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ABSTRACT
If a problem is the collision between a system and a fact, Spinozism and German idealism’s greatest problem is the corpse. Life’s end is problematic for the denial of death’s qualitative difference from life and the affirmation of nature’s infinite purposiveness. In particular, German idealism exemplifies immortalism – the view that life is the unconditioned condition of all experience, including death. If idealism cannot explain the corpse, death is not grounded on life, which invites mortalism – the view that death is the unconditioned condition of experience. In “Philosophical Letters,” Schelling critiques idealism, arguing that death symbolizes the regulative ideal of a philosophical system’s derivation, our striving for which unifies our rational activity. I interpret Schelling’s critique as explaining how death puts philosophy into question, an idea he develops in the Freedom essay and Berlin lectures. Death is not a problem to be solved by a system, but represents philosophy’s highest yet unrealizable end.
Notes on contributor
G. Anthony Bruno is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University, prior to which he was a Faculty Lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bonn. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto.
Notes
1 See Spinoza (Citation2002), 1 App.
2 See Fichte (Citation1994a): “the only thing that exists in itself is reason, and individuality is something merely accidental. Reason is the end and personality is the means; the latter is merely a particular expression of reason, one that must increasingly be absorbed into the universal form of the same. For the Wissenschaftslehre, reason alone is eternal, whereas individuality must ceaselessly die off” (505); and Schelling (Citation1994a): “By virtue of the self-affirmation of the absolute, whereby the latter eternally conceives the universe in itself and is the universe itself, the particulars of the universe, too, are granted a double life, a life in the absolute – which is the life of the idea, and which accordingly was also characterized as the dissolution of the finite in the infinite and of the particular in the universal – and a life in itself – which, however, is only proper to the [particular] merely to the extent that it is simultaneously dissolved into the universe, [for] in its separation from the life in God the latter is a mere semblance of life” (6:187); and Hegel (Citation1977): “the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself” (§32); and (Citation1969): “In the genus process, the separated individualities of individual life perish; the negative identity in which the genus returns into itself, while it is on the one hand the process of generating individuality, is on the other hand the sublating of it, and is thus the genus coming together with itself, the universality of the Idea in process of becoming for itself. In copulation the immediacy of the living individuality perishes; the death of this life is the procession of spirit” (12.191).
3 Whether the Spinozist should accept this challenge is, of course, debatable.
4 For a more complete account of Schelling’s critique of Fichte than I can offer here, see Bruno (Citation2014).
5 This threat is first voiced by Jacobi. Although he does not coin “nihilism” until his “Open Letter to Fichte” (1799), he discusses annihilation in Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn (1785, 1789), analysing the concepts – absolute grounding, infinite efficient causation, the absence of final causes – that will inform his neologism; see Jacobi (Citation1994), 189, 209–210, 362; and compare David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (1815), 317–318. While Jacobi attributes nihilism to Fichte in the “Open Letter,” his initial target is Spinoza. In his view, Spinozism entails nihilism because it explains things by efficient causes, which comprehensively entails mechanism, which entails that final causation or purposiveness is incoherent (362).
6 See Fichte (Citation1994a), 530n. See also (Citation2000): “One would hope that these two quite distinct concepts, which are contrasted here with sufficient clarity, will no longer be confused with one another” (54).
7 For an account of the explanatory role served by intellectual intuition during Schelling’s identity philosophy, see Bruno (Citation2013).
8 Most scholars overlook this when citing Hegel (Citation1977, §16), whose famous bullet Schelling dodges before and after the fact: “One does not even yet have [the existence of the universal subject-object] as something which is really thought, that is, as something which has been logically realized; it is rather from the very beginning merely what is wanted; ‘the pistol from which it is fired’ is the mere wanting of that which is, which, though, in contradiction with not being able to gain possession of that which is, with not being able to bring it to a halt, is immediately carried away into the progressing and pulling movement, in which being behaves until the end as that which is never realized, and must first be realized” (Citation1994c, 151).
9 Compare Schelling (Citation2000): “There is no consciousness without something that is at the same time excluded and contracted. That which is conscious excludes that of which it is conscious as not itself. Yet it must again attract it precisely as that of which it is conscious as itself, only in a different form” (I/8:262).
10 Compare Schelling (Citation1994a): “Without opposition [there is] no life. Indeed, such [opposition] inheres in man and in all existence” (I/7:435).
11 See Schelling (Citation1980b): “Either our knowledge has no reality at all and must be an eternal round of propositions [that is, circularity], each dissolving into its opposite [that is, arbitrariness], a chaos in which no element can crystallize [that is, infinite regress] – or else there must be an ultimate point of reality on which everything depends, from which all firmness and all form of our knowledge springs” (I/1:162).
12 See Schelling (Citation1980b): “[Reinhold’s] theorem of consciousness automatically vanishes as a principle of philosophy. For it is clear that through it neither subject nor object is determined, except logically, so that the theorem has no real meaning, at least as long as it is supposed to be the ultimate principle. No philosopher has pointed out more emphatically this lack of reality in the theorem of consciousness than Salomon Maimon” (I/1:208n).
13 Hence, Schelling (Citation1980a) assigns scepticism an essential philosophical function (I/1:306–307). Contrast his position in the identity philosophy (Citation2001, 4:366).
14 Speaking of the author of “Of the I,” Schelling (Citation1980c), distancing himself from his early affirmation of Fichtean intellectual intuition, says in the “Anti-Critique” (1796): “Still less does he think of a universally valid philosophy, a philosophy of which only a wiseacre should boast … . However, since the philosophical public seemed to have ears only for first principles, his own first principle in regard to his readers had to be only a postulate [nur ein Postulat seyn]. It demands the same free action as that with which, as he is convinced, all philosophizing must begin. The first postulate of all philosophy, to act freely, seemed to him as necessary as the first postulate of geometry, to draw a straight line” (I/1:243).
15 Schelling immediately adds: “while dogmatism uses it merely as a constitutive principle for our vocation.” Since idealism and dogmatism’s common vocation is to strive endlessly for what dogmaticism illegitimately appropriates as knowledge, dogmatism’s association with a “constitutive principle” in this passage connotes nothing negative. It is noteworthy that, in the Marti translation of the “Letters,” Dogmaticismus is consistently mistranslated as “dogmatism,” for this obscures both the text’s pluralist thrust and the term’s importance for the anti-completeness argument Schelling revisits after the identity philosophy. Also noteworthy is that F. I. Niethammer, editor of the Philosophisches Journal in which the “Letters” appeared, changed the text’s original title, which was “Philosophical Letters on Dogmaticism and Criticism.” Given that dogmaticism lays claim to a doctrine, whereas criticism and dogmatism authentically eschew this as beyond the limits of critique – and given that Schelling ardently defends this Kantian distinction (I/1:301) – we might philosophically translate the text’s original title as “Philosophical Letters on Doctrine and Critique.”
16 See Schelling’s (Citation1969) Erlangen lectures (1820/1821): “In man there is no objective bringing forth [of the absolute subject] but rather just ideal imitation … . In him there is only knowledge … . The absolute subject is only there to the extent to which I do not make it an object, i.e., do not know it, renounce knowledge” (38).
17 Compare Gabriel (Citation2009) on the contingency of necessity (51–52).
18 Hence Schelling’s (Citation2007) charge that “the God of pure idealism, as well as the God of pure realism, is necessarily an impersonal being, of which the concepts of Spinoza and Fichte are the clearest proofs” (I/7:395). Fichte’s idealism, no less than Spinoza’s realism, depersonalizes necessity.
19 Contrast Spinozistic and Fichtean depersonalization, which purports to reconcile freedom and necessity. Spinoza (Citation2002) analyses them from the concept of substance (1Def7). Fichte (Citation1994a) identifies them in the act of intellectual intuition (I: 445). For both, freedom and necessity coincide at a system’s ground.
20 Compare Heidegger (Citation1985): “The question of the compatibility of system and freedom … is not only an ‘object’ of philosophy … but is in advance and at bottom and finally the condition of philosophy, the open contradiction in which it stands and which it brings to stand, brings about again and again … . Philosophy is intrinsically a strife between necessity and freedom. And in that it belongs to philosophy as the highest knowledge to know itself, it will produce from itself this strife and thus the question of the system of freedom … . Schelling wants to say we are not philosophizing ‘about’ necessity and freedom, but philosophy is the most alive ‘and,’ the unifying strife between necessity and freedom. He doesn’t just ‘say it,’ he enacts this in the [Freedom essay]” (57–58).
21 Compare Gabriel’s (Citation2009) mythology criterion (77).
22 As Schelling (Citation2007) asks: “Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?” (II/3:7).
23 For an account of Schelling’s parallel and its Maimonian roots, see Bruno (Citation2015).
24 See Kant (Citation1998): “Only in the case of the categories is there this special circumstance, that they can have a determinate significance and relation to any object only by means of the general sensible condition” (A244–245/B302).
25 See Schelling (Citation1980a), I/1:310 and (Citation2007), II/3:150.
26 This targets Schelling’s (Citation1994b) own formulation of the absolute at the height of the identity philosophy, in System of the Whole of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Nature in Particular (1804), as “that whose ideal includes its Being [and] whose idea is thus the immediate affirmation of Being” (6:147).
27 Compare Schelling (Citation1980a): “[the question] why is there a realm of experience at all? … can be answered only in such a way that it can never again be asked” (I/1:311, italics mine).
28 See Schelling (Citation2007): “as little as the a priori excludes the empirical, to which it rather has a necessary relationship, just as little is the empirical free from the a priori, having rather a significant amount of the same in itself [… . The] essence [of the empirical] is, in the consummation of this science, something to be comprehended a priori, but that it exists, that it is empirical, is only to be realized a posteriori” (II/3:102–103).
29 See Schelling (Citation2007): “the object of the positive philosophy is the object of a proof that is, while of course sufficient at earlier levels, nonetheless still incomplete; there could always arise in a resulting stage a contradiction of an earlier postulate. In this context, even the present is no limit, but is here a view that still opens onto a future that will also be nothing other than the progressive proof of the existence of the power [i.e. thinking] that rules over being” (II/3:131–132).
30 Compare Schelling (Citation1980a): “You are right, one thing remains, to know that there is an objective power which threatens our freedom with annihilation, and, with this firm and certain conviction in our heart, to fight against it exerting our whole freedom, and thus to go down” (I/1:336).