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

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

Subjectivism and the Annihilation of Nature In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. One major reason for this renewed attention lies in the symphonic power of this thinker’s work, the expanse and complexity of which provides a robust alternative to the anemic theorizing one encounters in contemporary academic philosophy. Too far-reaching to fit into the categories of either German Idealism or Romanticism, Schelling’s oeuvre is an example of an organic philosophy which, rooted in nature, strives to support the continuous creation of meaning within a unifying and integrated framework. Realizing that the negative force of critique can never satisfy the curiosity of the human spirit, he insists that philosophy must itself be as capable of continuous development as life itself. Advancing such an ambitious project led Schelling to break away from the conceptual current of modern subjectivism to develop a way of doing philosophy firmly planted in the sensual world of human experience and nature. For it was only from such an organic standpoint that he believed he would be able to overcome and integrate the dualisms that necessarily follow from modernity’s standpoint of the subject, posited as the otherworldly source of order and form required to regulate the chaotic flux of life. As Kant realized, the ideal of unity is the condition of possibility of employing reason systematically. For Schelling, however, Kant failed to pursue the logic of his reasoning to its necessary conclusion, thereby denying continuity between the virtual world of pure reason and the existing reality of nature. Hypostatizing the patterns of his logic, Kant “prescribes” an unbridgeable duality between the object 1 Life as the Schema of Freedom Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy ? 1 2 Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy world of physica rationalis and the subjective interiority of psychologia rationalis.1 In doing this, Kant limits the unconditional demand both of the Transcendental Ideal and the Kingdom of Ends to the sphere of the thinking subject, thereby demoting the other ‘Kingdoms’ of nature to the status of mere means to be exploited by humans. While creating a powerful yet limited position from which a disembodied subject can “constrain nature to give answers,” the destructive consequences of such an approach vis-à-vis nature were all too clearly visible to Schelling.2 In its essence, Kant’s Copernican Revolution resulted in what Schelling calls “the pure inversion” of traditional dogmatism,3 an inversion in which the static and unchanging doctrines of a Wolffian form of scholastic metaphysics are replaced by the “dogmata” of Kant’s a priori synthetic propositions which, according to Kant, are as “closed and complete” a “body of doctrine” as the logic of Aristotle.4 The consequences of this inversion produce an even more destructive dual-plane model of reality than that of dogmatic theology, since it culminates for Schelling in a new form of “dualism” he held to be a “necessary phenomenon of the modern world.”5 Initiated by Descartes, formulated by Kant, and perfected by Fichte, the subjective idealism of modernity denies the objective reality and intrinsic value of nature, since as “a product of the I,” the world of nature becomes nothing more than a “Gedankending” to be posited by the thinking subject “when needed.”6 According to Schelling, this devaluation of sensuous nature has its roots in modernity’s promotion of the thinking human subject to the rank of the absolute, an inflation of the cogito that leads to the vainglorious deification of the human subject at the subsequent cost of what Schelling presciently calls the “annihilation of nature”: Descartes, who through the cogito ergo sum gave philosophy its first orientation to subjectivity, and whose introduction of philosophy (in his Meditations) is in fact identical with the later grounding of philosophy in Idealism, could not yet present the orientations entirely separate—subjectivity and objectivity do not yet appear completely divided. But his real intention, his true idea of God, the world, and the soul he articulated more clearly in his physics than through his philosophy. In the comprehensive spirit of Descartes, his philosophy permitted the annihilation of nature, which the idealism of the above mentioned form [Fichte’s] extols, just as truly and factually as it actually was in his physics. (I/5, 274) The annihilation of nature addressed here has at its root the elevation of epistemology above all fields of philosophy, most notably ontology, [18.118.30.253] Project...