The Revolution In Question
- Schelling’s Attempt at Restoration: Idealism Under Review
- Kantian Paradoxes and Modern Despair: Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard
- Conclusion: The Legacy of Idealism
Schelling’s Attempt at Restoration: Idealism Under Review
Schelling’s Development after 1809: The Middle Period
Schelling hasn’t been publishing since 1809, after return to school in 1840s, Schelling started with the motivation: Given the problems in Kant’s own views, what would it take to “complete” the Kantian philosophy in spirit, if not in letter.
There are three problems. 1). The relationship between freedom and nature in Third Antinomy 2). The “Kantian paradox” of self-legislation. 3). The stress on the “system” itself had blinded the post-Kantians to the incommensurable difference between thought and existence, a mistake that Kant never made. By dropping Kant’s doctrine of intuition or seeking to derive all of Kant’s system out of one principle, all the post-Kantians had in effect confused logic with existence; they had labored under the illusion that a coherent, consistent system of thought was necessarily identical with the way the world had to be. That we had to think of the world in a certain way could not imply that the world had to be that way. The mistake of post-Kantian idealism had been to ignore the sheer heterogeneity of thought ad reality.
Schelling claims that since various oppositions (like sweet/non-sweet) do not exhaust all the ways of characterizing things, “either things exist or are not” might itself not be exhaustive to the ways in which the “absolute” or God can be characterized. Therefore any apprehension of God must be intuitive, metaphorical and indirect. As part of the mythical divine history of ages of the world, Schelling’s resolution of the paradox of self-legislation is to push the resolution back to mythology.
The Late Philosophy: Schelling’s Berlin Period and the “Philosophy of Revelation”
Schelling’s mature work is called the “Philosophy of Revelation”. All the modes of post-Kantian philosophy are only different versions of what Schelling dubbed “negative” philosophy: they offer a critique of thought by presupposing the authority of reason to perform such a “negative” task, but it is in fact only a matter of the arrogance of philosophy to think that by “reason alone” it can critique all other ways of thinking and living and can offer a final account of the way the world “really” is. Contrary to the “negative” philosophy is the “positive” philosophy that started from some kind of metaphysical “fact” that it freely admitted could not be demonstrated by reason and which then elucidated developments out of that “fact,” using reason to make its case but conceding that the development out of that “positive” beginning is always guided by something beyond human reasoning that is to guide reason itself. Indeed, the “absolute” authority of reason can’t be established with reason without begging the question about its own authority.
To resolve Kant’s paradox of self-legislation, Kant appeals to the “fact of reason”, however it is something “positive”, that must be accepted. Hegel showed that one could construct a self-enclosed system of “logical” thought, but he could not show that this system of logical thought entailed anything about the actual world.
Contrary to Hegel, Schelling held to the notion that there had o be a “final dichotomy” to our thinking, namely, the opposition between our system of thought an that which is beyond thought, which is the metaphysical “fact” that provides the normative basis of any appeal to reason itself. Not the “fact of reason” but “Being” (and ultimately God) forms the normative basis of our freedom.
An adequate “positive” philosophy would understand the Christian God, not reason, to be the “fact” that would explain human freedom and thought.
Kantian Paradoxes and Modern Despair: Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard
Schopenhauer’s Post-Kantianism Idealism as Romantic Pessimism
Schopenhauer thinks that our grasp of our embodied presence has two facets: first the representation of body as material substance interacting with other substances in the material world according to causal laws; second there is also the awareness of the body as the expression of one’s will. On this basis, he claims that the thing-in-itself from Kant’s transcendental idealism is actually one’s will. Since will is thing-in-itself, it cannot be explained by the principle of sufficient reason, so will is blind, we do not know the reason of why we will one thing rather than another thing. The body as appearances conform to causality, and is determined. Also since the will lies outside of space, time and causality, it knows no plurality, and is one.
For Schopenhauer, the will has no purpose, so it cannot be satisfied in principle. In that light, the only true goal we can have is to renounce the illusion of individuality and become instead of “selfless” knower, a point of view equivalent to no point of view.
Schopenhauer argued for the superiority of aesthetic experience over all other forms of experience. Art, he says, gives us insight into the Ideas, the “objectification” of the will in the empirical world, and the higher arts deal with the higher Ideas. Aesthetic is the vehicle for escaping from the conditions of “the will”. Art leads us to “perfect resignation, which is the innermost spirit of Christianity as of Indian wisdom, the giving up of all willing, turning back, abolition of the will and with it of the whole inner being of this world, and hence salvation”. Schopenhauer’s philosophy was called the philosophy of pessimism and resignation.
Kierkegaard: Post-Schelling Hegelianism?
Kierkegaard picked up on the Kantian and post-Kantian emphasis on self-direction, on the notion that what ha come to matter to “us moderns” not just in part but “absolutely” and “infinitely” was the necessity to lead one’s own life. It was the lack of the connection of “life” and “theory” that drove much of Kierkegaard’s writing and which earned him the posthumous title of “existentialist”.
Schelling’s objection to Hegel, or all forms of negative philosophy, that we ignore the crucial break between “what we must think” and “the way things must be” between “thought” and “actuality” was taken over by Kierkegaard and transformed into something more radical.
Kierkegaard’s conception of subjectivity is close to Hegel’s, to be a subject, an agent, is not to be something fixed, it is to be the kind of entity that undertakes commitments, assumes responsibilities and holds himself to them. To be an “existing subject” is to be a work in progress. A person’s life is life an ongoing project, and what matters is their life to be their own life, and their action and beliefs issue from themselves. People become subjects by virtue of what they take themselves to be committed to. To be a subject is therefore an existential matter. For a person to make it through life as a “subject”, they must assume certain responsibilities and hold themselves to it. The paradox is that what counts is leading one’s own life and therefore choosing and acknowledging that the value of that which one chooses cannot always be the result of one’s choosing it, while at the same time holding fast to the idea that it can bind you only if you choose it.
It is crucial that the “choice” or “decision” be made on grounds that are one’s own reasons, not simply the “objective” reasons of one’s culture, one’s background or even one’s personal dispositions. That requires that there be a reason that one did not choose, yet which nonetheless can be seen as one’s own reason. This “paradox” is simply the paradox of all human life: we must lead our own lives, yet the very basis of what might count as our own life does not seem as if it could be our own.
Kierkegaard’s Either/Or laid out this paradox. There are essays from two authors A and B and a third-party editor.
First author A presents the case for leading an “aesthetic” life. In aesthetic mode, the life chosen is that militates against choice, and attempts to live life in the present, to focus on the immediacy of his experience, it amounts to an attempt to escape one’s own agency. The aesthetic chooses himself as not choosing himself, his only response can be that of despair, the feeling of the impossibility of leading one’s life in the only way that it matters to them.
Author B talks about leading an “ethical” way of life. In that way of life, the agent assumes responsibility for himself and elects to hold himself to his self-chosen responsibilities. In B’s telling, the paradigm for this is marriage, which involves taking on responsibility and committing oneself to holding to those commitments over a whole life. The satisfactory life consists in understanding that true freedom consists in choosing oneself, not knowing oneself, and that consists in recognizing one’s duties and holding oneself to them. However, we cannot really completely choose ourselves since we are always creatures of our own histories, social surroundings and person idiosyncrasies, and these we cannot choose.
The intended result of Either/Or is for user to realize that in the choice between either leading the aesthetic life or leading the ethical life, there can be only despair over the impossibility of leading one’s own life in general. That is, one seems to be forced to choose between two ways of life, both of which are fated to fail in the most important way. Despair is the condition of realizing the impossibility of achieving what matters the most to an agent while at the same time not able to give up striving for it. Absolute despair is the realization that it is futile to put absolute value on anything finite in the world.
The only way out of this existential dilemma is to accept the paradox whose solution cannot come through reason and which requires therefore something beyond reason to resolve it. In Fichte’s language, “I” must freely “posit” itself and must post the “Not-I” as determining it. Therefore there is no intellectual solution to the problem. Also no straightforward practical solution, since no act of will can overcome the metaphysical paradox inherent in the idea of freedom as self-determination. This condition is called “sickness unto death” by Kierkegaard, a metaphysical malaise attendant on the self-conscious realization of the impossibility of actualizing the only thing that really matters, a sickness that cannot on its own call for its own cure.
The only way out is not a new mode of conceiving of one’s life, Kierkegaard called this the “leap of faith”. We must simply acknowledge that we are dependent on a power outside of ourselves and that power must be itself capable of giving us the “reasons” for directing our life that are not subject to the worries about contingency and finitude, even if we cannot fully conceptualize how that happens. And that can only be the Christian God. Moreover, one cannot simply decide to take the “leap”. One cannot will to resolve the paradox of leading one’s own life by acknowledging that one’s own freedom is dependent on God’s power to empower you to freedom. One must give oneself over to God and accept that only by submitting one’s life to God’s judgment can one then have a life of one’s own. The “Kantian paradox” is “overcome” only by acknowledging the Christian paradox that one must first give up one’s life in order to have one’s life.
The condition under which one can become a faithful Christian is to acknowledge and live with the despair of someone who sees that there can be no prior motivation for the leap, nor can there be any intellectual justification for the leap, nor can the leap actually conceptually resolve the paradox. To be a believer in the religious sense is not in fact to overcome this despair but to be in the constant process of coping with despair, of living out one’s despair (analogous to Kant’s conclusion that there can be no interest in being moral, it’s simply a “fact of reason”).
After Kant, there could be no God’s eye metaphysics that would resolve the problems of what it means to be human, since Kant had pinpointed both the answer and the problem: to be human is to be “spontaneous” and “free”, and that was not a theoretically resolvable problem. Kant claimed a “practical” resolution, but Kierkegaard had taken this in his own “existential” direction. Also Kierkegaard rejected the Hegelian’s political reconciliation of modern life and argued that all that left is each individual, confronting the necessary but impossible task of leading his own life, acknowledging the despair that necessarily follows from that acknowledgment.
Conclusion: The Legacy of Idealism
After the Kantian revolution, i was no longer possible to conceive of experience without also conceiving of the ways in which that experience is “taken up” by us and the ways in which we interpret it, in which the meaning of experience cannot be merely given but, in part at least, spontaneously construed or constructed by us. How we achieve self-consciousness about our place in the world is crucial to understanding all our claims to knowledge, spiritual integrity, aesthetic truth and political rightness. If anything, Kantian revolution left behind a view that nature per se could no longer serve as the source of such meaning, and that we therefore had to look to human spontaneity to supply it or to find the conditions under which such claims could be meaningfully made.
The Kantian legacy, by taking normative authority to be self-legislated, to be a product of our spontaneity as it combines itself with our receptivity in the theoretical sphere and to be a product of our autonomy in the practical sphere, raised the issue as to whether that kind of normative authority could itself be secured against further challenge. Kant said the normative authority is a “universal self-consciousness,” of the rules binding all rational agents, since without such rules we could not be self-conscious at all. Post-Kantians moved to the idea ha as self-legislated, such authority is itself always subject to challenge. The universal self-consciousness is only a kind of unavoidability, but not certainty. That self-consciousness carries within itself the realization that the capacity of those kinds of claims to withstand such challenges rests on whether they historically and socially can come to be elements of a “universal self-consciousness,” not whether they are the necessary conditions for all such agents all the time in all places.
Kierkegaard’s own existential reworking of the “Kantian paradox” is emblematic for this period: what has come to matter to us absolutely in modern life is that we lead our own lives, individually and collectively.
The upshot of idealism is an understanding that, as self-legislated, our normative authority is always open to challenge, and that the only challenges that can count are contained within the “infinite” activity of giving and asking for reasons. As a set of some of the deepest and more thorough reflections of what it could mean for us to be free both individually and collectively under the inescapable conditions of human plurality, this is and remains the true legacy of idealism.