Previous thinkers have separated Metaphysics into natural laws and metaphysical principles, and dissolved the latter into the former by naming them constiutive of experience. Now, the distinction has become between pure and applied philosophy.
The pure is looking into knowledge as such; the applied is looking into its determinate forms.
Schelling provides his outline of what a system that reconciles these might be, but no system as such. He seeks to use science to speak about theoretical philosophy and history to speak about applied philosophy.
My object, rather, is first to allow natural science itself to arise philosophically, and my philosophy is itself nothing else than natural science.
Philosophy is the science of itself. Understanding what it is means understanding its object. Because of this it is undefinable.
Instead of defining philosophy of nature, Schelling allows it to grow into itself through reason, assuming that such a philosophy must deduce the possibility of nature from first principles.
The question is “how a world outside us… is possible” (172). When we consider ourselves as opposed to nature we begin to think philosophically, and reflect; but this separates us from what was always united before. This is unnatural, since only when reunited “does man become man” (172).
Reflection as an end and not as a means, therefore, is “a spiritual sickness in all mankind” (173). But philosophy only operates when the original divorce happened. So true philosophy sees reflection as with a negative value, and seeks to reunite what was originally united using its freedom. Philosophy seeks to cancel itself out.
In the empirical world we know only of cause and effect. If we want to reunite the real world and our ideas (Vorstellungen), we must relate them through cause and effect.
We intuitively feel our ideas are dependent on objects (Dingen), so Schelling assumes the former are effects of the latter. But this would imply that they are permanently separated, since it means that objects precede ideas. We could also never know what things are like before our ideas interpret them.
Reflection about the source of your ideas raises yourself above them, and therefore establishes you as an entity with being in itself (Sein in sich selbst). This process separates mind and matter, and separates you from cause and effect, since you’ve stepped outside of the succesion of ideas. This is freedom.
With freedom, it is hard to imagine things affecting you. You exist for yourself. What if you were a thing, “a mere piece of mechanism” (176)? Then you couldn’t ask these big questions. Your ability to ask is proof of your independence, since you ask it for yourself. That which doesn’t ask is a mere object, and cannot think of its self.
Why are philosophers so obviously wrong? Because they’ve gone beyond your paltry understanding. They cannot reconnect what, to you, seems entirely natural.
The first one who saw beyond the separation of mind and matter was Spinoza. Leibniz too, and he has been harshly misunderstood. He believed all alterations proceed from an inner principle.
If I am dependent on external impressions,… I myself am nothing more than matter – as it were, an optical glass, in which the light-ray of the world refracts. But the optical glass does not itself see; it is merely an instrument in the hand of a rational being. And what is that in me which judges it to be an impression that has impinged upon me?
Schelling sharply opposes a matter-in-itself perspective, and presents several avenues of attack to such arguments.
Looking at the properties of the world, Schelling sees:
The first is related to statics, the second to chemistry, and the third to mechanics. It is clear that the system of nature is complete; but how did it come to be? It seems that, to our mind, representing things in this order is “as necessary for our mind as if they belonged to its very being” (186).
Schelling starts with what necessity means. He describes it as a phenomena happening if and only if a particular succession is in place. The fact that lightning precedes thunder is not in us; it is in the things themselves, not in our ideas of them. We subjectively represent them as ordered because of the objective order. This relation means that the phenomena and the succession arise together.
Schelling then asks: do succession and phenomena arise, together, outside us or within us? He associates the former with “common human understanding” (187), and remarks that it offers no explanation for why we feel compelled to represent it in a certain way. It is unphilosophical, and cannot be understood by us, since it happens in the things themselves, and not in any comprehensible field.
A logic of a priori forms that become the real world is equally untenable; for the a priori forms are contentless, and Schelling regrets that “there is the deepest silence” (190) about how things actually come to be represented.
Hume’s scepticism, which suggests that succession isn’t actually necessary and we just consider it so by habit, is marginally better, but fails to explain why things have been so up to now.
Only Leibniz and Spinoza have truly attempted to “derive the necessity of a succession of presentations from the nature of our mind” (191), which means approaching the problem assuming they arise within us.
Spinoza saw the ideal and the real connected in nature. It is our ideal nature which empowers us to see beyond; and we can only be aware of the real by contrast to the ideal and vice versa. They are both but “modifications of one and the same ideal nature” (192). He was unabled to explain how things change from one onto the other, and therefore was unable to explain how things came to be, which is Schelling’s goal. “His system is the most unintelligible that ever existed” (192). Schelling interprets him to mean that there must be something infinite and finite in his nature simultaneously, otherwise they wouldn’t be so; and this union is his nature.
Leibniz focuses on both the infinite and the finite coexisting. He explains all by reference to natural law experienced by perceptual beings. Only they are originally unified, and “push” unity onto actual things by perceiving them. If all ideas come from this mind, then so must all experiences; and so must the principle of agreement between different people. Since no mind can come to be from things, then it makes sense that external things arise from it.
In this frame, philosophy is just running its due course, and is thus a part of experience.
Dogmatism cannot explain its core mechanism of cause and effect. But life, the organic, exists for itself and arises from itself; it sidesteps the succession of things.
In things, parts exist because we arbitrarily divide the total set of things into units. In organisms, parts are real; there is an objective relation to the whole. This means that there is a concept (Begriff), which is in the organization itself and organizes it. “Not only its form but its existence is purposive” (196), and requires no external context to work. It allows organisms to be organized. For this reason, in organisms, form and matter are inseparable. This indivisibility means they cannot be explained mechanically. It makes no sense, like a dogmatist would do, to separate their concept and their object.
Unity only exists for an abstracting observer; it lies not in matter, but in the concept of unity. It is only through a mind (Geist) that the concept of unity can be attuned to the material reality of unity. The mind passes judgement (Urteil) to unify them.
By positing a statistically created universe, you imply no purposiveness or organization. Schelling asks how the organic products could come to be independently of the mind. Such a view would also imply that the purposiveness of things is a necessary representation to you. This is clear, since a plant is clearly a plant, but a collection of sand we arbitrarily name beach. But this implies that you come to know the properties of something outside of you and represent it in that way without it being connected to you at all.
The answer that we force our concepts onto the external reality is insufficient, since we would have to know what the things-in-themselves are to be able to decide what to perceive in one way and what in another, which is impossible.
For this reason, Schelling posits a concept that has no matter in itself, but exists necessarily and reciprocally in all organizations. The form and matter of things is tightly bound up in a unity.
Schelling thoroughly argues against intelligent design using this principle.
In organic matter, its existence is purposive; not just its form. Since organization is contingent on a mind to organize it, humans posited a unified being, which brings together the real and the ideal; but this cannot be reached by mere reflection.
There is total reciprocity in nature: animals move when excited by sound, but they are sensitive to sound because they can move. Still, this doesn’t explain life. Life is a product of nature, but ruled by a mind. Even if we were all machines, a principle would bind us harmoniously together. Schelling also meticulously refutes the possibility of a life-force by appeal to the mechanical nature of forces, and the inbalance that such a force would produce.
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