Cupid and Psyche: Part Four

Schelling and Hegel defy the rule that a straight line is the shortest route between two points. Instead, we must approach Schelling and Hegel from a round about path. We shall also take the novel approach of trying to understand the philosophies of Schelling and Hegel by trying to understand the rival insults they used against each other. Hegel's insult of Schelling's absolute by comparing it to " the night all cows are black" and Schelling's return insult by referring to Hegel's philosophy as a "negative philosophy." These may be the greatest inside joke-insults in history, but they also contain the usual Hegelian somersault. That the information that one needs to understand the joke-insults is publicly available, the trouble being that the knowledge needed is a wide and deep knowledge of German Idealism. It must also be said that in examining Schelling, we are only concerned with his Identity philosophy. Schelling's philosophy continued to evolve throughout his life, resembling a kaleidoscope, ever changing but retaining a continuity of themes. We shall begin with a very brief examination of Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer. In other places I have called Kant a reverse Platonist, but for the purpose of this essay we shall regard him as a reverse Parmenides. Remember Parmenides posited a duality: the way of truth, and the way of seeming. This is of course reality and appearance. For Parmenides truth is the One. The One is reached through the use of reason. For Parmenides intellect is both the moving and final term of the dialectic of will and intellect. The way of seeming is the world of appearance, our everyday world. Kant also posits a duality of the thing is itself (noumenal), and the phenomenal realm. Again we have reality and appearance (the phenomenal) and reality (the thing in itself). The phenomenal realm is again the world of appearances (everyday world). The difference between Kant and Parmenides is that it is the phenomenal real that is created or reached through the use of reason and logic. The thing in itself is reached through emotions. Kant reversed the place of reason and logic in the systems of Parmenides and Plato. Reason only leads to the world of appearances or the way of seeming. As I have started in other places ("Fichte and Schelling") Fichte is the most modern of the German Idealists. Fichte wisely moved the dialectic of will and intellect out of the metaphysical to the psychological. A move that was rejected by Schelling and Hegel. In other words, for Fichte the dialectic was not a cosmic process, but only a part of human psychology. This view becomes the modern view as expressed in the writings of S. Freud and C.G. Jung. The other contribution of Fichte which is accepted and built on by Schelling and Hegel, is that the the dialectic becomes explicit in Fichte's philosophy. It was from Fichte that Schelling abstracted out thee dialectic of will and intellect as we know it today. Fichte was one of the responses to the Kantian philosophy, as were Schelling and Hegel. Another response was that of Schopenhauer. Of all the German Idealists Schopenhauer is the closest to Kant. Schopenhauer keeps the Kantian framework with some modifications. The modifications do not involve the basic architecture of Kant's philosophy. An example of Schopenhauer's modifications would be his trimming of the transcendental categories. Schopenhauer gets rid of all the categories except for three: space, time, and causality. The major difference we find between Kant and Schopenhauer is that Schopenhauer claims to know Kant's unknowable thing in itself. Even in this Schopenhauer follows Kant's lead. In that it is the emotions or sentiments that gain us access to the thing in itself. For Schopenhauer the thing in itself is Will or desire. That the outward appearance of the cosmos is due to the transcendental categories of space, time, and causality. The inward core or being of the cosmos is a cosmic will. It should be no trouble recognizing for Schopenhauer that the moving and final term of the dialectic is will. We shall take one more digression, back to the early centuries of the common era, to the Gnostics. A Gnostic parable shall help us move to the heart of the Idealist philosophies of Schelling and Hegel. So we must now examine a Gnostic parable called "The Hymn of the Pearl." The Hymn of the Pearl is found in the Gnostic Gospel: "Acts of St. Thomas" The Hymn tells the story of a young prince who is sent by his father the King of Kings to retrieve a giant perfect pearl from a sleeping serpent. The pearl and the serpent reside in Egypt. The prince is seduced by the worldliness of the Egyptians, and forgets who he is and his mission. He becomes involved in the material world. The King of Kings sends a letter that wakes the prince up, and makes him remember both who he is and his mission. He then retrieves the pearl from the sleeping serpent, and returns home to the King of Kings. I shall attempt an interpretation, some being the standard and some of my own ideas. As with the standard Gnostic interpretation that humans are lost souls in the material world, they have forgotten their true home and mission. The sleeping serpent would seem to represent dull unconsciousness of everyday life. As for the pearl, I cannot think of a better symbol for the One. The pearl represents Being or reality. So when humans become conscious they recover the way of truth, or the One. Friedrich Wihelm Joseph von Schelling offers a myth very close to that of "The Hymn of the Pearl." That we are all immortal souls, but that all the souls collectively comprise God. In other words, God is nothing except the total of human souls. There is no transcendent God; no God apart from the collective of human souls. The reason we do not realize this is, because we are unconscious. History is a chronicle of humankind moving from unconsciousness to consciousness. The transcendental categories are none other than the prearranged harmony between souls that create the cosmos. There is no thing in itself. Let us have recourse to our continuing analogy of a gamer and the video game. The landscape or the cosmos of the video game is created by the program. The program code is the analogy for the prearranged harmony that creates the external world. So matter is created by the prearranged harmony of our perception. As with Kant the categories create the cosmos. Instead of a thing in itself, the souls containing the categories of perception create the cosmos; like the computer program creates the cosmos or landscape of the video game. It must be emphasized that the prearranged harmony is in categories in each individual soul, and not imposed from without. That brings us to where Schelling departs from the video game comparison. That the categories are an organic part of the soul, not an add on as in the computer game. The above myth solves two problems for Schelling. The first problem that is solved is that reason is not imposed from the outside by some transcendent tyrant. That the reason of the cosmos is intrinsic in the human soul, it is an organic part of the soul. Thus Schelling preserves freedom to submit to reason. That we are not giving up our will to some outside entity. That we are the reason of the cosmos. The second problem this myth solves for Schelling is that unlike Fichte, he does not have to move the dialectic out of the metaphysical. That the reason of the cosmos, and the reason inside our heads is the same: it is one. This means humans can have a true understanding of the cosmos. The cosmos can be understood by human reason. Thus absolute knowledge can be achieved by humans: the universe is intelligible. At first sight it would seem that Schelling would support intellect over will, but he does not. Instead Schelling posits that when absolute knowledge is achieved it shall be a comprehensive feeling, and be expressed in myth, not reason. That the contradictions of reason can only be resolved in myth and emotion. That reasons contradictory structure can never express a holistic view of the cosmos. Let us go to a quote from Schelling;s book: "A System of Transcendental Idealism 1800": "But now if it is art alone, which can succeed in objectifying with universal validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion. there is one conclusion yet to be drawn. Philosophy was born and nourished by poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with it all those sciences it has guided towards perfection; we may thus expect them, on completion, to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source. Nor is it in general difficult to say what the medium for this return of science to poetry well be; for in mythology such a medium existed before the occurence of a breach now seemingly beyond repair. But how a new mythology is itself to arise, which shall be the creation, not so some individual author, but of a new race personifying , as it were, one single poet-that is a problem whose solution can be looked for only in the future destinies of the world, and in the coarse of History to come." It should come as no surprise that Schelling was a big favorite with the German romantics. It should also be clear from the above quote Schelling's position in regard to the final term of the dialectic of well and intellect; it is will or emotion. That the end of knowledge cannot be expressed in abstraction (abstractions or negations would be Hegel's white cows) that only a comprehensive and collective feeling is adequate. That everyone shall share in this holistic feeling of oneness with the cosmos. This is why no matter how many authors there are of the new mythology, it shall seem to be written by a single author. Of course, on a deeper level it would be a single author, since Schelling is a monopsychist. All individual souls are really parts of greater consciousness. So we have what Hegel calls "the night all cows are black": a comprehensive, collective, holistic feeling. We now turn to Georg Friedrich Wilhem Hegel. Hegel takes the basic monopsychist myth of Schelling, but develops it in a different direction. There should be no question that Hegel asserts intellect over will as the final term, the moving term seems to be intellect over will. So let us hear from Hegel. All quotes taken from "Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences 1830" translated by William Wallace. Sec 92 "Being if kept distinct and apart from its determinate mode, as it is on Being-by-itself (Being implicit), would be only the vacant abstraction of Being. In Being (determinate there and then), the determinations is one with being; yet at at the same time, when explicitly made a negation it is a limit or Barrier. (( Hegel's white cows)) Hence the otherness is not something indifferent and outside it, but a function proper to it. Somewhere is by quality, firstly finite, secondly alterable; so that finitude and variability appertain to its being" From the above quote it should be easy to understand why Schelling called Hegel's philosophy a negative philosophy. It is the negation or limiting term that moves the dialectic. Thus it seems to be the negation that moves the dialectic. Although in other places Hegel speaks how the dialectic seeks fulfillment. So now let us examine the final term of the dialectic. To Hegel again. Sec. 89 "Becoming always contains Being and Nothing in such a way, that these two are always changing into each other. Thus Becoming stands before us in utter restlessness-unable however to maintain itself in this abstract restlessness; for since Being and Nothing vanish in Becoming (and that is the very Notion of Becoming) the latter must vanish also. Becoming as it were a fire, which dies out in itself, when it consumes its material, The result of this process however is not an empty Nothing, but Being Determinate (being then and there): the primary import of which evidently is that it has become" To understand what Hegel has done in the above quote, we must go back to classical philosophy. Remember, Paramenides and Empedocles. That in Parmenides dialectic there is either something or nothing. So Paramenides concludes there must be something, and that something is the One. Empedocles tied to make sense of Parmenides philosophy, since we can clearly observe there is change. So he posited that reality is a process of Love and Strife. Hegel agrees with Empedocles that Being is a process. Hegel's innovation is that he asserts Being and Nothingness are sublated in the higher term of Becoming. That Becoming reconciles Being and Nothing in a higher abstraction. Becoming both includes and cancels out Being and Nothing into a higher abstraction. Being and Nothing are no longer the final terms. Hegel than departs from Empedocles in that it is in abstraction (Strife) or intellect that the Holy Mind or the ultimate viewpoint is reached instead of Empedocles's comprehensive feeling of Love. To understand how opposed Hegel is to the Schelling, Empedocles view, let us observe Hegel's Objective and Subjective Notions. The Objective Notion is the above dialectic of Being and Nothing sublated by Becoming. Then according to Hegel the dialectic enters into matter, where the Subjective Notion is the sublation of subject and object into appearance. What is important here is the concept of matter. Hegel does not mean that there was a material cosmos waiting around to be vivified by the dialectic. Instead, Hegel is in agreement with the above "Hymn of the Pearl", matter is unconsciousness. The dialectic forgets itself and is lost in unconsciousness. So here Hegel has thrown down the gauntlet to Schelling. Instead of the comprehensive feeling being the apex of Knowledge (Holy Mind) it is the depth of ignorance. It is when strife rules that absolute consciousness or knowledge is achieved. Let us go back to our analogy of the video game. It is the program code that is distinct, yet logically connected that creates the landscape of the game. It is unconsciousness that prevents us from perceiving this state of affairs. We must also ask the question is absolute knowledge collective or individual for Hegel. In my opinion Hegel mature stance of this points to individual. Hegel denies any Utopias and he denies any evolution. If there was evolution it would mean the Forms or the terms of the dialectic could be modified; that would leave out absolute knowledge. Of course I am referring to evolution of material entities. It would seem that Hegel thinks only individuals can reach absolute knowledge (like Hegel). Let us now revisit Hegel and Schelling's dueling insults. Imagine Hegel's disgust that absolute knowledge is realized when everyone melts together into a syrupy feeling of One. And this realization results in a new mythology. A cosmic dithyramb. We can also imagine Schelling's disappointment when he discovered that Hegel's absolute is a fully worked out system of distinct but logically interlocking terms. That absolute knowledge does not produce any revolutionary change in humankind, but is only an interlocking system of logical terms. The reader can skip the last section without loosing any of the content of this essay, since it is but a bit of my fancy. Imagine Schelling and Hegel back when they were idealistic teenagers, best friends, and roommates at Tubingen. They were fired with the enthusiasm if the revolutionary age of the time. The young self confident, uninhibited nobleman Schelling. Schelling must have seemed an exemplar of the Romantic age to the young Hegel. Then we have the reserved critical somber looking Hegel. His classmates referred to him as the old man when he was teenager. Let us now imagine them late one night over a bottle of wine in there room discussing Oetinger's teaching that the power of magic was about to be reborn in the world, and would make them collaborators with God in bringing about a Golden age. Schelling pacing back and forth across the room wildly gesticulating with his hands in an inspired monologue on Oetinger. The young Hegel sitting on the bed judiciously sipping his wine, trying to make sense of Schelling's speech. Schelling stops to ask Hegel's opinion. Hegel replies "if only we could turn your poetry into prose" Schelling drinks down his wine with a flourish, and says " That is your trouble Georg, you do not have to read the score to understand a symphony"