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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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by Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling
All knowledge is based upon the agreement of an objective with a subjective. For we know only the true, and the truth is universally held to be the agreement of representations with their objects. The sum of all that is purely objective in our knowledge we may call Nature; whereas the sum of everything subjective may be termed the Ego, or Intelligence. These two concepts are mutually opposed. Intelligence is originally conceived as that which solely represents, and nature as that which is merely capable of representation; the former as the conscious -- the latter as the unconscious. But in all knowledge there is necessary a mutual agreement of the two -- the conscious and the unconscious per se. The problem is to explain this agreement. In knowledge itself, in that I know, the objective and subjective are so united that one cannot say which of the two has priority. There is here no first and no second -- the two are contemporaneous and one. In any attempt to explain this identity, I must already have resolved it. In order to explain it, inasmuch as there is nothing else given me as a principle of explanation except these two factors of knowledge, I must of necessity place the one before the other, that is to say, must set out from the one in order to arrive at the other. From which of the two I shall set out is not determined by the problem. There are, consequently, only two cases possible: I. Either the objective is made first, and the question arises how a subjective agreeing with it is superinduced. The idea of the subjective is not contained in the idea of the objective; on the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The subjective must therefore be superinduced upon the objective. It forms no part of the conception of nature that there must be likewise an intelligence to represent it. Nature, to all appearance, would exist even if there were nothing to represent it. The problem may therefore likewise be expressed thus: How is the intelligent superinduced upon nature? or. How does nature come to be represented? The problem assumes nature, or the objective, as the first. It is, therefore, undoubtedly the task of natural science, which does the same. That natural science actually, and without knowing it, approximates, at least, to the solution of this problem can here be only briefly shown. If all knowledge has, as it were, two poles, which mutually presuppose and demand each other, then they must seek each other in all sciences. There must, therefore, of necessity, exist two fundamental sciences; and it must be impossible to set out from one pole without being driven to the other. The necessary tendency of all natural science, therefore, is to proceed from nature to the intelligent. This, and this alone, lies at the foundation of the effort to bring theory into natural phenomena. The final perfection of natural science would be the complete intellectualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and of thought. The phenomena, that is, the material, must completely vanish, and leave only the laws,&emdash;that is, the formal. Hence it happens that the more the conformity to law is manifested in nature so much the more the wrapping disappears -- the phenomena themselves become more intellectualized, and at length entirely cease. Optical phenomena are nothing more than a geometry whose lines are drawn by aid of the light; and even this light itself is already of doubtful materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism every trace of matter has already vanished; and of the phenomena of gravitation, which even the natural philosopher believed could be attributed only to direct spiritual influence, there remains nothing but their law, whose performance on a large scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The complete theory of nature would be that by virtue of which the whole of nature should be resolved into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts of nature to reflect itself, but the so-called dead nature is merely an unripe intelligence; hence in its phenomena the intelligent character appears, though still unconscious. Its highest aim, that is of becoming wholly self-objective, nature does not attain, except in its highest and last reflection, which is none other than man, or more generally what we call reason. By its means nature first turns completely back upon itself, and thereby it is manifest that nature is originally identical with what in us is known as intelligent and conscious. This may suffice to prove that natural science has a necessary tendency to render nature intelligent. By this very tendency it becomes natural philosophy, which is one of the two necessary fundamental sciences of philosophy. II. Or the subjective is made first, and the problem is, how an objective is superinduced agreeing with it. If all knowledge is based upon the agreement of these two, then the problem to explain this agreement is undoubtedly the highest for all knowledge; and if, as is generally admitted, philosophy is the highest and loftiest of all sciences, it becomes certainly the chief task of philosophy. But the problem demands only the explanation of that agreement generally, and leaves it entirely undetermined where the explanation shall begin, what it shall make its first, and what its second. Since also the two opposites are mutually necessary, the result of the operation is the same, from whichever point one sets out. To make the objective the first, and to derive the subjective from it, is, as has just been shown, the task of natural philosophy. If, therefore, there is a transcendental philosophy, the only direction remaining for it is the opposite, that is: to proceed from the subjective as the first and the absolute, and to deduce the origin of the objective from it. Natural and transcendental philosophy have divided between themselves these two possible directions of philosophy. And if all philosophy must have for an aim to make either an intelligence out of nature or a nature out of intelligence, then transcendental philosophy, to which this latter problem belongs, in the other necessary fundamental science of philosophy.
Excerpted from System of Transcendental Idealism, by Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling |
F. W. J. von Schelling: On the History of Modern Philosophy, by F. W. J. von Schelling Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, by F. W. J. von Schelling
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