Manfred frank: innovations gain appreciation only if they don't demand too much of contemporaries. If they emerge hastily, they will be dismissed as an "untimely growth," he says. Even subsequent generations will continue to regard originator as taboo, frank says. He says even mentioning Schelling in seminars beside Fichte or Hegel is often viewed as obscenity.
Original Description:
Original Title
Manfred Frank - Schelling_s Critique of Hegel and the Beginnings of Marxian Dialectics.pdf
Manfred frank: innovations gain appreciation only if they don't demand too much of contemporaries. If they emerge hastily, they will be dismissed as an "untimely growth," he says. Even subsequent generations will continue to regard originator as taboo, frank says. He says even mentioning Schelling in seminars beside Fichte or Hegel is often viewed as obscenity.
Manfred frank: innovations gain appreciation only if they don't demand too much of contemporaries. If they emerge hastily, they will be dismissed as an "untimely growth," he says. Even subsequent generations will continue to regard originator as taboo, frank says. He says even mentioning Schelling in seminars beside Fichte or Hegel is often viewed as obscenity.
Manfred Frank The history of western philosophy provides many occasions for verifying a general experience: theoretical innovations gain immediate appreciation only if they do not demand too much of the ability of contemporaries to integrate them into their worldview. If they emerge hastily and lack clear connection to their epoch's expectations about meaning, they will be dismissed as an "untimely growth." This is, of course, easy enough to understand. What is remarkable, though, is that even subsequent generations that have come to accept the innovation will often continue to regard its originator as taboo. Consider, for instance, the fame accorded Nietzsche for the discovery that pre-conscious life forces lure the intellect into webs of Maya, making it be- lieve that it itself decides over the economy of values that is actually the pro- jection of the powerhungry will. Coinciding with the praise granted Nietzsche are strong attacks against Schopenhauer. Not only is the latter denied credit for having initiated the paradigmatic revolution in the metaphysics of will that occurred in the post-idealistic epoch, but he is made to answer for every imprecision and subterfuge-which is remarkable only in light of the fact that his work is a good deal more precise and straightforward than that of Nietzsche. It seems as if the official ideography has to eliminate one name from its canon before another name, even the name of one who has done little more than drawn the consequences of the eradicated doctrine, can be recognized or even praised: Jasper's and Heidegger' s interpretations of Nietzsche and condemna- tions of Schopenhauer are classic examples of this ritual. The rehabilitation of a thinker seems to necessitate the sacrifice of his predecessor. Something comparable has occurred to sabotage Schelling's fame. His name has been consistently scorned until it evokes a subcutaneous negative response. I am speaking in part about the fact that just mentioning Schelling in seminars beside Fichte or Hegel is often viewed as an obscenity or at least as a disclosure of one's naivety, with the result that the passage from Fichte to Hegel in the history of ideas has had to bridge an embarrassing loophole. I am also concerned about the many performances of the emperor's new clothes we have had to endure by paying automatic obeisance to Hegel's "profundity." Schelling's logical sleights of hand (especially the 1801 System of Identity) have meanwhile been soundly dismissed. Instead of being praised for his 252 IDEALISTIC STUDIES profundity, Schelling has been decried for a geniality that lacks seriousness, his works dismissed as a delirium of ideas brought forth by opium and romanticism. What concerns me much more, however, than the injustice wrought Schel- ling is that his "original insight" has been lost in the process. His work was an attempt (not always a successful one) to give birth to an idea that trans- cended the vision of his age, an idea which-in the Blochian sense-was transcontemporary (iibergleichzeitig). Exaggerating somewhat, I argue that Schelling's insight could never have been adequately articulated in the dis- cursive quilt offered by idealistic grammar. Stressing this helps us to critically evaluate the idealistic position of Hegel's Phenomenology in comparison with Schelling's 1801 system, with its alleged argumentative weaknesses. One cannot, of course, deny the tremendous historical impact of the Phenomenology. It embodied the major breakthrough through which idealism became recognized in its maturity and thus gained its followers. It constitutes, moreover, an important corrective to the growing sklerosis of a dogmatic and subhuman materialism, a corrective that carries weight to this day. At the beginning and at the end of the movement named dialectical materialism stands the figure of Hegel. No thinking-apart from that of Marx-has been so important for the general understanding of materialism, or of the modern era as a whole. In the interim, however,-and for a period lasting more than a century-the Weltgeist oversimplified matters by calling, against the background of turbulent changes in the institutional structure of our intellectual and social reality, for an overcoming of idealism. By doing so it took a characteristic turn and deviated from Hegel's legacy. It is this critical relation that (from the young Marx to the student movement of the 1960's) sustained interest in Hegel's oeuvre, but in what one today might call a deconstructive guise. The reading that resulted certainly reflected an heretical position towards idealism, but it never really penetrated to the crux of Hegel's arguments. You may already guess where I am headed. At the outset of the materialistic rejection of idealism, the only philosophy that could boast a truly revolutio- nary critique of Hegel's idealistic dialectics was Schelling's. It was contained in his-mostly unpublished-late works, available in student transcripts of lectures in Erlangen, Munich and Berlin. These transcripts, which com- manded stiff prices, were sold-without the control and to the grief of their author. They made their way even into Russia and France, where they were eagerly received by intellectuals among the nobility. People like Pavlov, Cadae, Herzen, Bakunin, Belinskij and Turgenev found in these transcripts their speculative acid test. They also reached the pupils of St. Simon (among SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 253 them Prosper Enfantin) and advocates of religious socialism (like Lamennais and Leroux). 1 Marx was well informed of these connections (and also knew Schelling's writings first hand). This could surprise only one who has no notion of the un- heard of pUblicity that accompanied Schelling's Berlin lectures in the winter of 1841142. It might, of course, also prove offensive to disciples who insist upon Marx's originality by, in a very unMarxian fashion, envisioning the development of an idea capable of moving the world as the result of a single act of original procreation. It is indeed the case that Schelling's late writings do not officially playa role in the genesis of Marxian dialectics. A more sympathetic view is taken of his earlier work, an important step leading to the temple of Hegel. But the older Schelling has a reputation of being a notorious reactionary, despite the fact that he left Munich for Berlin at least partly to escape restrictions imposed upon his own teaching. Indeed, his first act in Berlin was to suspend censorship against the Halleschen JahrbUcher. Arnold Ruge responded in August of 1841 by calling Schelling "a political and religious freethinker."2 The letter written by Marx to Feuerbach the third of October 1843 3 can be read-at first glance-as if Marx himself dismissed Schelling as a reactionary. The matter seems to me to deserve further attention. Marx incorrectly thought that Feuerbach, in his introduction to the second edition of the Wesen des Christentums, had proposed "a detailed work on Schelling." He urged Feuer- bach to execute the plan and gave several reasons why he should do so. First of all, Schelling had a protected status. Due to censorship rules he could not be attacked in journals, and thus had to be dealt with in a larger work. A more extensive study was also called for to unveil Schelling "to the French literati," who had remarkably enough fallen victim to his attempts to win them over. His French disciples were particularly to be feared, since some of them-for instance "der geniale Leroux," who translated Schelling in a series of articles- promoted socialism. An attack on Schelling would furthermore be "an indirect attack on Prussian politics as a whole," since Schelling had allegedly lent his doctrine to the task of "diplomacy." But, last though not least-and this is decisive-Marx regarded Feuerbach as unusually suited to lead the attack. You are precisely the man for this, because you are Schelling in reverse. You are the one who-we are permitted to believe the best about our opponent-has taken the splendid insight of his youth (der aufrichtige Jugendgedanke), which for him always remained a fanciful dream, and elevated it to truth, reality, and manly seriousness. Schelling is therefore your predetermined caricature, and once the real thing steps over against the caricature, it will dissipate into fog and vapor. 254 IDEALISTIC STUDIES I suspect that even today, when the issue has lost its relevancy, one will sense the irony in Marx's compliment: No one who strives to attain his intellectual identity will find it easy to face his own caricature, especially when it is a matter of world philosophy, which must be affirmed in its basic righteousness. Nor does it help to be told that its fanciful air will dissolve only when confronted in a "manly" way. Feuerbach' s dilemma is exasperated by the fact that his "positive philosophy" does in fact owe something to Schelling and that his deviation from Schelling's original intention makes them natural enemies. Marx was not the first to encourage him to take this step, although no one else insisted upon it so resolutely. IfFeuerbach hesitated for more than a decade to follow Marx's advice, it was presumably because he realized the delicacy of confronting his own caricature. Three fairly extensive outlines for letters mirror Feuerbach's embarrass- ment. He made diligent excerpts from the Paulus transcript of Schelling's lectures, tossed and turned for some weeks, and then confessed that Marx had "thrown him into a difficult connict with himself."4 It seems that Marx had touched upon a trauma: Feuerbach had always tried to fend off Schelling's obvious priority as being a presumptuous "fantasy." (Marx cites this with a certain sense of delicacy.) He had never found a better name to characterize his own position than Schelling's own expression, "positive philosophy," although he asserts that for him in contrast to Schelling the aim is "the actual rather than the merely imaginary absolute identity of all oppositions and contradictions."5 One has to be aware of all of this when seeking to elucidate Feuerbach's relationship to Schelling. After these fragmentary suggestions, I will set aside the biographical- philological search for points of contact between Schelling's materialism and that of Feuerbach and Marx. I would next like to assert that not only in the materialism of Feuerbach and Marx, but also in French Socialism, in Bakunin and Cieszkowski,6 there existed a powerful tradition of materialistic argumentation which, nourished by Schelling's late lectures, was critical of Hegel. The obscurity of this tradition, which can be followed all the way to Lenin's notebooks, can be explained in part by the fact that Schelling did not publish a single lecture during his lifetime. The short Vorrede zu Cousin and the pirated edition of notes from his first Berlin lecture were the only documents of his tum to "positive philosophy" that could be cited. Another reason for the obscurity of this tradition is that, for reasons of political identity, leftist theoreticians refuse to think of Schelling as a pre- decessor. It is indeed necessary to challenge the usual terms of political semantics by considering what antiliberal romanticism and anticapitalistic SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 255 socialism have in common. One might begin by noting that the dichotomy was not always evident. This was particularly the case in the beginning: Ruge's interest in the details of Schelling's tum was so great that he offered to edit his lectures; Feuerbach, who seemed to have been inspired by a transcript of a Schelling lecture, sent his dissertation to the philosopher with an obviously genuine respect (one might ask what would have happened if Schelling had liked it, but beyond any doubt the style of thinking was too Hegelian for him); Cieszkowski, whose historiography Schelling seems to have known, always sustained a lively interest in Schelling, was drawn to the latter's religiosity, and kept himself informed about the Berlin lectures from his Polish home (there also are two outlines for letters from him to Schelling). Bakunin wrote home: "You would not be able to imagine the great impatience with which I look forward to Schelling's lectures."7 Schelling, who saw himself as the inadvertent spiritual father of Young Hegelianism, acknowledged that these young people were striving for some- thing like positive philosophy. Their mistake was that they searched for it with Hegelian means and were thus doomed to failure. In order truly to transform the system, it was first necessary to dismantle the edifice of "logical necessity." One had to emancipate oneself from the immanent legiti- mation of a teleologically conceived intellectual process. 8 The emotion directed against Schelling, by Fr. Engels, for example, was the reaction of a young man who felt that the basis for group solidarity-the enthusiasm for Hegel-was threatened. That is the recurring theme in the Young Hegelian petition to Schelling: he would be welcome in Berlin as a teacher in the spirit of Hegel, but he should not desecrate the name of the symbolic father. He should not, in effect, attack idealism. It should be clear that Marx, however, would not make such restrictions. He praised Feuerbach, for instance, for overcoming the Young Hegelian idealism of "Bruno Bauer and his consorts." (In this regard he was like Bakunin, who was also outspoken in his criticisms of leftist idealism.) He relied on Schelling as he parodied their "irritation towards any praxis, which is different than theory, and towards any theory, which seeks to be anything but the dissolution of a given category in the 'limitless universality of self- consciousness."'9 As Schelling taught (and here he impressed not only Marx but Bakunin and Cieszkowski as well), there is in the Logic nothing that could change the world ... The transition cannot proceed from thinking . . . One cannot begin anything with the highest principle of rational philosophy [that is, with the concept of absolute self-consciousness] .... Rational philosophy must lead beyond itself and press towards a reversal. The reversal itself cannot 256 IDEALISTIC STUDIES proceed from thinking, but requires a practical impulse. In thinking, however, there is nothing practical; the concept is purely contemplative and relevant only to the realm of necessity. But we are concerned here with something that lies outside necessity, with something willed.1O Before I further document the convergencies between Schelling's late philosophy and Marx's practical materialism, I will attempt the impossible by briefly outlining the late philosophy and its position on Hegel. Unless one has a firm grasp of the direction and style of Schelling's thought, one will not be able to search for allusions to Schelling in Marx's early work. The fact that they have not already been deciphered I can only explain as a proof of the fundamental lack of interest displayed by those in power who guard Marxist doctrine. This lack of interest cannot be traced back to Marx himself. I believe it is possible to state precisely the one thought that sustained Schelling's philosophizing from beginning to end: It is the conviction that Being (understood as seamless identity) cannot be deduced by unfolding reflective relationships. In a certain sense this was the common conviction held by the three Tiibingen friends against Fichte. Dieter Henrich has ventured to carefully reconstruct a conversation ll in which Holderlin allegedly suc- ceeded to convince even Hegel of this thought and bring him beyond the "boundary line of Kantian philosophy,"12 that is, beyond the point where the abstract subject stands in opposition to its other. Holderlin maintained that absoluteness must exclude the self-relatedness of the "1."13 I-ness cannot be thought of as absolutely unconditioned, since it presupposes as its condition an explicit relationship to self. On the other hand, one cannot dispense with the unconditioned, for one must still account for the moment of self-possession and identity that is maintained through the opposition of what is interrelated. It is not a matter of denying one of the two moments, but of recognizing that the active relationship of the self to itself cannot explain knowledge of the identity of the relating moments. This knowledge is, however, real. According to Holderlin, it is thus necessary that "a preeminent unifying unity, which is itself not identical with the I," make itself manifest within the "infinite unity" of the Self. 14 Holderlin and Schelling call it "Being" or "Identity" and distinguish it from "Indifference," which is the result of an act of synthesis that itself presupposes a totally unreflected identity that eludes the play of relation. Despite terminological differences (Schelling first articulated his thoughts more in the language of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre) , 15 Schelling shared Holderlin's basic conviction. For Hegel this was much less the case. The impulse he received from the poet did enable him to take the decisive step SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 257 over the Kantian "boundary line." He thus no longer turned to abstract subjectivity to find a mediation of the conflict between love and selfhood. On the other hand, he regarded the mediation as occurring in the realm of reflection and rejected HOlderlin's account that it was rooted in a transreflec- tive "Being" or, using the term of Sinclair, in a pure" Athesis" that existed apart from and prior to the relation. 16 "Love," "life," and "spirit" are Hegel's terms for that which carries the opposition between the finite and the infinite forward to the point where it discloses its untruth and thus leaves behind the counterfeit totality envisioned by one-dimensional thinking. This process is that "true infinity" which establishes itself in the very finitude of the relationship of difference. It is itself not related to anything and constitutes a kind of argumentative fundus whereby relation can be thought of as unity and substance as subject. Such a concept of unity does not tolerate a being that transcends it and threatens to reduce it to a moment of reflection. As such it would have a merely relational existence that prevents it from being more than a specific and incomplete aspect of an incomprehensible totality. I hope that, given its necessary brevity, this is a fair characterization of Hegel's original insight. He provided it with more depth and consequence in the lena Logic and above all in the Phenomenology of 1807. He did not accomplish the full elaboration of the formal ontological status of his basic philosophical program until his Science of Logic. Particularly decisive for us in that work is his attempted demonstration that Being is in truth a moment of a reflection that depends on nothing outside itself. In the present context it is impossible to sum up Hegel's extraordinarily complex argumentation. For this step I refer the reader to the works of Dieter Henrich. I will here simply elaborate some of the consequences of Hegel's insight by conjuring up a hypothetical exchange with Holderlin (Hegel in reality never spoke with the poet after the latter's lapse into insanity-just as he also avoided further talks with Schelling). We can begin with Hegel's asser- tion that in "pure Being, without true determination" only negative qualities can be contained, qualities such as immediacy (Un-mittelbarkeit) and unre- latedness (Un-bezogenheit). Holderlin would have agreed. Hegel might then proceed to explicate-in an apparently harmless way-the unrelatedness of Being by depicting it as Being which is "only" related to itself. The pure nega- tion modifies itself into a simple restriction which does not necessarily exclude the possibility of a relation-to-itself. However, once Being is assumed to be inarticulate or "simple" relation, then according to Hegel it becomes not only permitted, but logically necessary to recognize within it a contradiction. Only by virtue of this contradiction does it attain internal determination (for only that is itself, which can be set off negatively against an other). 258 IDEALISTIC STUDIES Hegel, in a characteristic fashion, speaks of Being as "concept" Being. In this way too he forestalls the understanding that it is a question of trans- reflective Being-Being which could at any rate have no place in a logic, or in any formal system of ontology. The step that leads Hegel from the category of indifference-the last position of the logic of Being-to the category of appearance-the first position in the logic of essence--can be characterized as follows: the concept of a relationship conceived as unidimen- sional is matched with itself, conceived now as two-dimensional. In the logic of reflection, a hidden implication of the concept of a "simple relation only to itself' is unfolded and made explicit. It thence comes to light that this self-relation includes a relation to an other. Hegel maintains that this consequence is executed within the framework of one thought and leads to the realization that the other-relationship cannot be detached from the concept of self-relationship. Holderlin was not able to answer in person. Schelling spoke in his place, probably first during the summer semester of 1822 in his lectures on the history of modem philosophy that were delivered in Erlangen. Schelling's reply, despite the clarity of its language, was based on a complicated argumentation that I can here only approximate. I will occasionally make use of formulations from Schelling's Wiirzburg system of 1804. Beneath the appearance of an extensive consensus with Hegel's Jena philosophy, one finds even at that stage the seeds of the confrontation which was to come. Schelling discerned with an ingenious accuracy the circulus in probando in Hegel's proceedings. If the concept is, at the end of its development, to attain recognition of itself as itself, it would have to implicitly possess this self-knowledge from the beginning. Hegel rather shamefully confessed this when, in the methodology chapter of the Logic, he rehabilitated "intellectual intuition."l7 If this is indeed the case, then Holderlin was presumably right. It is necessary to abandon the claim that it is possible, without presupposition, to deduce through a series of steps the thought of the self from the thought of abstract Being which is void of self. The original, allegedly seltless, Being is, contrary to the stated intention, conceived as self-relation from the outset. It is a concept of self-relation which even possesses an implicit, but unreflected self-knowledge. If this were not the case, then it could not be posited, sublated and finally realized in the end as self-knowledge. This was Schelling's first critical observation: the dialectical progress in the unfolding of the idea grows out of a speculative or narcissistic dialogue of reflection with itself alone. The appearance of progress that occurs as an implicit presupposition is explicated and then interpreted as having arisen SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 259 first in the explication. Feuerbach later repeated this criticism when he objected that the method of proving things in the Logic is an attempt "to introduce already into the opposition of the idea a premise which the idea itself presupposed. "18 In this way, he concluded, the dialectic, which should be a dialogical discipline, conducts "a monologue of speculation with itself." Its alleged unconditionally is vain assertion. 19 Something like that he may have read first in an afterword of Schelling's. This even seems likely, given that an examination of Feuerbach' s intellectual development reveals that his critique of Hegel did not grow out of premises of his own thinking. It represented, instead, an abrupt break that one can accurately trace back to an almost literal citation of Schelling that Feuerbach recorded in his diary in 1828. He wrote there that the "immaculate maiden 'logic'" could never by itself give birth to a being which is not in turn of a solely logical nature. 20 Schelling did not stop with the objection that Hegel's philosophy is im- properly circular. He went on to show that the circle itself derived from an invalid theory about the nature of the self. Once again we hear H6lderlin, himself now reduced to silence, speak in Schelling's arguments. The circu- larity that stems from regarding Being as reflection is but the beginning, for reflectivity implies the belief that the self can be grasped as the interplay of two opposing reflexes-a widespread perception which unites thinkers as diverse as William James, Edmund Husserl and Jacques Derrida. Schel- ling, on the other hand, claimed already in 1804 that it is impossible to conceive the synthesis of self-cognition as the material ground (Real-Grund) of our knowledge of the self: It is not at all self-evident that an identity with otherness exists either in the constituent elements of the synthesis of self- knowledge or in the concept of the relation as a whole. This doubt exists even if one concedes that the consciousness of the self always implies the unity of the very thought in which the relation prevails. As we know, this was Hegel's contention and Schelling did not refute it. What he proved, however, is that two negations related to each other (or the self-relatedness of negation as such) are a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of the existential experience of the cogito-sum. Two mutually negating reflexes would be able to displace (abzuerkennen) a self-sufficient and independent Being, but would be unable to generate a consciousness of the identity of what is thus interrelated or of the unquestiona- bility of its being. Because this consciousness of an absolute positivity exists, however, Schelling concluded that it stems from an experience that precedes the mirrorplay of negations and grounds them in their Being. 21 The very existence of negation as negation is something that cannot be regarded as an effect of negation: existence is not an implication of its concept. If one 260 IDEALISTIC STUDIES says that negation is the ground of Being, insofar as through the negation of negation something positive is posited, one must nonetheless understand that the possibility of self-negation does not imply the actual productive force of Being, but only its ideal ground (Ideal-Grund). For one has in fact said no more than this: there is no concept of Being apart from that which is posited through the self-sublation of reflection; on this count there is no difference between Hegel and Schelling. What Schelling asserted is that it is possible for the negation, when applied to itself, to abolish itself for the sake of Being , thereby letting Being come to appearance (in this way negation is the ground of the appearance of Being). But in this way neither the being of negation nor of that which it negates is actually affirmed. This can be immediately and analytically grasped: negativity can destroy (and can destroy itself), but it cannot create. If through its play of opposition it does affirm a being (or even its own being), it must nonetheless be clear that it does not establish its own being. With Sartre one might call this the "ontological proof of reflection." It has several important consequences. First of all, in simple terms, Being precedes consciousness; the realization of this is confirmed within the inevitable collapse of any attempt to ground Being through an immanent and autonomous self-deduction (Selbstbegrun- dung). Secondly, and this is closely connected to the first point, although the essence (das Wesen) is the epistemological ground (Erkenntnisgrund) of Being (and of its own Being), it is not the real ground. For as soon as Being is, it is in a way that cannot be pre-conceived, it is "unvordenklicher- weise seiend." That means that---even if only to fulfill the formal-ontological condition of its being an essence-it must first of all be. Sartre characterized this with the technical term etre he. What he wants to say thereby is that conceptual Being---essence-is derived from a transreflective Being that always already "was," it is thus supported in its being and lacks genuine independence. Without a foundation in a Being that is not reflection, the being of essence would dissolve into nothing. This is the reason for Schel- ling's talk about "negative philosophy": it describes a form of speculation that has forgotten Being. It absolves itself from its own existence by reducing the transcendence of Being to a determination of essence. I admit that to this point Schelling's critique has been quite abstract. But before 1 tum to more concrete consequences (especially those that were elaborated by Marx), I might point out that precisely the abstractness of Schelling's critique of Hegel made plausible its claim to universal validity, a claim that in tum facilitated its deep undercurrent effect. Schelling con- fronted Hegel at the level of Hegel's own logic of essence. He formulated his objections in such a way that Hegel could not have defused them by SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 261 insisting that there is no point of contact between the idea of a pre-conceptual Being and the argumentation of the Logic itself. Indeed, Schelling makes the claim-which I believe to be thoroughly correct-that the Logic fails to accomplish its own program. The program was to resolve the conflict between concepts of opposition and of unity by arranging them within the concept of an overarching unity that bridged the conflict itself, what Hegel described in the chapter on the Idea as the "identity of the real and the ideal." According to Schelling, the place of this existing idea remains vacant as long as the term of reality lacks sensuality, for sensual existence is necessary to actually, rather than merely conceptually, differentiate it from its correlative concept, the ideal. Feuerbach repeated Schelling's conclusion verbatim: where there is only an essential, or what amounts to the same thing, a potential opposition, there exists no real discord at all. "Everything unfolds in an entirely peaceful manner-between being and nothing [regarded as mere conceptual powers] there is no opposition, they do not affect one one another at all."22 In other words: the Logic does not fulfill its own intention of attaining reality; it reaches only the concept of truth. Truth itself, as something to be postulated, must surrender itself to another discipline. This is clear even in Hegel's terms. The "merely logical" concept perceives its own impotence, its own "lack of Being," and decides, as Hegel said, to abdicate in favor of nature. The naked idea should be provided flesh and blood before it can ever be led towards its real truth, the self-consciousness of actually existing spirit. Hegel thus implicitly accepted the objection that his concepts are contami- nated by a lack of Being, once he makes the Logic the overture to his encyclopedic system. The problem, however, is that the system itself is caught up in the emptiness of the same circle that defines the Logic. For how could a concept that has no command of Being possibly give birth out of itself to an actually existing nature? The concession that Hegel's logical edifice lacks real truth is a concession that affects his entire system, insofar as the system itself springs forth from the Logic. The system thus takes on a negative character that is far more pronounced than Hegel intended. One can almost see the jarring effect on Schelling himself as his philosophy of nature bore its first fruit in the triumph over Hegel. From the vantage point of its historical reception, this is certainly Schel- ling's most successful argument against Hegel. Feuerbach repeated it as eagerly as did Marx and was indeed more keenly aware than the latter of its rich consequences for a philosophy of nature. Marx was still aware that "nature" is a synonym for "reality" and that the system of philosophy takes on true actuality, that is, more than a merely logical character, only when it passes through the reality of nature. I can document this from Marx's 262 IDEALISTIC STUDIES early wlitings. I would also like to refer to Alfred Schmidt's still unsurpassed work on the concept of nature in Marx. It lacks only the recognition that Marx's argumentation derives largely from the late work of Schelling. But before I begin with Marx, I want to present two further consequences that result from Schelling's objection to Hegel. One concerns the culmination of the system in the idea of absolute self-consciousness. This idea marks the place where, according to Hegel, the system reaches its truth. This truth emerges insofar as difference, which characterizes reflection, sheds its quality of otherness, and becomes, as Hegel liked to put it, completely self-trans- parent. Hegel insisted beyond this that the absolute suspension of the differ- ence between otherness and selfhood must itself be reconfirmed in the mir- rorplay of reflection. Schelling objected and asserted that the thought of absolute identity destroys itself by the very means it uses to actualize itself. We can once again hear H6lderlin speaking through him: a real difference would never be able to account for an ideal unity. Within the Hegelian system such unity can only be postulated. Its disclosure remains the subject of another science, which Schelling and Feuerbach referred to as "positive philosophy." Marx, in a similar spirit, pointed to the "one-sidedness and . . . limited nature of Hegel" that is made manifest in the final chapter of the Phenomenology. 23 The last consequence that I want to present here is perhaps the most surprising. Schelling believed that, judging from certain formulations in the foreword to the second edition of the Logic, Hegel had himself started to realize the abstract negative character of his philosophy of reflection. If not for Hegel's death, the revision might have been continued. Be this as it may, the formulations from the introductory essay of the Logic are worth listening to. According to Hegel: The absolute spirit, which discloses itself as the concrete and the last and highest truth, will be recognized all the more when at the end of the development it abandons itself with freedom, lets itself into the fonn of immediate Being, and resolves to create a world, a world which will contain everything given in the development which preceded this result, but by virtue of its reversed position over against the beginning will be transformed into something that depends upon the result as upon a principle. 24 The general context shows that Hegel did not mean by creation the self-aban- donment of the idea into nature. Instead, he was reflecting in a radical way upon the implications of the concept of reflection that underlies his entire argumentation. Consider a passage preceding our quote: One must concede that it is an essential observation, and one that will SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 263 be more closely described within logic itself, that progress forward is at the same time a regress into the ground, to what is original and true, that upon which the principle of the beginning itself depends, indeed, as that which has produced it. 25 Here he was plainly referring to a tum in the logical dialectic itself and to the idea that only the ground truly is, so that upon its Being the appearance of an independent beginning depends. Schelling closely analyzed the meaning of this tum in his first Erlangen lecture. Reflection, he said there, means reversal. It reverses as in a mirror the direction of everything that shows itself in it, so that what really is only the second is envisioned as being the first; and what really is first appears as the second. 26 When reflection is uncritical, what appears for it to be first is regarded as actually being first. But because reflection can reflect upon itself, it can provide an immanent correction to the perverted position of thought over against reality. It then realizes that the dialectical process which leads from Being to reflection really leads from reflection to Being, with the restriction that this Being becomes visible only as the limit of reflection so that it cannot be further thematized within the science of reason. To pursue this consequence does not lead to the completion of idealism, bilt to its abolition (Aufhebung). Anyone who is familiar with Marx's critique of Hegel, as it is formulated in the final chapter of the 1844 Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, will notice the convergence of his arguments with those of Schelling. The "Ver- kehrtheit," the "inversion," of Hegelian speculation over against reality is without doubt his favorite objection. This is what Schelling had already protested, when he accused Hegel of reversing the positions of subject and predicate. Feuerbach echoed this, as did Marx, when he wrote that for Hegel, actual man and actual nature are regarded as mere predicates, ... as symbols of a hidden, non-actual man and non-actual nature. Subject and predicate have been inverted. 27 Marx's arguments against Hegel on this issue were drawn, as far as I can see, for the most part from Schelling. Negation, according to Marx, cannot by itself generate something positive; it would sublate (aufheben) itself-not in the Hegelian sense, but absolutely [that is, it would abolish itselfl-if the real hypokeimenon, the ground of Being that is nature, were ever to be withdrawn. The objection that the thought of an unconditioned reflection is circular did not bother Marx as much as it bothered Schelling and Feuerbach. However, Marx still followed Schelling-and here one cannot speak of Feuerbach's influence-when he explained that Hegel's final thought is false, since self-referential negation exists only on this side of the threshold of its Being. 264 IDEALISTIC STUDIES There are in fact at least three important slogans of Marx that can be read as loose Schelling citations (in other cases they might also be allusions to Feuerbach). One of them stems from Schelling's parody of Hegel's belief that spirit would, after realizing its perverted relation to Being, have to descend the same steps that it ascended, so that through this reversal man would appear as the productive cause of the world of animals, animals as the productive cause of plants, and organisms as the productive cause of inorganic nature, and so forth. 28 Marx echoed the parody when he wrote: In Hegel's philosophy of history the son gives birth to the mother, spirit gives birth to nature, Christian religion gives birth to paganism, and in general the result gives birth to the beginning.29 At another juncture Marx wrote "that the abstraction, or the abstract thinker," permitted the idea to surrender itself "in its otherness" only because "he had been informed of its truth through experience. "30 In the Paulus transcript, Schelling had mocked Hegel in the same terms, as the thinker who, after the alleged completion of the idea, is compelled to work through the process of nature, not because of the force of logical necessity, but because he has happened to have an experience of nature. 31 Marx seems to have particularly enjoyed Schelling's sarcasm from the Vorrede zu Cousin: The logical self-development of the concept sustains itself, as one might have anticipated, only as long as the system is devoted to what is purely logical. Once it dares the difficult step into reality, the thread of the dia- lectical development is tom apart. A second hypothesis suddenly becomes necessary, that it occurs to the idea to let its moments fall apart in order to create the world of nature. Why this takes place is a mystery, unless it is to break the boring monotony of its logical development. 32 Marx wrote in a similar vein: This entire transition from logic to the philosophy of nature is nothing other than transition from abstraction to intuition, a step that is so diffi- cult for an abstract thinker that it can only be presented in an adventurous spirit. The mystical feeling, which forces the philosopher to abandon ab- straction for intuition, is boredom, the longing for a content .... Inso- far as the abstraction grasps itself and perceives its own infinite boredom, Hegel is moved to describe the abandonment of such abstract thinking which thinks only itself . . . as a decision to acknowledge nature as the essential and to shift the emphasis to intuition. 33 For the sake of brevity I will have to end here the philological catalog of SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 265 Schelling excerpts in the early work of Marx. I have presented much more evidence elsewhere. I now want to speak to an objection I have often encountered. What use, one asks, is the most complete catalog of Schelling quotations in Marx, if their dif- ferences in spirit remain insurmountable? I am myself not very bothered by this question. Both Schelling and Marx regarded their work as scientific. In a scientific context, the political-moralistic position of an author is significant only insofar as it is defended with arguments. Marx and Engels viewed Hegel as the seismographer, indeed, as the ideological leader of the Prussian restora- tion. This did not give them second thoughts about learning from him. One must presume that they would have regarded Schelling in the same manner. It is one thing to oppose Schelling as the "38th ranking officer" who had com- mand of the entire Prussian police, and something entirely different to study and often find agreement with the afterword to his first Berlin lecture. It is of no use to debate the matter abstractly. The evidence indicates that Marx did both. One observes repeatedly in the history of philosophy that systems are appropriated by later generations that no longer share the original concerns of the author. This does not mean that the structure of the system is violated. According to its structure-and quite apart from the political-theological concerns of its author-Schelling's concept of history is closer to historical materialism than is Hegel's. "True dialectic," he taught in Berlin, "exists only in the realm of freedom, which will solve all mysteries." By breaking the closed circuit of "logical necessitation," freedom gained a central position in the late phase of Schelling's philosophy. It constitutes a warning to humanity to discover its practical essence through the contrast with a Being that it has not itself created. This was an idea that clearly appealed to Pierre Leroux, Michail Bakunin and August Cieszkowski. 34 Even if his personal attitude might have been counterrevolutionary, Schelling unmasked the state as an association of force and did so with an acidic tone that only anarchists like Bakunin or Proudhon could reiterate. Marx's thought of a "resurrection of nature" in communism is noteworthy, but should not be overly emphasized. There are similar formulations in Schelling, but even if these are the source of Marx's thought, they still point to an entire tradition, from the neoPlatonism of the Renaissance to Jakob Bohme, that Marx and Schelling were both equally aware of. More important is the convergence in their idea of "alienation" (Entfremdung). Schelling used the expression, which one finds already in the conservative critique of capitalism developed by such thinkers as Franz Baader and Adam Miiller, to depict a dialectical reversal of the real and the ideal, that is, of what is and of what should be. The thesis of the primacy of being before essence 266 IDEALISTIC STUDIES (and in the field of appearance, of nature before reason) characterizes an ontological relationship: natural being surpasses the human powers of reason not in terms of its dignity, but only in terms of the immediacy of its being. In the course of its evolution, the process of nature attains a level in which its further fate is endangered. This is the moment when human self-conscious- ness has been produced, for the future fate of nature now rests upon an indeterminable freedom. According to Schelling, human beings spoiled the chance that thus presented itself. Instead of recognizing the ontical priority of their ground in nature, they have destructively degraded nature to an object of rule and exploitation and have thereby initiated the "catastrophe" (Umsturz), the inhuman consequences of which we sadly confront when we peer into our own nature or the natural world that surrounds us. This was the act of "alienation" which tore us from nature and delivered us over to the "state," that Leviathan of anti-physis, under whose whip we now sigh and whose mechanical impersonality subverts our freedom. These ideas clearly have an enormous contemporary relevance. They reflect and help verify, moreover, Marx's concept of alienation. For Marx, too, wanted to depict a subversion of what should be the ground of human nature, the source of real essential human powers. The result of this subver- sion is that, instead of deriving from our natural ground a free space for unfolding our most genuinely human possibilities, we exhaust our essential powers in the struggle for physical survival. Still, the act of alienation is not a work of nature, but of human beings- which means it could be terminated. Schelling's methodological materialism opens up for freedom a terrain of history that is, as a matter of principle, open-ended and interminable. He derived from the idea that Being transcends consciousness also the realization that no thinkable level of evolution could produce a species with a legitimate claim to have reached a final truth. Schelling's religious option-which the more hopeful of the socialists always scomed--thus proved always to be resistant to one thing: it did not necessi- tate, and here the contrast to Hegel is noteworthy, an acceptance of existing reality. It was for this reason that Schelling attacked Hegel's totalitarian doctrines of the state in a lecture in Munich. It would be a profitable undertaking, which I clearly cannot now pursue, to examine the historical reception of this critique upon the Hegelian left. I will instead close with a quotation from the early French socialist Pierre Leroux. He makes it evident that the animosity of socialists for Schelling is by no means a necessary or natural animosity. It derives instead from an Hegelian faction of socialism, a faction that historically developed into a technocratic and dogmatic Marxism that departed regrettably and tragically SCHELLING'S CRITIQUE OF HEGEL 267 from the humanistic outlines of a socialistic utopia-a utopian vision with clear religious components. Such socialism has opted for the politics of worldpower and-with dissonant self-approval-insists upon being called scientific. It is against this background that I now conclude with the quote from Leroux: Everything that Schelling had to say about the situation of contempor- ary philosophy is profoundly true .... We, like he, also sense the dan- gers which threaten philosophy. They derive not only from philosophy's natural enemies, but from those who present themselves as philosophers, but are only eclectics. The false interpretation of Hegel (on the part of left-Hegelians and Marxists) has unfortunately paralyzed many spiritual energies. The pantheism of the master has given way to the skepticism and indifference of his followers. Deplorably enough, many today who regard themselves as progressive believe that the goal of philosophy con- sists in drawing everything into doubt. They regard as a mystification the true goal of philosophy, which is to cultivate a conviction that allows one to engage oneself wholeheartedly in the practical sphere. One wonders how it could have come this far that obfuscating and sophistic thinkers are now prepared to betray philosophy altogether and to deliver it over to the prevailing powers. 35 Universitiit Tiibingen Notes II have verified and documented this in two publications: Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Schellings Hegelkritik and die Anfiinge der Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main 1975 and in the introduction as well as in the documentation part to F. W. 1. Schelling's Philosophie der Offenbarung 184112, Frankfurt am Main 1977. 2Schelling's Philosophie der Offenbarung, p. 421. 'Ibid., pp. 488ff. 4Ibid., p. 494. 'Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie, in: Gesammelte Werke, ed. by W. Schuffenhauer, vol. 9, Berlin 1970, p. 260. 61 discuss this little-known connection in the introduction to Schelling's Philosophie der Offenbarung 184112, pp. 25ff. 'Ibid., p. 461. "F. W. 1. Schelling: Siimmtliche Werke, ed. by K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart 1856-1861 268 IDEALISTIC STUDIES (vol. 13, p. 90). 9Die heilige Familie, in: MEW 2, p. 204. iOSW (vol. to, p. 153 and vol. 11, p. 565). I'Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext, Frankfurt am Main 1971; within that mainly "Hegel and Holderlin," esp. pp. 22ff. l2Holderlin, Siimmtliche Werke, 7 vols., Stuttgart 1943-1972, vol. VI, p. 137, Letter to Neuffer of to. to. 1794. I'Compare Holderlin, vol. IV, pp. 253/4 (the long footnote on the Verfahrungsweise des poetischen Geistes). l4Letter to his brother in the middle of 1801 (vol. VI, p. 419). l5Concerning Schelling's early relationship with Holderlin see M. Frank, Der unendliche Mangel all Sein, pp. 19-31. 16A recurring term from Sinclair's "Raisonnements," first printed in Hannelore Hegel, Isaac von Sinclair zwischen Fichte, Holderlin and Hegel, Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 243ff. l7G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Frankfurt am Main 1970 ff. (Theorie-Werkausgabe), vol. 6, p. 553. 18Feuerbach, Zur Kritikder Hegelschell Philosophie, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 40. 19Ibid., pp. 37 and 38. 2lbid., vol. to, pp. 155-56; see Schelling SW (vol. to, p. 152). 2lSW (4, 358) and (6, 185). I have reconstructed both arguments and documented them in the Unendlichen Mangel an Sein, pp. 75ff., and pp. 109ff. 22SW (vol. to, p. 137). See Feuerbach, vol. 9, pp. 252-53. 2'MEW, 1. Additional Volume, p. 574. 24HegeJ, Werke, vol. 5, p. 70. 25lbid. 26Cf. (vol. 10, p. 234). 27MEW, 1. Additional Vol., p. 584. 28SW, (vol. 10, pp. 158-59). 29MEW, Vol. 2, p. 178. ,oMEW, I. Additional Vol., pp. 585-86. 3lSchelling's Philosophie der Offenbarung 184112, p. 130. '2SW (vol. 10, pp. 212f.). "MEW, 1. Additional Vol., pp. 586f. 34 1 have documented these assertions in the introduction and in the documentation of my edition of Schelling's 1841142 lecture. See pp. 24ff., 460ff., 468ff., and 476ff. "Pierre Leroux, "De Dieu," in: La Revue Independante, Vol. 3 (April 1842), pp. 29-30. translated by Joseph P. Lawrence
Hegel: Collected Works: Phenomenology of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, The Criticism of Hegle's Work and Hegelianism by Schopenhauer & Nietzsche, Biography