as objects of these, two forms of existence, the
infinite, undivided existence of the absolute, and the finite existence of
individual things, split up into multiplicity and becoming. The manifold
and self-developing things of the phenomenal world owe their existence
to isolating thought alone; they possess as such no true reality, and
speculation proves them void. While things appear particular to inadequate
representation, the philosopher views them _sub specie aeterni_, in their
_per se_, in their totality, in the identity, as Ideas.
To construe things
is to present them as they are in God. But in God all things are one;
in the absolute all is absolute, eternal, infinitude itself. (Accord-to
Hegel's parody, the absolute is the night, in which all cows are black.)
The world-ground appears as nature and spirit; yet in itself it is neither
the one nor the other, but the unity of both which is raised above all
contrariety, the indifference of objective and subjective. Although amid
the finitude of the things of the world the self-identity of the absolute
breaks up into a plurality of self-developing individual existences, yet