Schelling’s substantive reinterpretation of the transcendental turn: beyond method

ABSTRACT

Several factors, including but not limited to his investments in Naturphilosophie and Spinoza, make it hard to determine the extent to which Schelling remains on track with Kant’s transcendental project. My aim here is to isolate Schelling’s conception of transcendental method in the first decade of his philosophical development, a topic that has received little direct and extended discussion. Schelling’s 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism stands out as of particular importance, but no single text can be regarded as Schelling’s definitive statement of his views on the question of method in his early period, necessitating a diachronic approach. I argue that, though in important respects Schelling’s concerns diverge from those of Kant and Fichte, Schelling should not be regarded as abandoning the transcendental framework, and is best understood as attempting to work out what is involved at the original point of adoption of the transcendental standpoint. This entails, I argue, exchanging transcendental philosophy’s claim to a distinctive method for a substantive interpretation of the transcendental turn.

KEYWORDS:

• Fichte
• Kant
• Naturphilosophie
• Schelling
• transcendental

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the referees of the BJHP for extremely helpful comments and suggestions.

ORCID

Sebastian Gardner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3066-5903

Notes

1 For helpful discussion, see Rockmore and Breazeale, Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, Pt. I.

2 As defined in the Critique of Pure Reason at A782-94/B810-22.

3 In what sense if any Hegel may be counted a transcendental thinker is disputed but not presently at issue: Hegel’s claim for the comprehensiveness and exhaustiveness of his Logic suffices to draw the relevant contrast with Schelling.

4 See Fichte’s letters to Schelling of 15 November 1800, 31 May–7[8?] August 1801, and 8 October 1801, in Vater and Wood, Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling, 41–3, 54–9, 66–8.

5 For more detailed discussion, see Beiser, German Idealism, Pt. IV; Esposito, Schelling’s Idealism and Philosophy of Nature; Nassar, The Romantic Absolute, Pt. III; and Sandkaulen-Bock, Ausgang vom Unbedingten.

6 Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt and Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, transl. On the Possibility of a Form of All Philosophy and Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, or On the Unconditional in Human Knowledge, in Unconditional in Human Knowledge. References to Schelling are first to pagination of the translation, from which quotations are taken, and then in square brackets to volume and page number of his Sämmtliche Werke.

7 See Schelling’s letter to Hegel, 6 January 1795, Aus Schellings Leben, 73.

8 Who are referred to explicitly at the beginning of the Formschrift, 38–9 [I 88–9].

9 One might consider this implied by what is said in the Formschrift, 43, 44 [I 94, 96].

10 The problem resurfaces in System of Transcendental Idealism (STI), 19–21 [III 358–60].

11 Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre. Regarding systematic form see 109–10 [I 48–51].

12 The principle must be ‘certain in itself, through itself, and for its own sake’ (108 [I 48]); the proper touchstone is something which the subject ‘really does know and can know’ (102 [I 39]). See also the Second Preface (1798), 97 [I 32–3].

13 The ‘magic circle’ is what grounds the ‘absolute evidence’ of the highest Grundsatz, hence it is strictly distinct from it (Formschrift, 43, 45 [I 94, 97]).

14 Goethe’s Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, with its theory of the Urpflanze, was published in 1790.

15 Described as a ‘history of self-consciousness’, composed of a ‘graduated sequence of intuitions’ (STI, 2 [III 331]).

16 STI, 60–72 [III 411–26] shows how Schelling’s transcendental method departs from Fichte: productive intuition, Produciren or produktiven Anschauung, replaces Fichtean Setzen, and what is produced is the thing in itself, yielding ‘two opposites really opposed to each other’ as the two factors in intuition.

17 Critique of Pure Reason, B166–8, concerning the idea of a Präformationssystem of pure reason.

18 Schelling is, note, locating the same fault in Fichte as Kant locates in the Präformationssystem (and, incidentally, that Maimon located in Kant): namely that it leaves me only ‘able to say that’, due to my subjective organization, ‘I am so constituted that I cannot think this representation otherwise’; which is ‘what the sceptic most desires’ (B168).

19 Which Schelling calls ‘eine wirkliche [Akt der] Construktion der Objekte’: STI, 3, 13 [III 333, 350].

20 In briefest summary: regulativity may define the status of certain principles in accordance with which scientific research should proceed, but it cannot coherently pertain to the philosophical theory of nature, for to approach Nature ‘as if X’ just is to affirm Nature’s intrinsic constitutional X-warrantingness; which it is the job of metaphysics to explicate. See Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797, 2nd expanded edn. 1803), II 187–200 and 291–5. For further discussion see my ‘German Idealism, Classical Pragmatism’, 22–45.

21 A concept which Schelling does not repudiate in the manner of Fichte but regards as in need of re-analysis, to strip it of its unknowability: e.g. Ichschrift, 79–80 [I 173].

22 Initially in the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (1801).

23 System of Philosophy in General and of the Philosophy of Nature in Particular (1804) [extract], in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, 141–50 [VI 137–51].

24 To be mentioned in particular is Schelling’s Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (1795), which provides an alternative approach to the whole topic of Schelling and transcendentalism, but requires independent treatment.

25 Indicative of Schelling’s stance are his remarks on ‘absolute skepticism’, STI, 7–8 [III 343–4].

26 See STI, 3–4, 10–11 [III 332–3, 347]. In Part Four Schelling explains how theoretical and practical consciousness are at once interdependent and differentiated; see esp. STI, 156–9 [III 533–8].

27 That these come apart is, we saw, the crux of Schelling’s system in STI. The Ichschrift proceeds with detours – e.g. Schelling’s insistence that the principle in question is ‘not at all objective’, 66 [I 155] – but has the same upshot.

28 See the Formschrift, 45 [I 96], and Ichschrift, 84 [I 179].

29 See my ‘Kant’s Practical Postulates’, 36–9.

30 Schelling broaches the problem in STI, 32 [III 375–6].

31 See my ‘Thought’s Indebtedness to Being’.

32 See Dews, Positive and Negative Philosophy.

33 Schelling’s anti-methodologism begins in the Fifth of his Philosophische Briefe [I 300–7].