for an immortal lot: it is the source of our progress, the moving principle in history.1 99 Fichte thus confirms the "primacy of practical reason,' proclaimed by Kant. Moreover, he endeavors to insert this essential doctrine, which had been mechanically added to the Kantian system, into the very body of his philosophy. Freedom is the highest principle, the essence of things.2 It is even superior to truth, considered from the purely theoretical standpoint, or rather, it is the highest Truth. For that very reason it is not an abstraction, but the supreme reality. But this reality, the source of all other realities, precisely because it is freedom, cannot be an empirical datum, an immediate, brutal, and fatal fact. If freedom were given, or made, or produced, as the facts of the physical order are produced, it would not be freedom. True freedom is the freedom which creates itself, or realizes itself. Self-realization means self-development in a series of stages, or entrance into the conditions of duration and time. Now time, like space, is an a priori intuition of theoretical reason, a form of the understanding; time is the intuitive faculty itself, or the understanding exercising its elementary and original function. And since it is, as we have just seen, the necessary instrument of freedom, we conclude that the understanding, the theoretical reason, the faculty which divides the ego into subject and object, is the auxiliary of practical reason, the organ of the will, the servant of freedom. Again: Freedom realizes itself in time; time is its means, its indispensable auxiliary. But time is the intuitive faculty itself, the theoretical reason perceiving things successively. Theoretical reason, or the understanding, is therefore the means, the organ, which practical reason em ploys to realize itself. Instead of being, as Kant seemed to conceive it, a power foreign and therefore hostile to 'Die Grundlage des Naturrechts (Complete Works, III.). Works, I., 489. practical reason, theoretical reason thus naturally and necessarily becomes subject to the will; it humbly enters the service of the moral ideal. The dualism of the "two reasons" disappears; the understanding simply becomes a phase in the development of FREEDOM;' knowledge is a means, a secondary thing; action is the principle and final goal of being. The non-ego is, in the language of Aristotle, the matter which the form needs in order to realize itself as supreme energy; it is the limit which the ego sets itself in order to overcome it, and thus to realize its essence, freedom. Self-assertion or self-realization means struggle; struggle presupposes an obstacle; this obstacle is the phenomenal world, the world of sense and its temptations.2 Liberty, we said, realizes itself in time and by means of thought, i. e., by distinguishing between a subject which perceives and thinks, and an object which is perceived and thought. But this object, which the magician Reason shows to the ego, the external world, the non-ego, is in turn composed of a multitude of egos, of personalities apart from mine. Hence, freedom does not realize itself in the separate individual (the empirical ego), but in human society. In order to become a reality, the ideal ego divides itself into a plurality of historical subjects, and realizes itself in the moral relations established between them, and these relations are the source of natural, penal, and political rights. Considered apart from the individuals which realize it, the absolute or ideal ego is a mere abstraction. The real God is a living God, or the God-man. gious conceptions," says Fichte, "which personify God, and regard them as unworthy of a reasonable being." And why? Because a personal being, or a subject, does not "I abhor all reli 1 Read will, and you have, word for word, the teaching of Schopen hauer minus his pessimism. 2 Works, V., 210. • Kritik aller Offenbarung, (Works, V.). exist without an object that limits it. True, this limitation is the work of the subject itself; but whether limited by itself or by something else, the subject is a limited being, and God cannot be conceived as such. God is the moral order of the world, the freedom which gradually realizes itself in it: he is nothing but that. Fichte's opposition to the idea of a personal God is the criticism of his own system, or, at least, of the subjectivistic form which it assumed under the influence of Kant, and of which it gradually divested itself under the influence of Spinoza. By denying the personality of God, he condemns both the notion of an absolute ego, as the creator of the non-ego, and the method of a priori construction. Schelling, Fichte's most brilliant disciple, turns his attention to this contradiction. § 65. Schelling 1 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SCHELLING, born 1775, at Leonberg, in Würtemberg, received the master's degree from the University of Tübingen, when seventeen years old, and continued his studies at Leipsic. In 1798 he was made professor of philosophy at Jena, where he became acquainted with Fichte and renewed his friendship with his fellow-countryman Hegel. In 1803 we find him at the University of Würzburg; then he becomes the General Secretary of the Munich Academy of Plastic Arts (1806 1 Complete works in two series, ed. by his son, 14 vols., Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856 ff. [Engl. translations in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.] French translations: Selections, by C. Bénard; System of Transcendental Idealism, by Grimblot; Bruno, by Husson. [Cf. Rosenkranz, Schelling, Dantzic, 1843]; Mignet, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de Schelling, Paris, 1858; [J. Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Classics), Chicago, 1882. See also Willm, o. c., vol. III.; Kuno Fischer, o. c., vol. VI.; and R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870. — TR.]. 1820). After serving as a professor in the Universities of Erlangen, Munich, and Berlin, he died (1854) in the seventy. ninth year of his age. A precocious and fruitful1 writer, but an inconsistent thinker, Schelling passed from Fichte to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Neo-Platonism, from Neo-Platonism to J. Böhme, with whom his friend and colleague Franz Baader had made him acquainted. The following works belong to his Spinozistic and Neo-Platonic phase, which he calls his "negative philosophy": Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797); Von der Weltseele (1798); System des transcendentalen Idealismus 5 (1800); Bruno, oder über das natürliche und göttliche Princip der Dinge (1802); Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803); Philosophie und Religion (1804). To his 'positive" period, which is characterized by the influence of Böhme and a more or less pronounced tendency to orthodoxy, belong: Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809); Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1816); Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Mythologie und Offenbarung, published by his son. 66 1. The non-ego, Fichte had said, is the unconscious product of the ego, or, what amounts to the same thing, the product of the unconscious ego. But, Schelling objects, the unconscious ego is not really the ego; what is unconscious is not yet ego or subject, but both subject and object, or rather, neither one nor the other. Since the ego does not exist without the non-ego, we cannot that it prosay duces the non-ego, without adding, conversely: the non-ego produces the ego. There is no object without a subject, as Berkeley had previously declared, and in this sense Fichte truly says that the subject makes the object; but 1 See § 71. 1 At least during his earlier stage. The most consistent and systematic of his writings. neither can there be a subject without an object. Hence the existence of the objective world is as much the condition sine qua non of the existence of the ego, as conversely. Fichte, who implicitly recognized this in his profession of pantheistic faith, regards the distinction between the empirical ego and the absolute ego as fundamental to his thought. But what right has he to speak of an absolute ego, when it is certain that the ego, or the subject, is never absolute, but limited, as it necessarily is, by an object? Hence we must abandon the attempt to make an absolute of the ego. Is the non-ego absolute? Not at all, for it does not exist unconditionally; it is nothing without the thinking subject. Hence we must either deny the absolute or seek it beyond the ego and the non-ego, or beyond all opposition. If the absolute exists, and how can it be otherwise! - it can merely be the synthesis of all contraries, it can only be outside of and beyond all conditions of existence,1 since it is itself the highest and first condition, the source and end of all subjective as well as of all objective existence. Consequently, we can neither say that the ego produces the non-ego (subjective idealism), nor that the non-ego produces the ego (sensationalism); the ego and the non-ego, thought and being, are both derived from a higher principle which is neither one nor the other, although it is the cause of both: a neutral principle, the indifference and identity of contraries.2 This brings us to Spinoza's point of view; though different terms are used, we find ourselves face to face with the infinite substance and the parallelism of things emanating from it: thought (the ego) and extension (the non-ego). Philosophy is the science of the absolute in its double manifestation: nature and mind. It is philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy, or philosophy of mind. By adding the science of nature to the science of mind, Schel 1 Cf. §§ 25 and 31. * Works, first series, vol. X., pp. 92-93. |