Schelling and Nietzsche Respond to Kant: On the Problems of Objectivity

‘The begetting of the gods out of one another is itself a symbol of the way the ideas inhere in and issue from one another. The absolute idea or God, for example, encompasses all ideas within itself; ...they are begotten of him.’1

The question that underlies all other questions is: which precedes the other? Which therefore is the product of the other - ‘matter’ (that which is independent of consciousness and thought), or consciousness and thought?2 To simply pose the question presupposes a rejection of metaphysics and metaphysical ‘matter’, precisely because those concepts imply a potential for separation of consciousness and thought from the world and for placing them prior to it. The referent of ‘metaphysics’ is not, as is said, Aristotle’s writing that came after his Physics, but what lies beyond the processes and change of the physical world - which nothing does. Consistently, at the core of First Philosophy, at the core of what Aristotle called the Science of Theology,3 was, and is - however much denied - an understanding of ‘god’.

To discuss Nietzsche and Schelling on the problems of objectivity on the basis of a materialist understanding of ‘matter’ avoids pitfalls - that there are two ways in which the world can be known - metaphysically (‘philosophically’) and, with regard to the foil of Kant and metaphysicians - empirically, with its metaphysical exaggeration of the role of the senses, its deduction of knowledge not from reason but from experience and denial of the active role and relative independence of thought. In particular, it avoids the pitfall of being caught up by competing idealisms and philosophies which amounted to struggles within an argument (that thought is to any degree primary to or independent from matter, that consciousness to any degree precedes that which is independent of it and especially, that the world cannot be known or that there are limitations on our knowledge of the world).

The key issue is what the underlying arguments of Kant, Schelling and Nietzsche were, not how they argued (in turn metaphysically, mythologically and rhetorically). Kant expressed strong criticism of prior metaphysicians and claimed to offer something new. Schelling strongly criticised Kant, advancing his solution to the problems he identified. Nietzsche, the rhetorician, made even stronger criticisms of Kant and metaphysics, pointing us to Dionysus and his ‘higher man’. Yet, despite the assertions by all three that they were putting forward something fundamentally new, my argument will be that not only are there several strong continuities between Kant, Schelling and Nietzsche, those continuities - which were anchored in a long tradition from Platonism, through Neoplatonism and Christianity - and differences can best be understood on a materialist basis.

As the Neoplatonists argued that the One in its unity cannot be known, so Kant argued that the one world in its unity, that thing in itself of which we have representations, cannot be known - ‘appearance’ being the barrier.4 He wanted to block the idea that we can go from a knowledge of objects presented to us in consciousness to knowledge of things in themselves. The Neoplatonism implicit in his earlier writing became explicit in The Critique of Judgement - what was possibly Kant’s attempt to overcome the dichotomies of his earlier work.5 Schelling and Nietzsche were to build their philosophies on Neoplatonism.

In his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature Schelling, particularly in response to Kant’s philosophy, wrote that through philosophy, man had placed himself in opposition to the external world, had separated himself from his natural processes, making himself his object - thereby creating divisions between ‘mind’ and body, reason, emotions and sensuality, above all between himself and Nature and that with this separation, from the world and from himself as an active whole, he had begun to reflect on both.6 

Reflection is a preoccupation with dissection, dismemberment and the evocation of chimeras which as things in themselves, lie beyond reason, intuition and imagination and are therefore impossible to fight. It is a spiritual sickness which kills man’s highest being, his spiritual life - which comes only from Identity between particular as self and universal as Nature. By asking how ideas of external things arise in us, philosophers did away with the identity of object and idea, positing things as independent of us. The understanding endlessly divides. Yet, our ideas only have substance because of our assumption of agreement between them and things. In asking how we have ideas, we raise ourselves above those ideas and become beings in ourselves, the counter of things in themselves. ‘Mind’ and matter, wrote Schelling, are thereby permanently divorced. 

Utilising Kant’s assertion of our freedom, Schelling argued that on this basis I can raise myself above the interconnection of things, existing only for myself. He asked what drove philosophers to forsake common ways of thinking to invent arcane philosophical structures. Where Plato set matter against God, Spinoza was the first who recognised ‘mind’ and matter as one. Both Leibniz and Newton also recognised this unity - the former in the pre-established harmony of the spiritual world, the latter with regard to the equilibrium of forces in the material world. Where Leibniz and Newton diverge, it is to be hoped that the mid-point of our ‘universe of knowledge’ can be found such that the systems of Leibniz and Newton can appear either the same or as different aspects of the same.

To resolve the divisions and return man to identity and equilibrium within himself and with Nature, Schelling proposed a philosophy of Nature in which philosophy performed the function of religion - when we engage in philosophy, when we employ the appropriate concepts and ideas, we have the same purpose as that of religion. In his Philosophy of Art he argued for the deification of nature, the infusion of religion, mythology and the gods in both nature and society, and for art and fantasy (which, with imagination can unite the Absolute with particularity in an image) to supplant reflective science, which is premised on the separation of knower from objectified known and is therefore incapable of expressing the Absolute in its unity.

Where Schelling responded to Kant, Nietzsche derided and condemned him. He banded Christianity and priests with philosophers and attacked Kant as exemplary of both with concepts such as ‘reason’, rationality (at any price), caution and opposition to the instincts. Kant (‘an underhanded Christian’)7 was motivated similarly to the Christian - both devalued this world as ‘appearance’ to argue for a false ‘true world’ beyond that ‘appearance’ - ‘a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause.’8 Philosophers believe that they cannot perceive that which has being because the senses (the body) lie. 

Nietzsche argued that this world of ‘appearance’ is the only world and that just as the senses show becoming and do not lie, the ‘true’ world of Kant and the Christians is a lie. Echoing Schelling’s terminology in his writing on the Kantian schism between ourselves and things in themselves, Nietzsche wrote that to devalue this world is a sign of decadence and the decline of life - a will to slander it. With equal relevance to Kant and the Christian, life comes to an end where the ‘true’ world (for Kant the unknowable, for the Christian, the ‘kingdom of God’) begins.

Kant’s distinction between appearance and the noumenal thing-in-itself was the basis for his holding that we are free agents and as such can be first causes. Nietzsche rejected this, believing that our actions take place in causal chains. Again, Nietzsche tied the free will of Kant, functioning in the shadow of his moral imperative, to Christianity - considering both as the attempt through the imputation of guilt to make mankind dependent on the theologian.

Nietzsche wrote that the reasons why this world has been characterised as of appearances are the very reasons that justify its reality, that the criteria of ‘true being’ amount to naught. Most probably thinking of Kant, he wrote that the ‘true world’ is a promise ‘for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man’.9 Displaying ironic facility, he wrote that it is at least unattained and therefore unknown. It is an idea no longer good for anything. In abolishing the ‘true world’ the apparent one is also abolished...the briefest shadow...incipit Zarathustra!10

Part One/To be continued... 

Notes.

1. Friedrich Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, Trans., D.W. Stott, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989, p. 44, #36. This quotation exemplifies one of my arguments - in its compactness can be found the influences of Platonism, Neoplatonism and Christianity - all rolled into One. It evokes ‘For God so loved the world ...’

2. At the very end of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, under the heading ‘The History of Pure Reason’, discussed early developments regarding this question, in Greek philosophy - between ‘sensualists’ (represented by Epicurus) and ‘intellectualists’ (represented by Plato). ‘Those of the former school maintained that reality is to be found solely in the objects of the senses, and that all else is fiction; those of the latter school, on the other hand, declared that in the senses there is nothing but illusion, and that only the understanding knows what is true.’ Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Trans., Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan Education, London, 1987, p. 667 A 854. Epicurus, following Democritus, went much further than Kant’s division between bodies that sense and the objects they sense - he held that everything, including sensing bodies and their objects, is made of atoms moving continuously. Plato’s philosophy is also more complex.

3. Hegel wrote of ‘the science of religion’: ‘The object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth, God and nothing but God and the explication of God. ...Thus religion and philosophy coincide in one. In fact philosophy is itself the service of God, as is religion. ...The linkage between them is nothing new. It already obtained among the more eminent of the church fathers, who had steeped themselves particularly in Neopythagorean, Neoplatonic, and Neoaristotelian philosophy.’ Georg Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Ed., Peter C. Hodgson, Clarendon, Oxford, 2007, vol. 1, pp. 152-153

4. Regarding his transcendental unity of apperception: again, it is not a unity of a thing, rather an abstract unity of ourselves as thinkers and the world as we think it.

5. ‘the feeling of the sublime involves as its characteristic feature a mental movement combined with the estimate of the object, whereas taste in respect of the beautiful presupposes that the mind is in restful contemplation, and preserves it in this state.’ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Trans., James Creed Meredith, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, p. 94. Also ‘The mind feels itself set in motion in the representation of the sublime in nature; whereas in the aesthetic judgement upon what is beautiful therein it is in restful contemplation.’ Ibid., p. 107. The junctures of ‘the sublime’ and movement, of contemplation and rest are the two great pathways to ‘god’  in our culture - both in the sense of well-trodden and what has been created on that basis. They appear in Schopenhauer, and in Nietzsche where they recur as the Dionysiac and the Apolline, blended for even greater effect. The linking of the sublime, movement, contemplation and rest is a core tenet of Romanticism. Again: ‘the highest model, the archetype of taste, is a mere idea, which each person must beget in his own consciousness...(and this) may more appropriately be called the ideal of the beautiful. While not having this ideal in our possession, we still strive to beget it within us.’ Ibid., pp. 75-76. As with in vino veritas, so often writing on art provides a similar result...

6. To exemplify the significance of Kant to Schelling: ‘With that separation, reflection first begins; he separates from now on what Nature had always united, separates the object from the intuition, the concept from the image, finally (in that he becomes his own object) himself from himself.’ Friedrich Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, Trans., E.E. Harris and P. Heath, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988, p. 172

7. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, from The Portable Nietzsche, Trans, W. Kaufmann, New York, Penguin, 1976, p. 484, section 6

8. Ibid., p. 495, section 3

9. Ibid., p. 485

10. Ibid., p. 486