But its divine essence strives back to the
original
ground and archetype, and this return of things into
Ood is history, the epic composed in the mind of God, whose Iliad is the farther and farther departure of man from God, and whose Odyssey is his return to God.
Ood is history, the epic composed in the mind of God, whose Iliad is the farther and farther departure of man from God, and whose Odyssey is his return to God.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
The aesthetic motif was active also, at least formally, in that a common systematic basis was sought for the Philosophy of Mature and the Transcendental Philosophy.
The former treated the objec tive, the latter the subjective reason ; the two, however, must be indentical in their ultimate essence; whence this phase of idealism is called the System of Identity (Identitatsystem).
According to this, a common principle is required for Nature and the self.
In the treatise which Schelling entitled "Exposition of my System of Philosophy," this common principle is called the "Absolute Reason" or the "Indifference of Nature and Spirit, of object and subject " ; for the highest principle can be determined neither as real nor as ideal; in it all antitheses must be obliterated.
The " Absolute " is here as undetermined in its content,5 with Schelling, as in the old " negative theology," or as in Spinoza's " substance.
" With the latter conception it has in common the property, that its phenomenal manifestation diverges into two series, the real and the ideal, Nature and Spirit or Mind.
This kinship with Spinoza as regards his thought, Schelling strengthened by formal relationship, imitating in his Exposition the schematism of the Ethics.
Nevertheless this idealistic Spinozism is different throughout from the original in its conception of the world.
Both desire to set forth the eternal transmutation of the Absolute into the universe; but in this Spinoza regards the two attributes of materiality and con sciousness as completely separate, and each finite phenomenon as belonging solely to one of the two spheres.
Schelling, however, requires that "Reality" and "Ideality" must be contained in every
phenomenon, and construes particular phenomena according to the degree in which the two elements are combined. The dialectical principle of absolute idealism is the quantitative difference between the real and the ideal factors ; the Absolute itself is just for this reason complete indifference. ''' The real series is that in which the objective factor predominates (" iiberwiegt") ; it leads from matter through light, electricity, and chemism to the organism — the relatively spiritual manifestation of Nature. In the ideal series the subjective factor predominates. In it the development proceeds from morality
1 In the coll. works, V. 353 ff. , first printed 1859.
1 Schelling'* disciple, Oken, expressed this very characteristically when he placed the Absolute, already called God by him, = ±0.
• Schelling illustrates this schematically by the example of the magnet, in the different parts of which north and south magnetism are present with vary ing intensities. . . .
Ch a*. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schilling. 609
and science to the work of art, the relatively most natural appear ance in the realm of Spirit. And the total manifestation of the Absolute, the universe, therefore, at once the most perfect organ ism and the most perfect work of art. 1
9. In this system Schelling would comprehend the entire issue of the investigations which had previously diverged in various direc tions. The different stages of the self-differentiation of the Absolute he termed at first, " potencies," but soon introduced another name, and at the same time another conception of the matter. This was connected with the religions turn which the thinking of the Roman ticists took at about the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. The incitement to this came from Schleiermacher. He proved to the " Cultured Despisers of Religion," that the system of reason can become complete only in religion. In this, too, was victory for the (esthetic reason. For what Schleiermacher then preached as religion (cf. 41, was not theoretical or practical behaviour of man, but an aesthetic relation to the World-ground, the
feeling of absolute dependence. Therefore, religion, too, was in his view limited to pious feeling, to the complete permeation of the individual by this inward relation to the universal, and put aside all theoretical form and practical organisation. For the same reason religion was held to be an individual matter, and positive religion was traced back to the "religious genius" of its founder. In view of this kinship we can understand the influence which Schleier- macher's " Reden " exercised upon Romanticism to this due the inclination of the latter to expect from religion the unitary solution of all problems of mankind, to desire to bring in the separated spheres of the activity of civilisation into inner and intimate union again, and, finally, to seek the eternal welfare of all in that rule of religion over all spheres of life, which obtained in the Middle Ages. As Schiller created an idealised Greece, so the later Roman ticists created an idealised Middle Ages.
Schelling followed this line of thought with great acuteness and fineness of feeling. Like Spinoza, he now named the Absolute " Ood " or the " Infinite," and likewise as Spinoza had inserted the attri butes and the "infinite modes" (cf. 409 f. ) between "substance "and the particular finite realities, so the " potencies " are now regarded as the eUrnal forms of the phenomenal manifestation of God, while the empirical particular phenomena are the finite copies of these. But when in this sense they were also termed by Schelling Ideas (in his Bruno and in his Method of Academical Study)
W. , 423.
i
I. 4,
6)
p.
: it
is
$
is,
a
a
610 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
another influence still comes to light in this. Schleiermacher and Hegel, the latter of whom had exerted a personal influence upon Schelling since 1801, both pointed to Plato; but the philosophical knowledge of that time * still saw Plato's doctriue through the spec tacles of Neo-Platonism, which conceived of the Ideas as God's vision or intuition of himself (Selbstanschauung Gottes). And so Schelling's doctrine turned back into a Neo-Platonic Idealism, according to which the "Ideas" formed the intermediate link through which the Absolute became transformed into the world.
This religious idealism of Schelling's doctrine of Ideas has a number of parallel and succeeding phenomena. The most interest ing of these personally is Fichte's later doctrine, in which he paid to the victory of Spinozism the tribute of making the infinite impulse of the I proceed forth from an "absolute Being" (Sein) and be di rected toward the same. For finite things, he held fast to his deduc tion of them as products of consciousness ; but the infinite activity of this consciousness he now deduced from the end of " imitating " an absolute Being, the deity, and hence the vocation and destiny of man appeared to him no longer the restless activity of categorical imperative, but the "blessed life" of sinking into a contemplation of the divine original, — a mystical dying note of the mighty thinker's life, which makes the victory of the aesthetic reason appear in its full magnitude.
The religious motif was followed still, farther by Schelling's dis ciple Krause. He wished to combine the pantheistic Weltanschauung
of idealism, which Schelling even at that time still defended Spinozistic fashion), with the conception of divine personality. He, too, regards the world as the development of the divine " essence," which is distinctly stamped out in the Ideas ; but these ideas are the intuition which the supreme personality has of himself. Essence
( Wesen) — this is Krause 's term for God — is not indifferent Rea son, but the personal, living ground of the world. In his"farther carrying out of the system, which was characterised as Panen- theism," Krause has scarcely any other originality than the very objectionable one of presenting the thoughts common to the whole idealistic development in an unintelligible terminology, which he himself invented, but declared to be pure German. He carries out, especially, his conception of the entire life of reason from the point of view of the " Gliedbau" (in German, organism). He not only, like Schelling, regards the universe as a " Wesengliedbau "
1 On Herbart's independent position, the importance of which becomes clear just in antithesis to that of Schelling and Hegel, see above, p. 684, note 1. -
(in
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Krau. se, Hegel. 611
(divine organism), but also regards the structures of society as continuations of the organic vital movement beyond the individual man ; every union {Bund) is such a " Oliedbau," and inserts itself again into a higher organism as a member (Glied), and the course of history is the process of the production of more and more perfect and comprehensive unions.
For the Romantic aesthetics, finally, Schilling's new doctrine gave rise to the result that the Neo-Flatonic conception of beauty, as phenomenal manifestation of the Idea in the sensuous, became again recognised as authoritative. The relation of inadequacy between the finite appearance and the infinite Idea agreed with Schlegel's principle of irony, and these thoughts Solger, especially, made the basis of his theory of art.
10. The consummation of this whole rich and varied development is formed by Hegel's logical idealism. He signifies in the main a return from Schelling to Fichte, a giving up of the thought that the living wealth of the world can be derived or deduced from the " Nothing" ' of absolute indifference, and the attempt to raise this empty substance again to spirit* — to the self-determined subject. Such knowledge, however, cannot have the form of intuition or immediate perception (Anschauung), which Fichte and Schelling had claimed for the Ego or the Absolute, but only that of the con ception or notion {Begriff). If all that is real or actual is the mani festation of spirit or mind, then metaphysics coincides with the logic* which has to develop the creative self-movement of spirit as a dialectical necessity. The conceptions into which mind or spirit takes apart and analyses its own content are the categories of reality, the forms of the cosmic life ; and the task of philosophy is not to describe this realm of forms as a given manifold, but to comprehend them as the moments of a single unitary development. The dialec tical method, therefore, serves, with Hegel, to determine the essential nature of particular phenomena by the significance which they have as members or links in the self-unfolding of spirit. Instead of Spirit (Oeist) Hegel also uses Idea or God. It is the highest task that has ever been set philosophy, to comprehend the world as a development of those principles or determinations which form the content of the divine mind.
> Hegel, PMiu»nen. Voir. , \V. , II. 14.
- [firuit. a* in J 20, has the connotation of both "mind" and "spirit. " rhe former *eems more appropriate where logical relation* are under considera
tion, though the latter la usually retained for the sake of uniformity. 1
1 Thia metaphysical logic Is of course not formal logic, but in its determining principle la properly Kant's transcendental logic. The only difference is that the "phenomenon"' is for Kant a human mode of representation, for Hegel an
objective externalising of the Absolute Spirit
612 Q-ermany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
In this, Hegel sustains not only to the German philosophy, but to the whole earlier intellectual movement, a relation similar to that of Proclus to Greek thought : ' in the "schema of trinities " of Posi tion, Negation, and Sublation or Reconciliation, all conceptions with which the human mind has ever thought reality or its particular groups, are woven together into a unified system. Each retains its assigned place, in which its necessity, its relative justification, is said to become manifest : but each proves by this same treatment to be only a moment or factor which receives its true value only when it has been put in connection with the rest and introduced into the whole. It is to be shown that the antitheses and contradictions of conceptions belong to the nature of mind itself, and thus also to the essential nature of the reality which unfolds from and that their truth consists just in the systematic connection in which the cate gories follow from one another. "The phenomenon the arising and passing away, which itself does not arise and pass away, but
in-itself, and constitutes the reality and movement of the life of truth. "
Hegel's philosophy is, therefore, essentially historical, systematic elaboration of the entire material of history. He possessed both the necessary erudition and also the combining power and fineness of feeling for the discovery of those logical relations which were of importance for him. The interest in his philosophy lies less in the individual conceptions, which he took from the intellectual labours of two thousand years, than in the systematic combination which he brought about between them and just by this means he knew how to portray in masterly manner the meaning and significance of indi vidual details, and to throw surprising light upon long-standing structures of thought. He, indeed, displayed in connection with his data the arbitrariness (Willkiir) of priori] constructive thought, which presents the actual reality, not as offers itself empirically, but as ought to be in the dialectical movement, and this violation of the actual matter of fact might be objectionable where the attempt was made to bring empirical material into philosophical system, as the philosophy of Nature, the history of philosophy, and history general. All the more brilliant did the power of the thinking sat urated by the historical spirit prove in those fields where the express province of philosophical treatment, merely to reflect on
Cf. above, 20,
This Heracliteanism, which was inherent already in Fichte's doctrine action (cf. above, p. 694 f. ), found its most vigorous opponent in Herbart's Eleaticism (cf. 41, f. ). This old antithesis constitutes the essential element in the relation of the two branches of German idealism (cf. above, p. 584, note)-
§§
7
8.
' 1i it is'
of
in in
it is
a
it [a
a
:
*
is a
it,
Chap. 2, § 42. ] Syttem of Reason : Hegel. 618
undoubted data, but not -to give any account of empirical reality. So Hegel gave as aesthetics a historical structure built up of the aesthetic ideals of mankind. Following Schiller's method, and attach ing himself also materially to Schiller's results, he displayed all the fundamental systematic conceptions of this science in the well- arranged series of the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic, and likewise divided the system of the arts into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. So, too, from the fundamental concep tion of religion as being the relation of the finite to the absolute Spirit in the form of imaginative representation (Vorstellung) his
philosophy of religion develops the stages of its positive realisation in the natural religion of magic, fire worship, and animal symbolism, in the religion of spiritual individuality of the sublime, the beautiful, and the intellectual, and finally in the absolute religion which repre sents God as what he the triune Spirit Here, with deep-going knowledge of his material, Hegel has everywhere drawn the main lines in which the empirical treatment of these same subjects later moved, and set up the philosophical categories for the general con sideration of historical facts as whole.
The same true, also, of his treatment of universal history. Hegel understood by Objective Spirit the active and influential living body of individuals, which not created by these, but rather forms
the source from which they proceed as regards their spiritual life. The abstract form of this body called Right;' the Objective Spirit " in itself. " The subjection of the subjective disposition of the individual to the commands of the common consciousness the philosopher calls "morality," while he retains the name of "Sittlich- keit " [social morality or the moral order] for the realisation of the common consciousness in the State. In the immanent living activity of the human reason the state the highest beyond this are only- art, religion, and science, which press forward to the Absolute Spirit. The state the realisation of the ethical Idea; the spirit of the people become visible in its Idea the living work of art, in which the inwardness of the human reason comes forth into outer manifestation. But this Idea, from which the system of the forms and functions of political life derives, appears in the actual world only in the individual structures of the states which arise and pass away. Its only true and full realisation universal history, in which the peoples enter successively, to live out their spirit in the work of state formation, and then retire from the stage.
Hence Hegel treau the doctrine of Objective Spirit under the title Philoso phy of Right RtchUrphilotophie).
(
1
is
a
;. it is
is
it is
is
is
is
a
;
it is
is
is,
614 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VL
So every epoch is characterised by the spiritual predominance of a definite people, which imprints the sign of its peculiar character upon all the activities of civilisation. And if it is the task of his tory as a whole to understand this connected order, then politics, too, must not suppose that it can construct and decree a political life from abstract requirements; it must, rather, seek in the quiet development of the national spirit the motives of its political move ment. So in Hegel, the "Philosopher of the Restoration," the historical Weltanschauung turns against the revolutionary doctrinair- ism of the Enlightenment.
Hegel is less successful in the treatment of questions of natural philosophy and psychology ; the energy of his thought lies in the domain of history. The external scheme of his system, as a whole, is in large the following: the Spirit in itself (Geist an sich), i. e. in its absolute content, is the realm of the categories ; this is treated by the Logic as the doctrine of Being, of Essence, and of Concep tion or Notion. Spirit for itself (Geist fur sich), i. e. in its otherness and self-estrangement or externalisation, is Nature, the forms of which are treated in Mechanics, Physics, and Organics. The third main part treats, as Philosophy of Spirit, the Spirit in and for itself (mi und fur sich), i. e. in its conscious life as returning to itself; here three stages are distinguished, viz. the Subjective
(individual) Spirit ; the Objective Spirit as Right, Morality, State, and History ;
finally, the Absolute Spirit as pure perception (Anschauung) in Art, as imaginative representation ( Vorstellung) in Religion, as conception (Begriff) in the History of Philosophy.
He repeats, in all these parts of his philosophy, not only the formal dialectic of the construction of his conceptions, but also the material which constitutes the contents of the successive con ceptions. So the Logic in its second and third parts develops already the fundamental categories of the Philosophy of Nature and of Spirit ; so the development of the aesthetic ideals constantly points toward that of the religious Vorstellungen ; and so the whole course of the Logic is parallel to his History of Philosophy. Just this relation belongs to the essential nature of the system of reason, which here embraces not only, as with Kant, the Forms, but also
the content, and aims to unfold before its view this content in the variety of the " forms of the actual world of reality," although this content is ultimately everywhere the same with itself. The course of development is always the same, viz. that the " Idea," by dif ferentiating and becoming at variance with itself, " comes to itself. " Hence the categories progress from the Being which has no content to the inner Essence, and from there to the Idea which understands
Chat. 2, { 43. ] Metaphyrice of the Irrational. 615
itself; hence the forms of the empirical world ascend from matter to the imponderables, then to the organism, consciousness, self- consciousness, reason, right, morality, and the social morality of the state, successively, to apprehend the Absolute Spirit in art, religion, and science; hence the history of philosophy begins with the cate gories of material existence, and becomes complete after all its fortunes in the doctrine of the self-comprehending Idea ; hence,
finally, the entrance into this " system of the reason," also, will best be found by making it clear to one's self how the human mind begins with the sensuous consciousness, and by the contradictions of this is driven to an ever higher and deeper apprehension of itself, until it finds its rest in philosophical knowledge, in the science of the conception. The iuter-relation of all these developments Hegel
has set forth with obscure language and many mysterious and thoughtful intimations, in his Phenomenology.
In this system of reason every particular has its truth and reality only in its being a moment in the development of the whole. Only as such is it real in concreto, and only as such is it comprehended by philosophy. But if we take it abstractly, if we think it in its isolation, in which it exists not realiter, but only according to the subjective apprehension of the understanding, then it loses that connection with the whole, in which its truth and actual reality consists: then it appears as accidental and without reason. Hut as such, it exists only in the limited thinking of the individual subject. For philosophical knowledge, the principle holds, that
what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. ' The System of Reason is the sole reality.
§ 43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational.
The " dialectic of history " willed it that the System of Reason should also change into its opposite, and that the insight into the insurmountability of the barriers which the attempt to deduce all phenomena from one fundamental principle necessarily encounters, caused other theories to arise close Inside the idealistic doctrines already treated; and these other theories found themselves thereby
forced to maintain the unreaxon of thr World-ground. The first to pass through this process was the. many-sided agent of the main development, the Proteus of idealism, Schilling. The new in this movement is not the knowledge that the rational consciousness always has ultimately something for its content, which it simply
>Vomde tur Bechttphilo$. . W, VIII. 17.
616 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Fart VI
finds present within itself, without being able to give any account of it : snch limiting conceptions were the transcendental X as thing- in-itself, with Kant ; as differential of consciousness, with Maimon; as a free act without rational ground, in Fichte. The new was, that this which could not be comprehended by the reason, and which resisted its work, was now also to be thought as something irrational.
1. Schelling was forced upon the path of irrationalism, remarka bly enough, by taking up the religious motif into his absolute ideal ism (§ 42, 9). If "the Absolute" was thought no longer merely in Spinozistic fashion, as the universal, indifferent essence of all phenomena, if the divine and the natural principle of things were distinguished, so that the eternal Ideas as the Forms of the divine self-perception were assigned a separate existence beside finite things, then the transmutation of God into the world must again become a
This was really Hegel's problem also, and the latter was right when he taught later that, in his view, philosophy has the same task as theology. He aided himself with the dialectical method which aimed to show in the form of a higher logic, how the Idea agreeably to its own conceptional essence releases itself to " other ness" (Anderssein) , i. e. to Nature, to finite phenomenal appearance.
Schelling sought to solve the same problem by the method of theoxophy, i. e. by a mystico-speculative doctrine, which transposed philosophical conceptions into religious intuitions. His happening upon this method was due to the fact that the problem met him in the form of an attempt to limit philosophy by religion. He obligated himself, in a vigorous reaction against this in the name of philoso phy, to solve the religious problem also. This, indeed, could only be done if philosophy passed over into theosophical speculations.
A disciple of the System of Identity, Eschenmayer,1 showed that philosophical knowledge can indeed point out the reasonableness of the world, and its agreement with the divine reason, but cannot show how this world attains the self-subsistent existence with reference to the deity, which it has in finite things. Here philosophy ceases and religion begins. In order to vindicate this domain also for
problem.
and restore the old unity between philosophy and relig ion, Schelling lays claim to specifically religious intuitions as philo sophical conceptions, and so re-shapes them in accordance with this claim that they appear usable for both disciplines : in doing which he makes a copious use of Kant's philosophy of religion.
1 Eschenmayer (1770-1852), Die Philosophie in ihrem Uebergange znr . VicA*
philosophy,
philosophie
(1803).
Chap. 2, § 43. ] Metaphysics of the Irrational : Schelliny. 617
In fact,1 there is no continuous transition from the Absolute to the concrete reality ; the origin of the world of sense from God is thinkable only by a leap (Sprung), a breaking off from the condition of absoluteness. A ground for this — Schelling still teaches here — is to be found neither in the Absolute nor in the Ideas : but in the nature of the latter the possibility at least is given. For to the Ideas as the " antitype " or counterpart of the Absolute, in which it beholds itself, the self-subsistence of the archetype communicates itself, — the freedom of that which is in itself (" In-skh-selbst-seins "). In this lies the possibility of the falling away of the Ideas from, Ood, of their assuming metaphysical independence, by which they become actual and empirical, i. e. finite. But this falling away is not neces sary and not comprehensible: it is a fact without rational around; not, however, a single event, but as timeless and eternal as the Abso lute and the Ideas. We see that the religious colouring of this doc* trine comes from Kant's theory of the radical evil as a deed of ihe intelligible character, while the philosophical, on the contrary, comes from Fichte's conception of the free acts of the ego, which have no rationale. On this apostasy, therefore, rests the actualisation of the
Ideas in the world. Hence the content of the actual reality is rational and divine; for it is God's Ideas that are actual in it: their being actual, however, is apostasy, sin, and unreason. This reality of the Ideas external to God is Nature.
But its divine essence strives back to the original ground and archetype, and this return of things into
Ood is history, the epic composed in the mind of God, whose Iliad is the farther and farther departure of man from God, and whose Odyssey is his return to God. Its final purpose is the reconciliation of the apostasy, the reuniting of the Ideas with God, the cessation of their self-subsistence. Individuality also experiences this change of fortunes : its selfness (Ichheit) is intelligible freedom, self-deter mination — breaking loose from the Absolute: its deliverance is a submergence in the Absolute.
In similar manner Frederick Schlegel * made the "triplicity" of the infinite, the finite, and the return of the finite to the infinite, the principle of his later theory, which professed to maintain the contradictions of the actual as a fact, to explain them from the fall, and to reconcile them through subjection to divine revelation ; but merely concealed, with great pains, the philosophical impotence of its author under the exposition employed.
' Schilling, Ueligion und Philoiophit, W. , I. 6, pp. 38 ff.
« In the Philotnphitrhe Vorltrungtn, edited by Windischmann (1804-1806), and IlkewUe later in the Phttotophie det Ltbtn* and the Philoiophit diet
UtsckickU (1828-1829).
618 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
2. The subtlety of Schilling, on the contrary, could not free itself from the once-discovered problem. The monism, which had always controlled his thought, forced him to the question, whether the ground of the falling away was not ultimately to be found in the Absolute itself: and this could be affirmed only if the irrational was transferred to the essence of the Absolute itself. From the point of view of this thought, Schelling became friendly to the mysticism of Jacob Boehme (cf. p. 374 f. ). This was brought near to him by his intercourse with Franz von Baader. The latter himself had received his stimulus both from Boehme and from Boehme's French prophet St. Martin,1 and, holding fast to the Catholic faith, had elaborated his mysticism with obscure fantastic genius and un methodical appropriation of Kantian and Fichtean thoughts. The original idea that stirred within him was, that the course of the life of man, who is the image of God, and who can know of himself only so much as God knows of him, must be parallel to the self- development of God. Since, now, man's life is determined by the fall as its beginning and redemption as its goal, the eternal aeif generation of God must consist in God's unfolding himself out of his dark, irrational, primitive essence, through self-revelation and self-knowledge, to absolute reason.
Under such influences Schelling also began in his treatise * on freedom (1809) to speak of an Urgrund, Ungrttnd, or Abgrund [pri mordial ground, unreason, or abyss] in the divine nature, which is depicted as mere Being, and absolute primordial accident (" Urxu- fall"), as a dark striving, an infinite impulse. It is the uncon scious will, and all actual reality is in the last instance will. This will, directed only toward itself, creates as its self-revelation the Ideas, the image in which the will beholds itself — the reason. Out of the interaction of the ever dark and blind urgency and its ideal self-beholding proceeds the world, which as Nature permits us to recognise the conflict between purposive formation and irra tional impulse, and as historical process has for its content the victory of the universal will revealed in reason, over the natural
1 St. Martin (1743-1803), "Le philosophe inconnu," the stern opponent of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution, was seized through and through by Boehme's teachings, and translated his Aurora. Of his writings, the most important are VHomme de Desir (1790), Le Souvel Homme (1796), and De VEsprit det Chose* (1801) ; the most interesting perhaps is the strange work. Le Crocodile, ou guerre du 61V11 rt du mat arrivte sous la regne de f. ouis XV. .
poeme (picomagique (1799). Cf. A. Franck, La Philosophic Mystique en Fraaet (Paris, 1866) ; also v. Osten-Sacken, Fr. Baader und St. Martin (Leips. I860).
4 This later doctrine of Schelling's is accordingly usually called the Doctrine of Freedom, as the earlier is called the System of Identity. Schelling, f/a iibtr Jit Frtihtit, W. , I. 7, 376.
Chap. 2, § 4a. ] Metaphysial of the Irrational: Schelling. 619
unreason of the particular will. In this way the development of the actual leads from the unreason of the primordial will (deu$ implicittit) to the self-knowledge and self-determination of reason
(dens explicitus). 1
3. Thus at last religion became for Schelling the "organon of phil
osophy," as art had been earlier. Since the process of God's self- development goes on in the revelations, with which in the human mind he beholds himself, all momenta of the divine nature must appear in the succession of ideas which man in his historical development has had of God. Hence in the Philosophy of Mythol ogy and Revelation, the work of Schelling's old age, the knowledge of God it gained from the history of all religions : in the progress from the natural religions up to Christianity and its different forms
the self-revelation of God makes its way from dark primordial will to the spirit of reason and of love. God develops or evolves in and by revealing himself to men. '
In its methodical form this principle reminds us strongly of Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy, in which " the Idea comes to itself," and the happy combination and fineness of feeling with which Schelling has grouped and mastered the bulky material of the history of religions in these lectures shows itself throughout akin and equal in rank to the Hegelian treatment. But the funda mental philosophical conception is yet entirely different. Schelling terms the standpoint of this his latest teaching, metaphysical em piricism. His own earlier system and that of Hegel he now calls negative philosophy: this philosophy may indeed show that if God once reveals himself, he does it in the forms of natural and historical reality which are capable of dialectical a priori construction. But that he reveals himself and thus transmutes himself into the world, dialectic is not able to deduce. This cannot be deduced at all ; it is
only to be experienced, and experienced from the way tn which Ood reveals himself in the religious life of mankind. To understand from this process God and his self-evolution into the world is the task of positive philosophy.
Those who both immediately and later derided Schelling's Phil osophy of Mythology and Revelation as " Gnosticism " scarcely knew, perhaps, how well founded the comparison was. They had in mind only the fantastic amalgamation of mythical ideas with philosophical conceptions, and the arbitrariness of cosmogonic and theogonic constructions. The true resemblance, however, consists
• Ct. above, p. 290 f.
» Cf. Coiuuotin Frantz, Sf lulling' $ Positive Philosophis (Cotton, 1879 L).
620 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
in this, that as the Gnostics gave to the warfare of religions, in the midst of which they were standing, the significance of a history of the universe and the divine powers ruling in so now Schelling set forth the development of human ideas of God as the develop ment of God himself.
Irrationalism came to its full development in Schopenhauer by the removal of the religious element. The dark urgency or instinct directed only toward itself appears with him under the name of the will to live, as the essence of all things, as the thing-in-itseff
(cf. 41, 9). In its conception, this will, directed only towards itself, has formal resemblance to Fichte's "infinite doing," just as was the case with Schlegel's irony (cf. 42, but in both cases the real difference all the greater. The activity directed solely toward itself with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determina tion, with Schlegel the arbitrary play of fancy, with Schopenhauer the absolute unreason of an objectless will. Since this will only creates itself perpetually, the never satisfied, the unhappy will and since the world nothing but the self-knowledge (self-revelation —objectification) of this will, must be world of misery and suffering.
Pessimism, thus grounded metaphysically, now strengthened by Schopenhauer by means of the hedonistic estimate of life itself. All human life flows on continually between willing and attaining. But to will pain, the ache of the "not-yet-satisfied. " Hence
pain is the positive feeling, and pleasure consists only in the removal of pain. Hence pain must preponderate in the life of will under all circumstances, and actual life confirms this conclusion. Compare the pleasure of the beast that devours with the torture of the one that being devoured — and you will be able to estimate with approximate correctness the proportion of pleasure and pain in the world in general. Hence man's life always ends in the complaint, that the best lot never to be born at all.
If life suffering, then only sympathy can be the fundamental ethical feeling (cf. 41, 9). The individual will immoral increases the hurt of another, or also merely indifferent toward moral feels another's hurt as its own and seeks to alleviate it. From the standpoint of sympathy Schopenhauer gave his psychological explanation of the ethical life. But this alleviation of the hurt only palliative does not abolish the will, and with the will its unhappiness persists. " The sun burns perpetual noon. " The misery of life remains always the same;
World as Will and Idea, 56 ft II. ch. 46 P<trer(/n, IT. oh. 11
1a
4.
it ;
is
it is
is
§
§ is a
is
'
is if
1. it it
§§ ;
is
f.
if it
a
it
if
; ; it a
§
it
is
is
is is is
5) is is :
it,
:
Chap. 2, $ 43. ] Metaphysice of the Irrational : Schopenhauer. 621
only the form in which it is represented in idea alters. The special shapes change, but the content is always the same. Hence there can be no mention of a progress in history ; intellectual perfecting alters nothing in the will which constitutes the essential nature of man. History shows only the endless sorrow of the will to live,
which with an ever-new cast of characters constantly presents the same tragi-comedy before itself. 1 On this ground the philosophy of Schopenhauer has no interest in history ; history teaches only indi
vidual facts ; there is no rational science of it.
A deliverance from the wretchedness of the will would be possible
only through the negation or denial of the will itself. But this is a mystery. For the will, the tv «<u -ray — the one and all — the only Real, is indeed in its very nature self-affirmation ; how shall it deny itself ? But the Idea of this deliverance is present in the mystical asceticism, in the mortification of self, in the contempt of life and all its goods, and in the peace of soul that belongs to an absence of wishes. This, Schopenhauer held, is the import of the Indian
religion and philosophy, which began to be known in Europe about his time. He greeted this identity of his teaching with the oldest wisdom of the human race as a welcome confirmation, and now called the world of idea the veil of Maia, and the negation of the
will to live the entrance into Nirvana. But the unreasonable will to live would not let the philosopher go. At the close of his work he intimates that what would remain after the annihilation of the will, and with that, of the world also, would be for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing ; but consideration of the life of the saints teaches, that while the world with all its suns and milky ways is nothing to them, they have attained blessedness and
" In thy nothing I hope to find the all. "
If an absolute deliverance is accordingly impossible, — were it
ever possible, then in view of the ideality of time there could be no world whatever of the affirmation of the will, — there is yet a rela tive deliverance from sorrow in those intellectual states in which the pure willess subject of knowing is active, viz. in disinterested contemplation and disinterested thought The object for both of these states he finds not in particular phenomena, but in the eternal
1 Hence the thought of grafting the optimism of the Hegelian development system on this will-irrationallstn of Schopenhauer's after the pattern of Spel ling's Dortrine of Frtrdum waa as mistaken aa the hope of reaching speculative result* by the method of inductive natural science. And with the organic combination of the two impossibilities, even a thinker so intelligent and so deep and many-sided in bis subtle investigations as Edward con Hartmann, could have only the success of a meteor that dazzles for a brief period (Die Philo$o- pkie dt» Unbevmutrn, Berlin, 1800) [Eng. tr. The Philotophy of the Vnconaciout, by B. C. Coupland, Lond. 1884].
peace.
622 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
Forms of the objectification of the will — the Ideas. This Platonic (and Schellingian) element, however (as is the case also with the assumption of the intelligible character), fits with extreme difficulty into Schopenhauer's metaphysical system, according to which all particularising of the will is thought as only an idea in space and time ; but it gives the philosopher opportunity to employ Schiller's principle of disinterested contemplation in the happiest manner to complete his theory of life. The will becomes free from itself
when it is able to represent to itself in thought its objectification without any ulterior purpose. The misery of the irrational World- will is mitigated by morality ; in art and science it is overcome.
PART VII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
M. J. Monrad, Denkrichtungen der neueren Zeit. Bonn, 1879.
A. Franck, Philosophes Modernes, Strangers el Francais. Paris, 1873.
R. Eucken, Geschichte und Kritik der Orundbegtiffe der Gegenwart. Leips
187a 2d ed. 181)2.
E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Wanderung durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart.
Leips. 1890.
W. Dilthey, Archiv fur Geschichle der Philosophie. Vol. XI. pp. 651 ff.
H. Siebert, Geschichle der neueren deulschen Philosophie seit Hegel. Got-
tingen. 1898.
Ph. Damiron, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophie en France au 19* Siecle.
Paris, 1834.
H. Taine, Les Philosophes Classiques Francais au 191 SiMe. Paris, 1867.
F. Ravaisson, La Philosophie en France au 194 Siecle. Paris, 1868.
L. Ferraz, Histoire de la Philosophie en France au 19" Siecle, 3 vols. Paris,
1880-1889.
P. Janet, Les Maitres de la Pensee Moderne. Paris, 1883.
E. l)e Roberty, La Philosophie dn Siecle. Paris, 1891.
C"h. Adam, La Philosophie en France, pr. Moitie du Ifr Siicle.
1. . Liard, Les Logiciens Anglais Contemporains. Paris, 1878.
Th. Ribot, La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine. Paris, 1870.
D. Masson, Recent English Philosophy. 3d ed. Lond. 1877.
liar. Hoffding, Einleititug in die englische Philosophie der Gegenwart.
1890.
L. Ferri, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophie en Italic au J9* Siecle.
1869.
K. Werner, Die italienische Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Vienna, 1884 [O. Pfleiderer, The Dnelopment of Rational Theology since Kant. Lond.
phenomenon, and construes particular phenomena according to the degree in which the two elements are combined. The dialectical principle of absolute idealism is the quantitative difference between the real and the ideal factors ; the Absolute itself is just for this reason complete indifference. ''' The real series is that in which the objective factor predominates (" iiberwiegt") ; it leads from matter through light, electricity, and chemism to the organism — the relatively spiritual manifestation of Nature. In the ideal series the subjective factor predominates. In it the development proceeds from morality
1 In the coll. works, V. 353 ff. , first printed 1859.
1 Schelling'* disciple, Oken, expressed this very characteristically when he placed the Absolute, already called God by him, = ±0.
• Schelling illustrates this schematically by the example of the magnet, in the different parts of which north and south magnetism are present with vary ing intensities. . . .
Ch a*. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schilling. 609
and science to the work of art, the relatively most natural appear ance in the realm of Spirit. And the total manifestation of the Absolute, the universe, therefore, at once the most perfect organ ism and the most perfect work of art. 1
9. In this system Schelling would comprehend the entire issue of the investigations which had previously diverged in various direc tions. The different stages of the self-differentiation of the Absolute he termed at first, " potencies," but soon introduced another name, and at the same time another conception of the matter. This was connected with the religions turn which the thinking of the Roman ticists took at about the close of the last and the beginning of the present century. The incitement to this came from Schleiermacher. He proved to the " Cultured Despisers of Religion," that the system of reason can become complete only in religion. In this, too, was victory for the (esthetic reason. For what Schleiermacher then preached as religion (cf. 41, was not theoretical or practical behaviour of man, but an aesthetic relation to the World-ground, the
feeling of absolute dependence. Therefore, religion, too, was in his view limited to pious feeling, to the complete permeation of the individual by this inward relation to the universal, and put aside all theoretical form and practical organisation. For the same reason religion was held to be an individual matter, and positive religion was traced back to the "religious genius" of its founder. In view of this kinship we can understand the influence which Schleier- macher's " Reden " exercised upon Romanticism to this due the inclination of the latter to expect from religion the unitary solution of all problems of mankind, to desire to bring in the separated spheres of the activity of civilisation into inner and intimate union again, and, finally, to seek the eternal welfare of all in that rule of religion over all spheres of life, which obtained in the Middle Ages. As Schiller created an idealised Greece, so the later Roman ticists created an idealised Middle Ages.
Schelling followed this line of thought with great acuteness and fineness of feeling. Like Spinoza, he now named the Absolute " Ood " or the " Infinite," and likewise as Spinoza had inserted the attri butes and the "infinite modes" (cf. 409 f. ) between "substance "and the particular finite realities, so the " potencies " are now regarded as the eUrnal forms of the phenomenal manifestation of God, while the empirical particular phenomena are the finite copies of these. But when in this sense they were also termed by Schelling Ideas (in his Bruno and in his Method of Academical Study)
W. , 423.
i
I. 4,
6)
p.
: it
is
$
is,
a
a
610 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
another influence still comes to light in this. Schleiermacher and Hegel, the latter of whom had exerted a personal influence upon Schelling since 1801, both pointed to Plato; but the philosophical knowledge of that time * still saw Plato's doctriue through the spec tacles of Neo-Platonism, which conceived of the Ideas as God's vision or intuition of himself (Selbstanschauung Gottes). And so Schelling's doctrine turned back into a Neo-Platonic Idealism, according to which the "Ideas" formed the intermediate link through which the Absolute became transformed into the world.
This religious idealism of Schelling's doctrine of Ideas has a number of parallel and succeeding phenomena. The most interest ing of these personally is Fichte's later doctrine, in which he paid to the victory of Spinozism the tribute of making the infinite impulse of the I proceed forth from an "absolute Being" (Sein) and be di rected toward the same. For finite things, he held fast to his deduc tion of them as products of consciousness ; but the infinite activity of this consciousness he now deduced from the end of " imitating " an absolute Being, the deity, and hence the vocation and destiny of man appeared to him no longer the restless activity of categorical imperative, but the "blessed life" of sinking into a contemplation of the divine original, — a mystical dying note of the mighty thinker's life, which makes the victory of the aesthetic reason appear in its full magnitude.
The religious motif was followed still, farther by Schelling's dis ciple Krause. He wished to combine the pantheistic Weltanschauung
of idealism, which Schelling even at that time still defended Spinozistic fashion), with the conception of divine personality. He, too, regards the world as the development of the divine " essence," which is distinctly stamped out in the Ideas ; but these ideas are the intuition which the supreme personality has of himself. Essence
( Wesen) — this is Krause 's term for God — is not indifferent Rea son, but the personal, living ground of the world. In his"farther carrying out of the system, which was characterised as Panen- theism," Krause has scarcely any other originality than the very objectionable one of presenting the thoughts common to the whole idealistic development in an unintelligible terminology, which he himself invented, but declared to be pure German. He carries out, especially, his conception of the entire life of reason from the point of view of the " Gliedbau" (in German, organism). He not only, like Schelling, regards the universe as a " Wesengliedbau "
1 On Herbart's independent position, the importance of which becomes clear just in antithesis to that of Schelling and Hegel, see above, p. 684, note 1. -
(in
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Krau. se, Hegel. 611
(divine organism), but also regards the structures of society as continuations of the organic vital movement beyond the individual man ; every union {Bund) is such a " Oliedbau," and inserts itself again into a higher organism as a member (Glied), and the course of history is the process of the production of more and more perfect and comprehensive unions.
For the Romantic aesthetics, finally, Schilling's new doctrine gave rise to the result that the Neo-Flatonic conception of beauty, as phenomenal manifestation of the Idea in the sensuous, became again recognised as authoritative. The relation of inadequacy between the finite appearance and the infinite Idea agreed with Schlegel's principle of irony, and these thoughts Solger, especially, made the basis of his theory of art.
10. The consummation of this whole rich and varied development is formed by Hegel's logical idealism. He signifies in the main a return from Schelling to Fichte, a giving up of the thought that the living wealth of the world can be derived or deduced from the " Nothing" ' of absolute indifference, and the attempt to raise this empty substance again to spirit* — to the self-determined subject. Such knowledge, however, cannot have the form of intuition or immediate perception (Anschauung), which Fichte and Schelling had claimed for the Ego or the Absolute, but only that of the con ception or notion {Begriff). If all that is real or actual is the mani festation of spirit or mind, then metaphysics coincides with the logic* which has to develop the creative self-movement of spirit as a dialectical necessity. The conceptions into which mind or spirit takes apart and analyses its own content are the categories of reality, the forms of the cosmic life ; and the task of philosophy is not to describe this realm of forms as a given manifold, but to comprehend them as the moments of a single unitary development. The dialec tical method, therefore, serves, with Hegel, to determine the essential nature of particular phenomena by the significance which they have as members or links in the self-unfolding of spirit. Instead of Spirit (Oeist) Hegel also uses Idea or God. It is the highest task that has ever been set philosophy, to comprehend the world as a development of those principles or determinations which form the content of the divine mind.
> Hegel, PMiu»nen. Voir. , \V. , II. 14.
- [firuit. a* in J 20, has the connotation of both "mind" and "spirit. " rhe former *eems more appropriate where logical relation* are under considera
tion, though the latter la usually retained for the sake of uniformity. 1
1 Thia metaphysical logic Is of course not formal logic, but in its determining principle la properly Kant's transcendental logic. The only difference is that the "phenomenon"' is for Kant a human mode of representation, for Hegel an
objective externalising of the Absolute Spirit
612 Q-ermany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
In this, Hegel sustains not only to the German philosophy, but to the whole earlier intellectual movement, a relation similar to that of Proclus to Greek thought : ' in the "schema of trinities " of Posi tion, Negation, and Sublation or Reconciliation, all conceptions with which the human mind has ever thought reality or its particular groups, are woven together into a unified system. Each retains its assigned place, in which its necessity, its relative justification, is said to become manifest : but each proves by this same treatment to be only a moment or factor which receives its true value only when it has been put in connection with the rest and introduced into the whole. It is to be shown that the antitheses and contradictions of conceptions belong to the nature of mind itself, and thus also to the essential nature of the reality which unfolds from and that their truth consists just in the systematic connection in which the cate gories follow from one another. "The phenomenon the arising and passing away, which itself does not arise and pass away, but
in-itself, and constitutes the reality and movement of the life of truth. "
Hegel's philosophy is, therefore, essentially historical, systematic elaboration of the entire material of history. He possessed both the necessary erudition and also the combining power and fineness of feeling for the discovery of those logical relations which were of importance for him. The interest in his philosophy lies less in the individual conceptions, which he took from the intellectual labours of two thousand years, than in the systematic combination which he brought about between them and just by this means he knew how to portray in masterly manner the meaning and significance of indi vidual details, and to throw surprising light upon long-standing structures of thought. He, indeed, displayed in connection with his data the arbitrariness (Willkiir) of priori] constructive thought, which presents the actual reality, not as offers itself empirically, but as ought to be in the dialectical movement, and this violation of the actual matter of fact might be objectionable where the attempt was made to bring empirical material into philosophical system, as the philosophy of Nature, the history of philosophy, and history general. All the more brilliant did the power of the thinking sat urated by the historical spirit prove in those fields where the express province of philosophical treatment, merely to reflect on
Cf. above, 20,
This Heracliteanism, which was inherent already in Fichte's doctrine action (cf. above, p. 694 f. ), found its most vigorous opponent in Herbart's Eleaticism (cf. 41, f. ). This old antithesis constitutes the essential element in the relation of the two branches of German idealism (cf. above, p. 584, note)-
§§
7
8.
' 1i it is'
of
in in
it is
a
it [a
a
:
*
is a
it,
Chap. 2, § 42. ] Syttem of Reason : Hegel. 618
undoubted data, but not -to give any account of empirical reality. So Hegel gave as aesthetics a historical structure built up of the aesthetic ideals of mankind. Following Schiller's method, and attach ing himself also materially to Schiller's results, he displayed all the fundamental systematic conceptions of this science in the well- arranged series of the symbolic, the classic, and the romantic, and likewise divided the system of the arts into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. So, too, from the fundamental concep tion of religion as being the relation of the finite to the absolute Spirit in the form of imaginative representation (Vorstellung) his
philosophy of religion develops the stages of its positive realisation in the natural religion of magic, fire worship, and animal symbolism, in the religion of spiritual individuality of the sublime, the beautiful, and the intellectual, and finally in the absolute religion which repre sents God as what he the triune Spirit Here, with deep-going knowledge of his material, Hegel has everywhere drawn the main lines in which the empirical treatment of these same subjects later moved, and set up the philosophical categories for the general con sideration of historical facts as whole.
The same true, also, of his treatment of universal history. Hegel understood by Objective Spirit the active and influential living body of individuals, which not created by these, but rather forms
the source from which they proceed as regards their spiritual life. The abstract form of this body called Right;' the Objective Spirit " in itself. " The subjection of the subjective disposition of the individual to the commands of the common consciousness the philosopher calls "morality," while he retains the name of "Sittlich- keit " [social morality or the moral order] for the realisation of the common consciousness in the State. In the immanent living activity of the human reason the state the highest beyond this are only- art, religion, and science, which press forward to the Absolute Spirit. The state the realisation of the ethical Idea; the spirit of the people become visible in its Idea the living work of art, in which the inwardness of the human reason comes forth into outer manifestation. But this Idea, from which the system of the forms and functions of political life derives, appears in the actual world only in the individual structures of the states which arise and pass away. Its only true and full realisation universal history, in which the peoples enter successively, to live out their spirit in the work of state formation, and then retire from the stage.
Hence Hegel treau the doctrine of Objective Spirit under the title Philoso phy of Right RtchUrphilotophie).
(
1
is
a
;. it is
is
it is
is
is
is
a
;
it is
is
is,
614 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VL
So every epoch is characterised by the spiritual predominance of a definite people, which imprints the sign of its peculiar character upon all the activities of civilisation. And if it is the task of his tory as a whole to understand this connected order, then politics, too, must not suppose that it can construct and decree a political life from abstract requirements; it must, rather, seek in the quiet development of the national spirit the motives of its political move ment. So in Hegel, the "Philosopher of the Restoration," the historical Weltanschauung turns against the revolutionary doctrinair- ism of the Enlightenment.
Hegel is less successful in the treatment of questions of natural philosophy and psychology ; the energy of his thought lies in the domain of history. The external scheme of his system, as a whole, is in large the following: the Spirit in itself (Geist an sich), i. e. in its absolute content, is the realm of the categories ; this is treated by the Logic as the doctrine of Being, of Essence, and of Concep tion or Notion. Spirit for itself (Geist fur sich), i. e. in its otherness and self-estrangement or externalisation, is Nature, the forms of which are treated in Mechanics, Physics, and Organics. The third main part treats, as Philosophy of Spirit, the Spirit in and for itself (mi und fur sich), i. e. in its conscious life as returning to itself; here three stages are distinguished, viz. the Subjective
(individual) Spirit ; the Objective Spirit as Right, Morality, State, and History ;
finally, the Absolute Spirit as pure perception (Anschauung) in Art, as imaginative representation ( Vorstellung) in Religion, as conception (Begriff) in the History of Philosophy.
He repeats, in all these parts of his philosophy, not only the formal dialectic of the construction of his conceptions, but also the material which constitutes the contents of the successive con ceptions. So the Logic in its second and third parts develops already the fundamental categories of the Philosophy of Nature and of Spirit ; so the development of the aesthetic ideals constantly points toward that of the religious Vorstellungen ; and so the whole course of the Logic is parallel to his History of Philosophy. Just this relation belongs to the essential nature of the system of reason, which here embraces not only, as with Kant, the Forms, but also
the content, and aims to unfold before its view this content in the variety of the " forms of the actual world of reality," although this content is ultimately everywhere the same with itself. The course of development is always the same, viz. that the " Idea," by dif ferentiating and becoming at variance with itself, " comes to itself. " Hence the categories progress from the Being which has no content to the inner Essence, and from there to the Idea which understands
Chat. 2, { 43. ] Metaphyrice of the Irrational. 615
itself; hence the forms of the empirical world ascend from matter to the imponderables, then to the organism, consciousness, self- consciousness, reason, right, morality, and the social morality of the state, successively, to apprehend the Absolute Spirit in art, religion, and science; hence the history of philosophy begins with the cate gories of material existence, and becomes complete after all its fortunes in the doctrine of the self-comprehending Idea ; hence,
finally, the entrance into this " system of the reason," also, will best be found by making it clear to one's self how the human mind begins with the sensuous consciousness, and by the contradictions of this is driven to an ever higher and deeper apprehension of itself, until it finds its rest in philosophical knowledge, in the science of the conception. The iuter-relation of all these developments Hegel
has set forth with obscure language and many mysterious and thoughtful intimations, in his Phenomenology.
In this system of reason every particular has its truth and reality only in its being a moment in the development of the whole. Only as such is it real in concreto, and only as such is it comprehended by philosophy. But if we take it abstractly, if we think it in its isolation, in which it exists not realiter, but only according to the subjective apprehension of the understanding, then it loses that connection with the whole, in which its truth and actual reality consists: then it appears as accidental and without reason. Hut as such, it exists only in the limited thinking of the individual subject. For philosophical knowledge, the principle holds, that
what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. ' The System of Reason is the sole reality.
§ 43. The Metaphysics of the Irrational.
The " dialectic of history " willed it that the System of Reason should also change into its opposite, and that the insight into the insurmountability of the barriers which the attempt to deduce all phenomena from one fundamental principle necessarily encounters, caused other theories to arise close Inside the idealistic doctrines already treated; and these other theories found themselves thereby
forced to maintain the unreaxon of thr World-ground. The first to pass through this process was the. many-sided agent of the main development, the Proteus of idealism, Schilling. The new in this movement is not the knowledge that the rational consciousness always has ultimately something for its content, which it simply
>Vomde tur Bechttphilo$. . W, VIII. 17.
616 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Fart VI
finds present within itself, without being able to give any account of it : snch limiting conceptions were the transcendental X as thing- in-itself, with Kant ; as differential of consciousness, with Maimon; as a free act without rational ground, in Fichte. The new was, that this which could not be comprehended by the reason, and which resisted its work, was now also to be thought as something irrational.
1. Schelling was forced upon the path of irrationalism, remarka bly enough, by taking up the religious motif into his absolute ideal ism (§ 42, 9). If "the Absolute" was thought no longer merely in Spinozistic fashion, as the universal, indifferent essence of all phenomena, if the divine and the natural principle of things were distinguished, so that the eternal Ideas as the Forms of the divine self-perception were assigned a separate existence beside finite things, then the transmutation of God into the world must again become a
This was really Hegel's problem also, and the latter was right when he taught later that, in his view, philosophy has the same task as theology. He aided himself with the dialectical method which aimed to show in the form of a higher logic, how the Idea agreeably to its own conceptional essence releases itself to " other ness" (Anderssein) , i. e. to Nature, to finite phenomenal appearance.
Schelling sought to solve the same problem by the method of theoxophy, i. e. by a mystico-speculative doctrine, which transposed philosophical conceptions into religious intuitions. His happening upon this method was due to the fact that the problem met him in the form of an attempt to limit philosophy by religion. He obligated himself, in a vigorous reaction against this in the name of philoso phy, to solve the religious problem also. This, indeed, could only be done if philosophy passed over into theosophical speculations.
A disciple of the System of Identity, Eschenmayer,1 showed that philosophical knowledge can indeed point out the reasonableness of the world, and its agreement with the divine reason, but cannot show how this world attains the self-subsistent existence with reference to the deity, which it has in finite things. Here philosophy ceases and religion begins. In order to vindicate this domain also for
problem.
and restore the old unity between philosophy and relig ion, Schelling lays claim to specifically religious intuitions as philo sophical conceptions, and so re-shapes them in accordance with this claim that they appear usable for both disciplines : in doing which he makes a copious use of Kant's philosophy of religion.
1 Eschenmayer (1770-1852), Die Philosophie in ihrem Uebergange znr . VicA*
philosophy,
philosophie
(1803).
Chap. 2, § 43. ] Metaphysics of the Irrational : Schelliny. 617
In fact,1 there is no continuous transition from the Absolute to the concrete reality ; the origin of the world of sense from God is thinkable only by a leap (Sprung), a breaking off from the condition of absoluteness. A ground for this — Schelling still teaches here — is to be found neither in the Absolute nor in the Ideas : but in the nature of the latter the possibility at least is given. For to the Ideas as the " antitype " or counterpart of the Absolute, in which it beholds itself, the self-subsistence of the archetype communicates itself, — the freedom of that which is in itself (" In-skh-selbst-seins "). In this lies the possibility of the falling away of the Ideas from, Ood, of their assuming metaphysical independence, by which they become actual and empirical, i. e. finite. But this falling away is not neces sary and not comprehensible: it is a fact without rational around; not, however, a single event, but as timeless and eternal as the Abso lute and the Ideas. We see that the religious colouring of this doc* trine comes from Kant's theory of the radical evil as a deed of ihe intelligible character, while the philosophical, on the contrary, comes from Fichte's conception of the free acts of the ego, which have no rationale. On this apostasy, therefore, rests the actualisation of the
Ideas in the world. Hence the content of the actual reality is rational and divine; for it is God's Ideas that are actual in it: their being actual, however, is apostasy, sin, and unreason. This reality of the Ideas external to God is Nature.
But its divine essence strives back to the original ground and archetype, and this return of things into
Ood is history, the epic composed in the mind of God, whose Iliad is the farther and farther departure of man from God, and whose Odyssey is his return to God. Its final purpose is the reconciliation of the apostasy, the reuniting of the Ideas with God, the cessation of their self-subsistence. Individuality also experiences this change of fortunes : its selfness (Ichheit) is intelligible freedom, self-deter mination — breaking loose from the Absolute: its deliverance is a submergence in the Absolute.
In similar manner Frederick Schlegel * made the "triplicity" of the infinite, the finite, and the return of the finite to the infinite, the principle of his later theory, which professed to maintain the contradictions of the actual as a fact, to explain them from the fall, and to reconcile them through subjection to divine revelation ; but merely concealed, with great pains, the philosophical impotence of its author under the exposition employed.
' Schilling, Ueligion und Philoiophit, W. , I. 6, pp. 38 ff.
« In the Philotnphitrhe Vorltrungtn, edited by Windischmann (1804-1806), and IlkewUe later in the Phttotophie det Ltbtn* and the Philoiophit diet
UtsckickU (1828-1829).
618 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
2. The subtlety of Schilling, on the contrary, could not free itself from the once-discovered problem. The monism, which had always controlled his thought, forced him to the question, whether the ground of the falling away was not ultimately to be found in the Absolute itself: and this could be affirmed only if the irrational was transferred to the essence of the Absolute itself. From the point of view of this thought, Schelling became friendly to the mysticism of Jacob Boehme (cf. p. 374 f. ). This was brought near to him by his intercourse with Franz von Baader. The latter himself had received his stimulus both from Boehme and from Boehme's French prophet St. Martin,1 and, holding fast to the Catholic faith, had elaborated his mysticism with obscure fantastic genius and un methodical appropriation of Kantian and Fichtean thoughts. The original idea that stirred within him was, that the course of the life of man, who is the image of God, and who can know of himself only so much as God knows of him, must be parallel to the self- development of God. Since, now, man's life is determined by the fall as its beginning and redemption as its goal, the eternal aeif generation of God must consist in God's unfolding himself out of his dark, irrational, primitive essence, through self-revelation and self-knowledge, to absolute reason.
Under such influences Schelling also began in his treatise * on freedom (1809) to speak of an Urgrund, Ungrttnd, or Abgrund [pri mordial ground, unreason, or abyss] in the divine nature, which is depicted as mere Being, and absolute primordial accident (" Urxu- fall"), as a dark striving, an infinite impulse. It is the uncon scious will, and all actual reality is in the last instance will. This will, directed only toward itself, creates as its self-revelation the Ideas, the image in which the will beholds itself — the reason. Out of the interaction of the ever dark and blind urgency and its ideal self-beholding proceeds the world, which as Nature permits us to recognise the conflict between purposive formation and irra tional impulse, and as historical process has for its content the victory of the universal will revealed in reason, over the natural
1 St. Martin (1743-1803), "Le philosophe inconnu," the stern opponent of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution, was seized through and through by Boehme's teachings, and translated his Aurora. Of his writings, the most important are VHomme de Desir (1790), Le Souvel Homme (1796), and De VEsprit det Chose* (1801) ; the most interesting perhaps is the strange work. Le Crocodile, ou guerre du 61V11 rt du mat arrivte sous la regne de f. ouis XV. .
poeme (picomagique (1799). Cf. A. Franck, La Philosophic Mystique en Fraaet (Paris, 1866) ; also v. Osten-Sacken, Fr. Baader und St. Martin (Leips. I860).
4 This later doctrine of Schelling's is accordingly usually called the Doctrine of Freedom, as the earlier is called the System of Identity. Schelling, f/a iibtr Jit Frtihtit, W. , I. 7, 376.
Chap. 2, § 4a. ] Metaphysial of the Irrational: Schelling. 619
unreason of the particular will. In this way the development of the actual leads from the unreason of the primordial will (deu$ implicittit) to the self-knowledge and self-determination of reason
(dens explicitus). 1
3. Thus at last religion became for Schelling the "organon of phil
osophy," as art had been earlier. Since the process of God's self- development goes on in the revelations, with which in the human mind he beholds himself, all momenta of the divine nature must appear in the succession of ideas which man in his historical development has had of God. Hence in the Philosophy of Mythol ogy and Revelation, the work of Schelling's old age, the knowledge of God it gained from the history of all religions : in the progress from the natural religions up to Christianity and its different forms
the self-revelation of God makes its way from dark primordial will to the spirit of reason and of love. God develops or evolves in and by revealing himself to men. '
In its methodical form this principle reminds us strongly of Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy, in which " the Idea comes to itself," and the happy combination and fineness of feeling with which Schelling has grouped and mastered the bulky material of the history of religions in these lectures shows itself throughout akin and equal in rank to the Hegelian treatment. But the funda mental philosophical conception is yet entirely different. Schelling terms the standpoint of this his latest teaching, metaphysical em piricism. His own earlier system and that of Hegel he now calls negative philosophy: this philosophy may indeed show that if God once reveals himself, he does it in the forms of natural and historical reality which are capable of dialectical a priori construction. But that he reveals himself and thus transmutes himself into the world, dialectic is not able to deduce. This cannot be deduced at all ; it is
only to be experienced, and experienced from the way tn which Ood reveals himself in the religious life of mankind. To understand from this process God and his self-evolution into the world is the task of positive philosophy.
Those who both immediately and later derided Schelling's Phil osophy of Mythology and Revelation as " Gnosticism " scarcely knew, perhaps, how well founded the comparison was. They had in mind only the fantastic amalgamation of mythical ideas with philosophical conceptions, and the arbitrariness of cosmogonic and theogonic constructions. The true resemblance, however, consists
• Ct. above, p. 290 f.
» Cf. Coiuuotin Frantz, Sf lulling' $ Positive Philosophis (Cotton, 1879 L).
620 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
in this, that as the Gnostics gave to the warfare of religions, in the midst of which they were standing, the significance of a history of the universe and the divine powers ruling in so now Schelling set forth the development of human ideas of God as the develop ment of God himself.
Irrationalism came to its full development in Schopenhauer by the removal of the religious element. The dark urgency or instinct directed only toward itself appears with him under the name of the will to live, as the essence of all things, as the thing-in-itseff
(cf. 41, 9). In its conception, this will, directed only towards itself, has formal resemblance to Fichte's "infinite doing," just as was the case with Schlegel's irony (cf. 42, but in both cases the real difference all the greater. The activity directed solely toward itself with Fichte the autonomy of ethical self-determina tion, with Schlegel the arbitrary play of fancy, with Schopenhauer the absolute unreason of an objectless will. Since this will only creates itself perpetually, the never satisfied, the unhappy will and since the world nothing but the self-knowledge (self-revelation —objectification) of this will, must be world of misery and suffering.
Pessimism, thus grounded metaphysically, now strengthened by Schopenhauer by means of the hedonistic estimate of life itself. All human life flows on continually between willing and attaining. But to will pain, the ache of the "not-yet-satisfied. " Hence
pain is the positive feeling, and pleasure consists only in the removal of pain. Hence pain must preponderate in the life of will under all circumstances, and actual life confirms this conclusion. Compare the pleasure of the beast that devours with the torture of the one that being devoured — and you will be able to estimate with approximate correctness the proportion of pleasure and pain in the world in general. Hence man's life always ends in the complaint, that the best lot never to be born at all.
If life suffering, then only sympathy can be the fundamental ethical feeling (cf. 41, 9). The individual will immoral increases the hurt of another, or also merely indifferent toward moral feels another's hurt as its own and seeks to alleviate it. From the standpoint of sympathy Schopenhauer gave his psychological explanation of the ethical life. But this alleviation of the hurt only palliative does not abolish the will, and with the will its unhappiness persists. " The sun burns perpetual noon. " The misery of life remains always the same;
World as Will and Idea, 56 ft II. ch. 46 P<trer(/n, IT. oh. 11
1a
4.
it ;
is
it is
is
§
§ is a
is
'
is if
1. it it
§§ ;
is
f.
if it
a
it
if
; ; it a
§
it
is
is
is is is
5) is is :
it,
:
Chap. 2, $ 43. ] Metaphysice of the Irrational : Schopenhauer. 621
only the form in which it is represented in idea alters. The special shapes change, but the content is always the same. Hence there can be no mention of a progress in history ; intellectual perfecting alters nothing in the will which constitutes the essential nature of man. History shows only the endless sorrow of the will to live,
which with an ever-new cast of characters constantly presents the same tragi-comedy before itself. 1 On this ground the philosophy of Schopenhauer has no interest in history ; history teaches only indi
vidual facts ; there is no rational science of it.
A deliverance from the wretchedness of the will would be possible
only through the negation or denial of the will itself. But this is a mystery. For the will, the tv «<u -ray — the one and all — the only Real, is indeed in its very nature self-affirmation ; how shall it deny itself ? But the Idea of this deliverance is present in the mystical asceticism, in the mortification of self, in the contempt of life and all its goods, and in the peace of soul that belongs to an absence of wishes. This, Schopenhauer held, is the import of the Indian
religion and philosophy, which began to be known in Europe about his time. He greeted this identity of his teaching with the oldest wisdom of the human race as a welcome confirmation, and now called the world of idea the veil of Maia, and the negation of the
will to live the entrance into Nirvana. But the unreasonable will to live would not let the philosopher go. At the close of his work he intimates that what would remain after the annihilation of the will, and with that, of the world also, would be for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing ; but consideration of the life of the saints teaches, that while the world with all its suns and milky ways is nothing to them, they have attained blessedness and
" In thy nothing I hope to find the all. "
If an absolute deliverance is accordingly impossible, — were it
ever possible, then in view of the ideality of time there could be no world whatever of the affirmation of the will, — there is yet a rela tive deliverance from sorrow in those intellectual states in which the pure willess subject of knowing is active, viz. in disinterested contemplation and disinterested thought The object for both of these states he finds not in particular phenomena, but in the eternal
1 Hence the thought of grafting the optimism of the Hegelian development system on this will-irrationallstn of Schopenhauer's after the pattern of Spel ling's Dortrine of Frtrdum waa as mistaken aa the hope of reaching speculative result* by the method of inductive natural science. And with the organic combination of the two impossibilities, even a thinker so intelligent and so deep and many-sided in bis subtle investigations as Edward con Hartmann, could have only the success of a meteor that dazzles for a brief period (Die Philo$o- pkie dt» Unbevmutrn, Berlin, 1800) [Eng. tr. The Philotophy of the Vnconaciout, by B. C. Coupland, Lond. 1884].
peace.
622 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
Forms of the objectification of the will — the Ideas. This Platonic (and Schellingian) element, however (as is the case also with the assumption of the intelligible character), fits with extreme difficulty into Schopenhauer's metaphysical system, according to which all particularising of the will is thought as only an idea in space and time ; but it gives the philosopher opportunity to employ Schiller's principle of disinterested contemplation in the happiest manner to complete his theory of life. The will becomes free from itself
when it is able to represent to itself in thought its objectification without any ulterior purpose. The misery of the irrational World- will is mitigated by morality ; in art and science it is overcome.
PART VII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
M. J. Monrad, Denkrichtungen der neueren Zeit. Bonn, 1879.
A. Franck, Philosophes Modernes, Strangers el Francais. Paris, 1873.
R. Eucken, Geschichte und Kritik der Orundbegtiffe der Gegenwart. Leips
187a 2d ed. 181)2.
E. v. Hartmann, Kritische Wanderung durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart.
Leips. 1890.
W. Dilthey, Archiv fur Geschichle der Philosophie. Vol. XI. pp. 651 ff.
H. Siebert, Geschichle der neueren deulschen Philosophie seit Hegel. Got-
tingen. 1898.
Ph. Damiron, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophie en France au 19* Siecle.
Paris, 1834.
H. Taine, Les Philosophes Classiques Francais au 191 SiMe. Paris, 1867.
F. Ravaisson, La Philosophie en France au 194 Siecle. Paris, 1868.
L. Ferraz, Histoire de la Philosophie en France au 19" Siecle, 3 vols. Paris,
1880-1889.
P. Janet, Les Maitres de la Pensee Moderne. Paris, 1883.
E. l)e Roberty, La Philosophie dn Siecle. Paris, 1891.
C"h. Adam, La Philosophie en France, pr. Moitie du Ifr Siicle.
1. . Liard, Les Logiciens Anglais Contemporains. Paris, 1878.
Th. Ribot, La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine. Paris, 1870.
D. Masson, Recent English Philosophy. 3d ed. Lond. 1877.
liar. Hoffding, Einleititug in die englische Philosophie der Gegenwart.
1890.
L. Ferri, Essai sur VHistoire de la Philosophie en Italic au J9* Siecle.
1869.
K. Werner, Die italienische Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Vienna, 1884 [O. Pfleiderer, The Dnelopment of Rational Theology since Kant. Lond.
