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

6: Freedom and the Construction of Philosophy

With this acknowledgment of the eternal within all things the philosopher sublates the last estrangement (Entzweiung) between the phenomenal world and the things in themselves. He recognizes that there are not two worlds, but rather one true world, which is not beyond or above the phenomenal, but is rather right here in this one. (I/6, 274) The Dynamic Process: Producing the System of Identity We have argued that the Form Essay presents Schelling’s synthesis of Plato’s triad of divine causes and Kant’s dynamic categories, articulated through Fichte’s formula ‘I=I’, understood as a statement of disjunctive identity. The goal of this strategy is to advance an organic form of unity that will overcome the debilitating dualities established by the regressive methodologies of reflective analysis. Although he too makes use of the regressive method, he does so only after having established the parameters of system via the employment of the progressive method. Schelling achieves this integration of the regressive and progressive methods through his inversion of Kant’s categories, so that the relational class precedes the mathematical, and within the relational class, the category of community precedes those of causality and substance.Working within Kant’s own transformed structures, the world of exponible concepts becomes nature viewed as an inexponible dynamic whole. This inversion supplies Schelling with the organic form and conceptual tools required to construct a system whose inner dynamic is animated by the very nature he seeks to account for. The challenge is to develop a system that can integrate and harness the positive content of 6 Freedom and the Construction of Philosophy ? 177 178 Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy sensuous nature, thereby expanding its explanatory power and scope, while strengthening its capacity to support the moral development of humanity. He claims that the most comprehensive and productive model for philosophy is organic, where this term signifies, in its broadest possible meaning, the positive capacity for self-organization. The framework proposition of his philosophy is synthesized by the category of community and reciprocal causation: to generate a comprehensive explanation of natural phenomena we must begin from the necessary idea of the whole, from the comprehension of the absolute magnitude of an unconditional unity, in order to guarantee systematic coherency and development. As he writes in 1799: there is no true system that would not at the same time be an organic entirety. For if in every organic entirety everything is reciprocally supported and sustained, then this organization as an entirety must precede its parts; the entirety cannot emerge from its parts, but rather the parts must emerge from the entirety. Thus it is not we who know nature [a priori], but rather nature is a priori, i.e., every individual member within it is determined from the beginning through the entirety, or through the idea of nature in general. But [if] nature is a priori, then it must also be possible to know it as something that is a priori, and this really is the meaning of our position. (I/1, 279) The epistemological possibilities of this inversion are comprehensive. There comes a point at which the mechanistic analysis of a subject no longer promises an expansion of knowledge. In many cases, the exclusive allegiance to one method proves counterproductive. Contrary to his reputation as the German Idealist whose sole service is that of a bridge between Fichte’s Subjective and Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, Schelling offers an epistemological structure grounded in the facticity of organic life and actual existence that, if fully understood, lends little support to this “textbook” reputation. Parallel to the argument Plato advances in the Philebus, Schelling accepts the restrictions of existence as his paradigm of necessity. Following the trajectory of his inversion of the categories, Schelling inverts Kant’s understanding of necessity: whereas for Kant rational certainty exerts a stronger necessity over the knowing mind than empirical certainty, for Schelling it is the involuntary dimension of our embodied existence that determines the ideal of certitude. Our consciousness is not an otherworldly Gnostic power momentarily trapped in this alien organic body; rather our consciousness is itself the dependent product of our embodied nature; a depen- Freedom and the Construction of Philosophy 179 dent and restricted nature that informs our understanding of certitude. A priori and a posteriori are not related to before or after experience, but rather derive from necessary or not necessary in experience...