UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 4
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS
Win Corduan
Virtually everything that is being written on Fichte and Schelling these days, berates the practice of treating them simply as transitions from Kant to Hegel and counsels us to read them as philosophers who had a lot to offer in their own right. I must confess that I'm guilty of pursuing the "transition approach." I have learned, however, that in German philosophy the war of superiority, Schelling vs. Hegel, is either still going on or has been revived.
It has been said that Friedrich Joseph Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854) got his education in public. He started out as a follower of Fichte and then slowly moved away from him (and even from transcendental philosophy) to establish his own system in stages. Every time that he gained a new insight, he would write and lecture about it as the final truth of his system until the next time that he changed his mind. To a large extent, these transitions also manifested themselves in the erosion of various friendships, e.g. with Fichte and Hegel, though in the latter case, it's pretty clear that Hegel fired the first loaded shot. 
Consequently, Schelling is a moving target for any description or critique. Since I'm using the "transition approach," I need to confine my efforts of trying to represent Schelling in his transcendental phase. I must say, though, that it's not easy for anyone to give a short summary of Schelling in any of his phases. Consequently, we'll look at just one item that will be suitable to understand Hegel's reaction to him.
Remember the meaning of "transcendental." This word describes the type of philosophy that begins by stipulating knowledge as a given and then asks, "What are the conditions that make knowledge possible?" We saw how Kant answered that question with the existence of a thing-in-itself, the sensory intuition of the empirical world, and the synthetic a priori faculties of the mind: the forms, concepts, and categories, without which we could not have knowledge. Fichte, as we saw last time, dispensed with the thing-in-itself and posited an "absolute I," that, in reaction to the fact that there are many instances of "not-I," limits itself and makes knowledge and morality possible. Schelling thought that this was an arbitrary move by Fichte.
How can there be an "Absolute I"? Or, to put a different spin on the question, How can I know that there is an "absolute I"? I certainly never experience myself as absolute or unlimited. In order to justify the existence of an "absolute I," we need, first of all, to have a framework that allows us to speak of an "Absolute." So, a necessary condition of all knowledge is that there is an Absolute that presents itself in the multiplicity of facts of consciousness. Consequently, Schelling takes us back all the way to the thought of Anaximander, according to whom contraries are explained on the basis of an all-inclusive Infinite. I need to find myself and all other particulars in the Absolute. There is an identity between the Absolute--the One--and nature--the many--which it is necessary to embrace. So, on one level, all particular things are the same, insofar as we look at them merely as integrated into the Absolute, but on another level, they are distinct. You will not be surprised to learn that, when Schelling espoused this view, he was enamored by the pantheism of Spinoza, though later on he repudiated Spinoza because Spinoza's philosophy led to determinism rather than freedom.
The Achilles Heel of pantheism is that one and the same thing cannot be both infinite and finite. Schelling attempted to get around this problem by pointing out that the law of contradiction only applies to a thing when it is itself, not when it is something else. Now, please bear with me; this point is confusing, but we need to understand what Schelling was trying to say. So let me repeat slowly what I take to be Schelling's reasoning. In general, the law of contradiction applies to a thing (or a proposition concerning a thing). But Schelling found (or invented) an exception to this rule. Thus:
| The contradiction between the two kinds of being is only apparent. Schelling maintains, in line with the identity philosophy, that the "properly understood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot be as the same something and also the opposite thereof, but this does not prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other, to be not-A" |
| Bowie, Andrew, "Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), Stanford Encyclopedia, art. "Schelling" |
We can see here a triadity similar to that of Fichte.
This line of argumentation constitutes the way in which he attempted to maintain the identity of the particulars with the Absolute. Every particular thing is identical with the Absolute, either in its own form or in another form. Schelling accused Fichte of making an arbitrary leap by assuming the absolute "I,", but it seems to me that his exposition of the Absolute out-leaps Fichte by a long distance.
Unfortunately, you cannot eliminate the laws of logic in this way (or, for that matter in any other way). The reasoning above is at best a mental slight of hand, though not even a subtle one. If something seems to be two different things, but is actually one and the same thing, then the two apparent aspects must share their logical properties. Or, to reverse the statement, if two things do not share their logical properties, they cannot be one and the same thing. So, if thing B is the negation of A, A and B cannot be identical.
