Exceeding Reason

Freedom and Religion in Schelling and Nietzsche

Dennis Vanden Auweele

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110618457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The work of the later Schelling (in and after 1809) seems antithetical to that of Nietzsche: one a Romantic, idealist and Christian, the other Dionysian, anti-idealist and anti-Christian. Still, there is a very meaningful and educative dialogue to be found between Schelling and Nietzsche on the topics of reason, freedom and religion. Both of them start their philosophy with a similar critique of the Western tradition, which to them is overly dualist, rationalist and anti-organic (metaphysically, ethically, religiously, politically). In response, they hope to inculcate a more lively view of reality in which a new understanding of freedom takes center stage. This freedom can be revealed and strengthened through a proper approach to religion, one that neither disconnects from nor subordinates religion to reason. Religion is the dialogical other to reason, one that refreshes and animates our attempts to navigate the world autonomously. In doing so, Schelling and Nietzsche open up new avenues of thinking about (the relationship between) freedom, reason and religion.

Chapter 1 Schelling and Nietzsche: A Philosophical Discussion?

Let’s first get rid of a pesky interjection: are (the later) Schelling and Nietzsche thinkers amenable to philosophical dialogue? I think yes, but truth be told, Nietzsche’s general awareness of Schelling’s philosophy – and of his Spätphilosophie in particular – was limited at best. Nietzsche did not enjoy a classical training in philosophy and Schelling’s later works were not widely available. There is little use in arguing for any direct influence of Schelling on Nietzsche. There are other ways, however, that the two could be put into fruitful dialogue.

There are some figures between Schelling and Nietzsche that might have funneled some of Schelling’s thoughts to Nietzsche, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig von Feuerbach, Eduard von Hartmann and Jacob Burckhardt.⁵ But even here the evidence of significant influence is disappointingly circumstantial. The situation is not helped along by the fact that Nietzsche was quite secretive of his sources, probably because he wanted to project an image of himself as a free spirit, untimely and “not much of a reader” (see EH, ‘Why I am so Wise’).⁶ My aim is not to find some hidden notes or library receipt cards that prove how Nietzsche would huddle under his bedsheets at night to read Schelling’s books. Instead, I venture here to show that Schelling and Nietzsche share in a nexus of philosophical concerns and interests, a bond of consanguinity if you will, that connects them more intimately than most readers would recognize. Many readers in the history of philosophy might even find this more moderate claim difficult to swallow since it is hard to imagine a constructive dialogue between Nietzsche and Schelling, between, on the one hand, the despiser of Christianity, the hater of metaphysics, the denier of morality and the renouncer of philosophical system, and, on the other hand, the justifier of Christianity, the builder of metaphysics, the grounder of moral good and evil and the enthusiast of systematic thought. I will show that both of them recognized a similar problem in Western philosophy, how they initially believed in Romanticism as a solution to this problem, how they lost faith in Romanticism and in what divergent directions they ultimately parted ways.

A historical-interpretative difficulty further renders a dialogue between Schelling and Nietzsche problematic. Schelling had an incredibly long career, publishing material from the age of eighteen and lecturing well into his sixties, even seventies. Nietzsche had a relatively short, but incredibly turbulent philosophical lifespan. Both of them lacked the sort of consistency of those philosophers who let their thoughts develop at length. This usually means that any engagement with Schelling and Nietzsche is almost always prefaced by an account, sometimes ridiculously detailed, of which period, which books and even which chapters are under discussion. There is no denying that Schelling and Nietzsche did not remain fully consistent from their earliest to latest works. No true philosopher can. Schelling’s ideological trajectory tends to be split up into three periods: early idealism and philosophy of nature (up until around 1804), middle Romanticism (until the abandonment of the Weltalter project roughly around 1830) and later philosophical religion (mostly the lectures in Munich and Berlin, which were prepared in Erlangen). Nietzsche’s philosophical trajectory is usually presented as moving from youthful Christian piety (abandoned formally when he abandoned his studies in theology) to Wagnerian Romanticism (up until 1876), through positivism and free spirits (up until 1882), towards over-humanity, will to power and anti-Christianity (until his mental collapse in 1889). There is truth to this periodization. Scholarship on their philosophical trajectories has done historical research a service by showing the developments, small and large, of their thought. This cannot, however, be an end in itself. When one compartmentalizes a philosopher’s thought excessively, then this tends to obfuscate the continuity, evolution and development between these periods of thought. One misses how one way of thinking gives over to another way of thinking: one misses the dynamic of philosophy itself. Scholars who focus only on distinct periods in a philosopher’s development remind me of one of Hegel’s more memorable quips in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, where he compares merely historical scholars to “countinghouse clerks, who keep the ledgers and accounts of other people’s wealth, a wealth that passes through their hands without their retaining any of it, clerks who act only for others without acquiring assets of their own” (Hegel 2006, p. 44).

Schelling and Nietzsche are invested in their philosophy. They have put their money down. This means that they have to keep rigorously honest about their views and allow their thinking to evolve if the need would arise. In hindsight, they saw their earlier thought as youthful, incomplete and even an embarrassment (I shudder myself when rereading my first published articles). Nietzsche admits this openly: “But I assert that there has never been a philosopher who has not in the end looked down on the philosophy of his youth with contempt, or at the least with mistrust” (MAM 253).⁷ The truth is in the whole: not that the final thought is the most complete, but that their development shows the dynamic of thought itself.

At one point in their development, respectively middle and early, Schelling and Nietzsche are most amenable to conversation; namely, when they are generally considered to be Romantics. At that time, they sought to rekindle a more passionate engagement with reality, assisted by art and religion, through focusing on vitality, will and energy. Most, if not all, of the comparative scholarship has indeed built from that period. Nevertheless, the work here can be quickly summarized. In 1935, Otto Kein pioneered with his Das Apollinische und Dionysische bei Nietzsche und Schelling, and six decades later, J.E. Wilson’s would publish his impressive study of the impact of Schelling on Nietzsche’s earliest work (1996). More recently, there has been the work of Dieter Jähnig on art in Schelling and Nietzsche (2011), Bernard Freydberg’s study of the darker regions of modern thought, entitled A Dark History of Modern Philosophy (2017), and, while not directly on Schelling and Nietzsche, George Williamson’s The Longing for Myth in Germany (2004) is a helpful tool that sketches the contours of 19^th-century philosophy of religion. My point of departure will be the Romantic preoccupations of Schelling and Nietzsche, wherein they are diagnosing similar difficulties in European thought and culture. My real interest lies, however, in how they seek to overcome these difficulties and what determinative role is played by freedom and religion in such an undertaking. In other words, I am interested in how and why they abandoned Romanticism. For the sake of clarity, this means that I will take up Schelling’s work mainly, but not exclusively, from 1809 onwards, and with Nietzsche, my focus will be on his work between 1881 and 1887.⁸

In the remainder of this chapter, I outline the general points of this reading. Schelling departed on a philosophical voyage in 1809 with his Freiheitsschrift that would last more than four decades, a voyage in which he was developing a system of philosophy that should be “strong enough to endure the test [Probe] of life, strong enough not to pale [erblassen] in front of cold reality” (UO 3). There was a time in the 20^th century that philosophers would baulk at attempts to philosophical completeness and suspect that they are excessively hegemonic, oppressive and lacking in a certain kind of finesse (see, for instance, the work of Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault). Schelling was no stranger to these very same concerns. For him as well, philosophy must become more organic, more lively and more attuned to reality. This does not force Schelling to shy away from giving a systematic account of reality, as he calls it a ‘world system’ (Weltsystem), which should “[…] not exclude anything (for instance, nature), not subordinate anything one-sidedly or suppress anything altogether” (SV 5).

Schelling believes that a certain premise (Voraussetzung) of much philosophical thought has obfuscated the search for a good philosophical system. In his lectures known as the System of the Ages of the World (Munich, 1827/28), Schelling asserts that “we are justified in presuming that all previous attempts in philosophy have at bottom entertained a false premise and a common fault” (SW 10). That common flaw is what Schelling sometimes calls “the Eleatic presupposition”, which set up a philosophical tradition opposed to the less successful “Ionic tradition” (a tradition thus preferring being over becoming, Parmenides over Heraclitus). This tradition thought about reality in a one-sided, non-dialectical and uniformly abstract fashion, a pernicious mistake that Schelling seeks to correct. He does so, not by abandoning ‘being’, but by giving ‘becoming’ its proper dues. Initially attracted to a more systematic form of Kant’s transcendental idealism, Schelling would become increasingly hesitant about the capacity for idealism to attain such an organic world-system, at least if it would remain devoid of realism. Particularly after 1800, Schelling would slowly move away from Fichtean idealism and, from the 1820s on, he would become a vocal opponent of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of absolute spirit. As he matured, Schelling became ever more hesitant about whether (dialectal) philosophy is capable of sublating the opposition between thinking and being – or whether it is even desirable to do so. Hegelian sublation is a move from lack to determination and holistic completeness; for Schelling, however, all becoming must move from contradiction to creation to new contradiction. Hegel’s dialectic is blind to the messy and murky, even agonistic, layers of reality:

In the Hegelian philosophy the beginning point behaves in relation to what follows it as a mere minus, as a lack, an emptiness, which is filled and is admittedly, as such, negated as emptiness, but in this there is as little to overcome as there is in filling an empty vessel; it all happens quite peacefully – there is no opposition between being and nothing, they do not do anything to each other.

(GNP 157 [143])

Contrary to Hegel, one of Schelling’s philosophical innovations is a more compelling view of dialectics, a view that recognizes how there is something which cannot be taken up in abstract concepts. Schelling famously calls this “the indivisible remainder” (der nie aufgehende Rest) in Freedom-Essay. It will be a consistent hallmark of Schelling’s thought, and the very means by which Schelling believes that philosophy can rejuvenate, refresh, rethink or, in short, develop itself. That remainder is the passion of philosophy, the gift of madness that propels thinking, that which is in excess of philosophical system. Philosophy does not stare in wonder at that which forms a nicely structured and systematic unity. Philosophy is spurred on by that which upsets that unity and harmony – any college lecturer will tell you that a class on evil, suffering and violence draws in more students that one on goodness, happiness and charity. Sublating the wonder at the bottom of philosophy means sublating philosophy itself. Instead, philosophy must be bold enough to return to wonder at that which is in excess to determinate thought. As Schelling states: “Not only poets, but also philosophers, have their ecstasies. They need this in order to be safe, through the feeling of the indescribable reality of that higher representation, against the coerced concepts of an empty dialectic that lacks enthusiasm” (W3 203). Plato knew this as well: “The best things we have come from madness” (Plato 1997, p. 522 [244a]).

Schelling believed that the philosophical tradition was unsuccessful in thinking about the whole of reality in an organic world-system because it dealt inappropriately with the remainder (Rest). But, ironically, the majority of Schelling’s contemporaries (and similarly many today) believe that Schelling was not successful in achieving that goal either. The standard way of receiving Schelling’s philosophy throughout history has seen its development as an ideological decline, where Schelling gradually degenerated from idealism to Romanticism and ultimately to Christian orthodoxy.⁹ In this standard view, the early Schelling is a stepping stone to Hegelian philosophy, while the later Schelling is an overly-Christian reinterpretation of dialectics and Romanticism. Perhaps one of the most explicit iterations of this view was made by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856):

I think that the philosophical career of Mr. Schelling ended with the attempt to intuit the absolute intellectually. A greater thinker now emerges who develops Naturphilosophie ​into a complete system, who explains with this synthesis the entire world of appearances, who adds even grander ideas to the grand ideas of his predecessors, and who carries out the synthesis in every discipline, thus grounding it scientifically. He is a pupil of Mr. Schelling, but a pupil who gradually assumed all of the power of his teacher in the realm of philosophy; seeking dominance, he outgrew Schelling, and finally cast him out into the darkness. It is the great Hegel.

(Heine 2007, pp. 110–11)

This deflationary view of the relevance of Schelling’s (later) philosophy would have to ignore, and indeed often did, the innovations of Schelling’s later philosophy, which is not a homesick Christianity but a move away and beyond idealism (and realism) for good reasons. A more promising way to think of Schelling’s philosophical journey is as the continuous, dialectical development of certain ideas (as he himself would argue in his philosophy of revelation) which must remain open to new things that upset a previously self-enclosed system. Regrettably, as we shall discern near the very end of our discussion, Schelling did not stay faithful to his own greatest insight and, under the weight of some theological pressure, seems to prefer the relative completeness of a Christian orthodox philosophy of revelation (Schelling was brought to Berlin mainly to be a counterweight to Hegel’s deflationary reading of Christianity). This is what many in the audience at Schelling’s Berlin lectures experienced as well, namely that his tone turned strikingly orthodox, not least regarding his thoughts on incarnation, revelation and Christology.¹⁰

While Schelling himself might have come to embrace Christianity in the end, the premises, arguments and general trajectory of his philosophy could be taken, perhaps even more naturally, into a different direction. Friedrich Nietzsche might then very well be a more faithful Schellingian, a truer follower of Heraclitus, and of the task to think in more organic terms. My claim is most certainly not that Nietzsche received this philosophical calling from Schelling: throughout a grand total of fifteen direct references to Schelling in his published and unpublished oeuvre, Nietzsche is quite happy simply to mock Schelling as just one more Tübingen theologian. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche puts things most clearly: “Germans are only ever inscribed in the annals of epistemology under equivocal names, they have only ever produced ‘unconscious’ counterfeiters (– Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schleiermacher deserve this epithet as much as Kant and Leibniz, they are all just Schleiermachers –)” (EH, ‘The Case of Wagner’, 3).¹¹ All of the philosophers that Nietzsche mentions are counterfeit, deceitful (hinterlistig) and even unconscious theologians: they do not know that they are merely providing a philosophical justification for their customary and traditional faith in Christianity.

Martin Heidegger writes that Schelling’s Freedom-Essay “attains the acme of the metaphysics of German Idealism” (1985, p. 165). This could be read to suggest that Schelling’s philosophy after Freedom-Essay goes beyond and even outdoes German Idealism. Indeed, as the 19th century progressed, Schelling woul...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Translation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Schelling and Nietzsche: A Philosophical Discussion?
• Part I: Dualism, Rationalism and Cultural Fatigue
• Part II: Organicism, Freedom and Self-Formation
• Part III: Mythology, Revelation and Religion
• Index
• Endorsements