Status Updates From Schelling's Transcendental ...

...after Schelling had done his best to solve them and had in large measure failed, and were attacked anew with a vigor, pertinacity and originality that have never been excelled in any age. If in Hegel the pure light of philosophy does not shine, it may safely be said that it has not yet shone upon the earth.'

...Schelling in his later days committed himself to a mode of philosophizing, the form of which is radically unsound, valuable as its substance in many respects is; and that whatever is best in his system has been absorbed and superseded by a greater than he. The higher problems
of philosophy, as they were thrown down before the world by Kant, were taken up by Hegel, after Schelling had done his best to...

‘Nor, I hope, am I insensible to the great value of his lectures on Mythology and Revelation as contributions to the philosophy of religion, and as a powerful and, on the whole, beneficent incentive to the study of religion in its history. But I cannot refrain from saying that, with all his brilliancy, fertility and poetic insight, Schelling in his later days committed himself to a mode of philosophizing, the form...

...His system with its dead mechanical explanations may be compared to the statue of Pygmalion before it was quickened into life by the breath of love. This dead and motionless pantheism of Spinoza, spiritualized by idealism, is the true philosophy of nature...'

'The source of all his [Spinoza] mistakes is the assumption of the independent reality of things, an assumption which leads him to conceive even of God and the will as things outside of other things, and to regard each volition as the mechanical effect of a precedent cause, which again has a prior cause and so on to infinity...

...opposing nature and intelligence as two coordinate realms, each explicable by itself, we must hold that the former is simply a lower phase of the latter. In this way alone can we get rid of the dualism which, implicit in Kant and Fichte, is made explicit in Schelling.'

'The great imperfection of Schelling is not in contrasting man and nature, but in maintaining the complete parallelism of the two distinguishable realms...
...Instead of...

'...Fichte himself insists that knowledge and life are distinct; that
the former is a picture, the latter alone reality. Thus in Fichte we have implicitly the two elements which afford a relative justification for Schelling s contrast of intelligence and nature.'

'Comparatively short as the Transcendental Idealism is, it goes over in a sense the whole ground of philosophy. It is at once a metaphysic, a philosophy of nature, and a philosophy of spirit; or, more exactly, it sets forth the supreme conditions of knowable reality, the grades of nature, the phases of knowledge, the basis of ethics, the principles of art and the nature of religion.'

'It may be hoped that, even in the imperfect medium of a summary restatement, the stimulating and suggestive character of Schelling's Transcendental Idealism has been partially visible to the reader. Especially for those who desire to see the transition from Kant to Hegel made before their eyes, an acquaintance with that treatise is indispensable.'

'Neither the explanation of hylicism [materialism] nor of conscious teleology will bear examination. Both fail to account for the unconscious development of organic beings.'

'...in Schelling's phraseology, "It has to be explained how the I can itself become conscious of the original harmony of subject and object."

'...there could be no philosophy of history, if history were the mere
expression of lawless caprice, and hence it must be shown how will and law are in it united. The peculiarity of historical development is that its various stages are not fixed in a goal which is attained once for all, but that it is an eternal progress.'

'To secure the highest form of consciousness in each individual state, there ought, as Kant contended, to be a subordination of all states to a common law of justice, administered by an areopagus of nations.'

'For the individual other intelligences are as it were the bearers of
the universe, and there are as many indestructible
mirrors of the objective world as there are intelligences...'

'The self is not one of the possible objects of knowledge: it is not simply a part of nature, but a pure self-activity which is the condition of the knowledge of nature. It is thus evident that to explain intelligence as knowing we must go beyond it to intelligence as willing.'

‘We have now reached one of the most important sections in the whole of the Transcendental Idealism - that in which Schelling endeavours to give a final explanation of the peculiar problem of philosophy, so far as that can be done from
the point of view of knowledge.’

...as it is, simply the primary activity without which no
consciousness could be. The I is a pure activity that can only be defined as that which is not an object, and which therefore cannot properly be said to be, but only to be pure activity returning on itself.’

‘It need hardly be added that the question as to whether the I of self-consciousness is a thing-in-itself or a phenomenon is utterly meaningless. To speak of the I as a thing-in-itself is to suppose that the I exists otherwise than for itself, which is as absurd as to suppose that the I exists before it exists. To speak of the I as a phenomenon is to affirm it to be an object of consciousness, instead of being,...

‘In the same year the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism were published. Nothing could exceed the force and grace of this little work, which may be regarded as the consummate flower of Schelling’s period of storm and stress.’

'Kants imperfection, therefore, is not in asserting the limited nature of the sensible world, but in throwing around the noumenal world a half-transparent veil of mystery...
Fichtes chief merit is that with unhesitating clearness and decision he removes the veil which Kant had drawn across the mysterious thing-in-itself.'

'Fichte grasps the Practical Reason as an absolute and universal self, revealing itself to us as an Ideal which we must make the goal of all our efforts.'

'Fichte, hardly changing in the least degree Kants view as properly understood, maintains that our ordinary experience of a real world is accompanied by the feeling that what is before us is not made by us, but is independent of us.This conviction must, however, be justified.'

...examine it separately before we can come to any decision as to the ultimate synthesis by which the two contradictions are reconciled with one another.'
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...the latter the basis of Theoretical Philosophy. Now, the proposition that the relative Ego and non-Ego mutually limit or determine each other, while yet both are only for the absolute Ego, leaves it undecided what is the exact sense in which the mutual determination is to be understood, and also how the contradiction is to be reconciled. We have, therefore, to take each of the modes of determination and examine...

...the reality of the non-Ego is negated, and in positing the non-Ego the reality of the Ego is negated, while yet the reality of each exists only for the Ego."; Now, this synthesis may be broken up into two propositions: (1) The Ego posits the non-Ego as limited through the Ego; (2) The Ego posits the Ego as limited through the non-Ego. The former of these propositions is the basis of Practical Philosophy, the...

'The synthesis contained in the third fundamental principle is the starting-point of both the theoretical and the practical philosophy of Fichte. That synthesis is expressed in the proposition: "In and through the absolute Ego. both the Ego and non-Ego are posited as each limitable through the other; or, in positing the Ego the reality of the non-Ego is negated, and in positing the non-Ego the reality of the Ego is..

Chapter II
The Earlier Philosophy of Fichte

‘The interest in the philosophy of Schelling is thus twofold :
firstly, as a record of the intellectual development of a singularly gifted mind, and, secondly, as forming the transition from Kant to Hegel through Fichte.‘