Schelling

1
Schelling

• Schelling, the philosopher of German Romanticism,
  was influenced by Herder.
• Herder denied Kants claim that there is an
  eternal structure of the human mind.
• Every form of human consciousness is historically
  conditioned and unique.
• Every nation is equally close to God, revealing
  one possibility of human existence within the
  total concept of humanity.
• Primitive forms of consciousness/philosophical
  assumptions are known by interpreting myth.

2

• -The modern Kantian/Fichtean form of
  con-sciousness pits the ego against the non-ego.
• This form of consciousness is the sickness of
  alienation from the world, the sickness of the
  modern world.
• It has arisen by revolt against our original
  pre-reflective oneness with nature, by the fall.
• - This oneness was panentheistic and panpsychist
• The aim of philosophy is a post-reflective
  restoration of oneness with the world

3

• Fichte claimed the first problem of philosophy is
  to explain the external world.
• Schelling held the problem of philosophy was to
  eliminate the external world.
• Nature appears external only to an ego that has
  arrogantly detached itself from the world and
  risen above it to master it.
• We must return to nature, to be embraced in its
  arms.
• Fichtes idealistic self-positing ego recalls
  Spinozas materialistic self-caused cosmic
  substance.
• For Schelling the self-positing ego emerges out
  Spinozas self-caused substance of nature.
• This self-caused substance of nature is best seen
  in self-reproductive life. Nature is life,
  spirit, not dead mechanism.

4

• Fichte claimed that his philosophy was a
  deductive system.
• Though he deduced the non-ego in general from the
  ego, he failed to deduce the non-ego in
  particular that you confront. He failed to deduce
  the finite in particular from the infinite.
• He simply assumed that your particular non-ego is
  your own best challenge to moral striving. The
  transcendental ego incarnates itself in a
  particular finite ego opposed to a particular
  finite non-ego to produce a uniquely different
  field of action for every uniquely different
  moral agent. (But this does not explain why some
  fields of action are posited and not others.)
• Schelling abandoned the attempt to deduce the
  finite from the infinite. He merely sought to
  ground the finite in the infinite (deduce the
  infinite from the finite), to ground the finite
  ego in the infinity of nature.

5

• A first argument for panpsychism is the
  historical argument, based on successful
  knowledge of nature until the modern world.
• We can know only what we create (Vico), or what
  we empathetically understand creators like
  ourselves to have created.
• We know history only because humans like us
  created it.
• Vico held we cannot know nature because a
  superhuman God created it, and we cannot rise to
  Gods standpoint.
• We can know nature, the external world, because
  that world expresses its own inner sub-human
  soul life. To know external nature is to
  understand its inner dimension.
• We can adopt this sub-human soul life
  empathetically precisely because it is subhuman.

6

• Primitive animistic mythology shows that we
  originally knew the external world by
  interpreting it empathetically as an expression
  of its inner soul life. Nature consists in a
  creative soul life that resembles us on a more
  primitive level.
• We can empathetically interpret external behavior
  and the external world as the expression of inner
  dispositions of the soul--hostile or
  friendly--which we cannot know by the mechanical
  Kantian categories of human understanding.
• Since Descartes and Fichte in the modern world,
  we have fallen away from such empathetic
  knowledge of nature. We need to retrieve it.

7

• The argument for panpsychism is that its main
  rival, commonsense Cartesian/Fichtean dualism, is
  a recent innovation explained by the modern will
  to power.
• The will to power over nature, or to moral
  perfection, distorts nature. It takes nature to
  be what it is for us, from our viewpoint, a field
  of action or obstacle course, while empathy takes
  it as it is in itself, from natures own
  standpoint. It blocks knowledge of nature.
• We know that we know nature, that we have truly
  taken its own standpoint, when our predictions of
  its future external expressions are verified. The
  elephants knew the inner soul life of their
  immediate environment when they went to higher
  land before the floods. They had accurate
  knowledge because the great flood afterwards in
  fact arrived.

8

• A second panpsychist argument is the cognitive
  argument Knowledge is correspondence between
  knower and known. But such correspondence is
  impossible unless the known is of the same nature
  as the knower. And this is impossible unless
  knowledge is empathetic, not an expression of our
  will to power or moral mastery of nature.
• But knowledge of nature is empathetic only if
  nature consists in mind or feeling like us rather
  than in dead matter. Knowledge is possible only
  if like knows like, only if mind knows mind.
• Empathy is a form of imaginative intuition in
  which we explain observed external behavior or
  object by asking what would have to be going on
  in our minds for us to have expressed ourselves
  externally in such behavior or objects.

9

• An object like a stone is explained by
  panpsychism not as the behavior of a single soul
  but as the mass effect of the behavior of a crowd
  of micro souls.
• There is one world soul that includes us, and
  that knows itself only through the fact that we
  know it. When the part knows the whole, the whole
  knows itself through the part.

10

• A third, moral argument for panpsychism, the view
  that nature inwardly spirit, is the moral
  argument we ought be free, self-determined,
  autonomous (Kant, Fichte).
• Ought implies can.
• We cannot be free as long as nature is alien to
  us as a non-ego.
• Therefore, if we ought be free, nature cannot a
  mere non-ego or not-self. It must be ones own
  self in disguise, so that one can be free and
  self-determined even in being determined by it.

11

• A fourth argument for panpsychism is the argument
  from current physical science contrary to Kant
  and Fichte, matter according to physics is not
  inert, but is alive with mental forces of
  attraction and repulsion. (Possible criticism of
  Schelling does the law of gravity really mean
  that two bodies attract each other
  psychologically?)
• When one body seems to lie on another, each in
  fact exerts a force on the other. When it seems
  there is rest, there is always tension between
  striving in opposed directions.
• Nature, shot through and through with forces of
  attraction and repulsion, is a dynamic
  equilibrium between opposite forces.
• If nature were mere repulsion, it would disperse
  into nothingness. If it were mere attraction, it
  would collapse into a single point.
• The resistance of the ego meets that of the
  world. The mind, a dynamic equilibrium between
  between opposite forces, reflects a similar
  equilibrium in the material world.

12

• A fifth argument for panpyschism is that the
  materialistic concept mechanism is not basic for
  understanding nature.
• What is basic is the concept of community and
  organic wholeness.
• Community and wholeness are not constructed
  mechanistically from aggregating atomic units.
  Rather, atomic units are constructed by
  abstraction from prior wholeness.
• Nature is a community of microcosmic individual
  wholes, each of which unifies and represents
  within itself all nature as a single universal
  whole.

13

• Fichte held that you exist in opposition to the
  world (the non-ego).
• Schelling, most famous before 1801 for his
  romantic panpsychist philosophy of nature, held
  that you are contained within the world, and that
  your own ego is becomes the highest expression of
  the world.
• Kant was wrong to view the organic whole of the
  world as it were created mechanically by God.
  Such a whole creates itself, and reproduces
  itself.
• Apparently mechanistic behavior is mass behavior
  of interacting parts, not individual behavior of
  a single whole.

14

• Schelling invented the dialectical method of
  self-understanding
• One detaches oneself from ones present
  perspective and projects oneself into ones
  initial, original position.
• One then reconstructs (reenacts), stage by stage,
  the development (dialectic) by which one becomes
  the individual one is.

15

• System of Transcendental Idealism, 1801
• Schelling projected himself into the arms of
  nature as his original position.
• He then reconstructed natures own
  self-construction.
• Nature originally is infinite impulse, which by
  itself dissipates and disperses until it meets
  with the opposite force of infinite repulsion.
• Infinite impulse and infinite repulsion are an
  unstable contradictory whole, which must yield to
  mutual attraction between mutually repelling
  bodies. In physics to bodies repel each other by
  blocking each other from occupying the same
  space, and at once attract one another by
  gravity.
• The special forms of matter (electricity,
  chemical bonds, magnetism) as well as matter in
  general construct themselves as dynamic
  equilibria of repulsion and attraction.

16

• On the basis of matter, life constructs itself as
  a dynamic equilibrium of motor impulse
  (irritability, attraction) and sensation (the
  seed of knowledge, the attraction between knower
  and what is known). This equilibrium is life as
  self-reproductive through the dynamic alternation
  of these two forces.
• Motor behavior is checked by sensation. It
  becomes self-conscious by meeting a sensory
  obstacle. Otherwise it would disperse and
  dissipate.
• Life is the concrete process of which forces of
  attraction and repulsion are mere abstractions.
• Once life has constructed itself as the highest
  form of matter, Fichtes dialectic of the ego and
  non-ego continues the dialecic of nature on a
  higher level.

17

• Aesthetic intuition/interpretation is imaginative
  empathetic intuition of the creative impulse of
  the artist at the origin of the artwork.
• Creation in nature before human beings is
  unconscious. Artistic creation is both conscious
  and unconscious.
• Creation by artistic genius continues the
  unconscious creativity of nature on a higher
  level. A genius is not conscious of how he/she
  produced his/her work. Only the interpreter of
  the work can be conscious of how it is done.
• Purely conscious creation by human beings is
  purely reflective imitation (plagiarism)

18

• Schelling had held that the self and nature were
  identical. After 1801 he held they showed an
  identity of indifference. This world is a falling
  away from such identity, an absence of infinite
  goodness due to an abused of free will. The
  purpose of life is a mystical return to God, to
  the One.

19

• In 1841 Schelling founded existentialism.
• He rejected Hegels philosophy as essentialism.
  Hegels philosophy was negative philosophy,
  negating existence, while Schellings philosophy
  was positive. Gods existence is more than his
  essence. God is a personal being, not a mere
  idea. God was known to the Greeks by myth, to us
  he is known by revelation, not by rational
  philosophy.