In Chapter 1, I considered how Schelling’s early philosophy of nature described nature’s
Stufenfolge as a process of ‘potentiation’ leading from the inorganic forces of nature to the universal categories of physics and life. Finally, this process culminated in the emergence of consciousness as the highest stage of nature’s immanent development. I argued that
SW I/7: 443; Stuttgart Seminars, p. 214.
30
SW I/7: 444; Stuttgart Seminars, p. 214.
31
SW I/4: 304; Bruno, p. 200.
Schelling’s utilisation of the mathematical conception of ‘power’ or ‘potency’ to conceive this process of potentiation allowed Schelling to describe the more complex forms of being as immanently emergent from the more basic forms, as the more complex were conceived as nothing other than the more basic ‘raised to a higher power’. On this model, the powers associated with spiritual freedom have their source in the non-spiritual powers of inorganic nature, and it is only through nature’s self-potentiating process that consciousness and human freedom are possible.
In the philosophy of identity, Schelling continues to mobilise the concept of power, but now this term takes on a far different sense. Whereas Schelling insists in the nature philosophy that potentiation necessitates a qualitatively differentiated nature, the identity philosophy presents the power of differentiation in strictly quantitative terms. Here, Schelling’s mathematical figures, which throughout Schelling’s thought are meant to illustrate a form of difference immanent to identity, are reduced to their quantitative signification. Just months before, Schelling had rejected Eschenmayer’s conception of the potencies as strictly quantitative, and now, in the Presentation, Schelling appears to be in full agreement with Eschenmayer regarding the notion that differences in nature are only ever differences of degree. 33
As we saw above, Schelling argues that absolute identity posits itself as subject and predicate, illustrated as A = A. This is necessary, according to Schelling, because absolute identity not only is (i.e. it is not only being prior to the differentiation between being and thought) but it is thought, i.e. it is cognised. Thus, absolute identity must posited itself as A = A, which can also be represented as A = B insofar as we intend to emphasise the difference
between subject and predicate. But given that A and B remain 34 identical to one another, how do we conceive their difference? According to Schelling, any difference between A and B must result from a quantitative imbalance on either side of the equation.
This does not mean that Schelling revises his criticism of Eschenmayer’s subjectivism. On the contrary,
33
Schelling remains fully committed in the identity philosophy to the criticism he puts forwardin On the True Concept regarding the subjectivism of Eschenmayer’s nature philosophy. Cf. SW I/4: 101; On the True Concept, p. 25.
SW I/4: 131; Presentation, p. 155.
Between subject and predicate, none other than quantitative difference is possible…since there is no possible difference between the two terms of being itself…there remains only a quantitative difference, i.e. one that obtains with respect to the magnitude of being, such that the same identity is posited, but with a predominance of subjectivity or objectivity. 35
Since the absolute is fundamentally self-same, there can be no qualitative difference between subject and object, or to put this in the language with which this thesis is concerned: nature and spirit cannot be qualitatively differentiated. Wherever there appears
to be spirit—and we should not lose sight of the fact that, in the Presentation, even quantitive difference is associated with mere appearance—this apparently spiritual phenomenon is essentially nature-spirit identity which expresses a surplus of ‘subjective’ activity. Likewise, whatever appears as natural is nature-spirit identity which expresses a surplus of ‘objective’ being. Thus, absolute identity appears as nature, on the one hand, and spirit, on the other, as a result of quantitative imbalances of the originary nature-spirit identity. Schelling uses the diagram below (Figure 1) to illustrate this conception of quantitative differentiation, calling it ‘the fundamental form of our entire system’. 36
+ +
A = B A = B A = A
Figure 1. The form of absolute identity represented as line.37
The line differentiates absolute identity (A = A) from the realm of difference, the realm in which spiritual subjectivity (+A = B) and objective nature (A = B+) are distinguished by an imbalance in the equilibrium of absolute identity. But we should recall that A = A and A = B are different ways of representing identity itself. This means that the equations above the line (+A = B and A = B+) are also versions of absolute identity (A = A).
SW I/4: 123; Presentation, p. 151. 35 SW I/4: 138; Presentation, p. 160. 36 SW I/4: 137; Presentation, p. 159. 37
The only difference the line expresses is that between originary equilibrium and the derivative imbalance of identity that has such equilibrium as its eternal presupposition. Again, Schelling utilises the Neoplatonist logic in which the absolute transcends its various formations (it is not itself an instance of quantitative determinacy) but those formations are utterly immanent to—and are therefore nothing other than—the absolute.
Thus, Schelling writes: ‘the power (Kraft) that bursts forth in the stuff of nature is the same in essence as that which displays itself in the world of spirit, except that it has to contend there with a surplus of the real, here with one of the ideal.’ In this way, nature and 38
spirit are nothing other than ontologically disproportionate manifestations of their primordial identity. ‘All differentiation consists just in this: A = A is posited in one direction or tendency as infinite cognition, in the other as infinite being.’ Thus, even when nature and 39
spirit are expressed, or appear, as nature and spirit, they essentially remain manifestations of nature-spirit indifference. The linear diagram (Figure 1) is modeled on the magnetic line, which is central to Schelling’s conception of identity during this period. As we saw in 40
Chapter 1, Schelling understands magnetism as a universal category of nature which expresses duplicity within identity. The individual magnet is composed of both positive 41
and negative poles, and these poles cannot be separated from one another. Up until the
Presentation, however, Schelling conceived magnetism as only one of nature’s categories and, moreover, a category which signaled the qualitative determinacy of natural forms. Beginning with the Presentation, however, Schelling utilises the category of magnetic duplicity-in-identity as descriptive of the absolute as a whole, which is fundamentally different from the more restrictive conception of magnetic duplicity-in-identity as a potential
qualitative feature of all material bodies. The result is that each and every aspect of inorganic, organic, and spiritual being are understood, on the magnetic model of the
SW I/4: 128; Presentation, p. 153. Translation modified.
38
SW I/4: 137, Editor’s note; Presentation, p. 253n.
39
Cf. Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language, pp. 111-112.
40
See Chapter 1.8 above.
Presentation, to be actually present in everything that exists. Although some forms are 42 more organic than inorganic and some forms are more spiritual than natural, there is no ontological difference between these various forms since they are merely expressions of primordial indifference. 43
Thus, in the Presentation, Schelling abandons his conception of the ‘identity of emergence’ in which life and spirit develop out of inorganic nature. As Whistler notes, the potencies of the identity philosophy are not properly dialectical, ‘where each element succeeds the previous one’ because the potencies—conceived along the lines of magnetic polarity—are always coexistent. As Schelling puts it, ‘all potencies are absolutely 44
contemporaneous’. Whistler affirms this Schellingian logic, since it makes possible a 45
unique conception of difference without negation. But Schelling’s entirely 46 affirmative
conception of difference need not reject dialectical progress. On the contrary, already in the nature philosophy Schelling conceived nature’s qualitative differentiation without referring to a process of self-negation. While Whistler rightly distinguishes Schelling’s logic of the potencies from Hegel’s logic of negation, he is too sympathetic to Schelling’s 1801 formulation of potentiation as a strictly quantitative and, moreover, non-dialectical process.
Whistler’s defence of Schelling’s identity system is incredibly helpful, however, for drawing out the unique character of that system. I am in full agreement with Whistler that not only is Schelling’s system of identity a rationalist ontology with little in common with
Schelling affirms the logic of indifference with respect to the inorganic-organic relation in his lectures On
42
University Studies: ‘To penetrate the essence of matter, we must abstract from its particular forms (for instance, so-called organic or inorganic matter) for matter in itself is only the common seed of these forms’ (SW I/5: 327;
On University Studies, p. 125). Schelling has therefore reversed his claim in the First Outline that it is ‘impossible to reduce the construction of organic and of inorganic product to a common expression’ (SW I/3: 325; Introduction to the Outline, p. 231).
According to Holland, ‘Schelling’s use of indifference can be traced back to the work of Dutch scientist
43
Anton Brugmans, who describes a plane of indifference between the two poles of the magnet’ (Jocelyn Holland, German Romanticism and Science: The Procreative Poetics of Goethe, Novalis and Ritter [London: Routledge, 2009], pp. 136-137).
Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language, p. 113.
44
SW I/4: 135; Presentation, p. 157.
45
See, for example, Whistler, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language, p. 107.
apophaticism, but that this is one of its great strengths. 47 Pace White, then, the system of identity doesn’t fail on account of its rationalist dismissal of mysticism. Nevertheless, the 48
system of identity constitutes a significant retreat on Schelling’s part from his more compelling notion of the nature-spirit relation as articulated in the early nature philosophy. On my reading, it is not Schelling’s rationalism that is questionable, but his insistence upon a primordial as opposed to processual conception of nature-spirit identity. For it is this conception of nature-spirit indifference which leads Schelling to not only conceive nature and spirit as ‘merely apparent’ phenomena (a view which Schelling gradually leaves behind over the course of his identity philosophy texts), but it leads him to conceive nature and spirit as strictly quantitatively distinct and, moreover, as always expressive to some degree of both natural and spiritual being. In doing so, Schelling fails to provide an account of not only the difference between nature and spirit, but also their processual unity.
As we will see in Part II of this thesis, Schelling’s conception of the potencies in the
Presentation motivates Hegel to develop a new way of thinking about the nature-spirit relation, one which would not only grant qualitative distinctness to the various stages of nature but between nature and spirit themselves. On Hegel’s view, it is only by conceiving nature as the negative of reason—or, more precisely, as reason in negative form—that qualitative determinacy emerges in nature’s rational development. However, before considering Hegel’s alternative to Schelling’s system of identity, let us consider Schelling’s own advance upon his 1801 system. In the Freedom essay, Schelling returns to conceiving the nature-spirit identity as involving 1) an essential, as opposed to merely apparent, difference; and 2) a processual, as opposed to primordial, character. He does so by reformulating § 35 of the Presentation (‘nothing individual has the ground of its existence in itself’ ) in light of the idea, inspired by Jakob Boehme, that nature is the non-spiritual 49
ground of individual, spiritual existence.
Ibid., pp. 176-179.
47
White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, p. 74.
48
SW I/4: 130; Presentation, p. 155.