ABSOLUTE REFLECTION

How close, then, is Schelling to the idea soon to be explicated by Hegel – which was the prime target of Derrida’s objections to identity philosophy and, by implication, of Rorty’s arguments against metaphysical monism – that nature is the other of mind, because the Absolute is to be understood as the ‘other of itself’? There is no simple answer to this question. As Manfred Frank points out, there is a tension in Schelling’s position in the System, between a Romantic position of the kind we saw in the STI and in the analysis of the key thought of the System, and a version of absolute idealism of the kind Hegel was to develop in his system. This tension lies in the question whether the identity of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ can be explicated, without already relying on the inarticulable ground of their identity that Jacobi and Hölderlin termed ‘being’. Frank says of the identity philosophy:

On the one hand pure identity is moved to a space beyond the ideal (the ideal, that which knows, is only one relatum next to the real);

to the extent to which this is so one can see Hölderlin’s construction, according to which absolute being cannot be deduced from reflection, also shining through Schelling’s identity philosophy. On the other hand it claims to be able to carry out a

‘proof . . . that there is a point where knowledge of the Absolute and the Absolute itself are one’ [I/4 pp. 361 ff.].

(Frank 1989b p. 200)

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The second position is where the Schelling of the identity philosophy and Hegel at times converge. Once one realises the negativity of all particular knowledge the route to knowledge of the Absolute seems open. The result is a ‘doubling of identity’ where ‘The real totality is posited by God’s affirming Himself in an infinite manner, the ideal, though, by the fact that His affirmation is itself affirmed again’ (I/6 p. 204). Thinking, properly understood, is an articulated reflex of the Absolute, and, above all, can know itself as such:

with all knowledge (Wissen), apart from the fact that it is a real cognition (Erkennen) [i.e. what happens in our knowing would not happen if in nature that which we can know were not in being], the concept of this knowledge is also connected; whoever knows also knows immediately that he knows, and this knowing of his knowing is one with and immediately connected with the first knowledge, all regress into infinity is cut off, for the concept of knowledge which is connected with knowledge, which is the principle of consciousness, is in and for itself the infinite itself.

(I/4 p. 290) Schelling terms this an ‘identity of identity’: ‘the sameness of the subjective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows itself, and is the subject and object of itself’ (I/6 p. 173). Because consciousness knows itself immediately in intellectual intuition, and because what knows itself

‘affirms’ itself, ‘is’ in the way everything else is, it can ascend to the notion of the affirming totality of all that there is, because the structure of self-affirmation is doubled by its own structure. Epistemology and ontology mirror each other in the overall structure of the Absolute, thereby

‘sublating’ their difference. As the finite determinations of knowledge reveal what can be variously seen as their finitude, their negativity, their relative status, their not-being, their dependence upon other beings for being what they are, they necessarily lead to the Absolute in which they are grounded. The real question is how this Absolute can be presented in philosophy, which is what is at issue between Schelling and Hegel in the years following 1801.

The future of modern philosophy lies in the implications of this conflict. For the time being we need a schematic outline of the difference between Schelling and Hegel at the stage of the identity philosophy, in order that the significance of the later differences can become clear. We saw

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the basic point at the beginning of this chapter: Schelling often sees being as ‘transreflexive’, in the manner we saw in Hölderlin, which Schelling develops in the best arguments of the identity philosophy, whereas Hegel sees it as a ‘self-reflexive’ totality. Both regard the negativity of the finite as what leads to the infinite, but there is a major difference between them, whose consequences will only really become explicit more than twenty years later. Hegel’s objection to Schelling was that he began with a ground that was presupposed rather than articulated. Dieter Henrich makes Hegel’s position explicit when he suggests that, in the wake of Schelling, Hegel realised:

The finite cannot be something radically different from the Absolute. Schelling had for that reason given it the attribute of relative independence, because only in this way did it also correspond in itself to the characteristic of absoluteness. This independence was immediately to be negated (aufzuheben). And as this could again only follow internally, Hegel concluded that the Absolute is present in the finite as its own negation by itself. This thought could only be sustained, though, if one could again say, and in a new sense, that the finite is the Absolute and thus the Absolute is also the finite. The Absolute is the finite to the extent to which the finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself [my emphasis].

(Henrich 1982 pp. 159–60) The sense in which Hegel’s position is ‘reflexive’ becomes clear when Henrich says of Hegel’s conception of the Absolute: The Absolute relates itself to its Other as to itself’ (ibid. p. 166), where this relationship to the Other is a cognitive relationship to itself (hence the ‘as’). Clearly this is a statement of the ‘identity of identity and difference’ of the kind we have already seen in Schelling. Where is the great divide?

The key point is again that if the Absolute really is able to relate to the Other as to itself, it would already have to know that the Other is itself, before the reflexive relationship: I can only see myself in a mirror, as opposed to an object which may or may not be me, if I am already familiar with myself. This entails a necessary ground which precedes any movement of reflection, without which, as was evident in relation to Derrida, difference could not even be known as difference. For Hegel knowledge of the Absolute can only finally be reached at the end of the process, when the

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relative negations are revealed as the structure of the process which is the Absolute. All finite differences are the Absolute because they are always relative: they are all negative in relation to each other, and result in the (positive) Absolute, as the other of themselves (as negative). The process of overcoming is the Absolute which, so to speak, draws up all the finite negations in a movement towards itself. Schelling’s position in the identity philosophy only gives a hint of the problem, and Hegel, of course, has yet to publish his position in this form, let alone in its fully developed version in the Logic and the rest of the System, but the potential for revealing the problem is already there.

The key question is how the finite can be nothing but ‘negative relation to itself’. Frank again:

Negating a not-being (refusing it any being) does not mean:

providing it with being. If we encounter a being (Seiendes) in the finite world then it is the being of the Absolute. Put another way: if finite being is not wholly and in every respect deprived of being this is because it partakes as such and in its finitude of the Absolute.

This minimum of being, without which the finite could not even exist (dasein) as finite, is something which is, so to speak, borrowed from the Absolute.

(Frank 1985 p. 127) Schelling had made this point with regard to the relationship of Fichte’s I and not-I, which resulted in the ‘striving’ for the Absolute expressed in practical reason. This, however, makes the Absolute a postulate: I and not-I are relative negations of each other, so that we are caught in a circle ‘inside which a nothing gains reality by the relation to another nothing’ (I/4 p.

358). Only if this structure is itself regarded as ‘nothing’ (i.e. as a relation of dependence, where neither term can be absolute) are we able to understand the need for a positive absolute unity which is the real ground of the reflexive relationship of I and not-I, the relationship within which particular knowledge is articulated. Schelling makes a crucial distinction between the cognitive – reflexive – ground of finite knowledge and the real – non-reflexive – ground that sustains the movement of negation from one finite determination to another. This movement could not be sustained by negation itself:

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reflection . . . only knows the universal and the particular as two relative negations, the universal as relative negation of the particular, which is, as such, without reality, the particular, on the other hand, as a relative negation of the universal. From this standpoint the universal concept therefore appears as completely empty; from the concept of substance, for example, one can never understand real substance, something independent of the concept must be added to posit the substance as such.

(I/6 p. 185) The abstract determinations of thought cannot create their own reality out of themselves: the self-cancelling relations between them have to be in a way that thought cannot itself bring about.

What is at issue is, then, in the later terms of Hegel’s Logic, whether even being, as merely the beginning of the process, is really nothing. Or, in the terms of the later Schelling: is the concept of being real being? For Schelling the ground of finite beings is a being which cannot be said to be their own, in that they are negated within it, but which they must also be to be real in any sense at all. Can it, though, as it is in Hegel, be yet another kind of non-being whose real being only emerges at the end of the process?

Both Schelling and Hegel are confronted with the question of the transition from the Absolute to the world of finitude because they agree, though not for the same reasons, that finitude, relativity, leads one to the need for the Absolute. In Hegel’s terms one can articulate a position which avoids such a transition: thinking is always already in a reflexive relationship to the Absolute as the Other of itself, as what leads from one finite determination to another, but which is only fully ‘for itself’, ‘self-present’ at the end. The finite is therefore actually the infinite, without any transition. Schelling is uneasy about the relationship of finite and infinite, which is why he will become so important for key thinkers after him. Heidegger sees the essential tension that develops in the next period of Schelling’s philosophy as between ‘freedom [the infinite], as the beginning which needs no grounding [i.e. which is itself the ‘ungrounded’ ground], and system, as a closed context of grounding/justification (Begründungszusammenhang)’

(Heidegger 1971 p. 75). This tension begins to show even before the 1809 On the Essence of Human Freedom.

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