The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling

Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802)

J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, Michael G. Vater, David W. Wood, Michael G. Vater, David W. Wood

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438440187, 9781438440170
• eBook ISBN: 9781438440194
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The disputes of philosophers provide a place to view their positions and arguments in a tightly focused way, and also in a manner that is infused with human temperaments and passions. Fichte and Schelling had been perceived as "partners" in the cause of Criticism or transcendental idealism since 1794, but upon Fichte's departure from Jena in 1799, each began to perceive a drift in their fundamental interests and allegiances. Schelling's philosophy of nature seemed to move him toward a realistic philosophy, while Fichte's interests in the origin of personal consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the ultimate determination of the agent's moral will moved him to explore what he called "faith" in one popular text, or a theory of an intelligible world. This volume brings together the letters the two philosophers exchanged between 1800 and 1802 and the texts that each penned with the other in mind.

Introduction to F. W. J. Schelling's Presentation of My System of Philosophy¹ (1801) and Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract]

Friedrich Schelling's new presentation of his system, the first work in what came to be deemed his “philosophy of identity,” was occasioned by a double confrontation with Fichtean idealism in the summer and autumn of 1800: a more general challenge (documented in the Correspondence) to the place of a philosophy of nature in the transcendental tradition of the Wissenschaftslehre that had slowly taken form in Fichte's mind as he read, sometimes cursorily, Schelling's writings from 1795 to 1800, and a more specific epistemological challenge to the supposed independence of philosophy of nature that Carl August Eschenmayer voiced in Schelling's own journal on Naturphilosophie.²

Early in 1800, Schelling wrote to Eschenmayer to remind him of his promise to submit some articles for the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik.³ In a letter from April of 1800 no longer extant, Eschenmayer expressed the view that central claims Schelling had advanced in his 1799 essays on the philosophy of nature were circular,⁴ viz., that the business of philosophy of nature is to effect a “self-construction” of nature, that the idea of nature is necessary, and that it necessarily involves a duality of principles. Either the idea of nature is a priori or these suppositions are borrowed from an empirical overview of nature.⁵ In a manuscript submitted to Schelling in the summer of 1800 for the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik and printed in the first issue of Vol. II, January, 1801 under the title Spontaneität = Weltseele oder die höchste Prinzip der Naturphilosophie, Eschenmayer argues that there can be dual principles in nature only if there are dual and opposite tendencies in the subject who is conscious of nature—firstly, a principle of spontaneity that tends to infinity, secondly, a limiting nature-principle that strives to limit and confine activity to finitude, and in addition a synthesis that equalizes them—which can only be drive or impetus (Trieb), the foundation of sensation and intuition. As the first presentation of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre had suggested, the laws of nature are projected upon objectivity from the work of mind (Geist), since only in us is there to be found a principle of spontaneity or originary motion.⁶ Since empirical science cannot establish the claim to systematic unity in nature, a philosophy of nature needs a “propaedeutic” or foundation, which it indeed finds in transcendental philosophy (or Wissenschaftslehre). It is simply too soon, argues Eschenmayer, to proclaim an independent philosophy of nature.⁷

In the same issue, which Schelling finished editing and sent to his publisher early in the autumn of 1800,⁸ Schelling appends a reply to Eschenmayer's critique under the title Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige Art ihr Probleme aufzulösen (On the True Concept of the Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way to Solve Its Problems). – Later that autumn, Schelling receives essentially the same challenge to his notion of the independence of philosophy of nature from Fichte⁹, and he quickly replies to it in a letter¹⁰ that recounts the history of the development of his philosophical views in general and those on nature in particular in words that are almost identical to those used in the True Concept essay.¹¹ Though this theme of the independence of Naturphilosophie will become the major point of contention in the Fichte-Schelling Correspondence over the course of the next year, it seems that it was Eschenmayer's attack that directly occasioned the writing of the Presentation of My System of Philosophy.

In the True Concept essay, Schelling puts the disagreement between Eschenmayer and himself in the starkest possible terms: while the Fichtean Eschenmayer locates the activity of nature in the I, Schelling places it in nature itself. This claim of agency in nature, the precondition of philosophy's attempt to present nature as self-constructing, for now remains unexplained, but Schelling promises that the next issue (which appeared at the Easter book fair on 26 April, 1801) will contain a new presentation of his system, one in which Eschenmayer's dualism of nature and spirit, and all other dualisms that haunt ordinary consciousness, will be abolished and the oneness of the world proved.¹² But the one world Schelling has in mind is no longer the world of consciousness, or a transcendental construction of the inward activity or agility behind consciousness such as the newer versions of the Wissenschaftslehre articulated; it is the natural world, the one place where the identity-in-difference of the absolute comes to expression—as in Spinoza's one world which is both natura naturans and natura naturata. Nature is not to be viewed as a product of reason; reason itself comes to be in nature. In this reversal that Schelling announces in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy, transcendental idealism is transformed into objective idealism, to use the name Hegel gave to the nineteenth-century heir of Kantian-Fichtean subjective idealism.¹³

The Presentation of My System of Philosophy was composed in a scant six months, for Schelling writes extensively to Goethe late in January of 1801 on a central theme of its version of Naturphilosophie¹⁴—the role of metamorphosis (Goethe's term) or chemical transformation in connecting inorganic nature to organic nature—and again a month later with a short apology for forgetting to return his Spinoza volumes.¹⁵ Goethe's theories of light and plant metamorphosis are in fact highlighted in Schelling's Presentation. Goethe had daily studied Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism and General Deduction of the Dynamic Process with Niethammer from early September to early October in 1800. Schelling spent the Christmas holidays that year with Goethe in Weimar and celebrated the turn of the century with Goethe, Schiller, Hufeland and Steffens. The influence of Goethe's major scientific notions, both the unity of light and the recapitulative nature of plant morphology, can be seen in the Presentation's philosophy of nature, where the Potenzen or levels of nature's elaboration are presented not as discrete stages that nature actually has and has to progress through in a linear fashion,¹⁶ but as repetitions of the one fundamental activity of nature: to recall apparent difference back to essential identity and thereby exponentially increase (potenziren) the display of the unity and vitality of what Schelling calls “the prime existent”—matter, coextensive with the whole of nature. What Schelling finds in Goethe's holistic approach to science is a confirmation of the clues provided historically by Plato and Spinoza—nature is one and living through and through, despite the dissociative tendencies of ordinary perception and scientific empiricism (which Schelling calls “atomistic” or “physicalism”) to anatomize the living whole into discrete packets of dead matter.¹⁷

The body of the Presentation, as we have it,¹⁸ with its uninterrupted elaboration of theorems, corollaries, lemmata, and explanations from an opening meditation on what reason is and logically requires flows seamlessly from the exhibition of the logic of appearance (or metaphysics of identity) to its embodiment in the major structures of nature, closely corresponds to what Schelling told Eschenmayer he was going to do—display the unity and vitality of nature without recourse to any fundamental dualism (such as the genetic device of a fundamental categorical divide between an ever-hidden productivity and always only-apparent product that organized the theoretical section of the System of Transcendental Idealism.) It also mirrors the influence of Schelling's historical and contemporary fellow “nature-monists”: Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe. —The Introduction to the work, however, attempts to address Fichte's concerns about whether philosophy must necessarily be done from the perspective of the highest potency (the I) or can somehow start at the basic level, nature. Schelling clearly wishes, at least for the moment, to publicly sidestep the issue of whether or not there is one fundamental difference that separates Fichte and himself, or whether perhaps misreading of his works on nature and transcendental philosophy have merely given that suggestion. But his claim that he has always had a basic logic that united his philosophies of nature and consciousness is clearly revisionary and anachronistic. And the fact that the Presentation of My System of Philosophy breaks off with a mere promise to extend the account of nature from the border between inorganic and organic nature to the sphere of consciousness, and actively mirror the three potencies passively displayed in nature to their active counterparts in the structures of consciousness, suggests that Schelling is either uninterested or unable to take the account in that direction. In any case, Schelling is his own best commentator when, in the 1833/34 or 1836/37 Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, he refrains from calling the works of 1800-1801 philosophy of identity, and instead subsumes them under the broader labels Naturphilosophie and “Negative (i.e., merely conceptual) Philosophy.”¹⁹

The body of the Presentation falls into two sections: § 1 – 53 elaborate a metaphysics of identity or “indifference”²⁰ in a deductive manner that is modeled on Spinoza's more geometrico exposition in the Ethics, while § 54 – 159 describe the fundamental structures of nature's activity in stepwise exposition that works its way up from the most basic phenomena (matter in its simplest properties) to more relational or interactive properties (physical, chemical and what we would now call biochemical processes) to properly biological phenomena that plants and animals exhibit. Schelling says he adopts Spinoza's axiomatic presentation as a model because of its clarity and brevity, but he does not apply the word so fashionable since Kant, “deduction,” to his procedure, nor does he make claims of necessity or completeness for his results.

The two essays on philosophical methodology from 1802 that follow in this volume, the first on intellectual intuition, the second on philosophical construction, were written soon after the Presentation was published in 1801.²¹ The complementary techniques they describe involve, first, a unique nondiscursive insight into a pervasive principle that is both logically and ontologically necessary, and, subsequent to that, a taxonomic construction of the total horizon of phenomena wherein each singular phenomenon finds its place through a process of interrelating features of generality and particularity—a function of philosophical “imagination” (Ineinsbildung).

The two major sections of the Presentation are complementary, though the axiomatic derivation is continuous and without break: the metaphysics of identity shows how difference (finitude, the ground of individual phenomena) lurks within primordial identity as reason must conceive it and hence seems to be posited from its own side independent of the absolute, while the philosophy of nature shows how in its fundamental modes of activity, nature abrogates the seeming independence of the individual entity (or level of natural functioning) and returns it to its place in nature as a whole—relative totality or the unity of the “prime existent.”²²

Abstractly put, the metaphysics of identity aims to demonstrate that absolute identity is realized as totality or universe (through a logical process that moves from relative identity, to duplicity, to relative totality). The philosophy of nature displays a stack of processes that reveal upon investigation that items which initially seem independent and unrelated (pertaining to the order of duplicity) actually function only within relative totality. Identity means there is only one nature, one universe; nature itself reveals progressive integration or reintegration of difference back into indifference. It is the activities of nature—gravity, cohesion, light, electrici...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Trajectory of German Philosophy After Kant and the “Difference” Between Fichte and Schelling
• J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling: Correspondence 1800–1802
• Introduction to the Texts of J. G. Fichte
• Introduction to the Texts of F. W. J. Schelling
• Notes
• Select Bibliography