Schelling's Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom

Preface

In writing this book, I hope to contribute to the growing effort to decipher one of the most complex and enigmatic thinkers of German Idealism, F. W. J. Schelling. Like the wines of a challenging domain in Bordeaux, the life and ideas of this philosopher have been often overlooked as we reach for the now widely available and thus familiar vintages of a Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. Unlike these three acknowledged giants of German Idealism, Schelling never sought to offer up one unchanging system of philosophy. Over the course of his long career, different years often yielded different results, as he relentlessly worked the vay vignes of philosophy, never ceasing to call into question his own ideas in the face of new developments .1 Admirers of such an approach to philosophizing are rare. One such connoisseur and self-proclaimed follower of this stratagem was, not surprisingly, another quite enigmatic philosopher, the father of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. When asked who had most influenced his own philosophy of nature by William James, Peirce responds that his views were “influenced by Schelling,—by all stages of Schelling, but especially by the Philosophie der Natur.” He continues, “I consider Schelling as enormous; and one thing I admire about him is his freedom from the trammels of system, and his holding himself uncommitted to any previous utterance. In that, he is like a scientific man.”2 With these words Peirce lauds precisely that aspect of Schelling’s way of doing philosophy that others, most notoriously Schelling’s one-time friend and protégé, Hegel, ridicule as a crippling weakness that forced him “to carry out his philosophical education in public”—an embarrassing shortcoming Hegel sought to capture when he awarded Schelling the dubious title of the “Proteus of philosophy.” This is the same Hegel who, quite in step with the prevailing winds of modernity, and no doubt reflecting his early career as a Gymnasium schoolmaster, once wrote, “That philosophy, like geometry, is teachable, and must no less than geometry have a regular structure.”3 This position, while perfect for creating a school of thought Preface xi to be filled out by students drilled in the prescribed method, stands diametrically opposed to Schelling’s belief that, since philosophy is the highest act of freedom, the activity of doing philosophy is not only inherently creative, but must always reflect the unique character of the person engaged in this activity. In stark contrast to what would become Hegel’s rather megalomaniacal celebration of one method and system of philosophy , Schelling insists that because a philosophy must be “constructed by the individual student himself,” any such “system” can only be “perspectival” and thus a limited account of the “universal . . . system of human knowing” (I/1, 447; 457). Highly critical of modernity’s embrace of mathematic form as the paradigm through which to understand our knowledge of reality, Schelling embraces an organic and developmental model in which, for example, “all progress in philosophy [is] only progress through development; every individual system which earns this name can be viewed as a seed which indeed slowly and gradually, but inexorably and in every direction, advances itself in multifarious development” (I/1, 457). The telos of philosophy lies not in the gradual homogenization of thought into one all embracing logic, but rather in developing a multitude of systems, all of which should offer us ever more diverse and complex ways of understanding our existence. In undertaking the task of coming to grips with such a singular thinker, it is essential that we allow him to speak for himself, choosing for the moment to avoid the echo chamber of received readings. A strategy to facilitate this is, in a move of intellectual judo, to apply Schelling’s interpretive strategies to his own work, thereby helping us to disclose and understand him on his own terms. For while Schelling held that every one of us is called to create our own philosophy, he also maintained that in doing this all of us would be guided in our efforts by one unique yet fundamental idea. As we will see in much more detail, Schelling held that the key to understanding a thinker is to find that one central idea that serves as the axis around which his or her work revolves. And it is precisely this objective I pursue in the pages that follow, namely, to find the fundamental idea that animates and informs his work. As the title...