THE PATH TO THE SELF

The System of Transcendental Idealism (STI) of 1800 explicates for the first time in systematic form one of the most influential ideas in modern thinking: the idea that self-consciousness has to develop in stages from a point where it did not exist as such. The STI also develops the newly emerged Romantic thought, which we briefly touched on when looking at metaphor in the Introduction, that art can reveal more than philosophy can say. The STI thereby helps open the space for the specifically modern versions of aesthetic truth that are central to the work of Adorno, Heidegger, Gadamer and others, which are now even affecting conceptions of truth in certain areas of analytical philosophy.¹

The STI is another expression of the tension in Schelling’s work between Spinoza and Fichte, and of a related tension between an Idealist and a Romantic conception of philosophy. The first tension is expressed in the attempt to marry the conception of the Naturphilosophie to a Fichtean conception of the I. The second tension becomes evident in the privileging of art above philosophy as a means of revealing the Absolute: Schelling will not sustain this priority in subsequent work, though its implications for his position do not disappear in the later work. These tensions are, again, not merely specialised issues in the philosophy of the period.

Schelling is confronted with the fundamental modern problem of how to understand our status as self-conscious natural beings, in the absence of theological support. The danger is that one will either fall into the materialist trap of thinking that by explaining the mechanical functioning of nature we will finally explain ourselves, thus making self-consciousness and freedom merely epiphenomenal, or into the Idealist

trap of thinking that self-consciousness is wholly selfgrounding, thus making its relationship to nature one of simple domination. The two positions actually tend to be mirror images of each other, in that the complete mechanistic explanation would, in Kantian and post-Kantian terms, be a product of absolute subjectivity. Schelling sometimes leaves contradictions unresolved in the STI, but in doing so reveals vital issues in modern thought. It is no coincidence that structures which anticipate psychoanalysis emerge in the process, that a new understanding of the significance of art for philosophy is promulgated, and that, in moving away from Fichte, Schelling will in his subsequent work develop an expressly ecological conception of nature.

Schelling begins the STI with ‘the parallelism of nature with the intelligible’ that is familiar from the Naturphilosophie. However, he is clear that the Naturphilosophie is not complete in itself and that a further transcendental philosophy is required to explicate self-consciousness’s higher stages, which are necessary for the move from theoretical to practical philosophy. The tension in the STI is a result of Schelling’s uncertainty about the priority of the two philosophies. He opts for the transcendental philosophy for good Kantian and Fichtean reasons, but at the cost of a conceptual inconsistency he had evidently been aware of in the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. In Of the I he had, as we saw, changed the Kantian question as to the possibility of synthetic judgements into the question ‘How is it that the absolute I goes out of itself and opposes a not-I to itself?’ (not-I/1 p. 175); in the Letters this question was put in terms of the Absolute, which was no longer conceived of as an absolute I. In the STI he generally goes back to the Fichtean terminology. The problem here has already been suggested: opposing an I to a not-I within an absolute I means using the same term for the subject which is relative to the object as for the whole within which there can be such a relationship. As Hölderlin showed, it therefore becomes impossible to know in what sense the absolute I is an I in the same way as the individual conscious I.

In the STI the conceptual structures of the Naturphilosophie recur, but as descriptions of the I. Intellectual intuition, the activity of the I upon itself, in which subject and object are identical, is the source of the I in the highest sense, ‘to the extent that it is its own product, is simultaneously what produces and what is produced’ (I/3 p. 372). Nature itself, then, is to be understood via the explication of self-consciousness: The concept of an original identity in duplicity and vice versa is therefore only the concept of a subject–objectand this originally only occurs in self-consciousness’ (I/3 p.

373). Instead of a conception in which both nature and consciousness have

their source in a higher activity, the Absolute, consciousness is given priority (on this, see Frank 1985 pp. 71–103). This questionable use of the term ‘I’ leads to what always worries people about Schelling’s early philosophy: it seems to understand everything as the functioning of some kind of inflated mind. One should, though, read the text with more hermeneutic sensitivity: with some terminological adjustment, these ideas are not as bizarre as they may sound.

The originality of the STI lies in the way in which it turns philosophy into ‘a history of self-consciousness’ (I/3 p. 331). This history retraces the path leading to the moment where self-consciousness becomes able to write such a history, by seeing what stages the subject necessarily went through to arrive at this moment. Hegel adopts the model for the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it can, taken on the level of the individual subject, be seen in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It is also a model for psychoanalysis: Lacan clearly uses aspects of the Phenomenology, for instance. The stages of development in the STI are progressive stages of the absolute I’s self-limitation. The lowest stages are those of the differentiation of the natural world from a state of simple oneness. This stage of the limitation, which we can understand via our primitive sense of the resistance of the object world, appears independent of us, because

‘the act via which all limitation is posited, as condition of all consciousness, does not itself come to consciousness’ (I/3 p. 409). Limitation, the condition of a manifest world, is posited as an ‘act’ because one cannot give a causal explanation of its occurrence, in that it is the prior condition of possibility of any causal relation between determinate things.

The world of objective nature is, then, an ‘unconscious’ stage of the I, but it is still ‘of the I’. The I at this stage cannot simultaneously become objective by self-division and see itself becoming objective. If Kantian dualism is to be avoided, it must be clear that the sensation of resistance of the other is not of a wholly different order from the awareness of oneself:

even the judgement that the impression derives from an object presupposes an activity which is not limited to the impression but moves beyond the impression. The I is, therefore, not what feels, unless there is an activity in it which goes beyond the limit.

(I/3 p. 413) This conception, derived from Fichte, will be the basis of Hegel’s argument against Kant’s setting limits on knowledge, and Schelling uses it here against the notion of the thing in itself. Each limit becomes a reason to go

beyond that limit, as the awareness of a limit has always already transcended the limit by knowing it as a limit. Because each stage of development of the subject becomes a new limit on the infinite activity of the absolute I, it turns into the next object to be overcome. The very emergence of a differentiated world of matter, even prior to organic form and conscious self-awareness, is in these terms a form of ‘intuition’ of the I by itself. Only because the productivity is inhibited does it manifest itself.

The basic structures of the world of objects are nothing but a lower form of structures of mind that the philosopher can understand by reflecting on why the world has come to be felt and thought of as other to herself, even though it must ultimately be the same as herself.

The next stages of development are the constitution of natural organisms, and then the emergence of individual consciousness in the act of ‘absolute abstraction’, which takes us out of the realm of natural necessity towards self-consciousness and the autonomous will. It is at this stage that the notions of ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ productivity begin to become most important. The argument about the emergence of the individual I of consciousness is Fichtean. It is only by an action which takes the I absolutely above the object world that such consciousness can arise.

As such it can have no prior cause: ‘thus the chain of theoretical philosophy is broken here’ (ibid. p. 524) and we must, even to explain theoretical knowledge, move into the realm of practical philosophy, of the I as self-positing spontaneity. How, though, given the absolute transcending of the object world by this action – the subject is again, as we saw in the earlier texts, unbedingt – are we to understand the object world without again slipping back into dualism? The answer lies in the fact that the world of nature is the sphere of ‘unconscious’ productivity, as opposed to the

‘conscious’ productivity of the self-aware, autonomous I. There is no absolute division of the two: the main problem is understanding how they relate.

‘Absolute abstraction’ leads to a second phase of development: ‘Just as nature developed itself as a whole from the original act of self-consciousness, a second nature will emerge from the secondary act, or from free self-determination’ (ibid, p. 537).²In subsequent sections of the STI Schelling works through the stages of the development of second nature: history and the state. I shall not consider these sections here for reasons of space (on this, see Marx 1984). The argument becomes most interesting when Schelling links conscious and unconscious in his conception of the art-work.