MOVING BEYOND THE I: THE BREAK WITH FICHTE Before attempting to delineate some of the still viable aspects of the

identity philosophy, we need to look briefly at how Schelling completes the move away from Fichte. The way he does so is characteristic of Schelling’s main philosophical direction from now on. In On the True Concept of Naturphilosophie and the Correct Way to Solve its Problems of 1801 Schelling ceases to equivocate over the relationship between Naturphilosophie and transcendental philosophy. The primary philosophy is the Naturphilosophie. He has no doubts about what this implies.

Although, as Fichte suggests, philosophical thinking has to begin with the free act of the conscious subject, this creates the illusion of this act being the real, as opposed to merely the cognitive beginning of philosophy.

Schelling argues that Fichte mixes up ‘philosophy’ with ‘philosophising about philosophy’ (I/4 p. 84). Fichte has begun at the highest ‘potential’, the self-conscious I, without explaining what precedes it, which for Schelling initially emerges in ‘unconscious activity’ (ibid. p. 85), not the conscious activity of the philosopher. Transcendental philosophy is a result, not a beginning. Schelling does not regress into dogmatism, though, because he knows he has to account for the conscious subject. He therefore suggests that, having arrived at the subject, philosophy must subtract from the highest point, the self-conscious I, reducing it to the lowest ‘potential’ in nature, before reconstructing the path upwards.² Fichte’s philosophy is forced to work within the conditions of already constituted consciousness, where the object always depends upon the subject, but ‘in this way it can never get beyond this identity [of subject and object], thus it can basically never get beyond the circle of consciousness’

(ibid. p. 85).

Schelling’s move beyond the immanence of the I is central to the identity system, and to his significance for modern philosophy, which, as we saw, both Heidegger and Habermas characterised in terms of the primacy of the subject in relation to a world of objects. Schelling now insists that the productivity does not begin as an I, but only becomes an I. He can only argue this by an abstraction, which takes away from consciousness in order to reach what precedes it: ‘by this abstraction I reach the concept of the pure subject–object ( = nature), from which I raise myself up to the subject–object of consciousness ( = I)’ (ibid. p. 86), which together form the structure of the Absolute. Schelling now insists these stages are ‘unconscious’ and can only become conscious to an I which has developed out of them and realises its dependence upon them. One must abstract from intellectual intuition in order to arrive at the initial

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unconscious subject–object, nature. Why, though, call it a subject–object?

Schelling’s answer is: ‘That pure subject–object is already determined for action by its nature (the contradiction it has in itself)’ (ibid. p. 90): without the contradiction between itself as subject and as object, the emergence and development of self-consciousness would be inexplicable. The important consequence of this is that we realise our dependency upon nature in a way which cannot, as Fichte had maintained, be overcome by the imposition of practical reason. For Schelling reason itself is only the higher aspect of nature, which should not be there to enslave what it emerges from.

Schelling makes, throughout his career, many of the moves which are the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, in which reason deceives itself about its relationship to nature and thereby turns into its dialectical opposite. Schelling’s objections to Fichte lead him to startlingly ‘Green’ pronouncements of a kind also seen in Adorno. Here he is in a letter to Fichte in 1801:

I am thoroughly aware of how small an area of consciousness nature must fall into, according to your conception of it. For you nature has no speculative significance, only a teleological one. But are you really of the opinion, for example, that light is only there so that rational beings can also see each other when they talk to each other, and that air is there so that when they hear each other they can talk to each other?

(in Schulz 1968 p. 140) By 1806 the gloves are really off:

in the last analysis what is the essence of his whole opinion of nature? It is this: that nature should be used . . . and that it is there for nothing more than to be used; his principle, according to which he looks at nature, is the economic teleological principle.

(I/7 p. 17) The reasons for Schelling’s harsh judgement have exemplary significance for the history of modernity. One of the disasters in the history of orthodox Marxism, the evidence of which can be found all over Eastern Europe, is its failure to sustain the younger Marx’s Schelling-derived concern for non-human nature, in favour of precisely the sort of vision of the domination of nature that Fichte at his worst (e.g., in the last part of the Vocation of Man) was capable of, and which is reproduced in other ways in the ravages of modern capitalism.

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The significance of the move away from Fichte for the development of the identity philosophy becomes very clear in the Propaedeutic of Philosophy of 1804. Fichte is here seen as really concerned only with ‘the origin of finite representations’ (I/6 p. 122), which result from the limitation of the infinite activity of the I. Fichte has therefore reduced philosophy to looking merely at the finite, by trying to make the fact of consciousness infinite. Habermas claims of the Young Hegelians that their

‘arguments reclaim the finitude of spirit against the self-related-totalising thinking of the dialectic’ (Habermas 1988 p. 47). Schelling already begins to move in this direction in his critique of Fichte and he will complete most of the move in the later critique of Hegel. He now sees the consequence of Fichte’s position in a startling way, that will affect his thinking from now on. The basic idea with regard to the subject, though without the conception of the Absolute, will reappear in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the conception of objectifying instrumental reason, which represses the fact of the subject’s dependence on the Other of nature:

By positing myself as myself I oppose myself to everything else, consequently to the entire universe. Egoity (Ichheit) is therefore the universal expression of isolation, of separation from the totality (All), and as nothing can be separated from the totality, given its infinity, except by its being finitely posited, i.e. with negation, then egoity is the general expression and highest principle of all finitude, i.e. of everything which is not absolute totality, absolute reality. How the infinite, in which there is no negation, could be the cause of privations, of limitations is absolutely incomprehensible.

(I/6 p. 124) The freedom of the conscious subject is thus the reason for its separation from the Absolute.³ The subject is therefore faced with the ‘necessity of contemplating (anschauen) not this absolute totality, but only negations of it’ (ibid. p. 125). The constitution of the subject thus depends upon a fundamental repression. As a result of the move away from Fichte in the identity philosophy, Schelling has to deny absolute reality to the finite world at the same time as suggesting that philosophy can move beyond the finite world. This may sound like a regression to the worst kind of Platonism, but the way Schelling carries out these moves points to the future rather than to the past, because he reveals the consequences of the dependence of subjectivity on a ground which it cannot itself grasp.

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