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

Schelling and Nietzsche both made excellent criticisms of Kant. Schelling who wrote that to philosophise, one cannot neglect the issue of matter,1 that matter is the foundation of all experience2 also wrote:

It is quite possible to drive even the most convinced adherent of things-in-themselves as the causes of our ideas into a corner by all sorts of questions. One can say to him, I understand how matter affects matter, but neither how one in-itself affects another, since there can be no cause and no effect in the realm of the intelligible, nor how this law of one world extends into another altogether different from it, in fact completely opposed to it. You would then have to admit, if I am dependent on external impressions, that I myself am nothing more than matter3

Schelling not only argued the priority of matter over thought but the impossibility of a law which is completely opposed to the material world and its causal determination, itself functioning in this world. Kant defined matter as ‘that in the appearance (of an empirical intuition) which corresponds to sensation.‘4 Yet matter, as with space and time, is a concept for what exists independently of consciousness and thought -  of us. Space is not a thing in which matter is distributed, it is the distribution of matter itself, time is not a measure which we rely upon, it is matter in motion. In the functioning of matter there is no requirement for us with our conscious thought. We are manifestations of matter. This is the unity that Kant rejected.

It is most interesting that Schelling, the same person who wrote so well about matter (although his discussion of it, indicatively, slipped into the metaphysical), who, on this basis identified the flaw in Kant’s noumenon, then proposed as the solution that philosophy take over the role of religion, later that nature itself be deified and mythologised - that mythology supplant matter.5 He developed his ‘cure’ by energising a Platonic/Neoplatonic/Christian current present in German philosophy long before Kant, and in Kant’s philosophy itself.6

Nietzsche’s relation of Christianity and ‘god’ to metaphysics and Kant is justified - his thoughts are are tersely, astutely and (as one would expect from him) acerbically expressed. His defence of becoming and praise for the senses themselves warrant praise. But if one has any concern for what is preached and philosophically practised, when one examines Nietzsche’s arguments more closely, his own position becomes ‘the last smoke of evaporating reality’.7 I know of no more contemptuously hypocritical and self-contradictory philosopher than Nietzsche. In relation to his own writing, his condemnation of Kant warrants Homeric laughter. His indebtedness to Kant was profound.

Kant’s setting out of his dilemma - we can only know appearance - contained, for the Romantics, the solution - we are free to overcome it by focusing on our inner experience.8 And not only to overcome that dilemma but, because of our freedom to focus on our inner experience, to bridge the schism between appearance and what stands beyond it (all the dichotomies symbolised by that schism, ‘the world’) - on the basis of Neoplatonism. 

The very dryness and one-sided rationalism of Kant’s philosophy was an incentive to take that step. The other incentives - our freedom (which Kant intended to be moral) and the justification to focus on the self by exploring the at first implicit then overt Neoplatonism9 in his writing (in fact, the very framework of the dilemma) were the answer. Kant’s philosophy was both the concentration of a problem and a dare - to fully take up what had not been fully explored, fully indulged in, in German philosophy in the modern period. The Romantics, Schelling and Nietzsche responded to Kant and met his unintended challenge.

Nietzsche’s philosophy, from The Birth of Tragedy to the final ‘aphorism’ of The Will to Power (which ‘aphorism’ contains a synopsis of The Enneads) was built on Neoplatonism mixed with Platonism and Christianity - the parallels between his god Dionysus and Christ are numerous.10 In The Gay Science Nietzsche wrote: ‘Even less am I concerned with the opposition between ‘thing in itself’ and appearance: for we ‘know’ far too little to even be entitled to make that distinction. We simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’11 The ‘truth’ to which he referred was Absolute and ineffable, not deepening and relative. It was constrained by the same ‘limits of reason,’12 the same Neoplatonic perspectivism to which Leibniz, Kant and Schelling subscribed.13

In hindsight, the ‘diagnoses’ that Schelling and Nietzsche made of Kant convey that he was far too restrained, too controlled. But in their writing all of the dualisms were retained - only the emphasis was different. The ‘reason’ of Kant shifted to the ‘emotion’ of Schelling and Nietzsche, but the writing of all three was equally within the embrace of Lloyd’s Man of Reason, equally divorced from  true life and nature, and from the criterion of practice.

Kant wrote:

the fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies gave established certainty to what Copernicus had at first assumed only as an hypothesis, and at the same time yielded proof of the invisible force (the Newtonian attraction) which holds the universe together. The latter would have remained for ever un-discovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator.14

He believed that in his Critique of Pure Reason he had made a similar revolutionary achievement in metaphysics - he too had developed an hypothesis that contradicted previous metaphysicians and made the spectator necessary. What Kant and Copernicus did could not have been more different, each from the other - and what Kant wrote, in his attempt to maintain the relevance of metaphysics by claiming it (his) echoed the greatest scientific hypothesis, more philosophically dishonest. 

The observation of matter, and thought about and testing of those observations, resulting in certain laws, confirmed Copernicus’ objective theory - a theory which did not seek the observed movements in the spectator, but of bodies in relation to the sun. In his hypothesis the spectator played no part. His discovery went beyond appearances, which according to Kant’s Critique, was impossible. Kant engaged in sleights of hand to justify his division between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge,15 between ‘conceptual knowledge’ and the distorting influence of the senses, between what goes on in the spectator’s head and in the world - of which that spectator’s head and body are a part.

Like Schelling and Nietzsche, Kant was not guilty of ‘spiritual sickness’ nor ‘decline of life’, he contemplated the world on the basis of a philosophical tradition.
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Notes.

1. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature op. cit., p. 181

2. Ibid., p. 179

3. Ibid.

4. The Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit., p. 65, A20

5.‘(mythology) is the world and as it were the ground in which alone the exotic plants of art are able to bloom and grow.’The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 45, #38

6. In his writing on morals, Kant advocated not only belief in God as ‘a postulate’ but Christian morals and ‘practical’ faith in the Son of God. Schelling wrote: ‘(the divine imagination) is the means by which the universe is populated; according to this law life flows out into the world from the absolute as from that which is without qualification one.’ The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 37, #30

7. Twilight of the Idols, op. cit., p. 481, section 4

8. In his metaphysics Kant argued that a person’s perception of the world is dependent on what they bring to the act, in his moral theorising he argued that the individual is free to determine their actions and in his aesthetics he argued the beautiful is to be found in the subject’s experience.

9. Behind which stood Leibniz.

10. The final words of Ecce Homo (the words spoken by Pilate before the crucifixion of Christ) are ‘Have I been understood? - Dionysos against the Crucified...’ My reply - nowhere near well enough. Ecce Homo, Trans., R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 2004, p. 104, section 8.

11. The Gay Science, Trans., Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 214 section 354

12. The Anti-Christ, p. 185, section 55, in Twilight of the Idols (or How to Philosophise with a Hammer) and The Anti-Christ, Trans., R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 2003

13. Schelling wrote: ‘Within the absolute all particular things are genuinely separated and genuinely one only to the extent that each is the universe unto itself, and each is the absolute whole.’ The Philosophy of Art op. cit., p. 34, #26

14. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason op. cit., Preface to Second Edition, Note p. 25

15. The Critique of Judgement op. cit., p. 15