Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 6 The Romantic Philosophers — Schelling
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I HAVE been presenting the philosophical problem of Romantic idealism. It was an attempt to state the world of knowledge, the world as known, in terms of a subject-object relation as that appears in the experience of the self. The statement that Fichte gave of this was that of the moralist. The view we are about to consider, that of Schelling, was given from the point of view of the artist. In each case the self is in some sense responsible for its object. In each you can show the self realizing itself in the not-self. And the relation of the self and the not-self can be identified with the realization of the self in the not-self. One can identify that with the subject-object relationship. That is, the self as the subject is responsible, and the attitude for which it is responsible appears definitely as the not-self, as the object. It is something that for the time being is foreign to the self. In each case it is a task that has to be performed. But when the task has been completed, it has been made a part of the self. In the moral situation, which Fichte emphasized, this relationship of subject and object is one in which, first of all, the self realizes itself from the point of view of a moral attitude, from the point of view of its obligations. The subject-object relation, however, is one in which the task, in being accomplished, becomes essentially a part of the self. That is, the duty one does identifies that experience with the self; the self has, made it its own.
In the case of the artist, the attitude which Schelling emphasized, the stress lies in the recognition that the self discovers its ideas, its meanings in the world, in its object. The artist finds himself in the object. In this he finds the meaning of the world; and, of course, at the same time he finds his own meaning. As
(112) an artist he is creative. He constructs his objects, his world, and yet that which he works on in this construction is the not-self. But it is constructed in terms of the idea, of the meaning, of the artist. He stands over against his material. It is that in which his meaning is to be found; he has to find his meaning, his own ideas, in the material with which he has to work. Thus the object is his own idea; it is his own construction. It is this attitude which Schelling presented, with the constant insistence that this meaning, this idea, is identical with the nature of the self.
Before we can get a background for Schelling's approach to this problem, we have to come back to another phase of the Kantian doctrine and the romantic development of it. Kant, you remember, assumed that our knowledge, in so far as it is reliable, belonged only to the field of experience. He assumed that we can make certain judgments which are necessary and universal, but only for experience, and that we can know nothing of that which lies outside of experience. But, if, as he assumed, it is true, that there must be certain forms of the mind into which our experience must enter, then we can make certain judgments for all possible experiences. just because the forms are there which every experience must take, we can say in advance that any experience whatsoever will have these forms. So our necessary and universal judgments are judgments for experience only; they do not hold for what lies beyond experience. In particular, they do not hold for the noumenal world which we assume but of which we can get no knowledge. Kant said that if we try to go beyond the field of possible experience we are made aware of that fact by falling into contradictions, antinomies. If we transcend the field of possible experience, we find ourselves caught at once in these traps, traps which seem to be there to keep the unwary phenomenalist from treading upon noumenalistic ground.
For example, if one tries to get back to a cause which shall be the cause of everything -- a first cause-he finds that he
(113) reaches contradictions. When we extend our line of causation, as we do in experience, we always find an antecedent cause for every effect and we are always justified in assuming a prior cause ad infinitum. That is as far A we choose to carry it. Every event that appears in the field of experience is the result of some previous event or group of events. Well now, if we say there must be some cause that is the cause of this experience but which lies outside of it, some primal cause, we force ourselves by this same logic to set up some antecedent cause, because we have brought the system within the field of causality. We set up a first cause, and yet we have to postulate another cause as the cause of the first cause. Thus we find ourselves entrapped in one of Kant's antinomies.
Or, suppose we try to get behind our experiences to the matter which is the ground of those experiences. As far as experience is concerned, we get hold of this matter and we crumble it in our fingers, and then we take particles so small we can hardly see them and bring them under the microscope. Finally, we get to the limit of ultra-microscopic vision and the imagination comes into play, and we imaginatively subdivide these particles, and so on. We are moving toward a limit which shall be the final element. That is, the world is made up of particles; at least, that is the way we experience it. If it is anything, it must be made up out of ultimate elements because what we have in the universe as a whole is not a sum of nothings but a sum of somethings. So, the final element that we reach must be something; but if we come to the final element by way of our crumblings, we can always continue the process of subdivision indefinitely. To Kant, this shows the impossibility of getting beyond the field of possible experience. We can imagine ourselves getting at smaller and smaller units, continually subdividing matter with which we are dealing; and yet the assumption of our experience is that things are made up of particles that have some extension. Thus we find another antinomy which results from the continued subdivision. We move toward
(114) the limit of the indivisibly small; and yet we cannot imagine a particle so small but what it could still be divided.
And, if we undertake to move in the other direction to the farthest limits of the stellar system, we find nebulae which, according to our present system of measurements, are millions of light-years away. And we will say that that represents the horizon of our stellar world. But when we reach that boundary, we find more space beyond. There is not any limit there, and yet our movement is always toward a limit. But the limits which we tentatively set up can always be transcended. And so we reach another antinomy.
Then Kant finds still another antinomy involved in moral conduct, namely, that all our conduct is explicable in terms of cause and effect, that we express every one of our actions in terms of the motives from which they spring, and yet we carry a sense of responsibility for our conduct which implies that it is not caused by these preceding events but through the volition of a free self. So we have the impossibility, the antinomy, that is due to the causal determination of our acts by preceding events and at the same time the assurance of our own obligation, of the causal relation between ourselves and our acts. Again, we assume that the world in which we are living is intelligible and ordered, and that this order which we find is due to some plan or purpose. That assumption is deeply ingrained and finds its expression in our views of nature. Since it is an ordered affair, it must have been ordered by some intelligent being. We set up the assumption of a deity, an intelligent being, who is responsible for the world having the order, the symmetry that it has. But when we try to come back to any mind that itself has ordered such a world, we find that we have put it outside of the very field of experience within which we had located it. In order to understand such a being, we have to locate it within the field of experience. But if we bring it into this field, we have made God a part of experience and then we must find a cause for God, since everything in experience falls under the idea of causation.
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Kant's general theory of these antinomies is that we are trying to explain experience by getting outside of experience, and yet every attempt to do that is an attempt lying within the field of experience. We cannot be both inside and outside of experience at the same time. That attempt is, says Kant, the basis for these antinomies. The moment we become involved in such a fundamental contradiction we can be sure that we are trying to know something that it is impossible for us to know, something that lies outside the limits of our possible knowledge. When we reach such a point, we have to turn to faith rather than to knowledge. And this faith, in Kant's sense, is the acceptance of the postulates of our conduct.
We find ourselves acting, and inevitably our action does present a transcendence of our immediate experience. The latter stops at the moment in which it is taking place. The next moment that is added to it does not lie in experience, and the reasons for it do not lie in experience. We have to get outside of our experience in order to reach the moment into which we are always entering. We are always putting our foot out into a world which is as yet not experienced. Now what is the world that continually lies just beyond, just over the threshold of experience and knowledge? The only thing that we can set up in regard to it is the postulate of our continually acting within it. The human being cannot see ahead. He cannot see what is going to happen. The only thing he can do is to look back and then into the future. Then he can say something of what the future is going to be, for, if it is experience-that is, if he is going to know it as a part of the field of experience-it will take on the forms of his own mind. But what the actual content of it is going to be he can never tell. Our insurance companies try to make a guess at it, and they can do it within sufficiently determinable limits to put it on a business basis. Also, prudent people can determine what, in general, their lives are going to be. But our attitude toward the future is always of the statistical sort. That is, it is highly probable that things that have happened in the past-like the rising and setting of the sun, the
(116) experience of colors, sounds, and so forth-will happen in the future. We think these are probable future occurrences, but we have no evidence of it outside of this statistical estimate. When things have happened, we can turn back on them and analyze them; but what is going to happen is something of which we can never get hold. There is always some sort of novelty about what happens in the most commonplace sort of an experience and the most ordinary sort of an action, always a tang of novelty about whatever takes place. That novelty is something which cannot possibly be predicted. We can predict something that is going to be strange and novel, but its very strangeness indicates that there are some features about it which depend upon its entering into experience before they can be known. Even what can be predicted-that you are going to meet your friend at the station, that you are going to read a book-always carries with it something which is different from what could possibly have been anticipated. Novelty is always present. There is something in respect to the future in regard to which we can only make postulates. We assume that it will be of an ordered, intelligible sort; and yet with every breath we are stepping into a world that has a novel element in it.
And that novelty, I should say, extends with regard not only to what we call the future, it also extends to the past. We speak of the past as irrevocable. What has happened has happened; what has been spoken has been spoken. But when we come to historians, whose work it is to discover what actually was spoken, what actually did happen, we find we get different accounts. This is particularly true when we look at what took place in the past from the point of view of two succeeding generations. We find that each generation has a different history, that it is a part of the apparatus of each generation to reconstruct its history. A different Caesar crosses the Rubicon not only with each author but with each generation. That is, as we look back over the past, it is a different past. The experience is something like that of a person climbing a mountain. As he looks back over the terrain he has covered, it presents a con-
(117) -tinually different picture. So the past is continually changing as we look at it from the point of view of different authors, different generations. It is not simply the future which is novel, then; the past also is novel. The world is continually changing in ways in which we cannot predict. Of course, we may be able to predict that it will change, but we cannot tell what sort of world it is going to become. For example, it would have been impossible, on the basis of the Newtonian theory, to have predicted the doctrine of Einstein. It would have been impossible, on the basis of the old biologies, to have predicted the Darwinian hypothesis. No one could have predicted the Copernican universe on the basis of the system set up by Ptolemy. The world is continually blossoming out into a new universe, and in this generation we have had fundamental conceptions brought forward that entirely change the character of the physical universe. Take such experiences as those represented in the quantum theory, a theory in accordance with which reality has to be regarded as both continuous and discontinuous. You are brought up against something that in the nature of the case you cannot predict. But we go right on without any disturbance from that front. We are pleased to have these revolutions take place in our theories, gratified to have our universe fall down so that it is replaced by a new one. We erect institutions called universities and invite research professors at high salaries who wreck our universities and substitute others in their place. And it appears to us to be perfectly right and natural.
It seems as if the world which lies beyond our actual experience will continue to be just the sort of ordered world we live in, and we hope a better one. These are the postulates of our conduct. We are always postulating something about what is going to happen, something which determines our own conduct. That is the attitude which Kant says we have to take in regard to the world of reality. We cannot know things as they are in themselves. The moment we reach the edge of our own knowledge, we find ourselves caught in an antinomy. But if we go ahead as we should go ahead, as, indeed, we must go ahead,
(118) and act on the basis of the assumption that the universe is going to continue to be rational and that we have our part to play in it by being moral individuals, then we should take these postulates which we make, but which we cannot prove, and make them the basis of our action. This is, of course, the principle of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.
Now, Kant said there are certain postulates that go with this assumption of our moral conduct. The first two I have indicated already. First, we are responsible, moral beings and we have to accept responsibility for our acts. Second, the world has a rational character that transcends our experience. As I have said, we take the world and set it in that rational order; and yet we expect that someone in this generation or the next will set it in an entirely different way. That is, there is some sort of an order that transcends any statement that we can make of our experience, that goes beyond it. We find ourselves in an ordered world, a world which requires an ordering intelligence. These two postulates come from our conduct: our freedom of will, together with our moral responsibility, and the intelligent God that directs the world in accordance with reason, knowledge. When we take this point of view, we always find that the new world becomes rational. It is irrational from the point of view from which we have taken it, outside of the field of experience, but it is more rational than the other.
Kant's third postulate is rather curious. He said that, since we are rational beings, our conduct must always be rational. You remember the form which he gives to his categorical imperative: So act that you can make a universal law out of the maxim of your act. This categorical imperative is practically the only one that Kant can set up, but there are some others that can be drawn from it. The test in question is, you see, that we should make our conduct perfectly universal. If we are to make it universal, it must not depend upon our inclinations. We must not act for our own interest or for our own pleasure. We must not act for our own immediate, particular ends, for our conduct must always be universal and the motive for it must
(119) be respect for law. Universality is the very core of Kant's morality. But our inclinations, unfortunately, are not universal; they are very particular affairs. We may say to ourselves that when we are hungry we should eat; but Kant's reason for it must be that it is good hygiene, not because we particularly want a beefsteak at the moment, not in order to get rid of a gnawing sensation, not for the sake of pleasure or for the avoidance of pain, but because it is our duty to eat. This is the only reason why we should ever act on anything.
Well, here we seem to have two parallel lines. One must always act with reference to a universal, while one's inclinations are always with reference to some particular. But, says Kant, what we look forward to is moral perfection; and that can be achieved only in situations in which the individual's own nature seeks what his conscience tells him he ought to seek. Our nature is made up of inclinations for particular things, and our conscience tells us always to act in a universal fashion and from respect for law. Now how and where are we going to bring these parallel lines together? Only in infinity. Therefore our conduct requires the postulate that we have an eternity within which to reach that perfection. The very break in our nature between the particularity of our inclinations and the universality of our conscience, of our reason, seemingly presents to us an immortality of the self, of the soul, because only in eternity can we possibly bring together two such divergent tendencies as an inclination for particular satisfactions and a conscience that demands that we should act only from respect for law. These postulates, then, lead to freedom of the will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. But you see Kant's philosophy reaches these not by deduction but by postulation. He says these postulates are involved in intelligent conduct. Thus, it is only by postulation that we can get beyond experience. In this way we can get beyond it, but this is not by knowledge. If we try to reach this end through knowledge, we find ourselves involved in an antinomy.
The contradiction that Fichte set up was that of the opposi-
(120) -tion of duty to inclination, the very opposition which Kant made the ground for his doctrine of immortality. The thing that we have to do, that we ought to do, is the thing that we do not want to do. It involves an effort. From the point of view of Kant we can never be sure that we are moral unless, as others pointed out, we are doing something we do not want to do. The moment you do something you want to do, you had better look out. The chances are you are being immoral. Essentially, the opposition seems to lie between what you have to do and what you ought to do at times of great stress, at strenuous moments in life. That is the characteristic of our duty. Not that everything we do not want to do we ought to do, but that what we ought to do is something that we do not want to do. We have to overcome the obstacle before us if we are to accomplish what we ought to accomplish. But, says Fichte, when we have done that, it becomes a part of our own nature. We have attained the knowledge we ought to attain. We have the education, the training, that we have forced ourselves to get; and, if we have made it a part of ourselves, it is what we really want. That is, it is when we look back at it. That is the dialectical process by means of which the self is constantly creating the world. There is a contradiction between what one wants and what one ought; but if the contradiction is overcome, then the individual advances to a new world.
Thus, the antinomy took on another character in the Romantic philosophy than that which it had for Kant, just as his noumenal world took on a new character. Kant said we have to postulate the self as noumenal, and the romanticists said that that is exactly what we are. We are at the center of reality. The self is the creative element of the universe. The finite self is one phase of the Absolute Self, of God himself. The antinomies which Kant set up as indications that we are going beyond the range of possible knowledge become, for the romanticist, the very process of creation. The antinomy in knowledge, instead of being the indication that we are trying to know something that we cannot know, is the very process by means of
(121) which knowledge itself arises. The antinomy is a stage in the process of knowledge.
This process is called after the term which was used in the old Greek speculation-" the dialectic." Of course, what---the dialectic" means is a process of discussion, conversation in which the ancient Sophist sought to entrap his opponent in a contradiction. That was the "outdoor sport" of the Athenian, discussing some question with the first person he met, and trying to catch him in a contradiction in his statement. And the Sophists were those who could play the game to the best advantage. Socrates was the supreme Sophist because he could catch the professional Sophists at their own tricks. But for Socrates the process was not simply a game; it was a means for getting back to certain fundamental realities. For example, he would ask a man what justice is; and when the man undertook to define "justice," he would point out contradictions in his statements. This little game is presented to us in the opening sections of Plato's Republic. The absolute definition of "justice" is rendering to a man what belongs to him. This is a good workaday conception. Socrates then asks, "Well, suppose somebody had given you his sword. It would be justice to give it back? Certainly. But, suppose the person had developed a suicidal mania and was intent on killing himself, would it then be just to return the sword?" And his opponent has to admit that it would not be just under that condition. In other words, his definition breaks down. And so on. What Socrates undertook to show was that, if you are criticizing definitions of "justice," you must be criticizing them from some standpoint. There must be such a thing as justice; otherwise you could not criticize definitions of it. You may not be able to define this thing, but evidently you have, some idea of a perfect justice which is the basis for your very criticism. That is what Socrates undertook to show was the case. He tried to show that there must be "ideas" -- in the Greek sense-of these moral perfections or we would not be able to point to them as being such. The very conflicts involved in these definitions indicate some per-
(122) -fect definition. And then Socrates, in ironical fashion, said that he did not know what this perfect justice was, but that evidently the person he was talking with knew, because he was criticizing every definition brought up. Thus, in asking the person for the basis for his criticism, he caught the Sophist at his own game.
What I want to point out is that here we have the dialectic as a means of advancing from contradictions to a truth. That is what the old process was, at least as Socrates worked it. The Sophist used it continually. He undertook to tear it down by means of the contradiction that he introduced. For example, what is the reason for obeying laws? They are nothing but enactments of the people in power. If one man becomes dominant, he will make laws to suit himself. If the majority of the people make the laws, they make them in the interest of the majority, to the disadvantage of the minority. The laws are always to the advantage of those in power, then why obey them? To avoid a penalty, of course. There is no such thing, then, as justice as such. That is the way the Sophist proceeded. Socrates took their method but utilized the contradictions as a means of reaching the truth.
As Kant left the antinomies, they were simply the indications of the mind's attempts to push its knowledge beyond the field of experience. Wherever it did that, it got caught in an antinomy. What the romanticist endeavors to show is that these antinomies are really steps by which we are going beyond experience. Of course, we do go beyond experience very day, every minute. We go into the past; and, as we look at the past from the point of view of the present minute, it is a different past from that which we viewed from the standpoint of the previous minute. The world is continually developing, says the Romantic idealist, by a process which he calls a "dialectic," a process which involves these contradictions, but a process which overcomes them in a continual synthesis.
Let us take, then, the steps which led from Fichte to Schelling and Hegel. Is there a phase of self-consciousness which can be
(123) responsible for the world as an object? This is the question which all the romanticists asked. The answer that Fichte gives is found in the moral nature in so far as the world is the scene of the duty of man. But the world is there before man; it is prior to his duty. The moral aspect may be the most important aspect of it after man appears. One may even conceive of it as being the purpose for which the world exists. But you have to presume the existence of the world before the moral self appears. Can the romantic attitude present the world as an object which appears to us when we are not in the moral attitude? Can the world be presented as an object for other than the moral phases of our nature? That is, can you find that it has the same many faceted existence that we have? This is the question that the romanticists asked when it was found that the answer that Fichte gave was inadequate.
The first answer to this further question was given by Schelling. He takes the point of view of the artist rather than that of the moralist. The artist discovers himself in his ideas, in the material with which he works. For the function of the artist-or rather, I should say, the process of the artist-is not simply that of taking dead material and fashioning his idea in it. He discovers the idea in the material itself. He finds the form in the clay which he is molding, and it is only as he molds that he finds out what the form is in his own mind. He may have worked that out in imagination before coming to the material, before getting his hands on the clay; but, as a rule, it is the process of working with the material that brings to the artist's mind what it is he is trying to present. The artistic procedure, the experience of the artist, is a discovery of his own ideas.
What Fichte was not able to do with the moral conception was to present the world as known. He could present it as a field of duty; but when he tried to state that in terms of knowledge, his statement was inadequate. He was faced with the problem of finding the content of knowledge, or the object of knowledge in the object of duty, starting with the Kantian as
(124) -sumption that the self is causal in its conduct and that it belongs, in that sense , to the world of things-in-themselves. He found the essence of duty to lie in the presentation of the task or obstacle that had to be overcome, and he identified this not only with the moral act but also with the process of self-consciousness, of being conscious of one's self. In this process lay the possibility of realizing one's self. But what has this to do with the problem of knowledge? Is the object of knowledge something that presents itself as a task, as an obstacle? On the face of it, this does not seem to be the case. Our objects of knowledge are about us; they are there as the world in which we live, move, and have our being. As such, they are not there seemingly as obstacles. There are, of course, tasks to be undertaken, duties to be done in which we have to recognize the nature of things; and some of our tasks, including that of gaining knowledge, are severe and difficult undertakings. But is knowledge, as such, of the nature of a duty that has to be done, of a task that has to be accomplished? That does not seem to be the nature of it.
Schelling recognized this and so he approaches the general problem from another angle. For him the world, as over against the Absolute, was that in which the artist found his idea, realized himself. He took the artistic attitude, that of artistic intuition, as Fichte has taken the moralist's attitude. According to Schelling, the point of departure is the attitude of the artist, that experience in which the artist discovers himself, discovers his own idea in the materials with which he is working. The artist gives himself to nature and finds in it the very ideas which he himself is trying to bring to consciousness. He turns to the society about him; he finds in social relations and in the history of the past those ideas which he is seeking to express. So Schelling conceived of the Absolute Self turning to nature or finding in nature an objective expression, an external expression of the self.
What Fichte insisted upon was that this world as known is identical with the self that knows. And he carried out some
(125) very subtle and profound analyses to establish his point. Of course, some of this work had been done in the empirical analysis of the English school. They had discovered in the ideas of Locke, in his philosophy of sensations and ideas, the very stuff of the world. For them, however, the self was a mere organization of such experiences. To some of them the self was a mere bundle of impressions, particularly those centering about the body and about our social relations. Certain groups of these impressions and ideas which remained relatively permanent became the self in experience.
But the Romantic philosophy pointed out that the self, while it arises in the social experience, also carried with it the very unity that makes society possible, which makes the world possible. At least from their point of view, it is impossible to reduce the self to the world, for the very unity of the world comes from the self. It is our thinking, our perception of the world, that gives it its unity. In our experience there is great diversity and multiplicity of sensations and experiences, but in our cognition these are all organized. That organization, according to the Romantic idealists, taking their cue from Kant, comes from the self. It is the self which organizes this world; but when it has organized it, it has really organized that which is identical with itself, it has organized its own experiences. It has, in one phase of its nature, discovered what it is in another phase.
Here, as I have said, Schelling turns back to the artist's experience for his analogy. The artist finds himself before a landscape, we will say, and in this he finds all the multiplicity of color, of form, of moving and stationary objects, and these take on a certain definite shape. The whole thing gets balance. The different parts of the landscape become arranged with reference to each other. But it is the mind of the artist that has organized it into this whole. He has discovered in it that unity and organization which belong to himself. He has discovered in it the sensations which are his own. He has discovered not only the landscape but himself as well. What he has hold of is his own experience, the expression of himself.
(126) Now, it is upon this identity of the object, that we grasp in our process of knowledge, that is, in our intuition, with the self that grasps it, that Schelling laid his whole stress. It is there to start with, but the process of knowledge identifies the content with the self. His position went under the name of Identitatsphilosophie, "the philosophy of identity"; and his whole undertaking was that of showing the identity of the object of knowledge with the self that knows. Nature, for Fichte, was the process of the self coming to consciousness of itself. The same subject-object relation is present in Schelling's philosophy, but for Fichte's moral statement he substitutes the analogy of the process of the artist. The assertion of identity on the part of Schelling came back to the reality of the artist's intuition, his seeing nature through his own idea, through that which gives the unity and meaning to it.
