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Introduction to F. W. J. Schelling’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801) and Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract]
- State University of New York Press
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Introduction to F. W. J. Schelling’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy1 (1801) and Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (1802) [Extract] Friedrich Schelling’s new presentation of his system, the first work in what came to be deemed his “philosophy of identity,” was occasioned by a double confrontation with Fichtean idealism in the summer and autumn of 1800: a more general challenge (documented in the Correspondence) to the place of a philosophy of nature in the transcendental tradition of the Wissenschaftslehre that had slowly taken form in Fichte’s mind as he read, sometimes cursorily, Schelling’s writings from 1795 to 1800, and a more specific epistemological challenge to the supposed independence of philosophy of nature that Carl August Eschenmayer voiced in Schelling’s own journal on Naturphilosophie.2 Early in 1800, Schelling wrote to Eschenmayer to remind him of his promise to submit some articles for the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik.3 In a letter from April of 1800 no longer extant, Eschenmayer expressed the view that central claims Schelling had advanced in his 1799 essays on the philosophy of nature were circular,4 viz., that the business of philosophy of nature is to effect a “self-construction” of nature, that the idea of nature is necessary, and that it necessarily involves a duality of principles. Either the idea of nature is a priori or these suppositions are borrowed from an empirical overview of nature.5 In a manuscript submitted to Schelling in the summer of 1800 for the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik and printed in the first issue of Vol. II, January, 1801 under the title Spontaneität = Weltseele oder die höchste Prinzip der Naturphilosophie, Eschenmayer argues that there can be dual principles in nature only if there are dual and opposite tendencies in the subject who is conscious of nature— firstly, a principle of spontaneity that tends to infinity, secondly, a limiting nature-principle that strives to limit and confine activity to finitude, and in addition a synthesis that equalizes them—which can only be drive or impetus (Trieb), the foundation of sensation and intuition. As the first presentation of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre had suggested, the laws of nature are projected upon 135 136 J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling objectivity from the work of mind (Geist), since only in us is there to be found a principle of spontaneity or originary motion.6 Since empirical science cannot establish the claim to systematic unity in nature, a philosophy of nature needs a “propaedeutic” or foundation, which it indeed finds in transcendental philosophy (or Wissenschaftslehre). It is simply too soon, argues Eschenmayer, to proclaim an independent philosophy of nature.7 In the same issue, which Schelling finished editing and sent to his publisher early in the autumn of 1800,8 Schelling appends a reply to Eschenmayer’s critique under the title Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und die richtige Art ihr Probleme aufzulösen (On the True Concept of the Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way to Solve Its Problems). – Later that autumn, Schelling receives essentially the same challenge to his notion of the independence of philosophy of nature from Fichte9 , and he quickly replies to it in a letter10 that recounts the history of the development of his philosophical views in general and those on nature in particular in words that are almost identical to those used in the True Concept essay.11 Though this theme of the independence of Naturphilosophie will become the major point of contention in the Fichte-Schelling Correspondence over the course of the next year, it seems that it was Eschenmayer’s attack that directly occasioned the writing of the Presentation of My System of Philosophy. In the True Concept essay, Schelling puts the disagreement between Eschenmayer and himself in the starkest possible terms: while the Fichtean Eschenmayer locates the activity of nature in the I, Schelling places it in nature itself. This claim of agency in nature, the precondition of philosophy’s attempt to present nature as self-constructing, for now remains unexplained, but Schelling promises that the next issue (which appeared at the Easter book fair on 26 April, 1801) will contain a new presentation of his system, one in which Eschenmayer’s dualism of nature and spirit, and all other dualisms that haunt ordinary consciousness, will be abolished and the oneness of the world proved.12 But the one world Schelling has in mind is no longer the world of...