Schelling versus Hegel

From German Idealism to Christian Metaphysics

John Laughland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317059257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In tracing Friedrich von Schelling's long philosophical development, John Laughland examines in particular his disentanglement from German idealism and his reaction, later in life, against Hegel. He argues that this story has relevance beyond the facts themselves and that it explains much about the direction philosophy took in the century between the French Revolution and the rise of Communism. Schelling's development turned principally on the related questions of human liberty and the creation. Following a sharp disagreement with his old friend Hegel over the Phenomenology in 1807, Schelling wrote a short but brilliant essay on human freedom in 1809, after which he never published another word. In the remaining decades of his life (d. 1854) Schelling developed in an increasingly conservative and Christian direction, preoccupied with the relationship between Christianity and metaphysics. In numerous lectures and unpublished works, he attacked what he saw as the hubris and artificiality of Hegelian rationalism. However the path against which Schelling warned was the one which philosophy finally took. Schelling was determined to show how philosophy (especially ontology) explained and was explained by Christianity, and that both had been damaged by modern rationalism. But Hegel's Marxist epigones who attended his later lectures scoffed and Hegelianism triumphed. This is an elegantly written and engaging study in the history of ideas of a philosopher on the losing side.

Chapter 1
The Creation, Liberty and Evil

If we read a book which contains incredible or impossible narratives, or is written in a very obscure style, and if we know nothing about its author, nor the time or occasion of its being written, we shall vainly endeavour to gain any certain knowledge of its true meaning.

Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, Chapter VII1

Philosophy is not written in a void, nor should it be studied in one. Philosophers write in reply to their predecessors, and within an overall philosophical context which varies with time and place. The aims of a philosopher – certainly philosophical, perhaps political – can often be better discerned if this context is understood. This is not to attribute greater importance to the ancestry of ideas than to their truth or meaning: to take a text as anything other than something which aims at truth is to mistreat it. Rather, it is essential to understand the points of view against which a writer is arguing in order to understand the writer himself. The need to look at the philosophical context is especially acute when the debates of the time and the assumptions behind them are difficult or unfamiliar.2

This is certainly the case with the long philosophical career of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Throughout his life Schelling adopted different and sometimes conflicting philosophical views but much of his thinking revolved around the same set of questions. In particular, the Creation, liberty, evil and God were issues on which he wrote throughout his life: his very first work was his 1792 master’s thesis on the origin of evil (Antiquissimi de prima malorum humanorum origine philosophematis Genes. III. explicandi tentamen criticum et philosophicum). As we shall see, his trajectory turns on his developing interpretations of these problems. It is therefore important to put them in context before examining Schelling himself.

Any such discussion must begin with the question of creation. Certain views about the origins of the world entail certain views about its metaphysical and ontological structure, as well as about God, human liberty and evil. In particular, the distinction is important between Judeo-Christian theories of the Creation and competing cosmogonies including Gnosticism, Manicheism, neo-Platonism and Orphism. This distinction is important precisely because the central claim of this book is that Schelling progressively disentangled himself from those competing cosmogonies, which had themselves so heavily influenced the German idealist tradition into which he was born and which he initially espoused, and became progressively closer to the Judeo-Christian model, embracing along the way an increasingly overtly Christian metaphysics to go with it.

The Metaphysics of Christianity

The fundamental distinction between Judeo-Christian and these other cosmogonies is fairly easy to state. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the creation is the result of a free and loving act of God: as a result, the created universe is basically good, orderly and intelligible. The opening words of the Gospel of St John (I:3) state, ‘Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’, while the sentence, ‘God saw that it was good’ is repeated six times in the first chapter of Genesis.3

The universe is therefore not itself eternal or divine. Nor is the creation a necessary progression from an impersonal Absolute, as neo-Platonism was to affirm, or a degradation or a collapse, as numerous Oriental myths were to argue. Souls are not ‘imprisoned’ in their bodies following a ‘catastrophe’, and their existence did not precede the creation, any more than anything else did. Souls are not parcels of the divine substance, although they enjoy intelligence and freedom, and although man was created in God’s image, man is ontologically separate from God. Man is called to return to God and to become unified with Him, but in this union, separateness is preserved: the Christian and Jewish theology of union is precisely the opposite of a cosmogony of unity, according to which everything, including man, is ontologically contiguous with the Absolute. Moreover, in the Judeo-Christian view, the created world is real: it is not an illusion, as Orientals maintained, hiding the fundamental oneness of reality.4

Because the creation is good, evil is not inherent in it. Evil comes instead from man, that is, from the liberty which God created. Man’s separation from God is the result of moral rebellion, and only from this.5 Far from being a fact intrinsic to the existence of creation, evil (in the Jewish and Christian view) is precisely that which attempts to destroy creation. Claude Tresmontant writes, ‘Evil is a destruction of creation, it is an opposition to the creation, it is an inversion of it. It is properly spiritual and not physical.’6 Evil is not matter, but will, or self-will. The separation between man and God is certainly in part ontological – because man is not divine – but mainly moral.

The goodness of creation is underlined by the specifically Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Flesh. The Gospels tell us, ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only Son so that whoever believed in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’7 In doing this, God sanctified the body and emphasised His love for the world He had created. Christians, and to a lesser extent Jews, ‘believed in the goodness, albeit relative and derivative, of the physical world, of profane history, of secular life; this attitude was confirmed in the Christian dogma of Incarnation, of the resurrection of the body and the soul being the form of body.’8 There can surely be no stronger illustration of the view that the eternal can inhere in the finite than the Incarnation of Christ as man, and as we shall see, the later Schelling will lard his desire to create a ‘real-idealism’ with religious vocabulary.

Man’s rebellion was made possible by his genuine liberty, which God also created. That liberty also made possible a genuine dialogue between God and man which permeates the whole of Holy Scripture:9 Abraham haggles with God over how many righteous there must be in Sodom to prevent the entire city being wiped out;10 the Virgin Mary replies freely to the angel Gabriel, ‘Be it unto me according to thy word,’11; Jesus himself teaches, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you …’12 The outcome of the dialogue and, a fortiori, salvation is no foregone conclusion, precisely because man is a free being. ‘When the son of man cometh, shall he find faith on earth?’13 There is a genuine contingency in the history of the world which theories of eternal return and logical emanation cannot accommodate. Henri Bergson emphasised that the flow of time, and the succession of events in the real world, are genuinely unpredictable.14 Indeed, time is the medium in which these events occur. It is not a measure of degradation or of distance from the absolute One, but rather an indication of the fullness of the creation. Indeed, the very existence of time flows from the fact of creation: without a theory of creation, the existence of time cannot be accounted for. The universe, as Plato first argued in the Timaeos, is a living being, not the fixed reflection of some immutable Absolute.

Man is called upon to cooperate actively and intelligently with the ongoing development of the cosmos. In the Christian and Jewish view, human liberty is not an uncomfortable problem which needs to be subsumed into a larger rationalist system, it represents the very raison d’être of creation; man’s vocation is to exercise his liberty in accordance with God’s command. Although the creation is imperfect, fragile and transient (‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’15), this does not mean that creation is the source of evil.

As a consequence, God’s liberty and man’s liberty stand in a relation of mutual philosophical reciprocity: if the creation were not the result of God’s free choice – if it had occurred as the result of a collapse, or a fall, or some other catastrophe within the Absolute – then evil would not be the result of man’s liberty, but rather an ineradicable and necessary ontological fact inherent in the very fabric of creation itself. Theories which compromise God’s own liberty to create the world therefore generally compromise man’s liberty also. Human liberty, in other words, is intertwined with cosmogony at the deepest level. As Claude Bruaire writes, ‘Not only does creation signify that there is not derivation or emanation … it also demands the conversion of the concepts of identity, the absolute, difference and multiplicity in terms of personal liberty.’16

Other Cosmogonies

The early Church had to struggle vigorously to establish the philosophical coherence of this cosmogony against various competing ancient Greek and Oriental ones. The most important competing view was that the cosmos was itself eternal and therefore divine. Supporters of such cosmogonies tried to accommodate this view with the obvious fact that there are new developments in the world over time, and that things are born and die. To do this they adopted either theories of eternal return or theories which attributed the creation to a fall or a collapse in the Absolute. Both variants tended to adopt a cyclical and determinist view of cosmic development, according to which everything returns to its original condition. If the soul was a parcel of the Absolute which had fallen into matter, for instance, its vocation was to return, purified, to the One from which it had proceeded. Time, according to such schemes, was a lack: it was a sign of the deficiency of the material world and of its separation from the eternal absolute. It was the area of corruption and death. The world was an illusion.

These metaphysical doctrines had very direct ethical implications. Above all, the doctrine that existence is an illusion, and that only the undivided One is real – a doctrine which probably originated in the Upanishads but which, as we shall see, is implied by numerous modern philosophies including those of Spinoza (1632–77), Kant (1724–1804) and Hegel (1770–1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 The Creation, Liberty and Evil
• Chapter 2 The Question of Being
• Chapter 3 Schelling’s Beginnings
• Chapter 4 The Metaphysics of Evil
• Chapter 5 Christian Cosmogony and the End of Idealism (Schelling’s Development from Stuttgart to Munich, 1810–27)
• Chapter 6 The Religious Flowering in Schelling’s Late Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index