Schelling and Spinoza: Realism, Idealism, and the Absolute

by Benjamin Norris

Schelling and Spinoza reconstructs Schelling's reading of Spinoza's metaphysics to better understand the roles realism and idealism play in Schelling's work. Schelling initially praises Spinoza's monism but comes to criticize the lifelessness produced by Spinoza's dualistic account of the relation between thought and existence. By turning to Schelling's notion of the Absolute, author Benjamin Norris presents a novel reading of Schelling's early and middle philosophical endeavors as a kind of ideal-realism dependent on the hyphen that marks both the identity and the non-identity of realism and idealism. Through close analysis of Schelling's work, he convincingly argues that any contemporary return to Schelling must grapple with his critique of Spinoza. This critique calls into question the categories of immanence and transcendence that orient the current debate surrounding realism, antirealism, and idealism. Schelling and Spinoza is an important contribution to our understanding of both Schelling and Spinoza, as well as the viability of the frightening claim that only one thing truly exists.

310 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2022

Reviews

[Ashjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unusually clear and lucid text considering the difficulty of the subject matter involved. I came to this book looking for an interesting comparison between the thought of two giants of philosophy, but what I found was much more profound and systematic than what I had originally presumed. With a brilliantly researched historical narrative, Benjamin takes us right into the essential core of Spinozism, revealing it not just as a complex yet idiosyncratic system of an eccentric lens grinder but as the sublime peak of any philosophy that vows to take both the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and Realism seriously. As the author goes on to show, the role of Jacobi in the historical Pantheism controversy, was not simply a polemical reaction of a man of faith against the Pantheistic implications of Spinozism. Jacobi identified the essential core of Spinozism which includes a denial of the ontological reality of particulars, a stringent necessitarianism and a collapse of the distinction between God and World. Jacobi saw how a universal application of the PSR, cannot lead to a coherent worldview where we can reconcile our phenomenological experience of freedom and finite particularly with the transcendence of God. Norris discusses how Schelling's relationship with Spinozism was a rather complex one, in which he was simultaneously in awe of him yet wanted to distance himself from him without rejecting him in his entirety. It was Schelling's brilliant insight to take Fichtean Idealism as an inverted Spinozism and seek to come up with a system of Ideal-Realism that sought to make both sides of the polarity indispensable to each other. He achieved this by identifying their common root, an essential identity that simultaneously affirmed their unity while preserving their essential difference. The theme of unification takes a very poignant role in the book as it is argued how a true unity has a weightier ontological role than simply being a salve that collapses distinction between a polarity. The discussions about the nature of the Absolute as a dynamic yet and fractured unity along with comparisons with Zizek's interpretation of Schelling were especially interesting. Benjamin discusses how the Schellingian idea of the essence of life being a dynamic activity of Being/Becoming, Reality/Ideality is one of the lessons any systematic ontology of nature should take into account if it is not to devolve into a cold, lifeless and necessitarian Rationalism or its inverted pole of a solipsistic coherentist idealism. Relating this idea with the inadequacy of the Spinozist notion of the parallelism between the Modes of Extension and Thought was especially novel, not only because it questioned the fictitious unity of a unitary substance with an infinity of modes, but also because it showed it's incompatibility with the system's own application of the PSR. Benjamin shows how Schellingianism inverts familiar tropes that are simply taken for granted e.g the question of how to make room for freedom in a world governed by necessary laws of nature by asking how it is that the world finds itself entangled in a network of cause and effect in the first place. This reminded me of Whitehead's idea of how taking the laws of nature as the objective preconditions of the cosmos rather than as the temporal achieved order of self determining occasions is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The discussions of Kant's Antinomies made it clear to me how Reason has the capacity of showing the limits of its own application, namely, how the PSR might point to its own inadequacy as being applicable as a universal principle. All this raises a very concerning possibility about the nature of reality. How there might be an essential incompleteness embedded into the very structure of Being. How do we take this insight into our core conceptions of reality without introducing an arbitrary 'principle of no principle' or a fundamental unintelligibility into our understanding of the world. How, our incapacity to comprehend the world in a system of Reason might reveal an ontological truth about incompleteness rather than a failure of our speculative endeavors or an epistemic limitation. What horrors lie waiting for us behind the curtain if instead of a Bohmian-esque implicate order we find a gaping void of chaos that spells the death of much more than Maxwell's Demon?

[Lamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

补标，点到即止的书，很难说作者到底理解了多少