F. W. J.

von Schelling

On the History of
Modern Philosophy

B Translation, Introduction, and Notes

2894 by
. Z8613
1994 ANDREW BOWIE
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/onhistoryofmoderOOOOsche
 TEXTS IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

On the History of Modern Philosophy

On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the

history of European philosophy. In it F. W. J. von Schelling sur¬
veys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows
why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. The lec¬
tures trace the path of philosophy from Descartes through
Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi to Hegel and Schell-
ing’s own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many
of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
This is the first English translation of On the History of Modern
Philosophy. In his introduction Andrew Bowie sets the work in the
context of Schelling’s career and clarifies its philosophical issues.
The translation will be of special interest to philosophers, intel¬
lectual historians, literary theorists, and theologians.
 TEXTS IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

General Editor: Raymond geuss

The purpose of this series is to make available, in English, central works of

German philosophy from Kant to the present. Although there is rapidly
growing interest in the English-speaking world in different aspects of the
German philosophical tradition as an extremely fertile source of study and
inspiration, many of its crucial texts are not available in English or exist only
in inadequate or dated translations. The series is intended to remedy that sit¬
uation, and the translations where appropriate will be accompanied by his¬
torical and philosophical introductions and notes. Single works, selections
from a single author, and anthologies will all be represented.

Friedrich Nietzsche Daybreak

J. G. Fichte The Science of Knowledge
Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.) The Young Hegelians: An Anthology
Wilhelm von Humboldt On Language
Heinrich Rickert The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science
Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations
Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All Too Human
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
Friedrich Schleiermacher On Religion
Immanuel Kant The Metaphysics of Morals
 F. W. J. VON SCHELLING

On the History of
Modern
Philosophy

Translation, Introduction, and Notes

by
Andrew Bowie
PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

ANGLIA POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE

Thomas J. Bata Library

TRENT UNIVERSITY
PETERBOROUGH, ONTARIO

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FOR MANFRED FRANK
'
 Contents

Translator’s Preface page ix

Acknowledgements x

Translator’s Introduction 1
Reassessing Schelling 1
Mind and Nature 3
Identity and Difference 13
Schelling and Hegel 23
References 35

ON THE HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

[Introduction] 41

Descartes 42
Comparison of Bacon and Descartes 61

Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 64

Spinoza 64
Leibniz 75 _
Wolff 84

Kant, Fichte, and the System of Transcendental Idealism 94

Kant 94
1 Fichte 106

The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 114

Hegel 134
Supplement from an Older (Erlangen) Manuscript 161

vii
viii Contents

Jacobi and Theosophy 164

Jacobi 164

On National Differences in Philosophy 186

Index 193
 Translator’s Preface

The diversity of German Idealist and Romantic philosophy has still to

be fully appreciated in the English-speaking world. In the light of the
revival of interest in the philosophy of German Idealism there is an
obvious need for more translations of work from this tradition. Too
much discussion of modern European philosophy still takes place on
the basis of the limited number of already translated texts and there¬
fore neglects questions posed by other texts that have as yet not been
translated. F. W. J. von Schelling’s Lectures On the History of Modern
Philosophy, translated here for the first time, are a crucial addition to
the list of works of nineteenth-century German philosophy translated
into English. The Lectures are particularly valuable because they out¬
line most of the key philosophical ideas of Schelling’s later work, vir¬
tually none of which has appeared in English. The later Schelling,
while remaining true to some of the aims of German Idealist philos¬
ophy, rejected central aspects of that philosophy. In so doing he was
probably the first to establish many key themes in European philos¬
ophy that reappear in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas,
Derrida, and others.
The Lectures were not published until after Schelling’s death, and
he did not, as far as we know, prepare a definitive version for publi¬
cation. However, the distinguished Schelling scholar Horst Fuhrmans
is sure that the text is authentic, even if its exact date is not certain
(the date would seem to be either 1833-4 or 1836-7). The text trans¬
lated here was compiled by K. F. A. Schelling, Schelling’s son, from
his father’s own manuscript of the Lectures, to which he appended a
few relevant supplementary texts from other work by his father. I
have taken the text directly from the edition of Schelling’s works pre¬
pared by K. F. A. Schelling, which appeared between 1856 and 1861,
soon after Schelling’s death in 1854, and which has been the standard
text of Schelling’s work ever since. Virtually all the extant Schelling
manuscripts, including the manuscript of the Lectures, were de¬
stroyed during the Second World War, in the air raids on Munich in

IX
X Translator's Preface

July 1944 (a few texts survived in Berlin). I have made no attempt to

produce a new edition of Schelling’s text, a task that must be left to
the editors of the new edition of Schelling’s works,1 working on the
basis of surviving lecture notes made by others at Schelling’s lectures.
The Lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy are unlikely to appear
in that edition for some considerable time.
The use of the existing text, instead of a modern edition with a crit¬
ical apparatus, is not necessarily a disadvantage: decisions about what
is the “real” text of an author can be made on the basis of many dif¬
fering criteria. The present translation is of the text which was avail¬
able to Schelling’s successors, and it is undoubtedly the work of
Schelling himself. The reliability of the text is testified to by its sub¬
stantial correspondences to versions of Schelling’s account of modern
philosophy from other sources, such as lecture notes made by mem¬
bers of his audience in the late 1820s, the 1830s, and the 1840s, and
other parts of the son’s edition. Every effort has been made to provide
an accurate translation of the original and to explain, in translator’s
notes, obscurities that might hinder understanding. Whenever there
was the serious possibility of any ambiguity I have added the German
text in brackets. The only omissions in the translated text are of the
son’s own occasional cross references to other parts of his edition,
which are of little or no help, even to a reader of the German original.
I have tried to preserve Schelling’s sentence structure as far as possi¬
ble, and most of the idiosyncratic typographical emphases have been
reproduced in italic and boldface type.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for

enabling me to complete my work on Schelling in Tubingen. I am
very grateful indeed to Manfred Frank, whose essential work in re¬
storing the philosophical reputation of Schelling was my main inspi¬
ration for undertaking this project, and whose friendship, advice,
support, fine wines, and congenial company made the work in Tu¬
bingen all the more enjoyable. Liz Bradbury’s company, forbearance
during my protracted absences, persuasive defenses of Hegel, and
support in the midst of crises were vital. Raymond Geuss took on the
project and made vital editorial suggestions, as well as persuading me
to write a separate book on Schelling, Schelling and Modern European
Philosophy (London, 1993). Peter Dews and I discussed many of Schel-

1 The Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, im Auftrag der Schelling-Kommission der Bayeruchen

Akadernie der Wissenschaften, edited by H. M. Baumgartner, W. G. Jacobs, H.
Krings, Stuttgart, 1976-.
 Translator’s Preface X)

ling’s ideas in Tubingen, to my great profit. Anglia Polytechnic Uni¬

versity in Cambridge kindly gave me leave of absence to take up the
Humboldt Fellowship. Andrew Benjamin, Phil Blond, Rudiger Bub-
ner, Matthew Festenstein, Heidrun Hesse, David Isaac, Nickjardine,
Chris Lawn, Peter Middleton, Julian Roberts, Cara Ryan, Birgit
Sandkaulen-Bock, Simon Schaffer, Gianfranco Soldati, Bob Stern,
Martin Swales, Nick Walker, other members of the Philosophisches
Seminar at Tubingen, and many others were invaluable interlocutors
at various times. Henry Merritt restored my faith in computer tech¬
nology in a crisis and helped speed the completion of the work. My
thanks go to the copy editor, Christie Lerch, for making me aware of
some of the problems in my original version of the translation and for
her careful attention to all aspects of the manuscript. My parents, as
always, were enormously encouraging and supportive.
Andrew Bowie
 ■V

*
 Translator’s Introduction

REASSESSING SCHELLING

The reputation of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-

1854) in the English-speaking world has depended almost exclusively
upon his early work, which influenced both the English Romantics
and other philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic currents in the first
half of the nineteenth century. The work of the later Schelling has, in
contrast, been largely ignored by philosophers and has been seen as
of interest mainly to theologians, with the result that its specifically
philosophical import has not been appreciated. In the light of the re¬
cent growth of interest in German Idealism and its links to the rest of
modern philosophy, it is important that some of the work of the later
Schelling should become available to an English-speaking public, par¬
ticularly in view of recent enthusiastic reassessments of Hegel. The
best text through which such an audience can approach the work of
the later Schelling is the lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy,
translated here for the first time, which contain the most extended of
Schelling’s critiques of Hegel. The Lectures (as I shall refer to them)
are one of the most significant works of nineteenth-century German
philosophy, and their influence has yet to be adequately appreciated.
Because the Lectures deal with figures such as Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, who are already familiar to those in both
the analytical and European traditions, they enable one to gain an
idea of Schelling’s own philosophical perspective in his later period.
The date of the Lectures has not been finally established. They were
for a long time assumed to have been given in 1827, but this cannot be
the case, given the access we now have to notes taken at Schelling’s
lectures at the University of Munich in that year (Schelling 1990).
The probable date is 1833—4, but there is also evidence to suggest
1836—7. Parts °f the text of the Lectures, particularly those relating
to Hegel, were adopted almost verbatim in the lectures Schelling gave
under the title The Philosophy of Revelation in 1841-2 at the University
of Berlin, when he took over what had, until 1831, been Hegel’s chair

1
2 Translator's Introduction

of philosophy. Towards the end of the 1830s Schelling did reduce the
role in his system given to the historical review of philosophy that
makes up the Lectures (see Fuhrmans’ introduction to Schelling
1972), but the Lectures can still be regarded as an integral part of the
late work. The real importance of the Lectures lies in their critique of
Hegel in the light of the later Schelling’s understanding of the history
of philosophy since Descartes. In this introduction I shall describe
Schelling’s perspective on the history of modern philosophy by out¬
lining certain aspects of his work as a whole, in order to suggest why
the later Schelling deserves our renewed attention.1
The recent revival of interest in German Idealism has been fuelled
by the widespread rejection of philosophies which entail a subject-
object duality and a notion of cognition which depends upon assum¬
ing a mind separate from the rest of the world. The suspicion that the
mechanistic, objectifying forms of explanation that came to dominate
natural science and philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth
century are seriously inadequate has led to a reconsideration of some
of the major philosophical positions of the early nineteenth century.
German Idealism has a somewhat paradoxical status in this respect.
On the one hand, it is seen as a form of totalising metaphysics that
merely conjured away, rather than overcoming, the modern problem
of the relationship between thought and being that was revealed by
Kant’s critique of previous metaphysics. On the other hand, German
Idealism is seen as that strand of modern philosophy which began to
develop a methodologically defensible way of overcoming the split be¬
tween consciousness and the world. This latter perspective offers
most for a reassessment of the work of Schelling.
The overlapping stages of Schelling’s philosophy began with his en¬
thusiasm, in the mid-1790s, for Fichte’s attempts to revise Kant’s tran¬
scendental philosophy, which had given the primary role to the
activity of consciousness in the constitution of the knowable world.
Along with this went the beginning of Schelling’s lifelong preoccupa¬
tion with Spinoza. Towards the end of the century Schelling devel¬
oped his Naturphilosophic, or philosophy of nature, which extended
Fichte’s notion of the activity of the subject into the idea of all of na¬
ture as “productivity”. The System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800
considered art to be the medium in which the activity of thought and
the productivity of nature could be understood as ultimately the
same. The “identity philosophy”, Schelling’s attempt at a complete
system which would demonstrate that “subject” and “object”, the

1 I have elsewhere given a much more detailed account of these issues, relating
them to contemporary concerns (see Bowie 1993). I refer those who want more
historical detail to Xavier Tilliette’s monumental Schelling. Line philosophic en devenir
(Tilliette 1970).
 Mind and Nature 3

“ideal” and the “real”, are only different degrees or aspects of the
Same, concerned him in the early 1800s (and in many ways for the
rest of his life). During this period he broke with Fichte, whom he re¬
garded as failing to move beyond the sphere of self-consciousness to
that consciousness’s ground in a nature of which it is only one aspect.
In the 1809 On the Essence of Human Freedom (the last substantial text
published by Schelling in his lifetime), and in the 1811-15 Ages °ftfie
World, Schelling renounced the tendency towards a balanced polar re¬
lationship of the “ideal” (mind, subject) and the “real” (matter, object)
that had been present in much of his preceding work and became
concerned with understanding the ground of which the antagonistic
principles that constitute the world are the consequence. Schelling’s
late work attempted to establish what he termed a “positive philoso¬
phy”, of which the Lectures formed a part. The late philosophy began
to develop in the 1820s, and he continued to revise it for the rest of
his life. Positive philosophy sought to move beyond “negative philos¬
ophy”, exemplified in Hegel’s Logic, which explicated the forms of
pure thought that determine what things are. The goal of positive
philosophy was to come to terms both with the fact that things are and
with the contingencies of the historical emergence and development
of thinking. The ultimate aim of positive philosophy was to derive a
philosophically viable religion from a reinterpretation of the histori¬
cal development of Christianity. It was not least Schelling’s failure to
achieve this latter aim that led to many of the valid aspects of the later
philosophy being ignored.
The story generally told about the history of German Idealism is
that it was initiated by Fichte’s critique of Kant, carried on by Schell¬
ing’s criticisms of Fichte in his Naturphilosophie and identity system,
and brought to (an albeit temporary) end by Hegel’s development of
a complete system of philosophy, on the basis of the philosophical
articulation of the identity of subject and object. It is this story that
now needs correction if we are to do justice to Schelling. Although
Schelling aimed at many of the same goals as Hegel, his work is im¬
portant precisely because it shows that Hegel’s attempt to reach a fi¬
nal resolution in'philosophy could not succeed. The divided world
with which Schelling’s later work confronts us makes a major contri¬
bution to modern philosophy in ways which are only now beginning
to be explored.

MIND AND NATURE

Only in recent years has the period of German Idealism begun to be

understood in sufficient depth for more adequate philosophical
4 Translator’s Introduction

judgements about it to become possible. One vital aspect of the con¬

text in which German Idealism arose is the “Pantheism controversy”,
which began in 1783 (see Beiser 1987). This was a theological contro¬
versy, involving most of the major thinkers of the period, about the
interpretation and significance of Spinoza’s philosophy. “Pantheism”
can be interpreted in many ways, as Schelling shows in the Lectures,
but one version of it entails the idea that God and nature are identi¬
cal. For Spinoza, God was that which is cause of itself and whose es¬
sence involves its existence. To the extent to which things are
explicable, they are so because they embody the intelligibility of God:
“All things, I repeat, are in God, and all things which come to pass,
come to pass solely through the laws of the infinite nature of God,
and follow... from the necessity of his existence” (Spinoza 1955
p. 59). All finite things are explicable in terms of their dependence
upon their causal relations to other things, which are in turn depen¬
dent upon their relationships to other things, ad infinitum. God is this
infinity, in that He is not conditioned like everything else: His nature
is the totality of those conditions, and He is therefore the first cause.
The vital fact about Spinoza’s philosophy in relation to Schelling is
that'it need not be understood merely as a theology: the dominant
image of the world in modern science relies upon the idea that the
task of scientific investigation is to reveal the chain of conditions
which explains a particular phenomenon in nature via the principle
of sufficient reason.
In one of the most influential contributions to the Pantheism con¬
troversy, which plays a vital role in the genesis of German Idealism,
F. H. Jacobi, whose later work Schelling criticises in the Lectures,
raised the question of what happens if one tries to make the principle
of sufficient reason the sole means of understanding the world. Ja¬
cobi suggests in relation to Spinoza that “we remain, as long as we
grasp things conceptually (begreifen), in a chain of conditioned condi¬
tions” (cited in Sandkaulen-Bock 1990 p. 15). This chain blocks the
route to that which has no condition, the Unbedingte, the Absolute,
which Jacobi terms Seyn, “being”. The hiatus between what can be ex¬
plained causally and “being” is for Jacobi what allows him to sustain
the notion of God, who is not, as in Pantheism, to be equated with
nature’s intelligibility, and who therefore cannot be known but only
revealed. The problem which comes to concern Schelling and his con¬
temporaries in the 1790s is precisely the relationship between a na¬
ture of causally related things in the knowable world and the
Absolute. The Absolute need not be thought of as some strange, mys¬
tical entity: it is initially just the necessary correlate of the relative sta¬
tus of anything that can be explained causally.
 Mind and Nature
5

The importance of Kant in this debate, and the main reason why he
was attacked by Jacobi, lay in his denial that we can say anything pos¬
itive about things in themselves. Kant argued that all knowledge is of
“intuitions”, which are organised by categories of the understanding.
This meant we have no right to claim that we can know any more than
the necessary connections of intuitions in the judgements of our un¬
derstanding. The problem with this, as Jacobi suggested, is that it
makes knowledge groundless. Kant, though, did not deny the existence
of what was beyond the world of phenomena, in that the world “in
itself” includes ourselves, who are free as noumena, even as we are
determined as phenomena. The question that concerned German
Idealism was how to understand the relationship of the phenomenal
and the noumenal worlds.
It was J. G. Fichte who suggested, in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794
and subsequent texts, that our cognitive and our practical aspects
must have a common source if Kant’s philosophy is to provide what
Kant intended, a grounding of the possibility of knowledge and ethics
that did not have to rely on theological support. Fichte’s key move was
to radicalise Kant’s question as to how knowledge can explain itself.
He argued that consciousness could not be understood in the same
way as any aspect of the object world. The real question was how the
mind came to the act of reflection upon its own functioning at all. If
the mind were really a mechanism, it would be inexplicable why it
came to reflect upon itself, because there could be no reason for it to
do so. Nothing in a chain of cause and effect can explain why that
chain should come to the point of thinking about itself as itself. For
consciousness to reflect upon itself it must have a subject—object
structure, but that structure is not sufficient to explain consciousness,
because one needs a third aspect that establishes the identity of re-
flecter and reflected. This ground must have an uncaused, absolute
status, which Fichte attributes to the “I”.
Subjectivity for Fichte, then, is a self-acting spontaneity which can¬
not be explained via a prior cause, because that would contradict its
essential nature by putting it in a relationship of causal dependence.
The structure of the world is, as it was for Kant, a product of the I: it
does not, as had been thought in dogmatic metaphysics, depend upon
the essence of things in themselves. Fichte, though, gives an account
of the I which Kant could not and did not accept. Without such an
account Fichte considers Kant’s philosophy incomplete, in that its
most fundamental aspect, self-consciousness, is unexplained. For
Fichte, the I cannot be known as an object because it is itself the prior
condition of objectivity. Access to this condition depends, therefore,
upon an action of the I upon itself, in “intellectual intuition”, where
6 Translator’s Introduction

the I as subject and the I as object are immediately identical. Kant

thought that intuitions were what was given to the subject, and that
there could be no intuition of the intelligible, or supersensible.
Schelling’s initial philosophical enterprise can, somewhat reduc-
tively, be understood as an attempt to marry Fichte’s I, which is the
spontaneous cause of itself, to Spinoza’s God, which is likewise causa
sui. The reasons for attempting to do this derive from Schelling’s un¬
derstanding of the problems raised by Jacobi and Kant. Schelling
wavers, in the work from 1795 to 1800, between a position very close
to Fichte and a position closer to Spinoza, before clearly moving away
from Fichte in 1801.
In this period Schelling’s philosophy already has an ontological fo¬
cus which is also vital in the Lectures. This focus is evident if one com¬
pares his approach to an issue that appears in two texts of 1795, On
the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Absolute in Human Knowledge, and
Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. The issue is Kant’s
question as to how synthetic a priori judgements are possible. They
were possible for Kant because of the synthetic activity of the subject
in judgements of the understanding. Schelling maintains, however,
that there is a more fundamental problem, that of why there is a
realm of judgement, a world of appearances, at all. If judgement con¬
sists in syntheses of appearances, it must depend upon a prior sepa¬
ration of what is joined again in the judgement, otherwise there would
be nothing that required synthesising. In On the /, Schelling reformu¬
lates Kant’s question in Fichtean terms: “How is it that the absolute I
goes out of itself and opposes a not-I to itself?” (I/i p. 175). The ab¬
solute I, following Fichte, is that which is the subject and object of it¬
self in the sense described earlier, which splits itself in order to know
itself. For Fichte, we are aware of the demand to overcome the not-I
via the dictates of Kant’s moral law, understood as the demand to re¬
alise freedom, the essence of the I, in the world of objective nature.
The apparent absurdity of Fichte’s idea that the world should be un¬
derstood as an absolute I can be tempered if one considers the diffi¬
culty of explaining the fact that we experience the resistance of the
object world. Without that which can feel compelled, which Fichte re¬
gards as the freedom of the I manifest in practical reason, how could
one assert that there is such a resistance? Freedom is thus necessarily
prior to what opposes it. If there were no such priority, it would be¬
come impossible to know how the world becomes intelligible at all, be¬
cause something that offered no resistance of any kind would be
unknowable. What is revealed here at the level of individual con¬
sciousness, in the feeling of resistance of the world, is used by Schell¬
ing to explain how it is that the not-I, the world of conditioned
natural objects, must also involve what is present in the conscious I.
 Mind and Nature 7

In Schelling’s view, knowledge itself is, as it was for Kant, the result
of the necessary linking of phenomena expressed in judgements.
What makes knowledge (and practical reason) possible, though, can¬
not itself be of the same conditioned status. This is one of the most
important contentions of German Idealism. Schelling maintains, in
line with Fichte, that the condition of knowledge, the “positing” of
the I, must have a different status from what it posits: “nothing can be
posited by itself as a thing, i.e. an absolute thing (unbedingtes Ding) is
a contradiction” (I/i p. 166). The argument depends upon a play on
one of the words for “absolute”, unbedingt. Things can be determinate
only in relation to other objects, but they also depend upon what pos¬
its them as something, the subject. The subject is therefore unbedingt,
unthinged, “absolute”. The requirement, taken over from Fichte, that
the prior condition of objectivity is the subject, separates Schelling
from Spinoza for most of his career. There is, though, a serious prob¬
lem in understanding the Absolute in terms of subjectivity. In the
Philosophical Letters Schelling reformulates the question he had asked
in On the I as follows: “How is it that I step at all out of the Absolute and
move towards something opposed (auf ein Entgegengesetztes)?” (I/i p. 294).
Stepping out of the Absolute involves what must be conceived of as
the undifferentiated One somehow ceasing to be One. This intro¬
duces relation into the Absolute, which seems to contradict its es¬
sence. The relations in scientific knowledge are understood in terms
of the principle of sufficient reason, which makes links, in the form of
statements of identity, between what appears opposed. Jacobi’s point
was that the “negative” dependence of particular things on other par¬
ticular things for their determinacy meant that there must be a pos¬
itive ground, which he termed “being”, that could not be understood
in the same way as those particular things were understood. Schell¬
ing’s friend at the Tubingen seminary, Friedrich Holderlin, realised
that such an argument revealed a major problem in Fichte’s idea that
the Absolute should be understood as an absolute I. For it to be an
absolute / it must entail consciousness. However, if the absolute I con¬
tained all reality, it could not have anything opposed to it as an object
and therefore could not be conscious. Consequently, Holderlin ar¬
gued, one has to understand the structure of the relationship of sub¬
ject to object in consciousness as grounded in “a whole of which
subject and object are the parts”, which he, in the manner of Jacobi,
termed “being” (see Bowie 1990 p. 68). This meant that any attempt
to explicate the Absolute in reflexive terms, as a cognitive relation¬
ship of subject to object, was doomed to failure. A development of this
argument became the core of Schelling’s objections to Hegel. Schell¬
ing’s problem was to reconcile this view with his conviction that Fichte
had shown the inherent fault in Spinozism, its failure to explain sub-
8 Translator’s Introduction

jectivity. Schelling was faced with sustaining a philosophy in which the

spontaneity of the subject is central but which must also acknowledge
the problem of the ground of the subject’s relationship to the object.
Spinoza’s absolute object, the world of “conditioned conditions”, fails
to give any explanation as to why the world should involve the devel¬
opment of knowledge and freedom. Fichte’s subject-object, the abso¬
lute I, seems to rely on the subjective side of a relation being absolute,
thereby posing the problem of how it can be seen as absolute at all, in
that an I requires relation to a not-I to be itself.
The tension in Schelling’s early work is evident in its two most in¬
fluential products, which Schelling discusses at some length in the
Lectures: the Naturphilosophie which emerged in 1797 and developed
in the succeeding years, and the System of Transcendental Idealism of
1800. Both oppose mechanistic views of nature by attempting to ac¬
count for the fact of subjectivity, but both are faced with the problem
of how to understand the emergence of a world of relation from an
absolute ground. The key to the Naturphilosophie is the notion of pro¬
ductivity. What Schelling terms “productivity” should not be under¬
stood, as it often is, as a vitalist “life-force”, because, Schelling insists,
the notion of a force makes sense only in relation to another force
which opposes it. It is productivity’s opposing itself to itself that makes
it manifest in “products”, the world of appearing nature. How,
though, are we aware of productivity, given that, as Kant had insisted,
we have no access to things in themselves but only to appearances?
Schelling does not think of productivity as something knowable in the
manner of an object. It is rather the necessary ground of the dynamic
processes of appearing nature: “As the object is never absolute (unbe-
dingt), then something per se non-objective must be posited in nature;
this absolutely non-objective postulate is precisely the original pro¬
ductivity of nature” (I/2 p. 284). Rather, therefore, than seeing the ob¬
jects of empirical scientific investigation as the prior fact in nature,
for Schelling the prior fact is productivity. If it were pure productivity,
it would dissipate itself at infinite speed; it must, therefore, have “in¬
hibited” itself, in that it manifests itself in transient products. To char¬
acterise the appearance of productivity as the forms of empirical
nature, Schelling uses the metaphor of a stream, which forms eddies
that can at least temporarily sustain their shape despite the continual
replacement of the actual material of the eddy. Thus far the theory is
essentially a dynamically modified Spinozism.
The next problem is to explain how it is that we are able to know
nature at all, because, as Schelling maintains, “Spinoza could not
make comprehensible how I could become conscious of this succes¬
sion of representations” (I/2 p. 36) in the object world. Schelling is
 Mind and Nature 9

concerned to avoid the Kantian division between things in themselves

and appearing phenomena, in order to explain how the object world
comes to think about itself. He does so by rethinking the question of
reflection, the splitting of subject and object, mind and nature. In
Naturphilosophic, “Nature is to be invisible mind, mind invisible na¬
ture. Here, therefore, in the absolute identity of the mind in us and
the nature outside us, the problem of how a nature outside ourselves is
possible must dissolve” (I/2 p. 39). If the split is between things in
themselves and “representations”, it becomes impossible to know how
one could in any way affect the other. In some way, then, they must
be identical:

one can push as many transitory materials as one wants, which become finer
and finer, between mind and matter, but sometime the point must come
where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap that we so long
wished to avoid becomes inevitable (I/2 p. 53).

Schelling, always a monist, thinks of the difference of mind and mat¬

ter as only ever a relative difference within a totality which encom¬
passes both.
Schelling’s conception of nature, in the wake of Kant’s Critique of
Judgement, is of an organism: whilst the aspect of nature bound by
causal laws can be accounted for by mechanical explanation, the de¬
velopment of organic life and mind cannot. On the mechanistic view
we have no warrant for assuming that the different laws of nature
have any status in common: we just have Jacobi’s endless chain of con¬
ditioned conditions. This led Kant to introduce the notion of “reflec¬
tive judgement”, which considers nature as if it were purposive even
though this cannot be proven. The idea of reflective judgement al¬
lowed Kant to try to understand how it is that organisms emerge and
function according to principles which are not apparent in causal ex¬
planation. Schelling’s addition, which Kant would not have counte¬
nanced, is to regard the emergence and development of mind itself as
the result of an overall organic process. To do this Schelling develops
a key idea of Fichte’s: “what is included in a mechanism cannot step
out of it and ask: how has the whole [system of my ideas] become pos¬
sible?” (I/2 p. 17). The crucial contribution of the Natur philosophic lies
in its inclusion of ourselves as free, thinking subjects within nature, in
a way the science which succeeded it in the nineteenth century failed
to do. In the Naturphilosophie, everything that appears is only a result
of productivity’s inhibiting itself in the form of appearing objects.
Productivity itself therefore cannot be known as itself, because it is not
an object. As such, productivity is analogous to the conscious I, which,
for the reasons we have seen, also cannot be objectified. The emer-
io Translator's Introduction

gence of thinking must therefore be understood in non-causal terms,

as an act of freedom of the kind which is inherent in the very prin¬
ciple of dynamic nature. The implications of this position continually
concerned Schelling in his later career, as is evident in the Lectures.
Schelling’s attempt in the Naturphilosophie to provide an account of
the genesis of self-consciousness was carried over into the System of
Transcendental Idealism, the text for which he is probably best known.
The System suffers from a defect, however, which is the result of
Schelling’s indecisiveness over his relationship to Fichte. Instead of
seeing empirical nature and self-consciousness as having their com¬
mon source in the productivity of the Absolute, consciousness, the
absolute I, is given priority (see Frank 1985 pp. 71-103). This gives
rise to the problem we saw earlier of using the same term for the
subject which is relative to an object of knowledge as for the whole
within which that relation is located. The point of the System of Tran¬
scendental Idealism is to make philosophy, probably for the first time,
into a “history of self-consciousness”, to retrace the path thought
must have followed in order to arrive at the moment of reflection
upon itself which led it to the need to give a retrospective account of
its own history.2
Writing the history of the development of consciousness entails a
significant problem: how does consciousness give an account of what
it was before becoming itself as consciousness? Whatever preceded
consciousness cannot appear as itself, since it would have to do so
within consciousness, thereby losing its original non-conscious nature.
In the System, Schelling asserts that what gave rise to self-conscious¬
ness was the progressing stages of the absolute I’s self-limitation.
Rather than remain an undifferentiated, infinite One, the I divided
itself against itself in order to know itself. The process began with the
emergence of a primal duplicity in the initially undifferentiated One,
whereby the very beginnings of differentiation in nature became pos¬
sible. This idea of polar opposition within the Same - such as the op¬
position between an expanding and a contracting force - that led to a
manifest world is present in varying versions in all of Schelling’s phi¬
losophy. A process was initiated by this opposition which moved, via
the ever more complex differentiations manifest in inorganic and
then organic nature, to the point of the emergence of consciousness.
Because each stage is a limit on what is itself unlimited — what the
Naturphilosophie termed “productivity” - each stage, qua limitation,
becomes the next object to be overcome by the absolute I, the subject

1 I have looked in some detail at the System elsewhere (Bowie 1990 and 1993), so I
restrict myself here to a brief outline intended to facilitate the understanding of
Schelling’s own account of it in the Lectures.
 Mind and Nature 11

which cannot finally be objectified. The apparently lifeless resistance

of material objects is, in these terms, a result of the fact that “the act
via which all limitation is posited, as condition of all consciousness,
does not itself come to consciousness” (I/3 p. 409). This positing is an
“act” because it is not part of a chain of necessity and can only be un¬
derstood as happening spontaneously and becoming manifest
through its result, the object world that is opposed to consciousness.
For the act itself to come to consciousness it would have to appear on
the object side of the subject—object structure, which is precluded by
the fact that it is, like Fichte’s I, not a determinable object. In the Sys¬
tem of Transcendental Idealism, the object world is an “unconscious”
stage of the I, but, as we saw in the Naturphilosophie, the fact that it
becomes differentiated and felt as resistant presupposes the condition
of objectivity, the subject, which always goes beyond objectivity but
is also inextricably bound up with it. Until the emergence of self-
consciousness, the System provides what is really a genetic account of
Kant’s realm of appearance, the domain of “theoretical” philosophy.
For self-consciousness to arise, “the chain of theoretical philosophy”
(I/3 p. 524), the chain of Jacobi’s conditioned conditions, must be
broken. The spontaneity of the I cannot, as in Fichte, have a prior
cause, so the emergence of the I has to be understood in terms of
practical reason.
The key problem in the System is understanding the relationship be¬
tween the “unconscious” world of nature and the “conscious” world of
“second nature” (I/3 p. 537), history and society. In the System it is the
work of art which is given the role of enabling us to understand that
which cannot appear to consciousness (see Marquard 1987). The ma¬
jor contribution to modern philosophy of the early Romantic philos¬
ophy of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, with whom Schelling was in
close contact in Jena at this time, was a new philosophical understand¬
ing of the artwork that points forward to later developments in mod¬
ern philosophy (see Frank 1989, Bowie 1990, 1991). For the early
Romantics and the Schelling of the System of Transcendental Idealism,
the artwork is the place where the impossibility of gaining a repre¬
sentational perspective on the productivity which gives rise to the
manifest world is revealed. (See Frank 1989 and Schlegel’s Transcen-
dentalphilosophie of 1800—1 (Schlegel 1991) for the evident parallels to
the System). In art, what does “appear” — the empirical objects that
can be analysed in scientific terms, such as the frequencies and
pitches heard in a sonata - cannot be regarded as a re-presentation of
an underlying reality. Schelling and the early Romantics began to re¬
alise that the idea that thought is the representation of pre-existing
reality, the idea which is rejected by the most significant strands of
modern philosophy, makes little sense if considered in relation to art.
12 Translator’s Introduction

The conscious cannot represent its ground, the unconscious, as it is in

itself, precisely because access to the unconscious is only via what ap¬
pears to consciousness. Schelling argues that we have to work with the
idea that our reality is the product of the interrelation of conscious and
unconscious, not a representation of the unconscious by the con¬
scious. The production can never be seen from an external perspec¬
tive, in that it is itself the condition of possibility of “seeing” anything,
and it must therefore be understood in a non-representational man¬
ner. As Kant had suggested in the Third Critique, the work of art is
an appearing object in the realm of causality, but its status as art de¬
pends upon its being perceived as a work of freedom: none of an ob¬
ject’s conceptually determinable attributes can make it a work of art.
Schelling understands the work as the result of a uniting of “con¬
scious” and “unconscious” productivity. Though the work depends
upon the intention of its producer, its success as art depends upon
what is not exhausted by the intentions of the producer, who, like
Kant’s genius, is also dictated to by “unconscious” nature.
For Schelling the work of art is analogous to the organism. The or¬
ganism entails “an original identity of conscious and unconscious ac¬
tivity” (I/3 p. 610) and therefore cannot be understood in mechanical
terms alone, because the interplay of its parts is not explicable via
causal laws. Nature qua organism begins as unconscious production
but ends with the emergence of consciousness. The artwork reverses
the relationship of conscious and unconscious present in the organ¬
ism by ending unconsciously, in that its status as art is not determined
by the intentions that produced the object: the mere application of
artistic techniques with the conscious intention of producing an art¬
work is no guarantee of aesthetic success.
Because the work of art cannot be conceptually fixed as a knowable
object, it can never be finally interpreted. The same, of course, ap¬
plies to the Absolute, and this is essentially why art, for Schelling,
takes on a vital role in philosophy. This role is suggested by Schlegel’s
remark in the Transcendentalphilosophie that

Truth arises when opposed errors neutralise each other. Absolute truth can¬
not be admitted; and this is the testimony for the freedom of thought and of
spirit. If absolute truth were found, then the business of spirit would be com¬
pleted, and it would have to cease to be, since it only exists in activity (Schlegel
>991 P- 93)-

The natural sciences pursue the endless task of demonstrating the

chain of conditioned conditions in nature and thus can only ever ar¬
rive at finite determinations, on the basis of the principle of sufficient
reason. Art already embodies the infinity which science pursues but
 Identity and Difference
*3

cannot reach, because art cannot be determined in the way any par¬
ticular object of knowledge can be determined. As the “eternal organ
and document of philosophy”, art even takes on a role superior to
that of philosophy, in that philosophy tries to articulate the Absolute
but cannot positively say what the Absolute is in a final statement of
identity. Art does not say what the Absolute is, but via its endless po¬
tential for meaning art shows that which cannot be said.
The System of Transcendental Idealism ends with the famous invoca¬
tion proclaiming the need for a “new mythology”, a “mythology of
reason”, to lead the sciences and art back to their common source.
This invocation is beginning to look less silly than it did for much of
the time from the publication of the System until recently. The grow¬
ing conviction in certain areas of both analytical and European phi¬
losophy that representational, or correspondence theories, which
underlie scientistic views of truth, are failing to give an adequate ac¬
count of our relationship to internal and external nature is leading in
many places to the suspicion that both scientific and aesthetic reve¬
lations of truth are only ever different aspects of the same language-
embodied process. The main philosophical failing of the System, which
led Schelling to a revised position in the years following 1800, lies in
its account of the identity of mind and nature, which is couched, as we
saw, in terms of an absolute I. In the next phase of his work, Schelling
attempted to find a way of avoiding the problems to which this ap¬
proach to the question of identity gives rise.

IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE

The period of Schelling’s “identity philosophy” is usually dated from

the 1801 Presentation of My System of Philosophy until sometime before
the 1809 On the Essence of Human Freedom. This is misleading, however,
in that certain essential aspects of Schelling’s identity philosophy re¬
mained fairly constant throughout his career. Even more misleading
is the fact that the identity philosophy appears in most histories of
philosophy as merely an untenable stage in the history of German
Idealism, which Hegel had to overcome in order to arrive at his key
insights. In many ways this (classically Hegelian) story is Schelling’s
own fault, because in some of the texts his ideas on identity are not
fully developed and he fails to articulate the important insights that
are present in the developed version of the identity theory and in the
work after 1809.
To arrive at the identity theory, Schelling had to complete the move
away from Fichte. The underlying problem in Fichte’s position de¬
rives from its giving absolute priority to a consciousness grounded in
 Translator’s Introduction

practical reason. Fichte can consequently be seen as making nature

into just a means for the ends of rational beings. Doubts about this
kind of conception of nature are now, of course, common currency in
the contemporary debate over ecology: Schelling already made such
doubts about “instrumental reason” explicit. His vital argument is
that the conscious I itself depends upon nature. In this view the high¬
est point of transcendental philosophy, the developed I, is a result, not
the absolute initiating “act” it was for Fichte. Schelling maintains that
to understand transcendental philosophy appropriately one must
move, “beyond the circle of consciousness” (I/4 p. 85), back to con¬
sciousness’s ground in the nature that is its condition of possibility.
Schelling argues that nature itself must always already have in it the
potential for consciousness, rather than being just the passive object
of the I. This potential must not, though, be understood only from
the perspective of self-consciousness but also in terms of what must
have preceded it in the form of the stages of nature that lead to con¬
sciousness. The development of consciousness should not, therefore,
as it was in Fichte and some aspects of Schelling’s earlier work, be
grasped from only one side of the subject-object/mind-nature struc¬
ture, but rather from both sides. The question is how philosophy can
present such a position, which requires a move beyond the imma¬
nence of consciousness.
In one of his most characteristically uneven texts, the System of the
Whole of Philosophy and of Naturphilosophie in Particular of 1804,
Schelling both proposes the mature version of an identity philosophy
that can still stand up to serious philosophical scrutiny and writes an
account of Naturphilosophie that is often merely bizarre. I shall con¬
sider only the former. One of the main premises of Schelling’s identity
philosophy is that the relation of subject and object is not one of ad¬
equation. The reason adequation is rejected is the basis of the very
idea of identity philosophy in Schelling’s sense:

It is clear that in every explanation of the truth as an agreement

(Ubereinstimmung) of subjectivity and objectivity in knowledge, both, subject
and object, are already presupposed as separate, for only what is different can
agree, what is not different is in itself one. Our proposition now says the op¬
posite of this. We say: nowhere is there a subject as a subject, or an object as an
object, but it is rather only one and the same which knows and is known and
which is therefore as little subjective as it is objective (1/6 p. 138).

As Holderlin had shown, it is only within a structure which encom¬

passes subject and object that one can understand their relationship
without slipping into dualism by making the gap between them un¬
bridgeable. The very difference between subject and object is only
possible on the basis of a prior identity, otherwise it could not even be
 Identity and Difference ‘5

seen as a difference. The logic of this argument is present in a vital

passage of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre:

Everything which is opposed to something is the same as what it is opposed

to in one characteristic = X; and: everything the same is opposed to what it
is the same as in one respect = X. Such a characteristic = X is the ground, in
the first case the ground of relation, in the second the ground of difference; for
identifying (gleichsetzen) or comparing (vergleichen) what is opposed is called
relating; opposing what has been identified is differentiating them (Fichte
1971 p. 111).

Schelling develops this insight by exploring the problem of “reflex-

ivity”, the problem of the subject-object relationship, while beginning
with the Absolute, understood not as the I but as what he terms “ab¬
solute identity”, or “being”. His initial aim is to avoid a philosophy like
Fichte’s that “subjectifies” (1/6 p. 142) the object world without realis¬
ing how it in fact also depends upon it. The direction of the argument
is back towards Spinoza, but Schelling still insists that philosophy
must give an account of how subjectivity is possible, which Spinoza
had failed to do.
Grasping Schelling’s notion of absolute identity is difficult. One
way to approach it is in relation to Kant’s idea of “the thing in itself”.
Schelling argues against the Kantian notion of the thing in itself by
maintaining that we arrive at the idea of a thing in itself which is sep¬
arated from our representations only by privileging subjectivity,
thereby creating an “inside-me” and an “outside-me”, a relation be¬
tween subject and object: “This whole distinction stands or falls with
the assumption that I am what knows in all knowledge and that there
is no self-knowing of the in-itself” (1/6 p. 145). The odd terminology
should not obscure the basic point, which is that our fallible and tran¬
sient empirical knowledge cannot explain its own status. Empirical
knowledge, which depends upon the relationship of the I to an object
world, thus upon the difference between thinking and its object, leaves
us with the problem of describing the link between the two. If the gap
between them is to be bridged, there must be a prior identity of
thought and its object. The link must, in Schelling’s view, be
grounded in “transitive” being, a ground of identity which links mind
and matter as differing aspects of itself. Our experience of the fini-
tude of specific things and thoughts is a result of their dependence on
this ground, which unites them in the process of revealing their tran¬
sience. Schelling uses the metaphor of the earth in an essay of 1806 to
explain this “transitivity”.

you recognise its [the earth’s] true essence only in the link by which it eter¬
nally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its things and again posits this mul-
i6 Translator’s Introduction

tiplicity as its unity. You also do not imagine that, apart from this infinity of
things which are in it, there is another earth which is the unity of these
things, rather the same which is the multiplicity is also unity, and what the unity
is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and indissoluble One of unity
and multiplicity in it is what you call its existence. . . . Existence is the link of
a being (Wesen) as One, with itself as a multiplicity (I/7 p. 56).

Identity is the link of the two aspects of being, which, on the one
hand, is the universe, and, on the other, is the multiplicity which the
knowable universe also is.
Schelling’s conception of identity leads him to a prophetic anti-
Cartesian stance, which is later worked out in detail in the Lectures.
The Cartesian primacy of self-consciousness is clearly undermined by
the I’s dependence for its existence upon the prior ground of absolute
identity. Schelling insists that “The I think, I am, is, since Descartes,
the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and
being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality”
(I/7 p. 148). Instead of the I, as the absolutely prior fact, “positing”
the not-I as its means of self-realisation, in the identity theory I am, as
Schelling puts it, “affirmed” as a predicate of being. In trying to make
my conscious I absolute, I realise that it can only be in relation to the
not-I, the rest of the world. This means, as we have already seen, that
the conscious I inherently involves a relation to an other and cannot
be absolute. In the empirical world everything is, as in Spinoza, de¬
pendent upon other things for its determinacy. If one wishes to know
absolutely what something is, including the I, one is led into an infi¬
nite regress via the chain of relations of anything particular to every¬
thing else. In the reflexive view, the realm of appearances therefore
seems separated in Kantian fashion from the “in-itself”, the Absolute.
Schelling, who is fully aware of Kant’s objections to claims about the
in-itself, insists, though, that “All regression into infinity is cut off’
(1/6 p. 165) in his conception. This can be so only if the world of ap¬
pearance and the Absolute are the same. The question is how they are
the same. The fact of this identity cannot be known in the way we
know specific facts about ourselves and the world.
It is the inherent incompleteness of knowledge which shows the ne¬
cessity of the Absolute: we would not regard knowledge as incomplete
if what renders our knowledge relative did not already inherently play
a role in thinking. The point - and here Hegel and Schelling concur -
is not to assume that recognition of this incompleteness leads to scep¬
ticism. Schelling argues against scepticism on the basis of the
structural irreducibility of the Absolute to the subject-object struc¬
ture of propositional knowledge. He can do so because the Absolute
is the ground which necessarily emerges in the face of the relativity of
 Identity and Difference
»7

the knowledge that can be asserted in propositions. This ground for

Schelling, then, is “absolute identity”, the transitive being that links
the world as unity and as difference.
Without the presupposition of the Absolute, therefore, the evident
relativity of particular knowledge becomes inexplicable, because
there would be no reason to suggest that a revised judgement is pred¬
icated of the same world as the preceding judgement. The important
factor is, then, to understand the status of the particular knowledge
that we express in propositions. As we saw in the earlier On the I and
Philosophical Letters, Schelling’s concern was to understand the origin
of synthetic judgements, which, he claimed, become necessary be¬
cause of the division in the Absolute. Schelling now gives a more co¬
gent formulation of what this entails:

for being, actual, real being is precisely self-disclosure/revelation (Selbstoffen-

barung). If it is to be as One, then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it
does not disclose/reveal itself in itself if it is not an other in itself, and is in this
other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the living link of itself and
an other (I/7 p. 54).

It is because the One, in order to be disclosed as One, rather than

opaquely enclosed within itself, must become other to itself that we can
talk of its identity in this way. The very condition of possibility of
judgements is that the two sides joined in the judgement be different,
otherwise they would not need joining. At the same time, though, if
the judgement is to have claims to truth status, the two sides of the
judgement must also in another way be the same, otherwise there is no
ground of identity for the judgement and no possibility of truth. In
this way, things are both the same and different. This does not offend
the law of contradiction. The appearing world of “negative” relations
between particular, finite entities, the truth of which is asserted prop-
ositionally, is the same as the positive infinite world of the totality,
which “posits or intuits itself, by not positing, not intuiting the par¬
ticular” (1/6 p. 220) and thus cannot be characterised in a determinate
proposition. As we saw, it is the link between the two aspects which is
the basis of Schelling’s identity theory.
Many of Schelling’s further conclusions from his position are un¬
tenable and cannot concern us here. What does concern us are the
implications of this understanding of the Absolute. The first problem
with the position just outlined is that the ground of identity, the Ab¬
solute, cannot be known, because that would require the infinite to be
defined in relation to the finite. It can therefore only be presupposed.
Schelling continues in this period to toy with the idea that there can
be a way of articulating in philosophy how knowledge of the Absolute
i8 Translator's Introduction

and the Absolute itself are the same, so that “the sameness of the sub¬
jective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows itself, and is
the subject and object of itself’ (1/6 p. 173). This is, of course, what
Hegel thought he achieved in his mature work, beginning with the
Phenomenology of Mind. In this view it is the constitutive negativity of
particular knowledge and particular beings that leads to the final re¬
alisation of the nature of that negativity, in absolute knowledge. In
this view the Absolute is the result of the self-cancellation of the finite.
It can therefore be presented in the form of the successive over¬
coming of finite determinations in a system whose end comprehends
its beginning. The beginning thereby achieves a determinacy which it
did not have at the outset by being grasped in the concept. Schelling,
though, had begun with a positive Absolute, being, which made re¬
flexive knowledge of it impossible, because reflexive knowledge re¬
quires being as its prior real, rather than just as its cognitive ground.
In the later philosophy Schelling works out a position which uses this
understanding of being against Hegel in a prophetic manner. For now
we need to consider another problem that ensues from beginning
with the Absolute, in order to understand what moves Schelling
towards the position of the late philosophy that is represented in
the Lectures.
Though Schelling’s version of identity theory is enlightening as a
way of escaping the traps of representational thinking and of trying to
get beyond the mind-body dichotomy, nothing that we have consid¬
ered so far can explain why it is that there is a finite, knowable world
at all. Schelling began to become aware of the gravity of this problem
for a philosophy that begins with the Absolute as early as 1804, in a
text entitled Philosophy and Religion:

the origin of the world of the senses can be thought of only as a complete
breaking off from absoluteness, by a leap. . . . The Absolute is all that is real:
finite things, on the other hand, are not real; their ground cannot lie in a
communication of reality to them or their substrate, which would have ema¬
nated from the Absolute, it can only lie in a move away, in a fall (Abfatl) from
the Absolute (1/6 p. 38).

Jacobi’s problem appears again here: “nothing finite can arise immedi¬
ately out of the Absolute and be deduced from it. Whence already in this law
the ground of the being of finite beings is expressed as an absolute
breaking off from the infinite” (1/6 p. 41). How, then, does philoso¬
phy come to terms with this break, given the fact of the finite world?
The dialectical answer is that the finite and the infinite are necessary
correlates of each other. Schelling here already begins to see the prob¬
lems of a dialectical position in ways which will be vital for his critique
 Identity and Difference !9

of Hegel. Despite the insistence shared by Schelling and Hegel that

the “substance” should be thought of as “subject”, rather than as the
absolute object it was in Spinoza, Schelling’s identity philosophy cul¬
minates in a world not far from Spinoza’s, to the extent that negativity
and privation are overcome by insight into their necessary role in the
totality. It is against this harmonising view that Philosophy and Religion
began to protest.
Schelling’s new departure after the first attempts at an identity phi¬
losophy, which begins with On the Essence of Human Freedom, reawak¬
ens issues from the Pantheism controversy. The problem with
Pantheism is that it seems either to deny the existence of evil or to
entail a God who is in part evil. If one tries to avoid Pantheism, one
is left with the problem of Philosophy and Religion: a dualism which
makes the manifest world and its privations incomprehensible, be¬
cause there can be no reason for God to create something imperfect.
This need not just be understood in theological terms. The problem
is again that of explaining the world in more than the terms of mod¬
ern science, for which negativity is just the result of natural causal
processes. As Fichte had shown, though, consciousness, the very con¬
dition of explanation itself, is inexplicable if there are only “condi¬
tioned conditions”.
Schelling’s work from his middle period, usually referred to as the
philosophy of the Ages of the World, which stretches from roughly 1809
until the 1820s, can be seen as an attempt to give an account of the
emergence of the world’s intelligibility whilst acknowledging mind’s
inextricable relation to matter. Schelling thereby retains the core of
the theory of identity but uses it in a different manner. The vital fac¬
tor in the avoidance of Spinozist materialism is an appropriate under¬
standing of freedom. From 1809 onwards, Schelling understands
freedom as the freedom to do good and evil, not as the Kantian giv¬
ing of the moral law to oneself. The most evident new aspect of
Schelling’s philosophy, beginning with the period of the Ages of the
World, is its introduction of struggles at points where in the earlier
identity philosophy there had been continuous transitions. Schelling’s
project is to explain the fact that we have a world which is intelligible,
while not assuming that this world is simply the underlying sub¬
stance’s reflection back to itself of its essence. The Naturphilosophie
had worked with the idea of an inherent contradiction in all of nature,
which drives nature beyond itself. This contradiction is now under¬
stood in terms of the relationship of intelligibility to a ground without
which there could be no intelligibility but to which intelligibility can¬
not be reduced. This is a more conflictual version of his theory of the
structure of identity. The model is of a ground which is the insepa-
20 Translator’s Introduction

rable correlate of what moves beyond it. This move beyond the
ground leads to a constant struggle against it. At the same time, what
emerges could not be as itself without the ground. In order for free¬
dom to realise itself, it must have the possibility of non-realisation,
which Schelling now understands as the possibility of evil.
Schelling’s change of vision is evident in the way that the ground, as
the unity which links all finite things, now leads us, as finite beings, to
a vision of the “deep, indestructible melancholy of all life” (I/7 p. 399),
not to the serene insight into the necessary place of things in the to¬
tality of the first identity philosophy. “God”, as what makes the world
intelligible, relates to the ground in such a way that the “real”, what
becomes material nature, is in God but “is not God seen absolutely, i.e.
insofar as He exists; for it is only the ground of His existence, it is
nature in God; an essence which is inseparable from God but different
from Him” (I/7 p. 358). The implications of such an argument for
theology are evidently quite startling: if God is not to be nature, He
actually requires nature in order for Him to be what is above it, which
is what makes Him divine.
Even seen non-theologically, the argument has important conse¬
quences. Schelling now develops the identity theory in terms of the
story of conflicting forces whose struggles constitute the “ages of the
world”. He argues that the world whose origins he seeks to under¬
stand must entail the same conflicting forces which still act, though
not necessarily in the same form, in this world, of which the mind is an
aspect: “In us there are two principles, an unconscious, dark principle
and a conscious principle” (I/7 p. 433); “What we call understanding,
if it is real, living, active understanding, is really nothing but regulated
madness. Understanding can manifest itself, show itself, only in its op¬
posite, thus in what lacks understanding” (I/7 p. 470). As we saw in
the System of Transcendental Idealism, the problem Schelling repeatedly
faces is that the centre of his philosophy cannot be understood con¬
ceptually, in terms of its difference from other existents, because it is
the very condition of any kind of difference. If matter is always al¬
ready what Schelling terms “real-ideal”, because otherwise the emer¬
gence of life and consciousness is inexplicable, one cannot give an
account of that emergence merely in terms of mechanical explana¬
tion. We must therefore always be aware that what is articulated in
philosophy is grounded in what itself cannot be articulated. The
philosophical development of this basic thought will be what most ob¬
viously separates Schelling from Hegel.
Schelling claims that “Poured from the source of things and the
same as the source, the human soul has a co-knowledge/con-science
(Mitwissenschaft) of creation" (WA I p. 4). The basis of this claim is that
 Identity and Difference 21

each phase of development carries within it, as its existential condi¬

tion of possibility, the necessity which preceded it:

man learns that his peaceful dwelling place is built on the hearth of a prime¬
val fire, he notices that even in the primal being itself something had to be
posited as past before the present time became possible, that this past re¬
mains hidden in the ground and that the same principle carries and holds us
in its ineffectiveness which would consume and destroy us in its effectiveness
{WA I p. 13).

This connection to the past is evident in the way the Ages of the World
conceives of freedom. One does not choose one’s character, Schelling
argues, but this does not mean we think people incapable of free ac¬
tion and concomitant moral responsibility. There is “a region in which
there is no ground/reason (Grund) at all but rather absolute freedom.
The “unground” (Ungrund) of eternity lies this close in every person,
and each is horrified by it if it is brought to his consciousness” {WA I
P- 93)- Our sense of the lack of reason for our own existence enables
us to understand what God does when He freely takes on nature.
There can be no reason for God’s taking on of nature, because that
would make God’s freedom have a ground, thereby rendering Him
dependent and determined. The fact that there is no reason why each
person is that particular person does not mean that one cannot as¬
sume responsibility for oneself, despite the contingency of one’s own
existence. “Freedom” seen in this way includes, of course, the free¬
dom to do evil: “When the abysses of the human heart open them¬
selves in evil and those terrible thoughts come forth which ought to
remain eternally buried in night and darkness; only then do we know
what possibilities lie in man and how his nature is for itself or when
left to itself (1/8 p. 268)”. The problem Schelling tries to deal with in
this way is essentially the problem of Philosophy and Religion. Why does
God take on the ground, given that he has no need of anything? Less
theologically: why is being manifest at all?
Wolfram Hogrebe (Hogrebe 1989) has suggested that the Ages of the
World should be understood as a theory of predication which develops
aspects of Schelling’s theory of identity. In this work being, as initially
One, is not manifest and has no reason to be manifest: Hogrebe terms
it “pronominal being” (ibid., p. 83). The problem is that the same be¬
ing must also be “predicative being” (ibid.), which “flows out, spreads,
gives itself” (1/8 pp. 210-11), since there is now a manifest world. The
contradiction is only apparent, Schelling claims: “the properly under¬
stood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot be as
the same something and also the opposite thereof, but this does not
prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other, to be not A” (1/8
22 Translator's Introduction

pp. 213—14). One aspect of being is contractive, the other expansive.

If there were only the former, there would be no manifest world at all;
if there were only the latter, the world would, as was suggested in the
Naturphilosophie, dissipate itself at infinite speed. Dynamic processes
are therefore the result of the interaction of these forces. For some¬
thing to be “as” something, it must both “be” in the positive sense in
which everything else is, which makes it indeterminately positive, and
it must have a negative relation to what it is not, if it is to be deter¬
minate. Without the ground of identity, differentiation is not possi¬
ble. After the One has come into contradiction with itself, the two
forces constantly vie with each other. Differences must, though, as we
have seen, be grounded in unity, since otherwise they could not be
manifest at all as differences.
The central issue is the emergence of articulacy from what is ini¬
tially inarticulate, both at the level of the natural world and at the
level of consciousness. As was already the case in the Naturphilosophie
and the identity philosophy, Schelling regards the whole universe as
constituted in the dynamic tension between the “real” and the “ideal”,
which are here seen as contraction and expansion. Schelling describes
the development of articulation of the world as a development of
what he terms the “Word”. In this he takes up aspects of varying theo¬
logical traditions, from the Kabbala to Bohme’s mysticism and Ha-
mann’s philosophy of language. At all levels, the need for expression
is a result of the battle of contractive and expansive forces, which
pushes the primal being beyond itself into articulated forms. The ini¬
tial stages of this are an agonising battle for release from the tension
between the forces. This then leads to the tension being channelled
into forms which can temporarily alleviate it.
The Word results from mediation of the conflict between the con¬
tractive and the expansive force:

It seems universal that every creature which cannot contain itself or draw it¬
self together in its own fullness, draws itself together outside itself, whence,
e.g., the elevated miracle of the formation of the word in the mouth belongs,
which is a true creation of the full inside when it can no longer remain in
itself (WA I pp. 56-7).

This forming process happens both at the level of the material cos¬
mos and at the level of consciousness. The whole universe, as the link,
the Band, of the expansive ideal and the contractive real,

is very expressively termed the “word”, (a) because in it and with it all capacity
for differentiation begins; (b) because in it being-self and not-being-self. . .
are organically linked . . . the being which is dumb for itself is first raised to
comprehensibility by the ideal (I/7 pp. 442-3).
 Schelling and Hegel
23

The development of forms and structures in the material world de¬

pends upon the expanding force’s interaction with what is able to slow
the expansion, thereby allowing transient but determinate forms to
develop. T his basic interaction is also constitutive of consciousness.
Schelling stresses that consciousness itself has to emerge via its other:

There is no consciousness without something which is both excluded and at¬

tracted. That which is conscious of itself excludes what it is conscious of as not
itself and yet must also attract it as, precisely, that of which it is conscious, thus
as itself, only in another form (1/8 p. 262).

The later philosophy, as is particularly evident in the attention paid

in the section of the Lectures on Naturphilosophic to the question of
this “attraction”, presents a subject whose ground in the past of na¬
ture prevents it from ever being able to achieve “self-presence”. As
Schelling puts it in the Lectures,

But the subject can never grasp itself as what it Is, for precisely in attracting
itself (t'm sich-Anziehen) it becomes an other, this is the basic contradiction, we
can say the misfortune in all being - for either it leaves itself, then it is as
nothing, or it attracts itself, then it is an other and not identical with itself1
(I/10 p. 101).

This conception became a major point of contention in Schelling’s

disagreement with Hegel. Although the Ages of the World itself re¬
mained an unfinished project, Schelling seemed to see his later phi¬
losophy in much the same perspective, using the title “Ages of the
World” at least as late as 1827, when key motifs of the later philoso¬
phy had already developed. The vital question for us now is the emer¬
gence of Schelling’s opposition to Hegel on the basis of the new
insights of the Ages of the World into the relationship of consciousness
to its ground.

SCHELLING AND HEGEL

The influence of complex theological, historical and ideological fac¬

tors on the reception of Schelling’s later philosophy at the time of its
production and in the years following obscured its specifically philo¬
sophical import (see Frank’s introduction to Schelling 1977). Decid¬
ing when Schelling started to make a clear distinction between
negative and positive philosophy — the criterion for dating the late
philosophy - is difficult, but certain key ideas already began to de¬
velop in the early 1820s and were clearly in place by 1827. The im¬
portance of the late philosophy really depends on the ideas that
Schelling uses against Hegel, many of which were adopted, without
24 Translator’s Introduction

acknowledgement of their source, by others such as Kierkegaard and

Feuerbach. Let me briefly summarize Schelling’s critique of Hegel.
Hegel thought he had overcome the problem of the relation of the
Absolute to the finite world, which had troubled Schelling all along,
when he arrived at his method in the Phenomenology of Mind in 1807.
Hegel’s objection to Schelling was, one should note, probably not ex¬
pressed in the famous jibe about the Absolute as the “night in
which ... all cows are black” (Hegel 1970 p. 22). Schelling had used a
similar expression himself, in a text Hegel probably knew, when he
claimed in 1802 that he wanted to show “how that night of the Ab¬
solute can be turned into day for knowledge” (I/4 p. 403). Hegel’s real
objection was to something which Schelling continued to insist upon,
albeit in differing ways, for nearly all his career - namely, beginning
philosophy with the Absolute. For Hegel, the Absolute is “essentially
a result... it is only at the end what it is in truth” (Hegel 1970 pp. 23—
4). The Absolute can be articulated within philosophy because it is the
result of a process of “reflection”, where what begins as “immediacy”
becomes what it is in truth by mediation. In the same way as I become
“for myself” when I move beyond myself and reflect myself in a mir¬
ror, for Hegel what is “reflected” becomes for itself rather than re¬
maining in opaque immediacy in itself. In Hegel’s eyes Schelling had
created a problem by failing to show that the very nature of the Ab¬
solute is “reflexive” and thus does not require anything that precedes
or carries reflection. For Hegel, everything is the “other of itself”, be¬
cause there is nothing which is not “mediated” by its relations to what
it is not. Everything is therefore dependent upon what it is not in or¬
der to be itself. Once it can be revealed how this is the case, the artic¬
ulation of the Absolute can be carried out in philosophy.
Novalis already provided a rough image of how to conceive of He¬
gel’s solution, when, in the “Fichte Studies” of 1795-6, he suggested,
“The Whole rests rather like people who play the game of sitting
down in a circle, without a chair, with each just sitting on the knee of
the other” (Novalis 1978 p. 152). In this view, each finite element of
the totality has within it its own negation, in the sense that it depends
upon an other for it to be itself. Dieter Henrich says of Hegel’s con¬
ception of the Absolute that “The Absolute is the finite to the extent
to which the finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself”
(Henrich 1982 p. 160). The Absolute evidently cannot in one sense be
the finite, but if the fundamental characteristic of the finite is to ne¬
gate itself, then the Absolute can be said to relate “to its Other as to
itself” (ibid. p. 166), so that, in another sense, the other, the finite, is
itself. A complete system of philosophy becomes possible in this con¬
ception, because the final insight is into the relativity of everything
 Schelling and Hegel 25

particular. Hegel articulates the basis of such a system in the Logic,

which first appeared between 1812 and 1816, by showing how each
successive particular way of conceiving of the world cannot grasp the
whole because it has an internal contradiction and necessarily leads to
more comprehensive ways of grasping the world, until the point is
reached where there can be no more comprehensive way because
there is no longer any contradiction that would give rise to it. In this
manner the very fact of the limitations of empirical thought becomes
what gives rise to the infinite, which, in Hegel’s terms, is thought that
is bounded by itself and by nothing else. The advantage of such a
method is that it apparently does not require anything external to it,
thereby avoiding both dualism and the problems of the transition
from the infinite to the finite of the kind that Jacobi had made so im¬
portant in the Pantheism controversy and which Schelling spent so
much time trying to overcome.
Schelling accepted a version of Hegel’s method, considered as an
account of how knowledge develops, and continued his attempts to
develop it until the end, as is evident in the Philosophical Introduction to
the Philosophy of Mythology or Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy,
written between 1847 and 1852. What he comes to reject is the idea
that it is a complete system of philosophy. The simple reason is that it
is only a “negative system”: it tells one what happens once there is a
world but has nothing to say about the fact that there is a world at all.
Schelling therefore is led to the demand for a “positive philosophy”
which would come to terms with the facticity of the world. This fac-
ticity cannot be explained by being grasped in thought because it is
the condition of possibility of thought’s very existence. Such a con¬
ception might sound like just the sort of “immediacy” which Hegel
claimed he had overcome, but this is not the case, as we shall see. In
order to do philosophical justice to Schelling, I shall omit the theo¬
logical arguments which are the main aim of the positive philosophy:
his central point against Hegel does not require them, and they do
not provide what he hopes to establish with them anyway. The key
argument that Schelling develops in the later philosophy emerges in
the lectures that he gave in Erlangen in 1820—1, a transcript of which,
edited by Horst Fuhrmans, was published under the title Initia
Philosophiae Universae (Schelling 1969, hereafter cited as Initia).
Clearly influenced by Hegel’s arguments, Schelling pursues aims sim¬
ilar to Hegel’s but departs from Hegel’s approach at a crucial point.
This departure forms the core of his critique of Hegel in the Lectures
and elsewhere.
The vital issue is the status of “reflexivity”, the relationship be¬
tween subject and object. In a dialectical view such as Hegel’s, the mo-
26 Translator’s Introduction

tivation for extending knowledge results from the feeling of the

resistance of the object, which becomes the limit beyond which the
subject must have already moved for the object to be a limit. This
leads to a process in which the immediacy of the object and the im¬
mediacy of the subject cancel each other out in the process of their
interaction, which moves from the most primitive level of reflexive
difference to the level of philosophical articulation of that interac¬
tion. The process is therefore itself ultimately the Absolute, in that
thought and being are shown to be identical at the end of the process.
Schelling himself describes such a process in the description of his
own Naturphilosophie in the Lectures. He does so, though, with a fun¬
damental reservation concerning the applicability of the conception.
The standard assumption about both the Schelling of the identity
philosophy and the Schelling of the later philosophy is that he simply
asserts, as a given, that being or the Absolute is resistant to knowledge
because it is the prior condition of the subject-object structure. In
this view, being, in Schelling, is seen in the early philosophy as acces¬
sible to us only via a mystical “intellectual intuition” and in the later
philosophy as accessible by the dogmatic assertion of the facticity of
“being which precedes all thought” (unvordenkliches Seyn). Understood
in this way, Schelling’s position is open to the Hegelian charge of as¬
serting in a positive manner what cannot be stated. The reason for
this is that in Hegel’s view, stating the fact that being is prior to
thought entails “reflection”, an articulation of being’s relation to
thought which can necessarily be carried out only in thought. As
such, being itself, in the Hegelian view, must also be “negative”, de¬
pendent upon its “other”, thought. Schelling is seen, then, as claiming
immediate access to what must, if it is to play any role in thinking, be
mediated. (For this objection, see, e.g., Klaus Brinkmann’s essay in
ed. Hartmann 1976, and White 1983a, b.)
Schelling’s argument in the Initia shows that he does not take the
path of simple immediacy, as Manfred Frank has demonstrated
(Frank 1975 pp. 123-30). In his system, Schelling, like Hegel, wishes
to avoid Spinozism, and he therefore seems to follow Hegel’s doctrine
that the “substance is subject”, by insisting that what is in question as
the condition of possibility of the system is the “absolute subject”, the
condition of all predicates. The absolute subject cannot be charac¬
terised by a predicate, as that would contradict its essence: “this One
subject must go through everything and remain in nothing. For if it
remained anywhere, life and development would be hindered. To go
through everything and to be nothing, namely not to be anything such that
it could not also be otherwise - this is the demand” (Initia pp. 16-17).
The crucial factor is the subject’s ability to “enclose itself in a form
 Schelling and Hegel 27

and not to do so”, its “freedom”: this is evidently a development of a

central aspect of the Ages of the World. By talking of freedom in this
way, one would seem to characterise the subject by a predicate. How¬
ever, the freedom of the subject is not a determinable attribute, be¬
cause, as we just saw, the subject can be both A and not-A, enclosed in
a form and not enclosed. This point is fundamental. Freedom in this
view is the ground of the world’s being disclosed in ways which we
cannot attribute to the activity of our consciousness. What we know is,
as in Spinoza, determined in reflexive terms; the fact that we know
cannot be.
Schelling’s vital point depends upon the demonstration that the re¬
lationship of thought and being becomes inverted if being is under¬
stood in reflexive terms. Consciousness, he maintains, attributes the
world to its own activity when in fact it is the prior activity of the
world that is consciousness’s condition of possibility. The world’s be¬
coming knowable seems to result from its incorporation into thinking.
Schelling sees this as happening in the following manner. Because it
manifests itself as an external world by splitting into subject and ob¬
ject (leaving aside, for now, the question of why this should take
place), the “absolute subject” can become internalised as knowledge
by consciousness, which has thereby become the necessary other of
the object world’s being manifest. This means that the world, as the
realm of knowable objects, comes to seem to be the result of conscious¬
ness, to be the predicate of the conscious subject. Knowledge is thus
able to encompass the totality of the world, much as Hegel argued.
The difficult move to grasp is the inversion that Schelling reveals as
inherent in the notion of thought as the reflexive other of being. What
is grasped in thought, he claims, are determinate manifestations of
the “absolute subject”. Knowledge, as that which can be stated in true
judgements, results when the absolute subject becomes the object
world that manifests itself in thought: “As the object reflects itself in
the water, in the same way the absolute subject stands in an inverted
relationship to consciousness” (Initia p. 44). What results in the chang¬
ing and developing object world that we can know is not any thing
that can itself be known: one can arrive at the necessity of its existence
only when thinking tries, and fails, to ground itself in an absolute
manner. Objects about which true judgements can be made can be ob¬
jects only via a reflexive division from the subject, but what gives rise
to reflexive divisions cannot itself be characterised in reflexive terms:
“The absolute subject is only there to the extent to which I do not
make it into an object, i.e., do not know it, renounce knowledge” (Initia
p. 38). We can think of the absolute subject only as the object that for
us can be reflected in consciousness; grasping its whole structure
28 Translator's Introduction

would require a perspective from which both the object and its reflec¬
tion in consciousness can be seen and be known as the same. Con¬
sciousness, though, can see only a reflection, which involves an
illusion, in that what is reflected does not appear as itself but as an
inverted image of itself. We can even make a further move by correct¬
ing this inversion in thought, by acknowledging that it is only an im¬
itation, but that still means we remain in thought and thus have failed
to show how thought is grounded in being, which requires a transcen¬
dence of thought.
This difficult argument comes down to the fact that I cannot know
the absolute subject, because there is no predicate that I can attribute
to it which would be able to say what it is: any such predicate, as we
saw, would contradict the subject’s freedom to “enclose itself in a form
and not to do so”. All I can say is that there must be that which car¬
ries the process of the differentiated world, that “goes through ev¬
erything and remains in nothing”. Thought itself can also go through
everything and remain in nothing by encompassing an infinity of dif¬
ferentiation and change in the knowable world whilst remaining it¬
self. In this way the apparent identity of thinking’s encompassing of
the development of the object world with the activity of the absolute
subject is a repetition, but only in thought, of what is the prior real
ground of thought. In consequence, the ground cannot be encom¬
passed by thought: “in man there is no objective bringing forth but
rather just ideal imitation (ideales Nachbilden) ... in him there is only
knowledge” (ibid. p. 27). There is no place from which the identity of
the “imitation” with what it imitates can be known, because knowl¬
edge depends on consciousness. Consciousness itself depends upon
the division in the Absolute that gives rise to a manifest world by split¬
ting subject and object.
The identity of thinking and being, which Schelling does not deny,
thus depends upon what cannot be reflexively identified within
thought, because thought must come after the division which gives
rise to consciousness. Being therefore cannot appear as itself, because
to do so it would itself have to be in a structure of reflection: it would
have to be reflected in an other, thinking. The problem with the no¬
tion of reflection is that it entails a logic which excludes precisely
what has to be established, the identity of thinking and being that al¬
lows being to know itself as an object of thinking. Being could know
itself as itself in thinking, via reflection in an other, only if it already
had a non-reflexive access to what it is. Without this access it would
have no way to identify itself as being with itself as thinking, because
it would not be able to say that its reflection is the same as itself. As
Fichte had realized, to see myself as myself in a mirror I must already
 Schelling and Hegel
29

have access to myself as myself before the reflection: otherwise I

could be just seeing a random object in the world and would have no
means of knowing that what I see is myself. (See Bowie 1990 chap. 3.)
Being therefore has to be immediately identical with its other if a re¬
gress is to be avoided: “This relationship, this interchange could not
take place if our consciousness were not eternal freedom which has
come to itself, and vice versa, or if eternal freedom and our knowl¬
edge or consciousness were not originally One” (ibid. p. 47). This can
be the case only if reflexive division, which is the cognitive basis of the
relation of subject and object, is not the real condition of possibility of
this identity. As Manfred Frank puts it, “there is no concept of being
outside the concept which appears on the horizon of a self-negation
of reflection” (Frank 1984 p. 354). It is solely on the basis of what is
“originally One”, a prior irreflexive identity, which cannot be grasped
in a concept - because that would entail differentiating it from other
things - that reflexive differentiation can be understood. For us,
therefore, immediacy is the necessary result of a process of reflection,
not something which thought invokes to begin with. Once reflection,
the cognitive ground of that beginning, has been shown not to be its
real ground, though, the real beginning does, as Schelling nearly al¬
ways argued, become the central problem in thinking about the Ab¬
solute’s move into a determinate world.
Schelling’s argument does not mean that knowledge becomes im¬
possible, but it does mean that knowledge cannot be a representation of
the true world in itself. It is not that there is another kind of knowl¬
edge that we can hope for only via some kind of mystical access to the
world in itself: what we think of as the process of knowledge is all the
knowledge there can be. The identity exhibited in a true judgement
cannot, as Hegel suggests it can, just be the final result of the process
of reflection, because it can be known to be the result only if it always
already is this identity.
Being, “eternal freedom”, therefore entails an inherent non¬
identity for us as thinking beings, in that it cannot be thought of in
any other way than as the “Terminus a quo of our thinking. . . . Eter¬
nal freedom is the unthinkable, that which no one can think of as ever
being, but eternally only as past!having-been been (gewesen)” (India p. 92).
We saw in the identity philosophy how Schelling used the copula as a
transitive verb. He now begins to make use of an etymology that is
crucial for understanding the later philosophy. The German Wesen,
which can sometimes be translated as “essence”, also has the impor¬
tant sense of what has been “been” in a transitive manner. Wesen de¬
pends, therefore, on the prior being which carries it and is therefore
the lack of full being, which tries to overcome this lack in the concept.
30 Translator’s Introduction

All we know are the results of what has been “been”, which does not
give us access to the final truth about what has brought this about. It
is this failure of reflection to ground itself that leads Schelling to the
notion of positive philosophy, which he conceives of as a theology that
does not fall prey to Spinozism. This brings us again to Jacobi’s prob¬
lem. The failure of reflection described in the Initia leads to a familiar
issue: the chain of conditioned conditions, even when viewed as the
activity of the “absolute subject”, does not account for the fact of the
world at all, unless one has a Spinozist conception of God, which is
what Schelling has opposed all along.
By the later 1820s Schelling had begun to radicalise his insights into
this problem into a verdict on the “common mistake of every philos¬
ophy that has existed up to now”, namely the “merely logical relation¬
ship of God to the world” in those philosophies (Schelling 1990
p. 57). In 1827-8 he applied this criticism to the conception of being
in Hegel’s Logic: “This being had to transform itself for no reason into
existence (Dasein) and the external world and then into the inner
world of the concept. The consequence was that the living substance,
as a result of the most abstract concepts, was left only in thought”
(ibid. p. 58). The crucial factor in the “merely logical relationship” is
that the priority of thought and being is reversed in the manner we
saw in the Initia. This reversal is what makes something into a nega¬
tive philosophy. Negative philosophy is exemplified in a system like
Hegel’s Logic. Such a system can be self-contained because it is con¬
stituted via the principle of reflection, in which each moment of
thought, as in the identity philosophy, is constituted negatively, by not
being the other elements. Schelling wants philosophy to come to
terms with the very existence of such a system, which cannot be done
from within the system and requires a positive philosophy. Schelling is
prepared, as we saw, to acknowledge the inner necessity of a system of
philosophy, such as the explanation of the dynamic stages of the de¬
velopment of nature in the Naturphilosophie, but he now demands an
answer to the question of why there is such a necessity at all. There is
no logical explanation of this within the system itself; it is a “fact”.
This fact has, then, to be considered as unconditioned, as “absolute”.
Schelling, reminding us of the importance of Fichte for his opposition
to Spinozism, calls the fact a free “deed”, in order to remove any sense
of its being like a determinate thing. In this way what leads to the
disclosed, living world cannot be explained in the same terms as what
it gives rise to. God is therefore the subject of positive philosophy,
whilst the world of determinate knowledge is articulated in negative
philosophy.
 Schelling and Hegel 3i

The tension displayed between the positions of Hegel and Schelling

has exemplary significance for modern thought. Hegel’s system and
his method remove the problem of the facticity of the world by seeing
thought, properly understood, as the world’s self-articulation. Schell-
ing insists that reason cannot explain the fact of its own existence and
thus cannot encompass itself and its other within a system of philos¬
ophy. If we are to make sense of the manifest world, Schelling argues,
we cannot do so by beginning with reason but must begin with the
contingency of being and try to make sense of it with the reason
which is one aspect, but only one aspect, of it. Schelling does, unsuc¬
cessfully, try to make theological sense of the world, but the reasons
he gives for beginning this way do not require a theological legitima¬
tion. The key philosophical issue which Schelling repeatedly analyses
is the “ontological proof of God”. Schelling regards Hegel’s system as
an attempt to salvage the ontological proof and regards Hegel’s phi¬
losophy as flawed because it relies on the identity of thought and be¬
ing in a manner which allows thought to dominate its other.
Schelling concentrates on the ontological proof because it reveals
how philosophy prior to his own has failed to distinguish adequately
between kinds of being. One must, Schelling maintains, see the dif¬
ference between that which exists in a necessary manner-the do¬
main of negative philosophy - and that which necessarily exists, the
domain of the positive. The ontological proof moves invalidly from
the former to the latter, by assuming that the most complete abstract
notion at which thought is capable of arriving, God, conceived of as
that which exists in a necessary manner, has in fact to exist. The dif¬
ference also has important consequences for the rest of Descartes’s ar¬
gument and, by implication, for Hegel’s. Thinking must exist, as
Descartes demonstrates in the “Cogito ergo sum”, but all this estab¬
lishes is a kind of existence, existence as thinking; to this extent,
doubting the existence of the external world is invalid, because it also
must have some kind of existence if it is to be doubted in the first
place. In both cases the kind of existence is negative, in that they are
“not not at all" (I/10 p. 11) but cannot be said to be the absolute basis
of themselves. This leads Schelling to the demand for “what abso¬
lutely cannot not be” (Schelling 1972 p. 133). The vital fact is that
there can be no reason for this absolute being, in that it is itself the
non-necessitated “cause” of there being reasons for things at all. All
along Schelling is insisting, against Hegel, that one cannot articulate
the identity of thought and being within thought, because this must
always presuppose that they are identical in a manner which thought, as
one side of a relation, cannot encompass. Hegel sought to avoid this
32 Translator’s Introduction

presupposition, because it meant that philosophy is unable to account

for why there should be a difference between finite and infinite.
Schelling, on the other hand, explicitly made the problem of why
there is anything at all central in his philosophy, from 1804 (see 1/6
p. 155) until the end (see II/3 p. 7).
Can Schelling, though, validly talk of “being which is absolutely out¬
side thought. . ., absolutely transcendent being” (II/3 p. 127) without
transgressing all the Kantian strictures against talking of the tran¬
scendent that led Hegel to his system of immanence? Schelling’s ar¬
gument goes as follows. Thinking is concerned with possibility, the
possibility of revealing the “essence” of things. Essence is constituted
negatively, in reflection, by the relations of things to other things. Be¬
ing (in Schelling’s sense) cannot involve possibility, because what en¬
ables possibility cannot itself be a possibility, it must already be an
actuality: “it would be . . . nonsense to ask whether a being that nec¬
essarily exists could exist. . . . For if it only could exist, it would for that
reason not be what necessarily exists” (II/3 p. 166). Whereas, in He¬
gel’s Logic the category of essence is one stage of the articulation of
the Absolute, for Schelling being cannot be conceived of in terms of
essence: “One might object: a reality which precedes all possibility
cannot be thought. One can admit this in a certain sense and say: pre¬
cisely for that reason it is the beginning of all thinking - for the be¬
ginning of thinking is not yet itself thinking” (II/3 p. 162). If the
beginning were already thinking, Hegel’s self-enclosed system would
be possible, but this repeats the problem of the ontological proof, be¬
cause it entails the move from the concept of being to being itself,
which is, as we saw, invalid.
Schelling presents the basic alternative as follows:

For either the concept would have to go first, and being would have to be the
consequence of the concept, which would mean it was no longer absolute be¬
ing; or the concept is the consequence of being, then we must begin with be¬
ing without the concept (II/3 p. 164).

The difference is between being’s dependence upon essence for it to

be known and essence’s dependence upon being for it to be. Hegel
attempts to merge the two by making being part of a structure of re¬
flection, rather than the ground of that structure. He invalidly as¬
sumes that essence, which is one side of the relation between being
and essence, can articulate its identity with the other side. This entails
a move which turns even the immediacy of being into a form of re¬
flection, thereby allowing it to be integrated into the process of the
negation of the negation. To achieve this, Hegel has to make being as
“simple immediacy” into “an expression of reflection” (Hegel I 1969
 Schelling and Hegel
33

p. 68).3 If the category of being is to be determinate, Hegel must

demonstrate that it inherently entails relation, negativity, within it¬
self, which drives it forward into “essence”, defined as “being which
mediates itself with itself via the negativity of itself” (Hegel 1959
P !23)-
As Henrich (1971) shows, though, this move depends upon equat¬
ing two meanings of “immediacy”, so that the other of reflection, im¬
mediate being, turns out to depend upon reflection for it to be truly
itself, and thus to be reflection, a negative structure of relation. The
only way this is possible is to presuppose the identity of the immediacy
of essence (which is the necessarily positive result of the self¬
cancellation of negation) with the immediacy of being, so that being’s
“sameness only with itself” and essence’s “relation of the negative to
itself” are in fact the same and can be known as such (ibid. pp. 122-3).
If the Logic is to work, though, such presuppositions, as we saw, must
be avoided. This is why there must not be any positive foundations in
the Logic, and why what is positive can, like the immediacy of essence,
only be the result of the negation of the negation. Hegel thinks that
equating the two forms of immediacy allows him to make what ap¬
pears most resistant to mediation, the apparently positive prior fact of
being, into something which can be known via its dependence upon
what appears to succeed it: essence, and then the concept.
The problem that Hegel does not overcome is, though, that this
identity cannot be known, because, as Schelling argues in relation to
his own notion of being, “existing is not here the consequence of the
concept or of essence, but rather existence is here itself the concept
and itself the essence” (II/3 p. 167). The structure of this argument
derives from Fichte’s “original insight” (Henrich 1967) into the prob¬
lem of reflection that we noted earlier: identifying one’s reflection in
a mirror as oneself (understood now as a metaphor for essence) en¬
tails a prior non-reflexive awareness if one is to know that the reflec¬
tion is oneself rather than a random reflected object. Hegel relies on
making being a consequence of its notion, by seeing it as negative in
the same way as everything is negative until it has been fully compre¬
hended at the end of the process of negation of the negation. The
core of Schelling’s critique is that this comprehension is possible only
if what thought considers to be negatively differentiated is already
positively, and thus irreflexively, identical at the beginning. Hegel re¬
peats the invalid move in the ontological proof because he deals only
with the negative determinacy of being in thought, not with the prior

s I rely in this matter on the classic account of the failure of Hegel’s “logic of re¬
flection", Henrich 1971, which deals with this complex issue more fully than is
possible here; on its relation to Schelling, see Frank 1975 and Bowie 1990a, 1993.
34 Translator's Introduction

positive fact of the condition of possibility of what becomes determi¬

nate as thought. Schelling will not allow a notion of what is indepen¬
dent of thought that smuggles in the dependence of being on its
concept: “If we want anything at all which is outside thought, then we
must begin with a being which is absolutely independent of all think¬
ing, which precedes all thinking. Hegelian philosophy knows nothing
of this being, it has no place for this concept” (II/3 p. 164). It has no
place for it because for Hegel’s system to work being must be shown to
depend on the concept.
What, though, are the consequences of Schelling’s refusal to make
being depend on the concept, which is his key contribution to modern
philosophy? The suspicion of irrationalism directed at the later
Schelling by Lukacs and others, who explicitly or implicitly rely on
Hegel, would seem to be confirmed when Schelling talks of reason
being “posited outside itself, absolutely ecstatic” (II/3 p. 163), and of
the “overthrow of reason” (II/3 p. 162). Schelling, however, insists
that “conceptless being” is posited in order to “again make it the con¬
tent of reason” (II/3 p. 170). This is, therefore, not a celebration of
the irrational ground of the illusions of reason of the kind that has
recently again become all too familiar but rather a correction of a par¬
ticular conception of reason in which reason becomes narcissistic and
only sees the world as a reflection of itself. Schelling opens up the
space for a radical critique of this conception of reason. He asks in the
1830s, for example, “why is there sense/meaning (Sinn) at all, why is
there not nonsense/meaninglessness (Unsinn)?” (Schelling 1972
p. 222). He even insists, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Revelation
or Foundation of the Positive Philosophy, that

our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature which has
passed through everything, it is precisely just our consciousness ... for the
consciousness of man is not = the consciousness of nature. . . . Far from man
and his activity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which
is most incomprehensible (II/3 pp. 5-7).

At the same time, though, Schelling does undertake a theological sal¬

vage job, which tries to reveal in the experience of history the divinity
of the “merely existing”, in a “continually progressing, continually
growing” proof of God (Schelling 1977 p. 147). As Michael Theunis-
sen points out (Theunissen 1976 p. 22), Schelling thereby merely re¬
verses the ontological proof by invalidly attributing, in thought,
divinity to being. However, Schelling’s failure to come up with a pos¬
itive theological alternative to Hegel’s metaphysics does not affect the
philosophical validity of his critique.
Schelling’s theories hold renewed significance for the changing im-
age of modern philosophy that has begun to develop in recent years.
 References 35

A growing suspicion of scientistic and realist conceptions of knowl¬

edge has begun a move back towards the Hegel whose main achieve¬
ment is seen as a method of avoiding positive foundations for human
knowledge. Ultimately, though, Hegel seems likely to return us to an,
albeit more sophisticated, version of realism, which sustains the nar¬
cissistic relation of thinking and being exposed by Schelling. Aspects
of Schelling’s philosophy suggest an alternative to a representational
conception, without giving up the demand, which he still shared with
Hegel, that philosophy explicate a notion of reason.
The fact is that by establishing the “otherness” of being in relation
to any subject-object structure, Schelling began to show the impos¬
sibility of “self-presence” and of any representational or metaphysical
realist conception of truth, an approach usually assumed to have be¬
gun only with Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Heidegger. There is in
Schelling’s work a clear demonstration that there can be nothing that
could mirror back to our thinking about the world what would make
it ultimately true of the world. Schelling denies that the world
emerges via any kind of logical necessity: “what we call the world,
which is so completely contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot
possibly be the impression of something which has arisen by the ne¬
cessity of reason ... it contains a preponderant mass of unreason” (Schell¬
ing 1972 p. 99). At the same time it is important to remind ourselves
again that, despite all that Schelling does to begin the destruction of
the model of representation, he, unlike many of his successors, never
ceases to be an advocate of reason. Schelling explicitly rejects the idea
that “reason”, as the “infinite potential for cognition”, must itself be
put into question as merely the result of something else: “there is no
question whether there could be a potential for infinite cognition —
for this would be to ask whether there could be a reason, which no one
thinks of asking, everyone presupposes that there is reason” (II/3 p.
74). This is not a naive failure to see that people will ask, as they
clearly do, whether there could be reason. Schelling’s point is that
without the presupposition of reason one cannot even begin to ques¬
tion the status of reason. The presupposition, though, cannot finally
be grounded by reason itself: the most significant positions in subse¬
quent modern philosophy can be seen as responses to this situation,
which Schelling was one of the first to articulate.

REFERENCES

All translations are my own. The following abbreviations are used in the ci¬
tations in the Introduction and the translator’s notes: (I/10 p. 121) refers to
part, volume, and page in Schelling’s works (Schelling 1856—64). WA refers to
36 Translator's Introduction

his Die Weltalter (Ages of the World) (Schelling 1946). India refers to his India
Philosophiae Universae (Schelling 1969).

Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte.
Cambridge, Mass., 1987.
Bowie, Andrew. “The Actuality of Schelling’s Hegel-Critique.” Bulletin of the
Hegel Society of Great Britain, double issue (21-2) 1990a.
Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche. Manchester, 1990.
“Revealing the Truth of Art”: Review essay on Manfred Frank, Einfiihrung
in die friihromantische Asthetik. Radical Philosophy 58 (1991), 20—4.
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. London, 1993.
Fichte, J. G. Werke, Berlin, 1971.
Frank, Manfred. Der unendliche Mangel an Sein. Frankfurt, 1975.
Was 1st Neo-Strukturalismus? Frankfurt, 1984.
Erne Einfiihrung in Schellings Philosophic. Frankfurt, 1985.
Einfiihrung in die friihromantische Asthetik. Frankfurt, 1989.
Hartmann, Klaus, ed. Die ontologische Option. Berlin, 1976.
Hegel, G. W. F. Enzyklopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, ed. Friedhelm
Nicolin and Otto Poggeler. Hamburg, 1959.
Wissenschaft der Logik (pts. I—II). Vols. 5-6 in Werke, ed. E. Moldenhauer
and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt, 1969.
Phanomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt, 1970.
Henrich, Dieter. Fichtes urspriingliche Einsicht. Frankfurt, 1967.
Hegel im Kontext. Frankfurt, 1971.
Selbstverhaltnisse. Stuttgart, 1982.
Hogrebe, Wolfram. Pradikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheunstik
im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter”. Frankfurt, 1989.
Marquard, Odo. Transzendentaler Idealismus. Romantische Naturphilosophie. Psy¬
choanalyse. Cologne, 1987.
Novalis. Dasphilosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl. Vol. 2. Mu¬
nich, 1978.
Sandkaulen-Bock, Birgit. Ausgang vom Unbedingten. Fiber den Anfang in der Phi¬
losophic Schellings. Gottingen, 1990.
Schelling, F. W. J. Sammtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling. 2 parts, 14 vols.
Stuttgart, 1856—61.
Die Weltalter, ed. Manfred Schroter. Munich, 1946.
India Philosophiae Universae (1820-1), ed. Horst Fuhrmans. Bonn, 1969.
Grundlegung der positiven Philosophic (1832-3), ed. Horst Fuhrmans. Turin,
>972.
Philosophic der Offenbarung (1841-2). ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt,
> 977-

System der Weltalter (1827-8), ed. S. Peetz. Frankfurt, 1990.

Schlegel, Friedrich, Transcendentalphilosophie, ed. Michael Elsasser. Hamburg,
>99 >-

Spinoza, Benedict de. The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes. New York, 1955.
Theunissen, Michael. “Die Aufhebung des Idealismus in der Spatphilosophie
Schellings”. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 83 (1976).
 References
37
Tilliette, Xavier. Schelling. Une philosophic, en devenir. 2 vols. Paris, 1970.
White, Alan. Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics. Colum¬
bus, Ohio, 1983a.
Schelling: Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven, 1983b.
ON THE HISTORY OF
MODERN
PHILOSOPHY
Munich Lectures (ca. 1833-1834)

F. W. J. von Schelling
■
There are various reasons why, at least as an addition to an introduc¬
tion to philosophy itself, a look back to earlier systems can also be ad¬
visable. Science (Wissenschaft) is also a product of time and constantly
develops. Everyone who thinks he is in a position to advance science
a big or a small step forward will tend of his own accord to show his
relationship to what precedes him, in order thereby to make clear
from which point of development or standstill he is taking up science
and towards which subsequent goal he intends to advance it. He will
stimulate greater interest in his own researches if he shows how, from
stage to stage until now, the highest goal has not been achieved. The
beginner in philosophy in this way already gets to know, albeit only
historically, the issues in question and which of these have primarily
concerned the minds of the last centuries. Finally, if it is also neces¬
sary, in order to learn to value and judge the truth, to know error,
then such a presentation is the best and most gentle way to show the
beginner the error which is to be overcome. But the weight of all these
reasons increases if it is not just a question of a new method or of
changed views in particular matters, but of a change in the concept of
philosophy itself. In this case it will then be desirable if this concept,
independently of the truth which it initially has or has in itself, ap¬
pears at the same time as the natural historical result of earlier un¬
successful endeavours, no longer in its simple generality, but rather as
a necessary result of precisely this time.

4
 Descartes

The history of modern European philosophy is counted from the

overthrow of scholasticism until the present time. Renatus Cartesius
(Rene Descartes), born 1596, the initiator of modern philosophy, a
revolutionary, in the spirit of his nation, began by breaking off all
connection with earlier philosophy, by rubbing out, as if with a
sponge, everything that had been achieved in this science before him,
and by building it up again from the beginning, as if no one had ever
philosophised before he did. The necessary consequence of such a to¬
tal tearing away was, though, that philosophy regressed, as if into a
second childhood, a kind of immaturity which Greek philosophy had
already almost surpassed with its first steps. On the other hand, this
regression to simplicity could be advantageous to the science itself; it
withdrew thereby from the breadth and extension which it had al¬
ready received in antiquity and in the middle ages, almost to a single
problem, which now, by successive expansion, and after everything
was prepared for it in detail, has grown into the great, all-inclusive
task of modern philosophy. It is almost the first definition of philos¬
ophy to offer itself if one says philosophy is the science which begins
absolutely at the beginning. It had, therefore, already to have a big
effect, even if one only began at the beginning in the sense that one
did not presuppose anything from previous philosophy and did not
presuppose that it proved anything. The Greek Thales is supposed to
have asked what the First and the Oldest in the whole nature of things
was. Here, beginning at the beginning was meant objectively. But Des¬
cartes only asks: “What is the First for me?", and to that he could, of
course, only answer: “I myself, and even then I myself at the most
with respect to being (Seyn)”. To this first, immediate certainty all
other certainty for him was only subsequently to attach itself, every¬
thing was only to be true to the extent that it connected to that im¬
mediate certainty. But obviously the proposition: / am is at the most
the starting point for me — and only for me; the connection which re¬
sults from the attachment to this proposition or to the immediate con-

42
 Descartes
43

sciousness of one’s own being can, therefore, always only be a

subjectively logical one, i.e. I can always only infer: to the extent to
which I certainly am, I must assume as certainly that A, B, C, etc., are.
But how A, B and C are really connected to each other, or with their
true principle, or even only how they are connected to the I am itself,
is not shown at all. Philosophy achieves here, therefore, no more than
a merely subjective certainty, and a certainty not about the kind of ex¬
istence [of the subject] (which alone is really dubious), but only about
the existence of everything outside the subject. This much [about
Descartes] in general.
But now to describe the procedure of Descartes in detail: he takes it
as his principle provisionally to doubt everything, indeed, in order to
be very sure and completely certain that he had freed himself from
every prejudice, to consider everything to be false which up to that
time he had assumed to be true. This maxim was vigorously opposed
by theologians, in particular; they thought that in this manner Des¬
cartes was a temporary atheist; if someone died before he had written
or found the hoped-for demonstration of the existence of God, he
would die as an atheist; in this way, at least provisionally, a pernicious
doctrine was being taught; but one should not do evil in order that
good should result, and suchlike. But the meaning is really only that
one should not assume anything to be true in philosophy before one
has known it in its context. When I begin philosophy, I do not really
yet know anything philosophically. This goes without saying; on the
other hand, that maxim is to be less approved of if it leads to wanting
to acknowledge only what is certain to me, thus, as only / myself am im¬
mediately certain of myself, to acknowledge only my self as foundation,
for this so-called immediate certainty, my own being (Seyn), is in fact
just as incomprehensible - indeed, perhaps even more incomprehen¬
sible — than everything that I have assumed provisionally to be false
or at least doubtful. If I understand the doubt about things properly,
then I have just as much to doubt my own being (Seyn). The doubt of
Descartes, which initially only extends as far as things known through
the senses, cannot relate to their being real at all or in every sense - for
in some sense or other I must grant reality to them. The true sense of
my doubt can only be that I cannot believe these things which are
knowable through the senses to be in that sense in which the original¬
being — being through itself (das von sich selbst Seyende) - is; for their be¬
ing (Seyn) is not original being, we see in them something which has
become; and to the extent that everything which has become is only
dependently and as such doubtfully real, one can say they have in them¬
selves a doubtful existence, or it is their nature to waver between being
and not-being. But I must also recognise precisely this doubtful being
44 On the History of Modern Philosophy

(Seyn) in myself; for the same reason that I must doubt things, I would
have also to doubt myself. However, the doubt of Descartes in the re¬
ality of things really does not have the speculative significance which
we just gave it; the basis of his doubt is only empirical, as he says him¬
self, because he has often discovered that the senses deceived him, be¬
cause many a time he has convinced himself in a dream that this or
that was outside of him which afterwards turned out to be the oppo¬
site; indeed he adds that he has known people who felt pain in limbs
which they had had removed long ago - in this argument one recog¬
nises the former military man. Incidentally, it seemed reasonable to
reflect that such persons only felt pain in limbs which they once had,
and there is no example of anyone who felt pains in limbs which they
never had. Through this last experience, however, he thought himself
even particularly justified also to doubt the existence of his own body.
From here he then proceeds to cognitions which are not drawn
from the senses, which are therefore endowed with the character of
necessity and generality, namely mathematical truths, for whose du-
bitability he cites the strangest reason, which is not, as was that of the
ancient sceptics, taken from the inside of these objects and their pre¬
mises themselves, but from something external. Namely, so he ex¬
plains, although I am as convinced as I am convinced of my own life,
and cannot help for a moment knowing, that the three angles of a
triangle = two right angles, my soul has the opinion — I do not really
know whether taught to it or even implanted in it — that there is a
God, of whom I have heard that He can do everything and that I (the
doubter) am completely His creature, with all I am and know. Now He
could, he continues, also have made me be deceived even about those
things which otherwise appeared to me as the most clear. As if one
did not have far more cause to doubt such a doubt. Before one threw
up this last doubt, one would have to cite some interest or other which
the creator could have in deceiving me with necessary truths. The
true relationship in which philosophy finds itself at the beginning to
everything, and thus also to mathematical truths, is not to doubt
them (for how would philosophy anyway already come to make them
the object of its thinking?), but simply to leave them open until, in the
course of its investigation beginning absolutely from the beginning,
philosophy is led of its own accord to the premises upon which its
truth depends.
Having doubted in this not really very deep manner everything
which has come before his consciousness, Descartes asks whether he is
left with nothing at all which he could still doubt as well, for the rea¬
sons given earlier or for other reasons. Although he seemed now to
have doubted everything, he still had something left, namely himself
 Descartes 45

who was doubting in this way, not so far as he consisted of head,

hands, feet and other bodily limbs - for he had already doubted the
reality of these - but only to the extent that he was doubting, i.e. to
the extent that he was thinking. By now carefully investigating this, he
thought he found that he could not doubt himself, to the extent that he
was thinking, for any of the reasons which moved him to doubt the
other things. For, he says, whether I am awake or dreaming, I am
thinking and am, and if I should have erred in relation to everything
else, I still was, for I erred, Eram quia errabam, and the creator of na¬
ture, however elaborate He is assumed to be, cannot deceive me in
this respect, for to be deceived, I must be. Indeed, the more reasons
for doubt that are brought forward, the more reasons I gain which
convince me of my existence, for the more often I doubt, the more I
prove my existence - therefore, I prove that, whatever way I turn, I
am after all compelled to break out into the words: “I doubt, I think,
therefore I am”!
This, then, is the famous Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] of
Descartes, with which, it must be said, for a long time the keynote, so
to speak, of modern philosophy was established, which had worked
like a spell by which philosophy was caught in the realm of the sub¬
jective and of the fact of the solely subjective consciousness. But on a
higher level there was in the Cogito ergo sum, or in the decision to con¬
sider everything doubtful for the present, until it was connected in
some way or other with that one thing which was immediately cer¬
tain — in this decision lay the most decisive breaking away from all au¬
thority, the freedom of philosophy was achieved thereby, which it
could not lose from this moment on.'
It is clear enough how Descartes was led to this Cogito ergo sum. His
main doubt was how one could convince oneself of any form of ex-

1 A special peculiarity lies for us in the fact that this beginning of completely free
philosophy was, to all appearances, made in Bavaria, that, therefore, the founda¬
tion of modern philosophy was laid here. Descartes had, as he says himself in his
essay De Melhodo, which I take this opportunity to recommend to everyone as a
splendid exercise, come to Germany in order to see the beginning of the Thirty
Years’ War; he had been present under Maximilian I at the battle on the white
mountain and the capture of Prague, where, though, he primarily only made in¬
quiries about Tycho Brahe and his unpublished work. In 1619, when he returned
to the camp from Frankfurt, from the coronation of Ferdinand II, he had his win¬
ter quarters in a place on the Bavarian border, where he, as he says, found no one
with whom he would have liked to converse, and there he conceived (aged twenty-
three) the first ideas of his philosophy, which he, however, published much later.
In the same way as Descartes began to philosophise in Bavaria, he later found in
Princess Elisabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Elector of the Palatinate, Karl
Friedrich, the so-called Winter King, a great and devoted admirer, just as it was later
again a prince from the house of the Palatinate who became Spinoza’s protector.
46 On the History of Modern Philosophy

istence at all. This doubt seemed insurmountable to him with regard

to external things. We imagine [vorstellen, which also has the sense of
“represent”, or “have ideas of’] external things — this is not denied,
and we are even compelled to imagine them — but whether the things
which we imagine and how we imagine them really are, namely outside
ourselves, are like that independently of ourselves, that is the ques¬
tion to which there is no immediate answer. Descartes wanted, there¬
fore, to find a point where thinking or imagining (Vorstellen) (for he
does not distinguish the two) and being (Seyn) immediately coincide —
and this he thought he had found through his Cogito ergo sum, and,
because all doubt (in his opinion) is only related to existence, he be¬
lieved that he had overcome all doubt with this proposition. In the
Cogito ergo sum Descartes thought he had recognised thinking and be¬
ing as immediately identical. For he most definitely denies in later ex¬
planations that the proposition Cogito ergo sum is meant by him as a
conclusion (a syllogism). To a complete conclusion, it is true, a major
proposition would belong, which would be as follows: Omne, quod cog-
itat, est [Each thing which thinks is] - the minor proposition would
then be Atque cogito [and I think], and the conclusion Ergo sum [there¬
fore I am]. Admittedly Descartes cannot have meant it like this; for
thereby the proposition “I am” would become one which is mediated
through a general proposition; in this syllogistic form the immediate
certainty would be lost. The opinion of Descartes is, then, that the
Sum [I am] is enclosed in the Cogito [I think], already comprised in it,
and given without any further mediation. From this it follows, then,
that the cogito really means the same as Cogitans sum [I am thinking]
(for the verb anyway has no other meaning and is only a contraction
of predicate and copula: e.g., Lego [I read] means nothing different
from Sum legens, “I am reading” or “one who is reading”). Besides
this. Sum cogitans cannot mean that it is as though I were nothing but
thinking, as if I were only there in thinking or as if thinking were the
substance of my being. For Descartes himself only says the “I think” as
he thinks or doubts, in the actu [act] of his doubt. Thinking is, there¬
fore, only a determination or a way of being (eine Art und Weise des
Seyns), indeed, the Cogitans even only means “I am in the state of
thinking”. The state of real thinking is, as is well known, a very rare,
transitory, indeed unnatural state for most people, from which they
usually seek to emerge as soon as possible. Schiller’s saying is well
known: “I have often just been, and, in truth, thought of nothing
at all”. Admittedly Descartes uses, as was already remarked, the
word think in a very general sense, where it, e.g., also means sensu¬
ous becoming aware of or perceiving. But I am also not always in the
 Descartes
47

state of sensuous perception. If one wanted to say that even in sleep

it does not stop, for at least I dream, then there is always the swoon,
in which I admittedly also do not say, “I am”, this is in the same way,
though, as I do not say it when asleep, indeed do not say it in the
course of everyday life, and yet still indubitably am. The Sum which is
contained in the Cogito is, therefore, only: Sum qua cogitans, “I am as
thinking”, i.e. in that specific way of being which is called thinking,
and which is only another way of being from, e.g., that of the body,
whose way of being consists in filling space, i.e. in excluding every
other body from the space which it takes up. The Sum which is con¬
tained in the Cogito does not, then, have the significance of an abso¬
lute I am, but only the significance of an “I am in one way or another”,
namely as just thinking, in that way of being which one calls thinking.
Hence, even in the Ergo sum, “I am absolutely” cannot be contained,
only: “I am in one way or another”. As was already shown, however,
one can only really doubt of things that they are absolutely; that they
are in one way or another can, however, be brought out in the same way
that Descartes brings out his Sum. It is just as right to infer: I doubt
the reality of things, therefore they are, or at least: therefore they are
not not at all. For if something is not at all in any way, I also cannot
doubt it. Therefore, from my doubt itself about the reality of things,
it does not follow that they indubitably and absolutely are, but it does
follow that they are in one way or another; but, as was shown, no
more follows from the I think than that I am in one way or another.
But everything which is only in one way or another is precisely for
that reason something whose being is doubtful (ein zweifelhaft Sey-
endes). In the true sense of doubt, which is not just empirical and sub¬
jective but objective and philosophical, the being which I attribute to
myself is therefore as doubtful as that which I attribute to things.
But we can go back even further and even put the / think itself in
doubt - at least in the sense it undoubtedly has for Descartes. The
statement “I think” has, namely, two foundations: (i) that which
thinks in me, that is, e.g., precisely now doubting; (2) that which is
reflecting upon this thinking or doubting; only when the latter rec¬
ognises the former as identical with itself do I say: “I think”. The “I
think” is, therefore, in truth in no way something immediate, it only
emerges via the reflection which directs itself at the thinking in me;
this thinking, by the way, also continues independently of the think¬
ing that reflects upon it, in the way that, even as a rule, I think with¬
out saying to myself that I am thinking, without once more thinking
this thinking itself. Indeed, true thinking must even be objectively in¬
dependent of that subject that reflects upon it; in other words, it will
48 On the History of Modern Philosophy

think all the more truly the less the subject interferes with it. There¬
fore, because that which is thinking and that which reflects on this
thinking and posits it as one with itself are two different things, or
because there is an objective thinking which is independent of me, it
follows that that which reflects might deceive itself about that sup¬
posed unity, or, by attributing the original thinking to itself, it might
be precisely this attribution about which it is deceived, and the “I
think” could have no more significance than expressions I also use,
such as “I digest”, ‘‘I make juices”, “I walk” or “I ride”; for it is not
really the thinking being that walks or rides. It thinks in me, thinking
goes on in me, is the pure fact, in the same way as I can say with equal
justification: “I dreamed”, and “It dreamed in me”. The certainty
which Descartes attributes to the Cogito ergo sum cannot be sustained
even by thinking; if there is a certainty, then it is blind and devoid of
thought. To this certainty Descartes then attaches everything else. His
principle is: Everything which is just as clearly and distinctly recog¬
nised as the “I am” must also be true. But, expressed more exactly,
this can only mean the same as: Everything that is connected to that
blind empirical certainty which I have of my own being, or which is
implicite posited with the “I am” or can be proven to belong to the
completeness of this idea (Vorstellung), I must assume as just as true as
the “I am” itself (it goes no further); it does not follow, namely, that it
is also like that objectively and independently of me. The truth of the
“I am” can be sustained just as well if I am only compelled to imagine
all those other things, e.g., my body and the things that apparently
influence it. Once I want to attach everything to the “I am”, I must
give up ever getting any further than to this necessity of the idea of
everything else; it can also, if I am the focus of all knowledge to my¬
self, be completely indifferent to me whether that which I am com¬
pelled to imagine is there independently of imagining it or not, since
it, to use Descartes’s own example, is completely indifferent to the
dreamer as long as he is dreaming.
Descartes, who was not even concerned to comprehend things but
only to know that they are (the least that one can know of things), be¬
came the cause, by his procedure, of the question whether anything
really corresponded to our ideas of external things being regarded for
a considerable time as the main question in philosophy. It would have
been easy for Descartes to proceed already to complete idealism, i.e.
to the system which maintains that things are not objectively outside
us, but only exist in our, albeit necessary, ideas. But he did not want
this; in order to avoid this necessary consequence, he took refuge in
another conception. Because ideas have no guarantee in themselves,
he needed a guarantor for the truth of his ideas of external things -
 Descartes
49

here he seeks to come from the subjective into the objective

(H€Td|3aaio) - this guarantor he finds in God, whose existence,
though, must then previously have been proven. He achieves this
briefly as follows: There is in me the concept of a most perfect being
of all. (This is presupposed as an empirical fact, as the “I think” is also
just an empirical fact.) But to the concept of the most perfect being of
all belongs - not, as it was later said, the concept of existing at all, for
Descartes, to whom one must grant within his limits the whole astute¬
ness and ingenious capability and mobility of his nation, was not in
the habit of inferring as clumsily as Kant does in presenting this
proof, because he well knew that existing at all is something that is
indifferent to perfection and imperfection - to the concept of the
perfect being the concept of necessary existence also belongs. There¬
fore, even if I only think God, I must also see that He exists. This is,
then, the proof of the existence of God known under the name of the
“ontological proof”. From the simple concept of the most perfect be¬
ing of all it is then further inferred that the most perfect being of all
would not be such if it were not also the most truthful of all (here
there is a transition from the concept, which seemed up to now only
to be considered as a metaphysical concept, to moral qualities), for
such a being, therefore, it would also have to be impossible to deceive
us (1) with regard to mathematical truths - (strange that Descartes al¬
ways only doubts these, and not also the general concepts, as well as
the laws of thought, judgement and inference); (2) just as impossible
(since only God could effect this deception) with regard to sensuous
things. Consequently God is here now, after a completely different prin-
cipium cognoscendi had been assumed, additionally recognised as the
true principle of cognition, i.e. as that which first grants truth to all
cognition. That appeal to the truthfulness of God had, by the way, so
little effect on the successor of Descartes, the Frenchman Malebranche,
that he only concedes probability at the most to this argument, and
remarks that God, if he were to think it to be good and necessary, cer¬
tainly could imagine bodies for us, even if there were none.
What in the meanwhile must be most important for us, and it is pri¬
marily because of this that I have tried to give an idea of Descartes’s
philosophy, is precisely the introduction of that ontological argument.
Descartes has become decisive for the whole of subsequent modern
philosophy, far less for what he said otherwise about the beginnings
of philosophy than for the setting up of the ontological proof. One
can say: philosophy is still now occupied with disentangling and ex¬
plaining the misunderstandings to which this argument gave rise.
This argument is also curious because, among the classic proofs by
which the existence of God used to be proven in ordinary metaphys-
50 On the History of Modern Philosophy

ics, it was always in first place until Kant. It is important to note that
this argument was not recognised at all by the scholastics. For, al¬
though Anselm of Canterbury had already advanced a similar argu¬
ment, Thomas Aquinas most emphatically contradicted him. The so-
called ontological proof became primarily an object of the Kantian
critique, but neither Kant nor any of his successors hit upon the cor¬
rect point. The main objection to the Cartesian proof which was pri¬
marily raised by Kant depends upon the already-mentioned incorrect
idea that the argument is supposed to be as follows: I find in me the
idea of the perfect being, but existence is itself a perfection, therefore
existence is also of its own accord included in the idea of the perfect
being. Here, then, the minor proposition of the conclusion is denied.
It is said that existence is not a perfection. A triangle, e.g., does not
become any more perfect by existing, or, if this were the case, then I
should also have to be allowed to conclude that the perfect triangle
must exist. What does not exist, it is said, is neither perfect nor im¬
perfect. Existence only expresses the fact that the thing, i.e. that its
perfections, are. Therefore existence is not one of these perfections,
but it is that without which neither the thing nor its perfections are.
But I have already remarked that Descartes does not infer in this man¬
ner. Rather, his argument goes as follows: it would contradict the na¬
ture of the perfect being to exist just contingently (as, e.g., my own
existence is simply contingent, precarious and for this reason doubt¬
ful in itself), therefore the most perfect being can only exist necessar¬
ily. There would, I suggest, be no objection to this argument,
particularly if one agrees that the concept of necessary existing
should be understood to mean merely the opposite of contingent ex¬
isting. But the conclusion of Descartes is different. Let us repeat again
the whole syllogism. The perfect being cannot exist only contingently,
thus can only exist necessarily (major proposition); God is the perfect
being (minor proposition), therefore (he ought to conclude) He can
only exist necessarily, for this alone is inherent in the premises; in¬
stead of this, though, he concludes: therefore He necessarily exists,
and, it is true, thereby apparently brings out the fact that God exists,
and seems to have proven the existence of God. But it is something
completely different whether I say: God can only exist necessarily, or
whether I say: He necessarily exists. From the First (He can only exist
necessarily) only follows: therefore He exists necessarily (N.B., if He
exists, but it does not at all follow that He exists). In this, therefore, lies
the mistake of the Cartesian conclusion. We can also express this mis¬
take like this. In the major proposition (the perfect being can only ex¬
ist necessarily), it is only a question of the manner of existence (it is only
 Descartes
51

stated that the perfect being could not exist in a contingent manner)-,
in the conclusion (in the conclusio), however, it is no longer a question
of the manner of existence (in this case the conclusion would be cor¬
rect) but of existence at all, therefore there is plus in conclusione quam
fuerat in praemissis [more in the conclusion than there was in the pre¬
misses], i.e. a logical law has been broken, or the conclusion has an
incorrect form. That this is the real mistake I can also prove by the fact
that Descartes himself directly infers in several places, or, for the time
being at least, infers only in the manner I have shown. In an essay with
the title “Rationes Dei existiam etc. probantes ordine geometrico dis-
positae”, the conclusion is as follows: Therefore it is true to say of God
that in Him existence is a necessary existence or (he adds) that He ex¬
ists. The latter, though, is something completely different from the
former and cannot be regarded as equivalent to it, as is suggested by
the “or”. (Descartes himself is well aware that in his concept of the
perfect being only the manner of existence is determined.) Thus he
says in the same account: in the concept of a limited, finite thing,
merely possible or contingent existence is contained; in the concept of
the perfect thing, therefore, is contained the concept of necessary and
perfect existence. At another point, in his fifth Meditation, he carries
out the conclusion as follows: I find in me the idea of God no differ¬
ently or in the same way as I find the idea of any geometrical figure
or of a number, nec, he immediately continues, nec minus dare et dis-
tincte intelligo, ad ejus naturam pertinere, ut semper existat [nor do I un¬
derstand any less clearly and distinctly that it belongs to His nature
that He always exists], (Take good note of this semper; here he does
not, then, say, ad ejus naturam pertinere, ut existat, but only ut semper ex¬
istat.) From that it merely follows that God, if He exists, only always
exists, but it does not follow that He exists. The true meaning of the
conclusion is always only: either God does not exist at all, or, if He ex¬
ists, then He always exists necessarily, i.e., not contingently. But it is
clear that His existence is not proven thereby.
With this critique of the Cartesian argument we admit, though,
that, if not the existence, then the necessary existence of God is
proven — and this concept is now really the one which has had the most
decisive effect for the whole subsequent period of philosophy.
What is it, then, about this necessary existence of God?
Even as we only recognise the following as the correct conclusion:
Therefore God exists necessarily, if He exists, we already state that the
concept of God and the concept of the necessarily existing being are
not simply identical concepts, namely in such a way that the one could
be exactly contained in the other, that God would not be any more
52 On the History of Modern Philosophy

than the being which just exists necessarily. If He were only this, then
the proposition that He exists would be self-evident. Above all, then,
the question is

1. What is to be understood by the necessarily existing being?

2. In what way is God the necessarily existing being?
3. Are God and necessarily existing being identical concepts? In
what way is He more than just this?

In order, then, to answer the first, as far as it is possible at the point

at which we are now still standing (for we will subsequently return
more than once to this concept), we distinguish in all being (Seyn)
a. What Is, the subject of being (Seyn), or, as it is also said otherwise,
the essence (Wesen). [Schelling also uses Wesen in referring to the “per¬
fect being”, where it could not be translated as “essence”; I translate
it as “essence” here to distinguish it from the use of “being” in b. What
he means is the subject of all predication prior to any determination.]
b. Being (das Seyn) itself, which relates as predicate to “What is”, in¬
deed, of which I can say in general that it is the predicate per se, what
alone is really predicated in every predicate. Nothing else is said any¬
where and in any possible proposition but being (Seyn). If, e.g., I say.
“Phaedon is healthy”, then a kind of organic, and a kind of physical
and finally of general being is said; or I say: “Phaedon is a lover”, and
here I say a kind of psychological being. But it is always being which
is said. But I am free to think what Is by itself or purely, without the
being that I would first have to predicate of it — if I have thought it in
that way, then I have thought the pure concept, that in which there is
no trace of a proposition or a judgement, but precisely just the simple
concept. (It is absurd to put the pure concept into being, which is pre¬
cisely that which goes beyond the concept, i.e. the predicate. But the
subject is necessarily prior to the predicate, as already in the old or¬
dinary logic the subject was called the antecedent, the predicate the
consequens.) What Is is the concept Kax e^ox^v; it is the concept of all
concepts, for in every concept I only think what Is, not being. As long
as I think what Is in a pure manner, then there is here nothing which
goes beyond the simple concept, my thinking is still confined in the
pure concept, I cannot yet confer or attribute any being to what Is, I
cannot say that it has a being, and yet it is not nothing, but certainly
also Something, it is precisely being itself, auxo to ON, ipsum ens - be¬
ing, for it is still just in the essence (Wesen) or just in the concept, it is
the being of the concept itself, or it is the point where being and
thinking are one. I must think it in this nakedness, at least for a mo¬
ment. But I cannot keep it in this abstraction; for it is impossible that
what Is, of which I know no more than that it is the beginning, the
 Descartes
53

entitlement to everything which follows, but is itself not yet any-

thing — it is impossible that what is the entitlement, the precondition,
the beginning for all being should not also be - this “be” taken in the
sense of existence, i.e. of being also outside the concept. The concept
now immediately turns itself around for us, into its opposite - we find
that which we had determined as being itself (das Seyende selbst) now
also again as being (das Seyende), but as being (das Seyende) in a com¬
pletely different - namely only in the predicative or, as we can also
say, objective (gegenstdndlich) - sense, where formerly we thought it
as being (das Seyende) in the primary (urstandlich) sense. There is here
the most complete conversio of the subject into the object - as, in the
pure concept, it was the simple, pure subject (suppositum, for even
these two expressions have the same meaning) or the pure original
state (Urstand) of being (Seyn) — so it is as the immediate consequence of
its concept - precisely by virtue of its concept of being being itself (das
Seyende selbst zu seyn) - it is immediately, before we know where we are,
objective being (das objektiv, das gegenstdndlich Seyende).
If we now look at it more closely as this objective being (dieses ge¬
genstdndlich Seyende), how will it present itself to us? Obviously as that
which cannot not be, and accordingly as being which is necessarily, is
blindly. The being which is blindly is that in particular which has not
been preceded by any possibility of its self. I act blindly, e.g., if I do
something without having imagined its possibility beforehand. If the
action rushes ahead of the concept of the action, then this is a blind
action, and in just the same way being (Seyn) which has not been pre¬
ceded by possibility, which could never not-be and thus also could
never really be, which rather anticipates its possibility as such, such
being is blind being (Seyn). One might object: we ourselves spoke first
of all of what Is and determined it as the Prim, as the original state
(Urstand), i.e. as the possibility of being. Quite right; but we also im¬
mediately added that it could not be sustained in this priority, there¬
fore, even though the Prim, never as the Prim; the transition was
inevitable, what Is was in itself, therefore it was not possible for a mo¬
ment that what Is should not be, thus to think it as not-being (nicht sey-
end). But that for which it is impossible not to be (quod non potest non-
existere) cannot ever possibly be - for that possibility of being also
includes the possibility of not being in itself - therefore that for which
it is impossible not to be is never in the possibility of being, and being
(Seyn), reality (Wirklichkeit) precedes possibility. Here you now have,
therefore, the concept of the necessarily being (seyenden), the neces¬
sarily existing being [Wesen, in the sense used of God as the “perfect
Being”], and you grasp at the same time, via the genesis of the same,
with what force it, as it were, overwhelms consciousness and deprives
54 On the History of Modern Philosophy

it of all freedom. It is the concept against which thinking loses all its
freedom.
But now the question arises as to how God might be called the being
which is or exists necessarily (das nothwendig seyende oder existirende
Wesen). Descartes contents himself with the popular argument that
because non-necessary, i.e. contingent existence (as he defines the
concept), is an imperfection, God is the most perfect being {Wesen).
What he thinks when he thinks of the perfect being he does not say;
but one can see that he is thinking of that which is the essence {Wesen)
of all being {Seyn), which does not have a being outside itself, to which
its own being also relates as one being {Seyn), or, more simply, which
is not a being {Seyendes) which has another being or other beings
{Seyende) outside itself, but is being per se {das schlechthin Seyende),
which, therefore, can in its highest conception only be precisely
what we called being itself {das Seyende selbst), ipsum ens. If God is only
to be determined as being itself and that which is being itself as
that which cannot not be, as that for which it is impossible not to be,
then God is definitely and without all doubt that which exists neces¬
sarily {das nothwendig Existirende): this is now the highest sense in which
the real ontological argument is to be taken; the so-called proof of
Anselm comes down to this. But it is also now immediately clear
whence the mistrust against this so-called proof originates, and why
especially scholasticism rather preferred to refute it and refuse it than
to adopt it.
Here we come to the question of whether the concept of the nec¬
essarily existing being {Wesen) is identical with the concept of God.
We have just shown the necessarily existing to be at the same time
the blindly existing. Now there is, however, nothing more opposed to
the nature of God as it is thought of in common belief—and only
from this did Descartes, and thus up to now we also, adopt this con¬
cept - nothing is more opposed to the nature of God than blind being
{Seyn). For the first thing about the concept of that which exists
blindly {des blindlings Seyenden) is, of course, that it is devoid of free¬
dom in relation to its being {Seyn), it can neither negate {aufheben), nor
change, nor modify it. That which has no freedom in relation to its
own being has no freedom at all - is absolutely unfree. If, then, God
were the necessarily existing being {Wesen), He could only be defined
at the same time as that which was rigid, immovable, absolutely un¬
free, incapable of any free action, progression or going out of Him¬
self. Either we should have to stop at this blind being - we could not
take a step beyond what exists blindly at all - or if we wanted to
progress out of it, say to reach the world, this could only happen to
the extent to which we were able, say, to demonstrate an emanative
power in His blind being, by virtue of which other being {anderes
 Descartes
55

Seyn), e.g., that of things, poured out of this blind being - I say poured
out, not emerged, for to that one could still attach the thought of a
creation — but creation is precisely thoroughly incompatible with a
blind being, which could at best be thought as an emanative cause,
and even this would present not inconsiderable difficulty. Here, then,
we come up against, to use a Kantian expression, an antinomy be¬
tween what follows from reason of necessity, and what we really want
if we want God. For so far God is obviously just an object of our wish¬
ing - we are not compelled by anything to use the expression God; be¬
ginning with the absolute concept of reason, with the concept of what
Is, we are only led to the concept of the necessarily existing being (We-
sen), but not to the concept of God. But even if we begin with the con¬
cept God, we have to say: God is the essence (Wesen) of all being (Seyn),
He is what Is in the absolute sense, to ON, however he was defined;
but if He is this, He is also that which exists necessarily and blindly.
But if He is that which exists blindly, then he is for just this reason not
God — not God in that sense which the common consciousness associ¬
ated with this word and concept. What can help here, or how can we
escape from the straits in which we find ourselves? It would be no
help at all if one just wished to deny that God is the necessarily ex¬
isting being. For the real original concept (Urbegriff), which we abso¬
lutely may not renounce if our thinking is not everywhere to lack a
firm point of departure, would thereby be removed.
God as such is, of course, not just the necessarily or blindly existing
being (Wesen), He admittedly is it, but as God He is at the same time
that which can negate (aufheben) this His own being which is depen¬
dent upon Him, can transform His necessary being into contingent
being, namely into a being posited by itself, so that it in fact always
fundamentally (im Grunde) (in the foundation) (der Grundlage nach)
persists, but effectively or in fact is converted into an other, or as fol¬
lows: necessary being does always lie at the foundation of that self-
posited being, but without the effective, the real being of God just
being this necessary being.
Life (Lebendigkeit) consists precisely in the freedom to negate its own
being as immediate, posited independently of itself, and to be able to
transform it into a being posited by itself. What is dead in nature, e.g.,
has no freedom to change its being; it is as it is - at no moment of its
existence is its being self-determined. The very concept of the neces¬
sary being (Seyenden) would, therefore, not lead to the living but to the
dead God. Generally, though, in the concept of God it is thought that
He can do what He wants, and since He has no other object of His
activity than His existence, then — I cannot say: it is, but in the con¬
cept of God it must be thought that He is free in relation to His ex¬
istence, not bound to it, that He can make it itself into a means, can
56 On the History of Modern Philosophy

negate existence in its absoluteness. Even if those who pronounce and

assert God’s freedom are not accustomed to proclaim it in this way -
to think of it as freedom of God in relation to His existence, as a free¬
dom to negate this existence as absolutely posited, it is still in general
the case that in the concept of God absolute freedom of activity is
thought. I say in general. For the concept of God does not in any way
belong to philosophy in particular, it is present independently of phi¬
losophy in general belief. Now philosophy is, of course, free to take no
notice at all of this concept, to avoid it. But Descartes, with whom we
are concerning ourselves, drew it instead into philosophy, and there
the antinomy is then obvious.
God can only be thought as the necessarily existing being (Wesen),
and this in a sense in which this necessary existence negates all free
activity. But what is called God independently of philosophy, and was
unquestionably called this before philosophy, cannot be the necessary
existence in this sense - He must be thought of as free — in relation to
his own being (Seyn) — for otherwise He could not move Himself, not
go out from Himself, i.e. from His own being (Seyn) in order to posit
another being (Seyn). The question is only how this antinomy is to be
overcome. To show this is a matter for philosophy itself.
In another way the system of Descartes was significant and deter¬
mining for the further course of the human mind — by the absolute
opposition between mind and body which he introduced into philos¬
ophy. This is usually called the dualism of Descartes. Dualism was oth¬
erwise understood as the system which maintained, next to the
originally good principle, an equally originally bad principle, which
sometimes was regarded as a principle of completely equal power, at
other times at least as existing just as originally as the good principle.
Descartes did not go as far, as that kind of dualism and the Gnostics
did, as to posit matter as the source of all evil, as that which opposes
all good. In this case matter was a true principle for him, at least. But
for him it is not the principle of extension, but simply the extended
thing (Sache). At the beginning, as we said, he had doubted the ex¬
istence of the physical; on the other hand, what he thought he could
not doubt was his existence as thinking being, even though the de¬
duction from the simple actus cogitandi, of which alone he could be
immediately certain because only this appears in immediate experi¬
ence, to a thinking substance that was its foundation, which he saw as
the soul, was in no way beyond all doubt. His reflections continued, as
I have shown, by invoking God as a true Deus ex machina and by trust¬
ing that God, as the truest being, could not deceive us with the phys¬
ical world as though with a phantasmagoria [I have altered this part
of the sentence to make sense of what makes no sense in the origi-
 Descartes
57

nal] by this he admittedly restored the physical world in integrum [to

its former state]; the physical was now something real for him, but
mind and body were now apart and he could not bring them back to¬
gether again. He saw in the physical only the opposite of the mental
and of thinking, without considering it possible that, however differ¬
ent both might appear in their functions, it might still be one and the
same principle which finds itself on the one hand, in matter, only in
the state of its debasement, on the other, as mind, only in the state of
its elevation; on the one hand in the state of complete loss of self, of
being completely outsiefe-of-itself, on the other in the state of self-
possession, of being-in-itself. For him it seemed possible that some¬
thing could be absolutely dead, i.e. something dead in which life never
was, therefore something originally dead, an outside without any in¬
side, a product without having something of the producing principle
in itself. But such an absolutely or originally dead thing does not just
contradict every scientific conception but even contradicts experi¬
ence. For (1) there is a living nature (animals; difficulty of explaining
these); (2) so-called dead nature is precisely never to be grasped as
something dead, i.e. as an absolute lack of life, but only as life which
has come to an end - as residuum or caput mortuum [death’s head] of
a process which preceded it, thus of a past life. What is dead, bound
in matter, seemed to living minds so little able to be something orig¬
inal that many of them only thought they could explain it to them¬
selves by a preceding catastrophe, as in India it was something
incurred as punishment for a transgression, as a consequence of an
ancient Fall in the world of spirits, as the oldest Greek mythology only
saw in physical matter the suffocated spirits of the Titans of primeval
times. Descartes, admittedly, did consider this dead, spiritless matter
as something, but as something immediate, not as something which
had emerged out of an earlier state; he has it created in the form of
a rough, coherent lump by God, then be sundered, so that it splinters
into infinitely many parts, which then create the world system and its
movement by their rotations, eddies, etc. This crudity of scientific
conception, which is still so close to us and is hardly two centuries
away from us, may these days appear almost unbelievable. One can
measure by it how far the human mind has since come. But one can
also see from it how difficult and therefore how slow advances in phi¬
losophy must be, which people whom they benefit or who profit from
them think are so easy — if minds like Descartes can stop at such ideas.
It would be wrong to think less of them for that reason.
I have already remarked that the opposition in Descartes is not the
opposition of two principles, such that he assumes a principle of
thought and a principle of extension. The simple principle of exten-
58 On the History of Modern Philosophy

sion might in its own way also be a spiritual principle, it would not nec¬
essarily need to be something extended itself, as, e.g., the principle of
warmth is not itself warm because it is the principle of warmth, al¬
though it makes the body warm, communicates warmth to it. Des¬
cartes knows nothing of a principle of extension, but only of the
extended thing, which for this reason is absolutely unspiritual. On the
other hand he speaks of himself as of a thing which thinks: “Je suis
une chose, qui pense” (Med. Ill p. 263). The thing which thinks and
the thing which is extended are, therefore, two things to him, which
mutually exclude each other and have nothing in common; the ex¬
tended thing is completely devoid of spirit, spirit-less; the spiritual, in
turn, is absolutely immaterial; what is extended is simple being to¬
gether and being apart, pure disintegration, which, to the extent to
which it appears nonetheless as held together, as in physical things, is
not held together by an internal and thus spiritual principle, but only
through external pressure and thrust. The extended thing consists of
parts which are absolutely external to each other, these parts them¬
selves lack an inner moving principle, thus also any inner source of
movement. All movement is based on thrust, i.e. it is purely mechan¬
ical. Just as there is no spirit in matter, so, according to Descartes,
there is, in turn, nothing in spirit which is related to matter; the being
which is in matter (das in der Materie Seyende) is not a being which is
only in a different manner, but something toto genere different, both are
beyond all contact, two completely disparate substances, between
which, for this reason, nothing in common is possible.
Two things which have absolutely nothing in common also cannot
have effects on each other. For Descartes’s philosophy it was, then, a
very difficult task to explain that undeniable interaction which obvi¬
ously takes place between the thinking and the extended being (We-
sen). If both have nothing to do with each other at all, how can body
and spirit do so much together and suffer so much together? As when
a physical pain is felt by the mind, or an impression just made on the
body transmits itself to the mind and creates in the thinking thing
which we call our soul an idea, or when, on the other hand, an exer¬
tion of the mind, a pain of our soul tires out the body or makes it ill,
or the thought of our mind, as, e.g., in speaking, forces merely phys¬
ical organs to serve it, or a will, a decision of our mind produces a
corresponding movement in the extended thing which we call our
body. Until the time of Descartes, the accepted older scholastic system
concerned with this was the system of so-called natural or immediate
iniluence (systema influxus physici), which was based, even if not in a
clearly conscious way then in an unconscious way, on the presuppo¬
sition of a certain homogeneity of the final substance, of the substance
 Descartes
59

which lay at the foundation of both matter and mind and was there¬
fore common to both. Admittedly it was a crude idea, if one did not
wish to explain this just by a gradual becoming finer of the materials,
as in certain hypotheses of the physiologists, who, it is true, consid¬
ered a direct influence of the mind on what was called the crudely
physical to he impossible, but who thought that if one only interpo¬
lated finer materials between the mind and the crudely physical (they
used to talk of nerve juice, or, as they put it nowadays, in a supposedly
more refined way, nerve ether), then such an immediate transition
would eventually be possible.
Descartes removed at a stroke the difficulties which emerged for his
dualism through the obvious interaction between the thinking and
the extended thing by (1) denying animals a soul, declaring them to
be just highly artificial machines which only carry out all their ac¬
tions — even their actions which obviously resemble actions based on
reason - in the same way as a good clock tells the time. He also needed
to deny animals a soul because where there is thought there is a sub¬
stance which is completely different from matter, and therefore inde¬
structible and immortal.' (2) As far as man is concerned, he considers
him in terms of his body as also only a highly artificially arranged ma¬
chine, which, like a wound-up clock, carries out all natural actions
completely independently of the soul and only according to its own
mechanism; but as far as those movements which cannot be explained
as automatic, which correspond to certain movements or acts of will
of the mind, he is forced to assume that in every such case, if, e.g., a
desire or a wish arises in the mind, which the body should carry out,
God Himself should step in and produce the corresponding move¬
ment in the body - as if it should be more comprehensible how the
highest spirit (for it is not that God is identical with it (denn Gott ihm
nicht etwa Identitat [the sense is not clear])) should affect the purely
physical than how the human spirit should. And, in the same way, ev¬
ery time material things produce an impression on our body, the cre¬
ator steps in and produces the corresponding idea in the soul; the
soul would be inaccessible to all external or material impressions for
itself, only God acts as a go-between, so that my soul has an idea of
physical things. This is also, therefore, not an essential, but only an

1 This cause (immortality), for which Descartes had to deny animals a soul, is ex¬
plained by More in his letter to Descartes (Oeuvres, vol. 10, p. 190): “Having sup¬
posed that the body was incapable of thinking, you have concluded that
everywhere where there is thought there ought to be a substance really distinct
from the body and consequently immortal; whence it follows that, if animals
thought, they would have souls which would be immortal substances.” [Translator’s
note: The More quotation is given in French in Schelling’s text.]
6o On the History of Modern Philosophy

accidental or occasional unity between matter and mind. In them¬

selves they both remain separated. It is unitas non naturae sed compo¬
sition^ [unity not of nature but of combination]. Because God here
always acts only occasionally, this system consequently received the
name of Occasionalism. But in the same way as Descartes almost ap¬
pears in philosophy at all only in order to offer the basis for a com¬
pletely different system to another mind, so this hypothesis as well,
via which the connection of soul and body, mind and body, was to be
explained, is only significant in the history of science (Wissenschaft) be¬
cause that momentary and always only transitory identity between
matter and mind, between extended and thinking thing, gave cause
for the substantial identity which soon afterwards Spinoza maintained
not only between the thinking and the extended thing, but between
thinking and extension themselves. Another consequence of the Car¬
tesian system in this respect was that the question of the so-called com-
mercio animi et corporis [communication of the soul and the body] —
which only plays a subordinate role in a philosophy based on higher
principles - became for a long time almost the main question in phi¬
losophy that people concerned themselves with, if not exclusively,
then primarily; indeed for a long time one system only differed from
another by the way in which it answered this question.
Descartes’s philosophy had its most general, but at the same time
worst, influence by tearing apart matter and mind, which absolutely
belonged together and mutually explained and presupposed each
other, thereby destroying the great general organism of life, and re¬
linquishing with the lower organism also the higher organism to a
dead, mechanical viewpoint, which has until recently remained the
dominant one in all parts of human knowledge and even in religion.
This much about this side of Cartesian philosophy, which is usually
termed its dualism. Now we would like also to take a general look at it.
Descartes’s greatness lies in the general thought that nothing in
philosophy may be considered true which is not known clearly and
distinctly. But since this is not immediately possible — at least not every¬
where — then everything should at least be recognised in a necessary
connection with that of which I am immediately and indubitably con¬
scious. In this way he was the first to introduce with clear conscious¬
ness into philosophy the concept of a principle and of a certain
genealogy of our concepts and convictions, in which nothing should
be considered true which does not originate with and cannot be de¬
duced from the principle. But his limitation lay in the fact that he did
not seek that which was First in itself, but contented himself with what
was First to anyone, including myself. (Subjective generality, not gen¬
erality in the thing itself (in der Sache selbst)). In this way he had also
 Descartes 61

fundamentally given up, as he had in the object, the connection

which takes place between the principle and the things themselves, in
a word, given up the objective connection, and contented himself
with a merely subjective connection. He did, it is true, progress to the
concept of that which is First in itself, to the concept of God; but he
could not make this into a. principle, because he only grasped His nec¬
essary existence, but not what is beyond this, and which only really
makes God into God. Descartes still thought this Plus in the concept
God, but this Plus did not enter his cognition, it remained outside of
it as something just presupposed, not something comprehended.

COMPARISON OF BACON AND DESCARTES

If we had wished to follow chronological order in the historical de¬

velopment of modern systems, then we should have named Bacon
first, before Descartes; for he was born in 1560, Descartes was born in
*596- With Bacon the development of modern empiricism begins, as
the development of rationalism does with Descartes. Bacon’s main
works (and they are what really matters) are, by the way, almost con¬
temporaneous with Descartes’s first writings (for Descartes started
when still very young to make his new principles known). There is no
evidence that one of these two great writers influenced the other. Ob¬
jectively, then, they stand side by side: empiricism is renewed by Ba¬
con at the same time as Descartes renews rationalism. From the
beginning of modern philosophy, then, rationalism and empiricism
move parallel to each other, and they have remained parallel until
now. In the history of the human spirit it is easy to see a certain si¬
multaneity among great minds, who from differing sides nevertheless
are finally working towards the same goal. This is also true of Bacon
and Descartes. What they have in common is their breaking free from
scholasticism. Bacon does not really oppose later scholasticism, and
only opposes scholastic rationalism. Descartes and Bacon both want
what can, in opposition to scholasticism, be called “realist philosophy”
[Realphilosophie: the meaning of the term becomes obvious in what
follows]: (A. Scholasticism, B. Realist philosophy: (a) rationalism, (b)
empiricism). The first maxims of Descartes necessarily lead when
they are developed to the fact that it is the thing, the object itself,
which creates science by its movement, not the merely subjective
movement of the concept, as it is in scholasticism. But this is just what
Bacon wants. His philosophy is realist philosophy to the extent that it
wants to proceed, not from the concept, but from facts, i.e. from the
thing itself, as far as it is given in experience. But if one looks at it
more exactly, the two are even more closely related to each other. For
62 On the History of Modern Philosophy

Bacon’s induction is for him, as one clearly sees in his explanation,

not yet really science itself, but only the way to it.* He puts it as fol¬
lows: “I leave”, he says, “the syllogism to the scholastics. The syllogism
presupposes already-known and well-founded (known as true) prin¬
ciples” (this is quite right; the use of the syllogism only really begins
after one already has general and rational principles, and is for this
reason really more important in the subordinate sciences than in phi¬
losophy; for philosophy is the science which looks for these general
principles). “I leave”, says Bacon, then, “the syllogism, which can be of
no use to me, to scholasticism, for it already presupposes the princi¬
ples, and these are what I am looking for; I stay, therefore, with in¬
duction - not with that lowest kind of the same, which proceeds just
by enumeration (as, e.g., in the older arguments where we used to
enumerate the Apostles), this kind of induction has the disadvantage
that the smallest contradictory fact destroys the result; but I stay with
that kind of induction, which, in separating, with the help of correct
and well-made exclusions and negations, the necessary facts from the
useless ones, reduces the former to a very small number and thus, by
enclosing the true cause in the smallest space possible, makes discov¬
ering it all the more easy. From these thus reduced (brought down to
a few) facts, and always by the light of induction, I will raise myself up,
step by step and with extreme slowness, to particular propositions,
from these to intermediate propositions, finally from these to the
principiis generalissimis et evidentissimis” — but Bacon does not stop here,
instead, after he has found these, he says: “Supporting myself on
these as on unshakeable foundations, I will boldly carry on in my
thought, whether it be to lay down new observation, or completely to
replace observation, where it is not possible” (i.e. after all, having
found the most general principles, to decide on those questions or ob¬
jects which cannot be reached by observation), “and after I began with
doubt” (thus like Descartes) “I shall end with certainty, and keep a
correct mean between the dogmatic philosophy of the peripatetics”
(i.e. of the scholastics), “which begins with what it should finish with”
(the general principles), “and the wavering philosophy of the sceptics,
which stops with what one could begin with” (with doubt). Basically,
then, Bacon, as much as Descartes, wants in the last analysis a pro¬
gressive philosophy; only it is to be founded regressively, by induction.
(Bacon by no means rejects general principles, as he is understood as
doing by his successors, namely by Locke, David Hume and even
more by the Sensualists. Rather he wants to reach these principles by
induction, and beginning with them, as he says, only then achieve cer-

* Translator's note: See chap. 2, bk. 5, of The Advancement of Learning.

 Descartes
63

tainty). Admittedly Bacon did not get any further than the founda¬
tion, and did not get into the science itself. But the same is true of
Descartes; for he also really concludes with what, if one only were to
have begun with it, would have made really progressive science pos¬
sible, with the highest, with God. Both are at one in their opposition
to scholasticism, in the common striving for a real (reell) philosophy.
T hey only decisively part company in relation to the highest concept,
which Descartes wishes, by an a priori argument, to make independent
of all experience, thus also from his own starting point (the immediate
fact I think)-, he is thereby the originator of a priori, rational-a priori
philosophy, whilst Bacon still unquestionably wants the highest as
something empirical.
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff

If one recalls the Cartesian system in its true constitution, then one
longs for a better, more beautiful, more reassuring form (Gestalt),
which is then at once to be found in Spinozism.*

SPINOZA

Spinoza, who can be regarded as pupil and immediate successor of

Descartes, born in Amsterdam in 1632, had already, before he set up
his real system, worked on the Cartesian system, but in the direction
or with the aim of giving it a really objective context. The decisive move
to his own system took place when he made what was First in itself into
the sole point of departure, but also took no more of this into con¬
sideration than could be known with certainty, namely necessary ex¬
istence. Spinoza retained from the Cartesian concept, in which God
was still more than the necessarily existing being (Wesen), no more
than this definition; God was for him only the necessarily existing be¬
ing (Wesen)-, he cut off all reflections in Descartes which preceded this
concept, and began at once with a definition of substance, by which
he understood precisely, ad cujus naturam pertinet existere [to whose na¬
ture it belongs to exist], or id, quod cogitan non potest nisi existens [that
which cannot be thought if it does not exist], that which cannot at all,
without there being a contradiction, be thought as not being (nicht sey-
end). To the extent that Spinoza determined that which exists neces¬
sarily as substance, and indeed as absolute, general substance, one
can clearly see that he had thought that which exists necessarily first
as the general subject of being (Seyn), which, if just thought as such,
is not yet being (das Seyende), but only the prerequisite, the possibility
of being (Seyn), as, e.g., the person who is thought of as the subject of
illness is not for that reason really ill, but only the person who can be

translator’s note: Headings for the philosophers’ names have been added, for clarity,
in this and other chapters.

64
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
65

ill. Individual real things are not at all the subject of being itself (des
Seyns selbst), although they are in being (seyend sind)\ they are in being
{sind seyend) only by participation in being (S<?yn), not by the fact that
they could not not be at all, for they rather cannot be, because their
being (Seyn) is attached to being in a particular way (das so Seyn). We
must, of course, ascend to that of which not just being in a particular
way, but of which being at all (das Seyn iiberhaupt) can be predicated,
cujus actus est existere [whose act is to exist], and only this is the general
or absolute subject of being (Seyn), which we also call being itself (das
Seyende selbst). One can attempt to hold onto it purely and abstractly,
where it is still the Prius of being; here it would then be being (das
Seyende) just in thought, which only has a being (Seyn) in thinking (in
this sense, unity of thinking and being — namely taken negatively, in
the sense that being is not outside thought, thus not transitive being,
but just immanent being); but, as was already said, it cannot be held
onto in this narrowness, it is not just in the logical sense, it is also in the
transitive sense that which cannot not be, and however early I may
arrive, before I have had time to think, so to speak - before all think¬
ing, it is to me, or I find it already, as being (das Seyende), because it, as
the subject of all being (alles Seyns), is precisely that which is according
to its nature, and is never to be thought as not being.
This, then, is the origin of the Spinozist concept, which, as the his¬
tory of philosophy shows, has been until the present time the point
around which everything moves, or rather the imprisonment of
thought, from which thought has sought to emancipate itself by the
succeeding systems without yet being able to do so. It is the concept by
virtue of which there is in God explicite - expressly - neither will nor
understanding, according to which He really is only that which
blindly exists - we can also say: that which exists in a subjectless way,
namely because He has gone over wholly and completely into being
(Seyn). In possibility there is still a freedom from being, thus also
against being. But in this case possibility is swallowed by being. Because
that First is that which can only be (and not also that which is able not
to be), it is for that reason that which only is (das nur Seyende), i.e.
being (das Seyende) which is by the exclusion of all non-being - by the
exclusion of all potentiality - of all freedom (for freedom is non-
being). Accordingly it is being (das Seyende) without potentiality, and,
in that sense, powerless being, because it absolutely does not have the
power of another being (Seyn) in itself. Spinoza calls God causa sui, but
in the more narrow sense that He Is through the sheer necessity of
His essence (Wesen), without being able to be held onto as being able
to be (as causa)-, the cause has completely merged into the effect, and
behaves only as substance, against which His thought can do nothing.
66 On the History of Modern Philosophy

For surprised, as it were, by blind being (Seyn), as the unexpected,

which no thought can anticipate (whence this being really is the exis-
tentia fatalis [fatal existence], the system is itself fatalism), overtaken, I
say, by being (Seyn), which blindly descends upon Him, which swal¬
lows its own beginning, He even loses consciousness, all power and all
freedom of movement in relation to this being. It is because of this
that one can admittedly also attribute to Spinozism that calming ef¬
fect, which, among other things, Goethe praised in it; Spinozism is
really the doctrine which sends thought into retirement, into com¬
plete quiescence; in its highest conclusions it is the system of perfect
theoretical and practical quietism, which can appear beneficient in
the tempestuousness of a thought which never rests and always
moves; as Lucretius describes the state of such a peace; Sauve, mari
magno, it is sweet to watch the distress of others in a wild sea from a
distant bank — magnum alterius spectare laborem, not that one enjoys
other people’s misfortunes, but because one feels oneself free from
this torment. It is unquestionably the peacefulness and calm of the
Spinozist system which particularly produces the idea of its depth, and
which, with hidden but irresistible charm, has attracted so many
minds. The Spinozist system will also always remain in a certain sense
a model. A system of freedom - but with just as great contours, with
the same simplicity, as a perfect counter-image (Gegenbild) of the
Spinozist system - this would really be the highest system. This is why
Spinozism, despite the many attacks on it, and the many supposed
refutations, has never really become something truly past, never been
really overcome up to now, and no one can hope to progress to the
true and the complete in philosophy who has not at least once in his
life lost himself in the abyss of Spinozism. Nobody who wishes to ar¬
rive at his own firm conviction should leave unread the main work of
Spinoza, his Ethics (for he presented his system under this title), and
I should like to urge everyone who is seriously concerned with his ed¬
ucation not only to study assiduously on his own, which no teacher
can replace, but to be most conscientious and careful in the choice of
what he reads. Spinoza in particular belongs to the immortal authors.
He is great because of the sublime simplicity of his thoughts and his
way of writing, great because of his distance from all scholasticism,
and, on the other hand, from all false embellishment or ostentation of
language. But if we now ask at which price that deep calm of the
Spinozist system is bought, we must answer: at the price that God is
just substance, not free cause, and that even things can only relate to
Him as to substance, not as to cause. God is not the freely creating or
producing spirit which can work outside Himself, outside His imme¬
diate being (Seyn)-, He is completely confined in His being which pre¬
cedes all thought (sein unvordenkliches Seyn), thus things as well can
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 67

only be in him, only be particular forms or ways in which the divine

being presents itself; not that God Himself would be limited thereby,
but that every thing only expresses in itself the immediate divine es¬
sence (Wesen) in a particular and determinate way. Even though God
Himself is not limited by these forms, to the extent to which He him¬
self goes beyond them, one still naturally demands to know how these
limitations of being get into God. All Spinoza answers to this is that
those affections, and thus the things, belong to the nature of God in
the same way as the affections of the triangle follow from the nature
of the triangle and belong to it, i.e. there is not a free but a necessary
connection between God and things. But he does not show the nature
of this necessary connection. He admittedly does assume mediating
elements between the things themselves and God, i.e. he does not let
the things arise immediately out of God. As such, one might think it
possible that he provides some constant sequence of moments or tran¬
sitional points by virtue of which a comprehensible move from the
highest idea to the things, not just to things at all, but to things
constituted in that particular way, could be proven. But it is like this
with regard to those transitional elements. He posits, as the first me¬
diations between God and things, infinite extension and infinite
thought, which, as he says, are the immediate attributes of God or of
the infinite substance, i.e. the forms in which the substance immedi¬
ately exists (for one cannot explain the concept of attributes in any
other way). For him thinking and extension are, therefore, the two
immediate and - each in its own way — equally infinite forms in which
the absolutely infinite substance exists, which, to the extent to which
these are the two immediate forms of its being (Seyn), is itself neither
thinking nor extended. Here, it now seems, Spinoza would have to be
brought back to the concept of substance in and before itself {an und
vor sich) and would have to come to an explanation of the attributes.
Substance is for him causa sui, cause of itself. This causa sui could be
explained as that which posits itself. That which posits itself, one
could continue, can only posit itself as existing in the two forms of
thinking and extension, roughly in the manner, as it has later been said,
that what posits itself posits itself necessarily (a) as object (this would
in Spinoza be infinite extension), (b) as subject (this would be Spino¬
za’s infinite thought). But that way one would be giving determina¬
tions to it which have only emerged in a later development, and would
thereby have removed his peculiarity and his individual position in
the history of science (Wissenschaft). The substance of Spinoza is a
subject-object, but one in which the subject gets completely lost.
But, you will ask, how, then, does he come to those so-called at¬
tributes? Answer: initially only by the fact that Descartes had defined
the opposition of matter and mind as the opposition between exten-
68 On the History of Modern Philosophy

sion and thought and thus divided the universe, so to speak, into two
worlds, into the world of thought and the world of extension, Spino¬
za’s inheritance from Descartes is quite clear here. For him (Spinoza)
God is admittedly no longer simply the occasional mediator between
one and the other, who remains external to both, but their lasting and
constant unity. For Descartes thinking is outside God, for Spinoza
God is Himself infinite thinking and is Himself infinite extension. But
even this unity should not be taken, as one might be tempted to take
it these days, in such a way that thinking affected extension, and in
such a way that the different extended things were different just be¬
cause thinking was expressed more in the one and less in the other.
Not in this way. For, besides their both following/rom the same sub¬
stance, they have nothing in common, they are as alien to each other
as they are to his predecessor [Descartes]. Only when their correspon¬
dence has been or is mediated in every single case by a particular actus
for Descartes is the correspondence for Spinoza there once and for all
via the identity of the substance. Spinoza’s true idea is, therefore, an
absolute unity of substance combined with absolute opposition (mu¬
tual exclusion) of the attributes. What is extended is as devoid of spirit
for him as for Descartes, and Spinoza’s view of nature, his physics, is
for this reason no less mechanical and lifeless than that of his prede¬
cessor. The unity between both attributes is only a formal and exter¬
nal one, not one which is posited in themselves and substantial and
immanent in that sense. The duality which he posits in unity does not
found a real pulse, a true life, for the opposed sides remain dead and
indifferent to each other. This is only the necessary consequence of
the fact that has already been remarked upon, that Spinoza arrives a
priori at the duality of attributes, not by beginning with the substance.
For him they are admittedly consequences, and, indeed, necessary
consequences, of the existence of the absolute substance, but he does
not grasp them as these consequences. He does say that they are, but
he does not explain them. He does not prove that necessity. He just
takes them up a posteriori from experience, because he is forced after
all to acknowledge that the world does not just consist of spirit or
thought, but in part also of matter or extended being (Wesen), and just
as little does it consist just of matter, but in part also of spirit or
thought. Indeed, had he been aware of the necessity which drove him
to that system, then this necessity would not have led him to duality at
all, and the fact that apart from what is extended he also posits what
thinks is really just a correction of his system by experience. For what
is extended is obviously the First, that alone which is truly primary, of
the two. Thinking only relates to what is extended and could not be at
all without it; the human mind, e.g., is a modification of infinite
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 6g

thought, which it calls the “concept”, but this active or living concept
is only the immediate concept of the human body, i.e. of the modifi¬
cation of infinite extension which exists wholly independently of the
mind but corresponds with it. But how does infinite substance come
to posit not only what is extended but also the concept of the same,
why does it not stop with what is extended, which precedes the con¬
cept of what is extended in terms of time even if not in terms of na¬
ture? To this question there is only one answer, or it can only be
explained in one way, namely by assuming that the infinite substance,
in positing what is extended, or positing itself as what is extended,
does not completely exhaust itself; only in this case does it have to
posit itself once more in a higher stage - in a higher potential, as it
has later been called; this higher stage cannot again be what is ex¬
tended but must rather be the concept of what is extended, or must
relate to what is extended as its concept; for the higher is always that
which grasps what precedes it or is lower than it, as, e.g., the mind
grasps the body, its prerequisite, but not vice versa, or the later time
always grasps an earlier time which has not grasped itself. But this
view is completely alien to Spinoza, and, even though he calls the soul
the concept of the body, he has no other basis for the existence of the
soul, or for positing infinite thought as well as what is extended, than
experience. The fact that he opposes thinking to what is extended can
only be attributed to the irresistible influence of reality, and is already
the seed of a higher system which is latent in his own, without him
grasping it himself. For this reason Spinoza is primarily stimulating
and to be recommended for study because everywhere in his system
the seeds of higher developments are sown. Spinoza, whose system, by
the way, is capable of higher development even as a system of mere
necessity and even within its limit (that God (1) does not posit things at
all and (2) already for this reason does not posit them outside Him¬
self), represents in the history of philosophy the whole hermeticism
(Verschlossenheit) of the Old Testament (he was himself Jewish). The
higher developments of a later time and their greater proportions are
still foreign to him, but they are prepared and hinted at in part; the
sealed bud can still unfold into the flower. One might say Spinoza’s
philosophy (even considered within its limit) is, like Hebrew, a script
without vowels, the vowels were only added and made explicit by a
later age.
The God of Spinoza is still lost in substantiality and thereby in im¬
mobility. For mobility ( = possibility) is only in the subject. The sub¬
stance of Spinoza is just object. Things follow from God, not through
a movement, a wanting in Himself, but in a quiet manner, as, in his
one simile, the nature of the right-angled triangle follows from the
7° On the History of Modern Philosophy

relationship of the hypotenuse to the two sides. His intention, there¬

fore, is that the connection is a merely logical one. But he hirhself
does not explain this connection, he only affirms that it takes place. As
first mediating elements between God and individual finite things he
posits both kinds of being (Seyn), infinite extension and thought,
which in its own way is just as infinite. But the substance itself does
not unlock itself in them, but remains in its reserve (Verschlossenheit) as
mere ground of their existence, without emerging as the being (Sey-
ende) that they have in common, as the living bond of the two. To the
question why he gives the divinity just these, and no other, attributes,
he answers in one of his letters: this happens simply because in man¬
kind or in human nature no more than these two are recognisable
(thus no basis in the substance itself, but just in experience).
To infinite thought and infinite extension he then gives two more
subordinate modos [modes], as he calls them, namely movement and
rest. These, therefore, are again the immediate attributes of infinite
extension, as, then, will and understanding are immediate attributes
of infinite thought. New mediating elements. But he does not get any
nearer' to the individual real things thereby, which are either ex¬
tended or thinking, and the affections, i.e. determinations of the in¬
finite substance, are of substance as it presents itself as either
extended or thinking. The whole sequence is, therefore, the follow¬
ing: right at the top infinite substance, then attributes, then modi, fi¬
nally affections. But he completely rejects the question as to how
these affections arise in the infinite. Because he absolutely cannot ad¬
mit any real transition from the infinite to the finite, he does not have
any of these finite things arise immediately from the infinite, but only
mediately, namely mediated through something else separate and fi¬
nite, which itself is again mediated through another, etc., into infinity.
Each separate or finite thing is, as Spinoza says, determined in its ex¬
istence and its effect not absolutely by God, but by God insofar as He
is thought of as affected by some determination, and this determina¬
tion itself is not immediately posited by God, but only by God insofar
as He is affected by another, etc., into infinity. I therefore never arrive
at a point where 1 can raise the question how the things result or are
made to result from God. Spinoza therefore denies any true beginning
of the finite, everything finite only ever directs us towards something
else finite, by which the former is determined for existence, this goes
back into infinity, so that we never finish and nowhere can we prove
an immediate transition from the infinite into the finite.
We are compelled to go back into infinity with the explanation of
everything. Spinoza maintains nevertheless that every thing follows in
a temporal way only from another thing, but only in an eternal way
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 71

from the nature of God (aeterno modo), but such that one includes the
other. All things - both those which are now and those which used to
be or will be in the future - are posited in an eternal way by the na¬
ture of God, like the properties of a triangle.
How can eternal, and therefore simultaneous being-posited (Gesetzt-
seyn) fit together with that regress into infinity, i.e. how can that re¬
gress into infinity nevertheless be thought of at the same time as
absolutely present in the eyes of God? Spinoza answers this with a
mathematical simile. Think, he says, of two circles drawn from dif¬
ferent centres, one of which encloses the other, in this way the ine¬
qualities of the space between these two circles, or the changes which
a liquid or soft material would have to undergo in this space, will be
beyond number. And yet, he says, there is no external infinity in this
case. Just as here, with the simple idea of two circles with different
centres but which are not drawn concentrically, an infinite number of
inequalities or changes in a limited space is posited simultaneously
and actu, so an endless progression from one thing to another is pos¬
ited with the idea of God. One can, therefore, progress into infinity
with the being (Seyn) posited with God, without ever stepping out of
divine nature, but also without ever finding a true beginning of the
finite. Nothing finite is immediately explicable by God. (Spinoza re¬
garded the figure just described, of two circles placed within one an¬
other without being concentric, which are not, therefore, at any point
the same distance from each other, as a sort of symbol of his whole
philosophy, and it is, thus, engraved at the beginning of his Opus Post-
humum. The mathematician, he specifies, does not doubt for a mo¬
ment that the inequalities of the space between the two circles or the
number of changes which a pliable material moved in the space would
undergo are not determinable by any number, and are in this sense
infinite; he does not infer this from the size of the enclosed space. For
I can take again a randomly big or small part of this space and the
same infinity is always posited, which proves that this is an infinity
which is in the nature of the thing, and is posited with the thing, i.e.
with the idea. Thus an essential infinity is posited with the nature of
God, inside which I can progress into infinity, without ever stepping
outside divine nature).
But whence now do - not this or that thing, this or that affection,
but any affections at all of the divine substance come from? Spinoza
gives no answer to this, because he cannot give an answer. Determi¬
nation, limit, etc., can only be thought where there is reflection (Be-
sonnenheit), but the being (Seyn) of the substance is a being completely
devoid of reflection and limits, namely being which does even not
limit or reflect itself. Spinoza, then, posits determinations in the in-
72 On the History of Modern Philosophy

finite substance, not because there is in itself or in its concept a ne¬

cessity to give itself determinations, but because he can think things
only as self-determinations of the infinite substance; but he only
knows that there are things from experience; it would, so to speak,
never occur to him to posit affections in the infinite substance if he
had not discovered any things in experience, thus it is evident that he
admittedly maintains an objective connection between God and
things, but never really demonstrates it; the things are certain to him,
not from his principle but from elsewhere. It does not help, for in¬
stance, to say: “In Spinoza’s system, finite things have no truth, only
infinite substance, only God Is, really, the things have no truly real
existence”. “Fine”, I reply, “then at least explain to me their non-real,
their just apparent, existence”. Or: “Everything finite as such [is] only
non-being, only limit (= negation)”. “Fine, then explain these nega¬
tions to me, and do it by beginning with the substance; for this has to
be demanded”.
Spinozism, then, shows itself from this side as well as a system
which is not wholly and completely developed. If he had posited liv¬
ing substance instead of dead, blind substance, then that dualism of
attributes would have offered him a means of really grasping the fin-
itude of things. If, namely, the extended being (Wesen) is really that
which is blind and lacking determinations, the infinite thought could
be determined as the opposite potential, as that which seeks to bring
what is posited outside itself back into itself. Necessary modifications
arose thereby (1) of the extended being (Wesen), indeed not just mod¬
ifications as such, but modifications of extended being (Seyn) which
were specific and graded, but, at the same time, by thinking finding
a resistance in its relation to what is extended and only raising itself to
a certain degree of the actus in each modification, determinations,
modifications were also be posited in thinking itself. But, this thought
is completely alien to Spinoza; it is, as I said, an undeveloped system,
and to the extent to which all error only results from lacking power of
development, then it is already thereby shown as false or mistaken,
without the necessity of having recourse to the usual condemnations
of it, which are in part unjust and in part not actually distinct enough
to be able to be of any worth.
The condemnations of the first kind are generally summarised in
the ominous word “Pantheism”, with which these days the most di¬
verse things are designated at will, and which many people use only as
a tool which is easy to use without thinking about it, in order at least
to vent impotent wrath upon what they cannot refute because they
are not even able to understand it. Since this concept is in such gen¬
eral, indeed one can say, almost continual use, I shall say something
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
73

here about the possible meanings of it, but initially only in relation to
Spinoza. The commonest conception of Pantheism and, to the extent
to which one declares Spinozism to be Pantheism, also of Spinozism,
is the following: according to it, every single thing - every body, e.g. -
is only a modified God, therefore there are as many Gods as single
things; some more recent ideas declared in this blind attack against
Pantheism that it was the same as fetishism, which is contrary to every
received and well-known understanding of words. For it would occur
to nobody, e.g., who knows the differences of human ways of thinking
even just historically, to consider the fetishism of Negro peoples, who
choose an ostrich feather, a tooth, or a piece of wood as the object of
their prayers, to be the same as the Pantheism of an educated Indian.
Particularly in relation to Spinoza, everyone, even if he is inexperi¬
enced in philosophy (Wissenschaft), can be made to understand that, if
the being which is everything {das alles Seyende), as that which for just
that reason cannot be a particular or single being (Seyendes), is God -
that precisely for that reason God Himself could not be part of ev¬
erything which is particular or singular. But the concept can also be
grasped as follows: Although nothing singular can be called God, the
world, thought as unity or as universe, is the same as God, or, as is usu¬
ally said, not different from God. But by this universe is really only
understood the collectivity of finite things, so it is not true that
Spinoza does not distinguish them from God. For he teaches contin¬
ually from beginning to end that God is that which is grasped by itself,
which does not presuppose any other concept; the world, however, is
that which is only after God, and can only be grasped as a conse¬
quence of God (Substantia divina natura prior suis affectionibus [Divine
substance is by its nature prior to its affections]). This doctrine, which
maintains the absolute independence of God and the absolute depen¬
dence of things, posits a difference between the two, which is truly
differentia totius generis [a complete difference of kind], and, just as lit¬
tle as the single thing can be called God, can the world as well, as a
mere complex of single things, be called God according to Spinoza.
To crown it all, Spinoza also says: only Substantia infinita in se consid-
erata et sepositis suis affectionibus [infinite substance considered in itself
and separate from its affections] is God. It only remains to say that
according to Spinoza the world is indeed not God, but conversely God
is the world, or is world in general, i.e. with His being (Seyn) a totality
of determinations of His being is posited. But it does not follow from
this that everything - is God, as one expresses it by the word Panthe¬
ism, but instead that God is everything. But here every system will find
it immensely difficult to show how and in what sense God should not
be everything, i.e. how one could absolutely exclude God from any-
74 On the History of Modern Philosophy

thing at all. Furthermore the sense of the proposition: “God is every¬

thing” is also not that He should be everything in terms of His essence
(Wesen), for this always remains simple {prim affectionibm), but only
that He should be everything in terms of His existence; God regarded
as existing in the unfolding of His whole being (Seyn) and, so to speak,
outside Himself, is to be the totality of all determinations of being
(Seyn), but He is not to be God regarded in his essence (Wesen), in
Himself or in His seclusion. This is a very important distinction which
people usually like to overlook. However, it is, admittedly, not yet es¬
tablished, even with this distinction, that it is right to think and speak
about God when one says that God is the totality of all determinations
of being (Seyn) in His being or in terms of His being, and if one wishes
to call this Pantheism (although this is not quite linguistically correct),
it must be said that this concept of Pantheism has not yet been as¬
sessed. To assess this is the task of philosophy itself.
Other reproaches made to Spinoza are, if one examines them more
closely, essentially indeterminate, for every reproach only becomes
determinate if one can oppose the Right and the True to what one
reproaches, as, e.g., one has no right to blame a commander for losing
a battle if one cannot say how he could either have avoided it or won
it. This is particularly the case as well with that supposed non¬
distinction of God from the world. As long as the indeterminacy per¬
sists with regard to the kind of unity with the world in which God
must be (for the distinction may on no account turn out to be a formal
one) according to that system, as long as the bounds of that distinc¬
tion are not specified, that reproach to Spinoza has no determinacy.
The same can be said of the other no less common reproach: that
Spinoza denies the personality of God. It is true that God according to
Spinoza has no existence which is different from his essence (Wesen).
He is only his essence, and His essence is the general essence, the gen¬
eral substance. Furthermore He does not relate to the world in a free,
i.e. personal, way; the world is a consequence of His existence, and as
He exists according to His nature - i.e. necessarily - then the world as
well is a consequence of his nature. But as long as scientific concepts
are such that even those philosophers who argue for the personality
of God see themselves compelled to confess that the personality of
God is inconceivable in scientific terms - as long as this is so, this re¬
proach also has no force.
With regard to Spinozism nothing initially remains clear, then, but
the fact that it is a system of mere necessity, i.e. which explains every¬
thing as just a necessary consequence of divine nature (not as free,
contingent consequence of his will). But this is not a reproach which
can be made exclusively to Spinozism.
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
75

1 he doctrine of Spinoza is, in general, a system of necessity. But

even within this limit it is an undeveloped system. In particular, be¬
cause substance is completely immobile in it: dead, immobile, just be¬
ing (.seyend), lost in its being (Seyn), not possessing itself and
heightening itself, also not, therefore, being able to behave freely to¬
wards this being (Seyn). But if Spinozism is an undeveloped system of
necessity, then one can anticipate that in the immediately following
doctrines this system of necessity should have initially been more de¬
veloped, but that the necessity itself should not be overcome. For it is
in the nature of the human spirit not to leave anything undiscussed,
especially in the development of philosophy, and not to abandon a
principle until it is exhausted in all its consequences. Not that oppos¬
ing endeavours and attempts do not always intervene, thus also in op¬
position to Spinoza and those who follow him - but as they are
directed against what is undeveloped, what is undeveloped only
achieves a higher stage of development through being contradicted,
and is now revived with quite different and new powers, against which
the earlier objections, which only touched what was undeveloped, can
do nothing.

LEIBNIZ

Leibniz’s system (in the sequence of philosophical development the

next after Spinoza’s) was already praised very early on as tacitly op¬
posed to Spinoza’s and, so to speak, as undermining its principle. But
it is not at all like that. Spinozism was found most objectionable be¬
cause God, seen in relation to one of His two attributes, was the ex¬
tended substance. Now they say: Leibniz completely disposes of what
is extended and makes everything into spirit. But in the sense in
which Leibniz removes it, Spinoza had already removed it, and con¬
versely, in the sense in which Spinoza maintains it, Leibniz also keeps
it. For Leibniz says: The substance is monad; we can for the time being
satisfactorily explain this by saying: his opinion is that the substance is
spiritual substance. This concept is, though, initially only opposed to
the bad idea of matter as something composite. Leibniz says: both
what we call that which is extended and what we call that which
thinks — are in themselves only spiritual substance. But, if we under¬
stand him properly, Spinoza says this as well; he affirms more than
once that extension as a divine attribute, or seen truly and as it Is, is
not divisible into parts or put together from parts, but something ab¬
solutely simple; in the same way matter is also not divisible or put to¬
gether as substance, but only so far as it is considered abstracte,
abstracted from the substance, and thus untruly. Now if one under-
76 On the History of Modern Philosophy

stands by material only what is composite, then for Spinoza what is ex¬
tended, or the substance seen in relation to this attribute, is just as
spiritual as the idea is even to Leibniz. Matter which is divisible or put
together from parts arises just as much from a false and incorrect re¬
flection for Spinoza as it does from a simply confused idea for Leib¬
niz. Leibniz also does not absolutely deny that matter is divisible (as
appearance). Leibniz also considers those units which he calls monads
as the last, though spiritual, elements of everything material. One
monad looked at for itself is absolutely incorporeal, pure power of
thought (Vorstellkraft) (for being power of thought is, according to
him, the essence of all being (Wesen alles Seyenden). Only what thinks
(vorstellt) Is); but several monads together form a whole which consists
of relatively subordinate and relatively dominant monads, above
which, finally, One dominating monad rises. Whoever saw this whole
as God sees it, i.e. only as a whole consisting of spiritual powers which
are connected and mutually presuppose each other, would perceive
no bodily extension. But the individual earthly being (Weltwesen),
man, e.g., does not stand in that perspectival centre, where things ap¬
pear to him in this way, but outside of it, and through this kind of
displacement of the monads in relation to each other a confused idea
arises, and the mere appearance, the mere phenomenon of this con¬
fused idea is bodily extension, which has no more reality in itself than,
e.g., the rainbow. What Spinoza has come into being in this way by a
simply abstract way of thinking, by abstraction from the substance
which is in itself indivisible — the apparent image of divisible mate¬
rial - comes into being for Leibniz by a confused idea. Every physical
thing is in itself only a totality of spiritual powers, if we could think it
as adequately as God can, then we would only see spirit in it. Only the
confused idea creates the appearance of physicality. I do not wish to
investigate which of these two explanations is more plausible. I only
mention it here with the intention of showing that if one understands
by monad the simply spiritual, then the true substance of matter is sim¬
ple and indivisible for Spinoza as well. In this, then, Leibniz is no ad¬
vance on Spinoza; on the other hand, there is between them the big
difference that Spinoza has a real contradiction (Gegensatz) in the two
attributes, which he admittedly does not develop, but which could be
developed. Where there is contradiction there is life. Leibniz, on the
other hand, is an absolute Unitarian, if I may put it that way. He
knows nothing but spirit, for him nothing is unspiritual, opposed to
spirit. The differences which occur in him are really just quantitative
differences - there are more complete and less complete monads; the
one for him is lost in unconsciousness, the other conscious; but he can
explain neither whence this difference really comes, for it is not un-
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
77

spiritual in itself, not opposed to consciousness in itself, nor why such a

difference takes place at all. In this respect, then, not much is gained
with Leibniz’s doctrine of monads in comparison with Spinoza.
But in another way it was thought that in the concept of the monad
an antithesis to Spinoza and an objection to him could be found. For
every monad was its own substance which was purely self-contained,
hence there were as many substances or centres as there were
monads, and not just one substance, as Spinoza maintained. But in
the sense in which Leibniz assumes several substances, Spinoza as¬
sumes them as well, namely in the sense of several, indeed infinitely
many, modifications of the substance, and in the sense that Spinoza
maintains only One substance, Leibniz must in the last analysis as¬
sume only One as well. For he thinks of the monads, as already sug¬
gested, as inferior and superior to each other; this leads him to a
primal monad, to a monad which dominates everything, a world-
monad. This primal monad is God, who is also the only substance, if
one understands by substance what Spinoza did: id, cujus conceptus non
eget conceptu alterius rei [that whose concept does not need the concept
of any other thing], and Leibniz in fact does think of it like that. It all
depends upon what relationship to the primal monad he gives to the
derived monads which are dependent upon the primal monad. Here
I would like to cite his own words: Deus solus est unitas primitiva, sive
substantia originaria (= cujus conceptus non eget etc.), cujus productiones
(here creation) sunt omnes monades creatae aut (N.B.) derivatae, et
nascuntur, ut ita loquitor, per continuas Divinitatis fulgurationes, per recep-
tivitatem Creaturae limitatis, cui essentiale est, esse limitatam [God alone is
the primary unity or the original substance (whose concept does not
need, etc.) of which all the created or (N.B.) derivative monads are
products, and they originate, so to speak, through continual figura¬
tions of the divinity, limited by the receptivity of the created being, to
which it is essential to be limited]. Thus God alone is for him substantia
originaria; the others are produced by Him. Spinoza does not use this
word, or only uses it figuratively. Things for Spinoza are just logical
emanations. The question is, then, what this producing means in
Leibniz. Instead of a concept he gives us an image — the individual, de¬
rived monads arise by continual flashes of lightning, or storms of the di¬
vinity. Such effulguration is too indeterminate to be able to explain
the determinacy of things by it. He explains the determinacy of
things, therefore, by saying that this storm was limited by the recep¬
tivity of created things (they can only receive God to a certain degree).
Here one would have to attribute to the created thing a receptivity
even before it existed; it is essential to the created thing, he says, to be
limited, restricted. Of course, but only once it actually is. But what is
7« On the History of Modern Philosophy

in question is precisely the created thing, i.e., therefore, the question

of how limitation arises, and as this cannot be conditioned by the re¬
stricted receptivity of the not yet existing created thing, and as the
basis of this restriction cannot lie in the infinite power of the divinity
either, then it is easy to see that the basis of the limitation can only lie
in the divine will. Leibniz does not say this, however obviously he
ought to say it (he repeats the limitation of the created thing). The
fact that he so obviously avoids maintaining this shows how the whole
thing is meant. He in fact only wants to say via the — incidentally,
beautiful - image of flashes of lightning, whereby God is, so to speak,
thought like a cloud pregnant with reality, that the created monads
follow from God or divine nature as calmly and without their own ac¬
tion as they do according to Spinoza. He just uses a physical image, in
the same way as Spinoza uses a geometrical simile; objectively it
comes down to the same thing. The image he uses returns to the age-
old image of emanation. But Spinoza is, of course, an emanationist,
admittedly not a physical one but a logical one; he also admittedly
does not maintain an external being-separated from its source of that
which flows out, as emanation is usually understood (for whether em¬
anation has ever and in any system been comprehensible in this way,
e.g., in the Jewish Kabbala, is still a big question); rather, what follows
from God remains in God, and, as such, his doctrine can be called an
immanent doctrine of emanation. The pure monads are, though, ac¬
cording to Leibniz as well, in God. Because for him the physical only
arises when they are considered outside God. There is, on the other
hand, a true difference in what has already been remarked. Spinoza,
although he made no use of it, still had, in the original duality which
he posited in the highest being, a means of making a creation of finite
things comprehensible: Leibniz completely lacks such a means. It has
to be said as well that Leibniz has only obtained the simple monads
via that explanation, and has not yet really obtained the things,
which, according to him, consist of an accumulation or interconnec¬
tion of monads. Really, then, it would not have to have been the
monads, but these totalities, combinations or systems, which ema¬
nated out of God, otherwise the way they are combined in the as¬
sumed manner would have to be explained separately, i.e. it is not
worth the effort of proceeding with this assessment; for what has
been offered is sufficient to convince us that one would do the clever
man an injustice it one considered his doctrine of monads to be more
than a hypothesis which he thought up, perhaps only to oppose some¬
thing different for a time to Spinozism, in order, so to speak, to divert
the world with it. In one respect this hypothesis succeeded in making
itself important. For, as contemporaries are generally attached to pe-
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
79

ripheral matters, the Cartesian question of the commercio animi et cor¬

poris had become the most important of all. Here Leibniz was
different from Descartes. Leibniz was a convinced anti-dualist, phys¬
ical and spiritual were one for him to the extent to which he reduced
them to the concept of the monad. He did not, then, have Descartes’s
difficulty. But for him every monad was an absolute centre, a universe
for itself, a self-contained world, a pure egoity (Ichheit) into which
nothing from outside could enter. The monads, he says, have no win¬
dows through which things could get in. But how is it, then, that these
monads, which in relation to each other are pure independences, cor¬
respond to each other, or that one becomes determining for the ideas
(Vorstellungen) of the others, for their essence consists, after all, just in
the idea, every monad is only its own independent vis repraesentativa
[power of representation], or a centrum repraesentativum Universi [cen¬
tre of representation of the universe], which admittedly only repre¬
sents (vorstellt) the ideas (Vorstellungen) of the others. How, in
particular, can that inner and immediate relationship be explained
between the monad which is the one which dominates my organism,
the immediate soul of the body, which is merely an animal soul, and
the higher one which is the reasonable soul? Leibniz’s answer to this
is: “Both are so attuned to each other and calculated for each other
that the reasonable soul, as a consequence of the purely immanent
evolution of its ideas, and without going outside itself, represents ev¬
erything which goes on in the body, as if it were affected by it” (can
everyone see here Spinoza’s proposition in a stunted form? . . .
Spinoza says: the soul is nothing more than the immediate concept of
the body, in the place of “concept” Leibniz put the far less meaning¬
ful: power of thought (Vorstellkraft)); “in turn, the body”, he continues,
“expresses, following only an immanent law of its evolution, every¬
thing which goes on in the soul, by its movements, as if it had been
determined to perform these movements by the soul”; they relate (he
uses this comparison himself) like two clocks that the master has set
and wound up in such a manner that one, without knowing of the
other, strikes the hours and quarter hours at the same time as the
other. This, then, is the system of so-called predetermined (prestabi¬
lised) harmony, which became so famous, and was in its time the ob¬
ject of endless discussions, of a long argument for and against, which
nowadays is at best seen as a philosophical antique and as an occasion
to wonder about the forbearance of the German spirit, which allowed
itself to be detained for so long by such unnatural and yet at the same
time secondary ideas.
Though, after all this, we can primarily regard Leibnizianism only
as a stunted Spinozism, we must at least praise one deserving aspect
8o On the History of Modern Philosophy

of it, namely that it was not content always to talk of things only in
abstracto, without any consideration of their differences and grada¬
tions. Leibniz was the first to call the world of bodies which are inor¬
ganic and generally termed “dead” a sleeping monad-world; the soul
of plants and animals was for him the monad that was just dreaming,
only the reasonable soul was the waking monad. Although he only ex¬
pressed this gradation metaphorically, it should not be overlooked
that he did so; it was the first beginning of looking at the One essence
of nature in the necessary sequence of steps of its coming-to-itself,
and can, as such, be regarded as the first seed of later, more living
development. This side is still the most beautiful and best of Leibniz’s
doctrine; the doctrine is mainly presented from this side in the well-
known Thesibus, which Leibniz wrote about his system for the famous
Prince Eugene of Savoy, which are for that reason known under the
name of Theses in gratiam principis Eugenii; these prove at the same
time that the great commanders and princes of that time were more
concerned with philosophy than one can say they are these days — yet
Eugene as well was not a German.
Otherwise, in relation to Spinoza, Leibniz, as I stated, only worked
to drive out the speculative sense of this system from the thoughts of
his own time and the time that followed. His relationship to Spinoza,
whom he, it should be said, mentions rarely and only in passing, was,
however, not so much the one of an opponent as that of an interpreter
who cleverly interprets and tries to mediate. The Theodicy is mainly
written in this sense; throughout, without often naming him, it pre¬
supposes Spinoza but tries more to distract from him, to avoid him,
than go towards him. This work is supposed to contain a justification
of God for letting badness and evil into the world. But even the po¬
sition given to the question of the origin of badness and evil in the
world — viz. a justification of God is being demanded in this respect —
this position already presupposes a free relationship of God to the
world. For if the world is just a necessary consequence of the nature of
God, then there can, in things and in the world considered truthfully,
i.e. in the manner in which they follow from the nature of God, be
neither anything truly evil nor anything truly bad. Leibniz was, then,
already compelled by the question, which he, by the way, had not put
to himself but had been given as a task by an elevated personage (it
was Sophie, wife of the Elector of Brunswick, whose successors still
occupy the throne of Great Britain today, who had invited him to do
it, and in whom he had a great patron, as Descartes had earlier in the
already-mentioned Princess Elisabeth; everyone knows what science
and art owed to the house of the Palatinate; Karl Friedrich gave
Spinoza a professorship in Heidelberg); he was, then, already com-
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 81

Pel led by the task to give God a different relationship to the world
and to things than the one Spinoza had and he himself had given in
his monadological principles. He imagines God, then, as deliberating
with himself before all time (1) whether, given the necessary limita¬
tions to which a world different from Him would have to be sub¬
jected, it was better to create such a world or to refrain from doing so
completely; (2) which of the various possible orders of things, given
those unavoidable limitations, whose necessary consequences (he as¬
sumes) must be both physical evil and moral badness - which order of
things, then, presupposing those limitations, would still be the best of
all the possible ones; as a consequence of these deliberations he then
has God make the decision to create the present world which accord¬
ingly is not absolutely the best but still the best under those conditions;
whence the name optimism that was given to the Leibnizian idea.
Accordingly, Leibniz would have asserted (1) an origin of the world in
time and (2) a time before the world, not at all just a logical but a real
and historical origin of the same. However, many people wished to
doubt the honesty of Leibniz’s account as soon as, or at least soon af¬
ter, the appearance of the Theodicy, and a man, who was admittedly not
very credible on account of his vanity, even claimed to have received
a written communication from Leibniz himself which showed that
Leibniz himself regarded his whole theory in the Theodicy was just a
lusus ingenii [game of ingenuity]. If I were to express an opinion about
this, I would be inclined rather to assume that Leibniz regarded his
Monadology as just a lusus ingenii which he simply opposed to the ideas
of other philosophers of the time or of earlier times, and that he
meant the Theodicy seriously. Leibniz was on the one hand much too
experienced, and on the other too much a man of genius, to be able
himself to consider his doctrine of monads as more than just a tem¬
porary idea. But whatever opinion one adopts about this is less im¬
portant than the fact that even if the Theodicy is properly understood
it still cannot appear as really contradicting the Spinozist system, but
only as a moderating and accommodating interpretation of it. Leibniz
deduces the evil in the world from the necessary limitations in cre¬
ation. But this means to claim the same as Spinoza does: “The power
which shows itself in evil is, seen positively, the same as that which
works in good; it is admittedly comparatively more imperfect (less
positive) than that in good, but regarded in itself, or not in compar¬
ison, it is itself something positive and also a perfection. What we call
evil in it is only the lesser degree of the positive, which only appears
as a defect for our comparison, and in nature or in the totality is not
a defect, as this minus also belongs to the perfection of the whole.”
This is the true opinion of Spinoza, which is also completely consis-
82 On the History of Modern Philosophy

tent with his system. According to Leibniz there is likewise only a plus
of limitation and a minus of the positive in evil. This minus of the
positive in the one belongs, though, just as necessarily to the possibly
best world as the plus of the positive in the other, indeed, as in nature
a preponderance of the positive on the one side has a same prepon¬
derance of the negative on the other side as a necessary consequence,
so it is also in the moral world.
Leibniz defends God for admitting evil mainly by distinguishing the
divine will from the divine understanding (Verstand). God, he says, can
do nothing against the understanding, it is the understanding which
means that created things are limited at all, and are limited to differ¬
ent degrees; this limitation (and with it the possibility of evil) is, there¬
fore, independent of the will of God, God did not want these
limitations, He only wanted what is good. Leibniz, then, knows of no
other means of justifying God, as he thinks he must, for admitting evil
than by positing evil in limitation, i.e. in something which is only a
defect or a privation. And yet something more than simple limitation
must belong to evil; for of all created things only the one which is pre¬
cisely most perfect, i.e. the one which is least limited, is capable of evil,
not to mention that, according to the dogmatic conception, which
Leibniz defends in every way, the devil is not the most limited but
rather the most unlimited element of creation. Leibniz’s explanation
might be able to explain simply spiteful or common evil, but not evil
in its great manifestations, as it manifests itself in world history united
with the greatest energy and excellence — not just of spiritual but even
of moral powers. If one also takes into account that, according to Leib¬
niz’s doctrine, uncompromising evil also necessarily contributes to the
perfection of the world and, as such, is necessarily itself something
perfect, then one cannot see here where the difference is supposed to
be. One might say: but Leibniz sheds a soothing light over the whole
thing by his giving precedence to a free decision in God, which, by the
way, is left completely unfounded by him. But does not this decision
as well belong finally to the nature of God, could He deny Himself it?
Obviously not. The decision was, then, a necessary one in view of God
Himself. Leibniz only seeks to moderate this necessity by thinking of
it as a moral one. But if the moral necessity of choosing the good, and,
in certain conditions, the best, belongs to the nature, to the essence (We-
sen) of God, as Leibniz maintains, then this is only an attempt to me¬
diate and make comprehensible the necessity with which, as Spinoza
says, everything flows from the divine essence, not, though, an at¬
tempt to remove that necessity. In order to disperse this falsely sooth¬
ing glow, which the idea of a necessity founded only in the ethical
nature of God spreads over the system of necessity as a whole, one
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 83

needs only to reflect for a moment. It admittedly belongs to the usual

popularly rationalistic ideas that God could, absolutely and according
to His nature, only do good, and by good is understood that which is
in accordance with the moral law. But God is outside of and above all
law, for He Himself is the law. God is the lord jure absolute positivo [by
absolutely positive law], as He is because He Is; there is nothing good
before and outside Him which He would have to want, there is only
good after Him and as a consequence of Him; only what He wants is
good, and only because He wants it is it good (not in itself); if He did
not want it, it would not be good. Once one is clear about this and has
had the courage to realise this, then one sees that the common doc¬
trine “God can only do good” is a tautological proposition; for good is
only what God does, and as such he admittedly can only do good. Any¬
one who has any idea at all these days knows as well that the propo¬
sition which completely removes the freedom in God via the pretence
(Schein) of ethical necessity is the last resort of rationalism, which even
presumes to be exclusively ethical in some way or other; in opposing
itself only to the positive aspect of revealed religion, by the way, it is
really opposed to everything positive in philosophy as well.
It might seem that our judgement of Leibniz is not very favourable
overall. However, this judgement cannot do any damage to the true
spirit of the man. His philosophy was not necessarily his philosophy, it
was to a great extent the philosophy of his age, i.e. the only philoso¬
phy his age was capable of sustaining. Leibniz’s spirit undoubtedly saw
further than he revealed. He was, so to speak, endowed with a magic
gaze, a gaze which opened up every object that it attached itself to as
though of its own accord. Leibniz will remain, because of the breadth
and inclusiveness of his spirit, the fruitfulness of his ideas, his uncom¬
mon gift of useful invention, which is as rare in philosophy as it is in
poetry or any kind of human endeavour - he will always remain, be¬
cause of all this, a pride and joy of the German nation; his spirit,
more mediating than revolutionary, proceeded only step by step; not
least because of his inherent calm, he always only did what was at
hand and sought to bring extremes together rather than to establish
extremes himself; if, with such great qualities, he did not achieve ev¬
erything that he was able to achieve, then one must consider the ir¬
resistible deadness of his time, of that sad time which in Germany
followed immediately after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War;
Descartes, the initiator of modern philosophy, died two years after the
end of this war, the greatest part of his life passed during it. Leibniz
was born two years before the Peace of Westphalia (1646). It seems
that those spiritual movements which put the principles of the inner
life into question anew always have a certain relationship to external
84 On the History of Modern Philosophy

movements. Kant’s philosophy happened at the time of the French

Revolution, and none of his successors has yet lived to see the end of
this politically divided time, in which, so it seems, every misunder¬
standing could only be compensated for by a new and bigger one.

WOLFF

Leibniz’s main endeavour seems to have been to pacify again the rev¬
olutionary element which had come into philosophy via Descartes
and to assert against the objective rationalism of Spinoza, which was
indeed premature because it sought to put an end to the free scien¬
tific dialectic too soon - to assert once more against this ossifying ra¬
tionalism the freedom of a dialectic which was by no means exhausted
or at an end. He could not avoid opposing to the objective rationalism
of Spinoza a philosophy which was merely rationalistic (rasonnirend)
and a basis for subjective rationality (Vernunftigkeit), from which
naturally resulted, particularly after Christian Wolff [ 1679-1754], of
tedious memory, had appropriated the Leibnizian ideas, that rational¬
ism which remained dominant for so long, particularly in religion.
The first theological rationalists were Wolffians to a man, who had
emerged in the state in which Wolffian philosophy was for a long
time, so to speak, the privileged philosophy. Leibniz steered back to¬
wards old metaphysics and became thereby, it must be said, the indi¬
rect author, or even the indirect cause, of the form which orthodox
metaphysics had taken before Kant. But Kant was to become for this
modern metaphysics what Descartes was for the old metaphysics. The
general character of scholastic metaphysics, to which the modern ver¬
sion remained as a whole true, depends (1) on the presupposition of
certain general concepts, which are assumed to be given immediately
along with the understanding itself. Leibniz had made a great effort
to defend the priority, the independence of thejse concept^ from sen¬
suous perception and experience, and thereby to.defend the necessity
and generality inherent in them, and to shield them against the op¬
ponents of innate concepts. Along with these general' concepts one
then presupposed (2) certain objects as given in experience. To these
objects belonged not just those which today are the only ones to be
called “objects of experience” because experience is limited just to
that of the senses. To these objects belonged just as much the soul, the
world, and God, whose existence one generally presupposed as given,
and which one only strove to elevate to the status of rational cogni¬
tion. This happened by simply applying concepts which were already
at hand to the objects. Such concepts were essence, being, substance,
cause, or abstract predicates, such as simplicity, finitude, infinity, etc.,
and it was only a question of bringing the presupposed concepts into
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 85

external connection with the presupposed objects, which one then

called proof The proof was never a proof by the object itself (Selbstbe-
wets des Gegenstandes)\ the object did not prove to be this or that via its,
own progression or inner development, it had not developed inter¬
nally or in itself, e.g., to the point where it announced itself as a hu¬
man soul, rather there was among the known and presupposed
things also one which one called the human soul, to which one sought
to attach the equally already known predicate of simplicity, i.e. of im¬
materiality. There was, then, no system which was continued through
all objects, instead this metaphysics began again at the beginning with
every object, and was able quite comfortably to treat the various mat¬
ters chapter by chapter. There was not one and the same concept
which went through the whole, and which, once it arrived at each new
stage of development, determined itself as an other, e.g., in one case
as matter or more determinately as plant, as animal, in another as hu¬
man soul. It was not a question of the subject and of the predicate
itself (which one just presupposed), but only of the connection of the
two, i.e. it was a question of the forms of fixed propositions, into
which one brought both; such propositions were, e.g.: “The soul is
absolutely simple”, “The world is either limited or unlimited in space
and time” (for here in the cosmological concepts this metaphysics per¬
mitted a certain freedom). Kant later sought something better in the
fact that these contradictory assertions only arise precisely in the cos¬
mological ideas. But this is not so at all. The supposed contradiction
between the cosmological ideas spreads to theology and psychology.
The question: whether the world is infinite or finite, whether it began
in time or is without a beginning, whether it is a chain of cause and
effects which goes back into infinity, this question also influences
theological ideas, and to the opinion that the world began also cor¬
responds of necessity a completely different conception of God to the
contrary opinion; furthermore, the opinion that everything in the
world is determined by a necessary, unbreakable causal nexus, which,
therefore, could not be interrupted by any free action, necessarily in¬
fluences rational psychology as well as theology. There is exactly the
same contradiction in theology. The two assertions, that God is just a
blindly working being (Wesen), i.e. only as a consequence of the inner
necessity of His nature, and that God is free, bound to nothing and
Lord of his activity; these two assertions are just as directly opposed as
the other two; the world has a beginning, or it has no beginning. The
reason why this contradiction in theological ideas did not become just
as apparent was because one had to be a lot more careful in this case,
and because one had, in particular, found an apparent means of uni¬
fying freedom and necessity in God in the already-mentioned concept
of a merely moral necessity. But in relation to the world one already
86 On the History of Modern Philosophy

thought orie was allowed to be more free, and the opinion heard so
often, even from theologians, that it did not matter to reason and
made basically no difference whether one assumed that God had cre¬
ated from eternity, or not, derives precisely from that Leibniz—Wolf¬
fian rationalism.
A great fault of this metaphysics is that it posited so-called formal
logic outside itself and left it behind. Kant was later reproached for de¬
riving the principle of deduction for his listing of the categories or
concepts of the understanding from the table of logical judgements,
as well as for deriving the principle of deduction for the “ideas of
reason” (as he calls them) from the conclusions. But the correct per¬
ception is at least present in the fact that the formal-logical differ¬
entiation of thought, judgement and inference, and the material
differentiation of the metaphysical concepts flow from one and the
same source. Kant proved, for another reason we can note here, to
have understood things correctly in this procedure (of deducing the
table of categories without more ado from the table of judgements,
which is presupposed as known). For had he wanted to deduce these
supposed forms of the human spirit genetically, he would have had to
go beyond them and precisely thereby acknowledge them as insepa¬
rable from man, as absolutely inherent in him.
In accordance with its particular content, this metaphysics split it¬
self up, by the way, into a succession of several individual sciences.
The first was ontology, which got its name from the fact that it was sup¬
posed to contain the initial and most general determinations of being
(des Seyenden), the basic and original concepts, which had to hold sway
in all subsequent proofs. It was concerned, then, with essence and be¬
ing (Wesen und Seyn) in general, with the possible, the contingent, and
the necessary, with the various concepts of cause, of multiplicity and
unity, finiteness and infinity, etc. But one can justifiably conclude this
list with an x, because this ontology as little secured the completeness
of its content as it secured a real system, a resulting-from-each-other
of these concepts, as is evident from the fact that it is not easy to en¬
counter the same order or sequence of concepts in different presen¬
tations of the ontology. Basically this definition was only a collection
of definitions with which one imitated the geometrical method, which
also gives definitions ahead of its demonstrations; it would be more
correct to regard this ontology as just an explanatory dictionary of
the various expressions and concepts which occur in philosophy,
which was given ahead of what follows in order to aid understanding.
In this science the presupposition was general that one could possess
those concepts independently of the objects, and possess them for
themselves, which is why it was preferred to call them concepts a pri-
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff 87

on, so that the whole subsequent era understood under concepts and
cognitions a priori those which arise before and separately from the
objects, as if for the true science which begins at the beginning the
objects would not have to be just as a priori as the concepts.
The second science was sometimes rational psychology, sometimes ra¬
tional cosmology. In the former (1) the absolute simplicity of the soul
was primarily to be proven - a concept which relied completely on
the atomistic view of matter - basically it was only proven that the
soul was not composite, in the sense that one thought of matter as
composite. But what if matter itself is not composite in this manner, so
that it was not at all a valid inference that: matter is divisible, there¬
fore it is composed of parts? From simplicity (2) the absolute inde-
structability of the soul was supposed to be proven. However, one
soon started to mistrust the conclusiveness of this proof; perhaps one
also felt the bareness and abstractness of the concept of immortality,
which is the least one can say about the continuation of the soul after
death, for instance; in short, all proofs were permitted, including, by
the way, empirical ones, such, e.g., as the proof taken from the per¬
fectibility of the human spirit, but one had then to rely again on the
help of the doctrine of God, which was, though, only dealt with after
this. In rational cosmology the creation of the world was then dealt
with, which one presupposed from the tradition; in this the question
of whether God had created from eternity or only at a certain time
was particularly discussed, in addition the infinity or finitude of the
world in terms of space, the mechanism of nature and whether it
could be interrupted or not, e.g. by miracles, a few general laws, the
law of economy (lex parsimoniae), of constancy, etc., as well as the gen¬
eral laws of movement were dealt with.
The last science and the pinnacle of all was, finally, the so-called
rational theology, in which, however (since it was only a question of ex¬
istence), three successive proofs - the ontological, the cosmological
and the physio-theological - were found necessary. This succession of
proofs already showed that none of these proofs was regarded as suf¬
ficient in itself. I have already said what I think about the first of
these, the ontological argument, in relation to Descartes, and I there¬
fore only need briefly to repeat its content in the form which it later
assumed. Everything which is only one being (Seyendes), which, there¬
fore, only takes part in being (Seyn), can also be considered in abstrac¬
tion from this being (Seyn), without this being (Seyn) — be considered
naked, as it were, as that which has just drawn being to itself (sich das
Seyn bloss angezogen), has just put it on (sich mit ihm iiberkleidet hat). Now
to the extent to which everything which is just one being (Seyendes)
can be considered as something to which being (Seyn) happens (ad-
88 On the History of Modern Philosophy

venit, accedit), it is in itself just as much a non-being (nicht-Seyendes), just

a possibility of attracting being (das Seyn anzuziehen). Or, to put the
same thing another way: everything which is only determined for being
(Seyn) makes a transition from non-being to being because of this. It is
initially only there in its potentiality or possibility, it becomes real
(wirklich seyend) only by the transition a potentia ad actum [from poten¬
tiality to actuality]. Now, it conflicts completely with the idea of God
to think such a transition in Him. (This subordinate proposition is in¬
dispensable because this metaphysics does not first arrive at the con¬
cept of God, beginning with the concept of that which purely [without
potentiality] is, but, conversely, begins with the concept of God in or¬
der to connect with Him the predicate of that which purely is. That
subordinate proposition itself, though — that it conflicts with the idea
of God to think a potentiality in Him - is basically just taken up from
the assumed concepts, from the existing doctrine, in the last analysis,
from the tradition.) But what now follows from the two premises?
Only this: God is the being (Wesen) that can only be thought as being
(seyend) and in no way as not being (nicht seyend). But it is precisely here
that one can see that this is just a determination of the nature of God,
which therefore says nothing about the existence of God; it is always
only the concept of God that He is that which purely is (das rein Sey-
ende), as is clear even in the usual Latin expression; Deus est id, quod
non cogitari potest nisi existens - [God is that which cannot be thought
unless it exists] - He can, then, only be thought as being (seyend), i.e.,
therefore, if He exists then He can only be thought of as existing as
that which purely is (das rein Seyende), as that which has not gone over
a potentia ad actum, but is really - without potentiality. The meaning of
the concept is not that God necessarily exists or that He is the neces¬
sarily existing being (Wesen), but that He necessarily is that which is
(das Seyende) — namely being which only is, or that which purely is (rein
Seyende) itself. Admittedly the two expressions: “God is that which
necessarily is” (das nothwendig Seyende) and: “God is necessarily that
which is” (nothwendig das Seyende) are so similar that the misunder¬
standing which gave rise to the ontological argument appears very
natural.
This misunderstanding has still even today not been explained (one
only needs to see how confusedly Hegel, e.g., talks about the onto¬
logical arguments). However, in the schools of metaphysics themselves
there was always a great mistrust of this argument; whence the move
to a second, the so-called cosmological argument. This had to be con¬
clusive in a completely different way. For here one did not begin with
a simple concept, but instead with existence itself, namely with the ex¬
istence of the world, and in this way one could only infer existence,
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
«9

whilst it was impossible if one just began with the concept to arrive at
existence in the concluding proposition.
The cosmological argument, examined more closely, is based on the
foundation used already by Aristotle, that a progression from causes
to causes in a row, where a last cause is never encountered, that such
a regressus in infinitum [infinite regress] would not really explain any-
thing. For the next cause which I assume is not really a cause, but, be¬
cause it presupposes another cause, only an effect, and the same with
the following cause. I only move, therefore, from effects to effects,
and the regressus in infinitum is really only an ever continued negation
of the cause. Either, then, I must never explain, or I must assume a
cause which itself does not presuppose another cause, which is abso¬
lute. This last cause can, admittedly, only be found in that which
purely is (das rein Seyende), for that which is not purely and absolutely
cause also cannot be that which purely is. In this way one really could
believe that the existence of God was proven, and the Thomist school
of the scholastics indeed lay the greatest emphasis on this argument.
For the purpose of this argument one had, however, to imagine a so-
called chain of causes. I admit that this has never been clear to me. For
if one does not, for example, wish to limit oneself just to living beings,
where one can go back from the son to the father, from the latter to
his father, etc., into the indeterminate, then I do not see how one can
demonstrate it in the rest of nature, because research into nature im¬
mediately comes up against limits in all directions that it cannot go
beyond; e.g., if it thinks it can explain magnetic or electrical phenom¬
ena by a magnetic or electrical fluid, then it cannot go any further
back with this matter, it must immediately accept it as something
which originally is, or was originally created. If one just relates this
chain to movements in nature, then the substance to which movement
is only attached as an accident remains unexplained: if one takes
things as the elements of this row, then we see, instead of such a chain
in nature in general, rather a system of general mutual determination.
If, for instance, one wanted to say that this particular substance, e.g.,
this metal = A could not exist in nature if that other metal = B did
not exist, thus metal A is dependent for its existence on metal B, then
we immediately see that metal B could just as much not exist if there
were no metal A, i.e. we see that the determination is a mutual one,
not a one-sided one. Perhaps one can allow such a mutual obligation
of bodies to each other, or allow the fact that in case one of them
could disappear from the row of things, all the others would have to
disappear - one can, I suggest, perhaps allow this for inorganic na¬
ture; it could not be asserted for organic beings at least, as experience
shows that members admittedly have already disappeared from the
90 On the History of Modern Philosophy

system of organic beings, or at least could disappear, without endan¬

gering the existence of the others. I did not just mean those species of
animals and plants whose remains we find in petrified impressions or
fossile bones, and which are no longer encountered in nature today,
but rather the fact that even within human memory species of ani¬
mals have probably disappeared, for, as several of these species are, so
to speak, in the course of departing and seem near to dying out com¬
pletely, why should this not also have happened earlier? Yet if we now
wanted to admit the idea of such a chain of cause and effect, then we
would only thereby have arrived at the concept of a last determining
cause, but whether this cause would be one which works blindly or
freely would not be decided thereby. For the cause which works
blindly does not need to be precisely the kind which is determined or
necessitated by another cause which is outside itself; it can also be one
which only works according to an inner necessity.
A final cause of the kind which Aristotle puts forward, a first mover
that is not moved itself (to Jiptbxov kivouv aiavr|TOv) would be completely
sufficient for the cosmological argument. The ontological argument,
if it is not based on a misunderstanding, can only lead to the concept
of absolute substance, the cosmological argument only to the concept
of absolute cause.
Metaphysics also moves on, therefore, from this argument to the
next - to the physico-theological, thus physico-logical argument. By
virtue of this third proof it might appear as if metaphysics arrived at
the existence of God as such, to the extent, namely, that from the pur¬
posive arrangement of nature as a whole and in its individual parts
one can infer not just an absolute cause but an intelligible cause. But
just presupposing an intelligible cause in general is neither sufficient
to explain the purposiveness of nature, nor is God, as just an intelli¬
gible cause, also already determined as God. For, as far as the first is
concerned, we must distinguish a dual purposiveness: the merely ex¬
ternal, which is imposed from outside on some tool or other, like the
purposiveness of a machine - this does not cross over into the mate¬
rial, but is based on just the external form and the external connec¬
tion of certain parts, and the inner purposiveness, which only has its
place where, as in the organic, form and matter are inseparable. In
the former (merely mechanical purposiveness), the artist or producer
remains outside his work, in the latter, the artistic or plastic activity
must be one which is inherent in the material, which has grown to¬
gether with the material. Not, then, the presupposition of an intelli¬
gible cause at all or in general, but only the presupposition of an
intelligible cause which is inherent in the matter itself would explain
the purposiveness, in particular, of organic nature. But metaphysics
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff gx

does not want such a cause, does not want a cause inherent in the
things themselves, it wants God as a cause which remains outside
things and outside matter. The kind of cause which is different from
the material can, though, e.g., will the organic form of the material,
but cannot produce it, for the form which it produced could in every
case only be imposed externally onto the matter, but not be the inner
form which has grown together with it, which we must gain knowl¬
edge of in organic nature.
So the simple presupposition of an intelligible cause in general is
not sufficient to explain the purposiveness of nature. On the other
hand, the concept which we wish to realise in God is not exhausted in
the concept of an intelligent, intelligible cause. God would also be an
intelligible cause as just the architect of the world.
But the understanding alone is not sufficient to produce a world in
terms of material as well. The understanding is only applied in every
production, but from this it is clear that it is not the really producing
force. What absolutely distinguishes God is His being the power to
produce material; if this cannot be demonstrated or made comprehen¬
sible in Him, then God is still not posited as God. The concept of a
simply intelligible (like that of a free, moral, i.e. generous) nature does
not contain anything which is really distinct with regard to God. For
man is also an intelligible nature, he is even, at least to a certain ex¬
tent, receptive to wisdom, just as to power, foresight and other ethical
qualities. Whence an addition was always found necessary in the ap¬
plication of these qualities to God; God is not called wise, but all-wise,
not powerful, but all-powerful, not generous, but all-generous (all-
giitig). By this addition the fact that God is not limited in the exercise
of these qualities by any material was to be expressed, and thus the fact
that He Himself is the cause which brings forth material — the creator,
and from this it is clear that the really distinct concept of God is not
to be absolute intelligence, but to be creator. With this third argument
as well, then, the concept of God as such was not achieved.
However, after it was thought that the existence of the true God had
now been proven, one went on to the doctrine of the attributes of God.
Strangely enough; for you would think that the complex of these at¬
tributes would constitute the concept of God, but one would have had
to have assured oneself of the concept before thinking of the proof of
existence. But now it was easy to distinguish two kinds of attribute
among the so-called attributes of God which could be found in the
tradition and in common belief. Some of these attributes presented
themselves as those without which God could not be God, so they
could be called the simply negative ones. Such attributes are, e.g., eter¬
nity, infinity, being of its own accord (a se Esse). A being (Wesen) which
92 On the History of Modern Philosophy

was not eternal, which was not of itself could not be God, but it is not
yet God for this reason alone; these seem, then, to be attributes of
God in and before Himself, i.e., as it were, before His Godhood, at¬
tributes which He, so to speak, needs, in order to be God, so that He is
God (a priori attributes). But as the blind substance of Spinoza is just
as eternal, just as infinite and of itself, then it is clear from this that
these attributes are not attributes of God as such. Others of these at¬
tributes presented themselves, on the other hand, as those through
which God really was God, or which God has according to His God-
hood (= positive). To these now belonged all those attributes which
include freedom, intelligence, will and Providence, or a real relation¬
ship [?] (eine aktuelle Relation). These two classes of attributes, though,
just stood side by side, without how they relate to each other being ex¬
amined (no transition from those of the first to those of the second
kind). The positive, or, as they were also termed, the moral attributes
were then used to try to refute Spinozism; however, one felt less se¬
cure against this system by these refutations than by the fact that God
was transferred to the end of metaphysics, where one thought that the
independent existence of things, the freedom of human actions, and
all those other things closest to the human heart were already pro¬
tected against infinity, omnipotence (which only seemed to leave an
absolute impotence for everything which exists outside God), as well
as against the omniscience of God (which seemed incompatible with
the freedom of human actions). One consoled oneself with it without
pondering that in reality God is not after things but before them.
I thought it was necessary for various reasons to present the former
metaphysics somewhat more extensively here. For (1) it was, after all,
really the only one which was valid, publicly tolerated and accepted:
neither the philosophy of Descartes, nor that of Spinoza, nor even
what was really speculative about Leibniz’s philosophy was ever taken
up in the schools; (2) it is still important to know what a dialectic which
is merely subjective and which thus remains outside the object is capable
of, and, as a preliminary exercise for higher philosophy, this meta¬
physics was still presented to good effect even in universities. For al¬
though we can only consider it to be a merely rationalistic,
subjectively-rational philosophy, it does allow precisely for that rea¬
son at the same time a certain freedom of thought and use of the un¬
derstanding which would be all the more charitable in its effect
because this way of philosophising is the only one which is suitable to
and comfortable for the great majority; for if the majority concerns
itself at all with philosophy, it does not like distancing itself from its
own point of view, but rather, being very satisfied with the education
it happens to have achieved, and being little inclined to admit that the
 Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff
93

edifice of its supposed education needs revision and rebuilding from

the foundations up, everyone attributes an a priori reason to them¬
selves, which justifies them in determining in advance what they want
to admit or not - thus by far the greater majority in the last analysis
want nothing more than that the great objects of philosophy should
be explicated to them from their point of view, without their being
forced to leave this point of view, just by reasonable conversation or
discussion.
Despite the scholastic apparel and the verbiage with which that or¬
thodox metaphysics had initially surrounded itself, as time passed it
became more and more, in its external appearance as well, a merely
rationalistic philosophy, and as a period which became step by step
ever more alive and aroused soon saw through that (namely that it was
not a scientific philosophy, but just a rationalistic philosophy), and as
everyone has, or thinks he has, the same right just to rationalise, be¬
cause one needs no more for that than the sort of reason everyone
attributes to himself, and nobody thinks he must first legitimate it by
his deeds, then that orthodox metaphysics gradually turned into a
kind of formless, merely popular philosophy, and finally into com¬
plete anarchy. The period of so-called thinking for yourself (Selbstdenken)
began, which seems admittedly a pretty pleonastic expression, for it
goes without saying that everyone who thinks must think for himself,
and nobody can have somebody else think for him, as little as one can
have somebody else sleep or digest for one; but the opinion was the
following: that everyone was already sufficiently equipped with that
general reason for them to have reasonable ideas about all possible
objects of philosophy; everyone, the idea was, had to make his own
system for himself; a philosophy which claimed objective validity was
only good for school, or to impress inexperienced youth; life and ex¬
perience was everything, etc. This pointing to experience did, how¬
ever, bring advantages to philosophy from another side, by giving
reasons for the emergence and development of empirical psychology,
which admittedly still lacks a real scientific foundation, but which did
open up to the human spirit a new region of itself, particularly that
highly interesting region which lies in between the physical and the
psychological.
 Kant, Fichte, and the System of
Transcendental Idealism

KANT

This was the state in which philosophy found itself when Immanuel
Kant unexpectedly appeared as its restorer and gave back to it its sci¬
entific seriousness, and at the same time its lost dignity.
Before I move on to Kant himself, I want to begin with a general
observation, which applies to more or less all human deeds: namely
that their real importance, i.e. that their true effects are generally oth¬
ers than those which were intended or which relate to the means by
which they were produced. The effect of Kant was indeed excep¬
tional. One cannot be pleased that, fifty years after the appearance of
Kant, after we are admittedly at a different point, but one to which we
would never have got without him, Kant’s contribution is diminished
by those who contribute nothing to going beyond Kant. The same can
be said of Fichte. It does not take much to pass a dismissive judge¬
ment about both, but it would take a lot only to raise philosophy again
to the point to which it had been raised by Kant and Fichte. The
judgement of history will be that a greater outer and inner battle for
the highest possessions of the human spirit was never fought; at no
time has the endeavour of the scientific spirit led to deeper experi¬
ences and experiences more rich in results than since Kant.1 But this

' With Kant’s appearance the previous course of philosophy suddenly changes, it is
as if a current which has been held back and dammed up for a long time had fi¬
nally found an opening, which it immediately works continually on widening, un¬
til it comes to the complete break-through, and it can flow freely and without
hindrance. If this stream does not keep a regular course straightaway, if it escapes
without barriers to each side and floods fields and meadows, then this is all right;
petty and narrow spirits may afterwards chide the river and praise the little stream
which they have diverted from it in order to drive their mill, the judgement of
history will be different. . . . Since Kant’s real influence began in philosophy (for
he remained unnoticed for a long time, and the first success by which his influence
announced itself was only a swarm of merely literal copiers and largely thoughtless
exegetes), but since his real influence began it is not various systems, but One sys¬
tem which forces its way through all the successive appearances to the last point of

94
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism
95

effect was not really produced by what Kant directly wanted. Whilst he
thought that he had brought all knowledge of the supersensuous to
an end for all time by his critique, he really only caused negative and
positive in philosophy to have to separate, but precisely because of
this the positive, now emerging in its complete independence, was
able to oppose itself, as positive, to the merely negative philosophy as
the second side of philosophy as a whole. Kant began this process of
separation and the resultant process of transfiguration of philosophy
into the positive. Kant’s critique contributed to this all the more be¬
cause it was in no way hostile towards the positive. Whilst he demol¬
ishes the whole edifice of that metaphysics, he always makes his view
clear that in the last analysis one must want what it wanted, and that
its content would in fact finally be the true metaphysics, if it were only
possible.
I now move on to the presentation of Kant himself with the asser¬
tion that Kant’s critique was initially directed against the metaphysics
accepted in the schools, but that from another side and, as it were,
unintentionally, it also again became a defence of precisely this
metaphysics.
Empiricism had, starting in England mainly with John Locke, re¬
volted against metaphysics at that time, denying the existence of all
concepts independent of experience, and out of this empiricism the
doctrine of the famous philosopher and historian David Hume had

its transfiguration; as the plant which begins to grow does not know what point it
will arrive at but still has a sure feeling of that point, and this feeling is what drives
it, is what we call the drive in it. Thus even if in this whole succession nobody had
a clear concept of the goal, everyone felt that it was necessary to reach some final
point, and precisely this feeling, this drive, which came into philosophy with Kant,
distinguished this epoch from all earlier ones - for, e.g., in Leibniz’s system there
was no such drive, the power which had awakened it consumed itself in the dead,
deaf and sterile endeavours of that pre-Kantian metaphysics; what, on the other
hand, in relation to the movement begun by Kant, brought those who stood out¬
side it, who looked at it from the outside, to mock and scorn it, namely the swift
change of its systems, was itself precisely the proof that finally the living point in
philosophy had been hit upon, which, like the seed of a being which has once been
fertilised, or like the basic thought of a great tragedy, does not allow any peace
until the complete development has been achieved - philosophy was gripped by a
necessary and, so to speak, involuntary process; what appeared to them to be a
rapid succession of systems was really only the swift succession of the moments of
development and continuating of One system. In such a succession, the individual
is not to be considered according to what is just idiosyncratic or peculiar about
him; this individual side is only the tribute he pays to his time, just the skin and
husk, which is left behind in the subsequent development, or even only a remain¬
der of the earth and the ground from which he has grown which has stuck to him.
We must, then, see Kant this way as well. (From another Munich manuscript.)
[Translator's note: The footnote text was added by Schelling’s son.]
g6 On the History of Modern Philosophy

emerged, which doubted or refuted everything general and necessary

in human knowledge; this so-called scepticism of Hume was, accord¬
ing to Kant himself, what gave him the main impetus for his own phi¬
losophy. Hume’s attacks were directed almost exclusively against the
objective validity of the law of causality, the basic proposition that ev¬
erything that happens has a cause. Without thinking about it we fol¬
low this law in all our actions and in our judgements, indeed Hume,
as a wholly pragmatic, i.e. as an instructive historian who explains
events by their causes, himself follows this law. And what is most won¬
derful about this is that we apply this law ourselves and see others ap¬
ply it, without really being conscious of it. We do not apply it because
of a scientific insight into it, but naturally and, so to speak, instinc¬
tively, which proves that it is a real principle in us which forces us to
judge in this way. If it is looked at closely, Hume has only proven that
such a universal law, which is valid not just for every real but also ev¬
ery possible case, could not derive from experience. Experience admit¬
tedly cannot guarantee anything general. Now it was already assumed
that all knowledge only came from the senses. Hume had, therefore,
no alternative but to explain the universality of the application of this
law as just a subjective appearance, namely via a merely subjective
habit. “After we”, he says, “have seen in countless cases that certain
phenomena or events have preceded others, or, vice versa, that other
events have followed certain preceding events, our understanding has
finally become used by this continuous repetition to see those phe¬
nomena or events as connected, and thus finally to relate them as
cause and effect, to regard the preceding ones as cause, the following
ones as effect”. I do not, for the time being, wish to demonstrate the
fact that even an infinitely recurring succession of two events A and B
still would not produce the concept of cause and effect if this concept
were not imposed upon us by an inner necessity of our nature, inde¬
pendently of external experience. All that could arise from that re¬
peated perception would be that we said: “After phenomenon A
phenomenon B has followed in all cases that I could observe until
now, and I have never observed phenomenon B without its being pre¬
ceded by phenomenon A”, but it is an enormous distance from this
observation to the connection of the two as cause and effect, in which
there is something more that just a succession - this can always only
teach me a post hoc, but never a propter hoc, and we would stop at the post
hoc with regard to all appearances, as in many cases we really do stop
with it - even in cases where one follows the other not just once and
contingently but really according to a rule, and where we are careful
not to connect these two phenomena in a causal nexus. If we know
how to distinguish the one kind of sequence, the post hoc, where there
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism
97

is just an external succession, from the other, the propter hoc, why
should we not be able to do this in every case? I do not, however, even
wish to insist upon this reflection, as I would really like to ask whether
the great apparatus of the Kantian critique was actually necessary to
refute the Humean doubt. It is strange enough that this refutation
was found to be so difficult, as no one until now has noticed the very
simple fact that it can even be refuted just by experience. Hume ex¬
plains the principle of causality by a habituation; but for every habit¬
uation a certain amount of time is necessary; Hume must, therefore,
allow not only the individual but the whole human race a certain
amount of time during which it always has seen, following the par¬
ticular phenomenon A, the other phenomenon B, and thus has fi¬
nally got used to seeing this succession as necessary (for this is inherent
in the law of causality). But precisely this fact, which Hume tacitly pre¬
supposes, and thus thinks he is able to presuppose, cannot be presup¬
posed. For I am convinced that none of us would be willing to admit a
time when the human race did not judge according to the law of
cause and effect, and Hume himself, if we could present him with the
question as to whether he could think human beings at any point in
time of their existence without this concept and without the applica¬
tion of the same, would hesitate with his yes to this question; he
would feel that the human being from whom he had withdrawn the
judgement of cause and effect could no longer appear to us as a hu¬
man being. We can, then, be completely certain that on the very first
day of his existence the first human being judges according to this
principle, because it belongs to human nature to judge in this man¬
ner, as the snake in Paradise, which, by the way, according to the Mo¬
saic story, immediately whispers sceptical remarks against the divine
interdict to the first human being, is not giving him lessons on the law
of causality, but presupposes that he will understand it if it says: “If
you ea‘t the fmit, your eyes will be opened”, or “On the day that you
eat of this ffuit, you will be like God”; which means the same as: “The
fruit or the eating of the fruit will be the cause of your eyes being
opened, the effect of this eating will be that you become equal to
God'’. There exists in Arabic a novel or a story with the title Philoso¬
phies Autodidactus, in which a child is invented which is abandoned by
its mother immediately after birth on an island in the Indian Ocean,
and which only gradually arrives at all philosophical concepts and
knowledge by applying its inherent or innate understanding. But we
do not need such fiction to refute Hume; for the child in the cradle,
which has not yet had an opportunity to get used to a particular
sequence of phenomena and to whom it is even less the case that
anyone has talked about cause and effect, the child in the cradle,
 On the History of Modern Philosophy

if it hears a noise, turns to the area whence the noise comes, with no
other intention than to see the cause of this noise, which it, therefore,
presupposes.
Judging according to the law of causality is, then, imposed upon us,
not just independently of our will, but even of our thinking, by a ne¬
cessity which precedes it; but we call something which is independent
of our will and our thinking a real principle. It is therefore proven by
experience itself that it is a real principle which, as it were, compels us
like universal gravity—just as this determines the body to move to¬
wards the centre, so are we compelled to judge according to the law of
cause and effect, as we are compelled to think according to the law
of contradiction.
But if we now move on to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then the
general foundation of it is the thought: before one wishes to know
something, it is necessary to submit our capacity for knowing itself to
an examination. Just as a careful builder carefully ponders his re¬
sources before he erects a house, to see whether they are sufficient for
both the firm foundation and the successful execution of the build¬
ing, the philosopher must, before thinking of erecting a building of
metaphysics, first be sure of the materials for it, whether he can ob¬
tain them, and, since these materials are drawn from a spiritual
source in this case, this source must itself first be examined, in order
to be certain whether it really contains or offers sufficient material for
the intended building. Before one can hope to have knowledge — par¬
ticularly of supersensuous objects — we must first examine whether
we also have the capacity to know them.
At first sight this thought is extremely plausible.' Looked at more
closely, it is revealed that it is here a question of a knowing of know¬
ing, and that this knowing of knowing itself is, in turn, precisely a
knowing. Accordingly it would first require an investigation of the
possibility of such a knowledge of knowing, and in this way one could
keep on asking into infinity.
At least Kant, given that he sets about his work so critically, will
have assured himself of a central principle and a reliable method for
his investigation of the capacity for cognition. Unfortunately this is
not the case. He does not start with a general investigation of the na¬
ture of knowing, but instead goes straight on to the listing of the in¬
dividual sources of knowledge or of the individual cognitive faculties,
which he does not, however, deduce scientifically, but rather takes

1 This thought was particularly plausible for that time, because one was already ac¬
customed by empirical psychology to assume a multiplicity of capacities in the
spirit or the soul. (From another manuscript.) [Translator’s note: The footnote text
was added by Schelling’s son.]
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism
99

from mere experience, without a principle which would guarantee

him the completeness and correctness of his list. As such, his Critique
of Pure Reason cannot itself count as a scientific survey of the human
cognitive faculty.
For him the three sources of reason are sensuousness, understand¬
ing and reason. Sensuousness relates either to the objects found out¬
side ourselves or to what is inside our own self, to the extent to which
we perceive the changes which happen in our self- the capacity for
this perception of the affections or changes posited in ourselves he
calls the inner sense, where, therefore (without a reason being given),
it is only a question of One sense, not of several as it is with the ex¬
ternal objects. The knowledge which arises from this first source,
from sensuousness - in which, therefore, more is already thought
than just the sensuous impression - is called intuition (Anschauung).
But in intuition we distinguish what is contingent, which could be dif¬
ferent, and something else which could not be different. With regard to
outer objects, this is space. We cannot imagine external objects other
than in space, space is, therefore, the necessary and general form of
our external intuition. Kant here proves, by the necessity and gener¬
ality of this spatial form of our external intuition, that space could
not, unlike what is simply contingent and material about things, just
be something empirical or something which only arises with real in¬
tuition; he proves that it is a form which precedes real intuition in us
and is therefore grounded in the nature of our capacity for cognition
itself, whence it then follows that it does not inhere in the things in
themselves or independently of our ideas of them, but only in the
objects to the extent to which they are intuited by us. From this it would
further follow that the essence of the objects outside us is in itself
non-spatial and non-sensuous. But Kant leaves this conclusion to us,
just as he leaves it to us to think how the material which is in itself
non-spatial, which must after all provide the last foundation of our
ideas of objects outside ourselves, how this material should accommo¬
date itself in our intuition to that form of space, how it should take on
spatial form.
What space is for external intuition, time is for internal. Our ideas,
sensations, etc., and indeed both the ideas which arise purely out of
ourselves, out of our spirit’s own activity, and the ideas which external
objects give rise to in us, succeed each other; the form in which we
perceive them is succession — time. From this it follows, therefore,
that there is in what gives rise to our idea of external things neither
succession nor time; indeed, it even follows that not even sensuously
imagined things themselves, but only the ideas to the extent to which
we perceive them by the inner sense, are in time. It follows, therefore,
lOO On the History of Modern Philosophy

that time has even less independence from our ideas than space, that
it is more subjective than even the latter.
Along with all this Kant also has, though, besides time and space,
which are just forms of our intuition and thinking, the basis of our
intuitions which is in itself space- and timeless, that Unknown, which
he designates with x (the sign of the unknown quantity in mathemat¬
ics), and which he, strangely enough, calls the “thing in itself” (really
it would be the “thing in and before itself”, i.e. before it becomes a
thing, for it only becomes a thing in our thinking). But what this thing
which is posited outside all space and all time, which, to the extent to
which it is outside of space is something mental, because outside all
time is something eternal, what this Unknown might be, if it is not
God, for example, is hard to say. But Kant is far from determining it
as God, for he calls the idealism of Berkeley, which explains the whole
world of the senses as a pretence created by a divine influence on our
powers of imagination - Kant calls this idealism, which can at least be
thought, fanciful. This it may be, but the fanciful itself, if at least there
is to be something to be thought via it, is philosophically better than
that which ends in a complete non-thought, or an un-thought like
Kant’s theory of sensuous intuition, which ends with two ungrasp-
ables, namely with the incomprehensible arrangement of what thinks
in us, which is forced to think what in itself is outside all space and all
time in space and time, and with that equally incomprehensible
outside-us and the necessity or the interest it has in affecting us and
giving rise in us to the idea of a world of the senses.
But Kant now moves on from the world of sensuousness to the sec¬
ond faculty which knows or determines knowledge in us — the under¬
standing. He remarks that what is sensuously perceived is not
necessarily just in space and time for us, that we, once it has been
known — once it elevates itself to being an object of judgement for us -
that we are immediately just as compelled to ascribe certain determi¬
nations of the understanding to it, e.g., to determine it as substance or
as accident, as cause or effect, as One or many, etc. All these
determinations are now no longer just forms of intuition, they are de¬
terminations of thought, concepts — concepts of the pure understand¬
ing. And yet it is our opinion that these concepts are in the objects of
thought themselves, that our judgement that this or that is substance or
is cause is not just subjective but an objectively valid one, and things can
be as little thought without these concepts as, e.g., they can be intu¬
ited without space. Nonetheless — because those determinations are
concepts, which can only be thought in an understanding, then - one
would think, they prove the presence of an understanding in the things
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 101

themselves which is independent of us - but Kant does not infer in

this way, instead the concepts can only be valid of the objects as objects
of thought as such, not beyond these, i.e. not of the thing in itself; they
cannot be applied to that Unknown which contains the last basis of
our ideas. But this Unknown is precisely that which explains in the
last instance, with which we therefore must primarily be concerned. If
we now ask what that can still be which is not in space, not in time,
which is not substance, not accident, not cause, not effect, then we will
have to admit that that Unknown does not = x, as Kant designates it
( = the unknown quantity of a mathematical formula), but that it = o,
that it has become absolutely nothing for us. Since, for him, that thing
which is presupposed outside experience (for by experience Kant
does not just mean intuition but intuition which has been determined
by those concepts of the understanding and raised to knowledge) —
since that thing which is presupposed outside all experience becomes
absolutely nothing by that very fact, we see that Kant brings us again
at the end to where we were before, to completely unexplained expe¬
rience. Nonetheless Kant has the merit of having sustained, if not ex¬
plained, the universality and necessity in our knowledge, without
which there would be no certainty any more. I cannot even be certain
of the sensuous phenomenon if there is not a necessary principle in
my mind which guarantees its validity. One would finally realise: it is
impossible that I do not feel what I feel.
Kant’s Critique, though, primarily became famous for the assertion
that the concepts of the understanding (or, as he calls them, borrow¬
ing the word from Aristotle, the “categories”) were not applicable to
the supersensuous; thereby Kant thinks he has brought to an end all
metaphysics which is directed towards knowledge of the supersensu¬
ous. But in this he did more than he wanted. For if it is right that the
concepts of the understanding cannot be applied to the supersensu¬
ous, then it follows that the supersensuous can not only not be known,
it cannot even be thought. But Kant gets into a contradiction with
himself by this. For he himself does not deny at least the existence of
the supersensuous, and himself presupposes it in his construction of
experience. For what really is that thing in itself, as he calls it? Is it not
also something supersensuous? It is at least something outside the
senses and something unsensuous. But as such it can only be one of
two things, either something which is above or something which is be¬
low sensuous experience. It would be below sensuous experience if it
were thought as just hypokeimenon, just substrate, as pure matter
without any actual quality (which it would only receive in sensuous in¬
tuition). But the concept of substrate is no different from the concept
102 On the History of Modern Philosophy

of substance. In that case he has, therefore, something lying outside

sensuous experience which he is compelled to determine as sub¬
stance. Or he wants to think of it as sw/^rsensuous. Here it would first
be asked: how this supersensuous relates to the supersensuous of the
other kind which Kant always presents at least as the object of the en¬
deavour of our cognition, although he denies that it can be really be
known, how it relates to that supersensuous which Kant recognises in
God, in the human soul, in the freedom of the will, etc. Nothing is
more noticeable than the fact that in the famous critical procedure
Kant never came across this obvious and pressing question: how the
one extra-sensuous or the merely intelligible relates to the other, the
really supersensuous; nothing is more noticeable than that he calmly
leaves these two standing side by side, without in some way either dis¬
tinguishing them or connecting them.
Kant himself calls the so-called thing in itself (which is in his own
terms an impossible hybrid, for to the extent to which it is a thing (ob¬
ject) it is not in itself, and if it is in itself it is not a thing), but he him¬
self explains this thing in itself as the intelligible ground of our ideas.
The word “ground” now also permits a merely logical interpretation
and, correspondingly, a merely logical relationship of the intelligible
to our idea. But because he has an impression on the senses precede
the real idea, but this idea cannot come from what has already been
thought, thus not from the object which has already been clothed
with the forms of pure sensuousness and with the form of the under¬
standing, but only from the thing outside and above all ideas, then he
has to derive the impression from the realm of the intelligible and to
make the intelligible into the causa efficiens [efficient cause] of our
idea, i.e. define it as itself a cause (by virtue of a concept of the un¬
derstanding); in the course of which the strange thing also happens
that he does not allow this intelligible realm, this noumenal realm, as
he calls it, any direct relationship to intelligence, to nous, to the real
knowing faculty, but instead to our merely material senses or to the
bodily organs of sense. If that intelligible basis which Kant calls the
thing in itself really provides just the matter, the material for our
ideas, which only then, in the “transcendental synthesis of appercep¬
tion”, as Kant calls this operation, thus at any rate only in the subject,
takes on the imprint of the understanding, which we have to presup¬
pose in it if it is to be the object of an objective judgement, then it
must be asked (t) how that intelligible basis gets to the subject, how it
affects it; (2) how this material so willingly bows to the form of the
understanding; (3) whence the subject derives its power over the ma¬
terial. These questions are not answered in the Kantian critique, in¬
deed they are not even asked.
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 103

Two demands are made of philosophy; first, to explain the genesis

of nature, whether it be that one assumes that nature is something
which exists objectively (etwas objektiv Seyendes), including outside our
ideas as we think them, or whether we assume it to exist idealistically,
as just in our thinking. Here, namely, it must at least be shown by
which process — and indeed by which necessary process — of our inner
self (Innere) we are compelled to think such a world with these deter¬
minations and such gradations. Kant evades this demand. The second
demand made on philosophy is to elucidate to us that really meta¬
physical world, the supersensuous region in which God, soul, free¬
dom, immortality belong. Kant has a peculiar relationship to this
higher part of philosophy. As already remarked, with regard to this
aspect of metaphysics he really wants the same as the received meta¬
physics before him. If there were a true metaphysics (Kant always
makes this opinion clear), then it would have to present God as the
free creator of the world, it would have to present human moral free¬
dom next to the iron causal nexus in nature, and present the immor¬
tality of the human essence. But Kant presupposes no other means of
achieving this goal than those familiar to earlier metaphysics. His cri¬
tique refers so exclusively to this metaphysics that one can see that it
never occurred to him that there could be another one besides this
one. Indeed Kant’s critique even refers only to a particular form of this
metaphysics, namely to that form which it just happened that it had
taken in his youth through Christian Wolff and even more through
Alexander Baumgarten (Kant’s teacher and, among the Wolffians,
still one of the best minds). Kant ignores everything which goes be¬
yond the subjective rationalism of that metaphysics. As such, his cri¬
tique cannot be applied, e.g., to Spinozism. Kant admittedly says: the
concept of a substance cannot and may not be applied to supersen¬
suous objects, thus not to God. This might seem as though it is being
said against Spinozism, but this reason does not affect Spinoza, pre¬
cisely because he does not think of God as something supersensuous
in the sense of Kant and of that subjective rationalism. For Spinoza
God is only the immediate substance of sensuous as well as all other
being (Seyn). Kant would, then, first have to prove that God is neces¬
sarily something supersensuous in his sense; but he does not prove
this, and instead just presupposes it from the general doctrine or from
the metaphysics which was accepted before him. By demonstrating
the insufficiency of the usual metaphysical proofs, e.g., in relation to
the existence of God, to the indestructibility and immortality of the
human soul, then, he thinks he has condemned all scientific meta¬
physics; the final result of his exhausting critique is that no real
knowledge of the supersensuous is possible. The real metaphysical
104 On the History of Modern Philosophy

objects are for him just ideas of reason, which, as he says, cannot be
found in any experience.1 But in the generality and indeterminacy
with which this is asserted, it is still in no way established that God is
not or could not be an object of experience. Admittedly not of that

1 I would like, with regard to these inherent ideas of reason, which, according to
Kant, are also independent of all experience, just to say the following here. It is
incomprehensible how Kant can call these a priori concepts as well. In relation to
the categories, this is comprehensible — they are a priori relative to the object; for
they are not themselves the object. But soul, world, God — these are themselves
objects; for how can objects be known otherwise than if they are there, i.e. a pos¬
teriori. Besides, the soul, e.g., is object of its own immediate experience; the con¬
cept of the world, however, at least as it occurs in Kant, is nothing but the last,
summarising concept of all individual existences. That complete separation from
experience which Kant assumes in these ideas would therefore, for instance, only
be applicable to the idea of God. But if God is explained as the object of a pure
idea of reason, i.e. as something which can only be thought and determined by my
reason, then this leads to the idea of the merely general being (Wesenf, for every
determination which is added beyond this would in Kant’s eyes already itself be an
empirical one. If one (to add this about Kant’s doctrine of the a priori concepts) — if
one had to distinguish a Prius and a Posterius in sensuous representation, then the
true Prius in it would be what Kant calls “thing in itself”; those concepts of the
understanding which it shows itself as affected by in my thinking are, according to
Kant himself, precisely that by which it first becomes object of my thinking, thus
is able to be experienced by me; the true Posterius is, then, not, as he assumes, that
element which remains after the concepts of the understanding have been re¬
moved, for rather, if I take these away then this is the being Seyende which is un¬
thinkable, before and outside the representation, it is thus the absolute Prius of the
representation, but the true Posterius is precisely this Unknown (which he himself
compares with the x of mathematics), this x + the determinations of the under¬
standing - this common child is the true Posterius; the determinations of the un¬
derstanding, as those which make that x into merely the Posterius, could to this
extent only have a relative priority, or would only be regarded as what mediates
between the true Prius, the thing in itself, and the representation, i.e. the Posterius.
If the question is whether philosophy itself and as a whole is an a priori or an a
posteriori science, then Kant (to say this as well here) did not really make up his
mind. For if it had, for instance, been his opinion that philosophy consisted in the
Critique of Pure Reason which he established, then it is clear that he obtained the
content of this critique just from observation and experience, and correspond¬
ingly declared philosophy itself in the last instance to be a science of experience.
Kant fights against empiricism only as far as he, in opposition to Locke and above
all to David Hume, demonstrates an a priori element for the understanding in the
empirical representations themselves - but how he himself arrives or arrived at
this assertion he basically does not explain, or does so only tacitly by only begin¬
ning with experience in the founding of this assertion, namely the experience of
the observed generality and necessity of those concepts. The question we are con¬
cerned with here could only arise after Kant, namely only after one had ascended
to the idea of a system which derived, in One continuous development, everything
from a first beginning. (From a Munich manuscript of 1827.) [Translator’s note: The
footnote text was added by Schelling’s son.]
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 105

experience which only he refers to as “experience”; but he himself

also establishes an inner experience which is outside experience
through the external senses; furthermore, he does admittedly say
that real experience is only in that coming together of the intelligible
cause of the matter of our representations, which lies outside our¬
selves, and of our (equally intelligible) subject, which is compelled by
its nature to impose on experience the forms of the understanding.
As such, the intelligible is itself one of the factors of our cognition and
seems for this very reason not to be able to be the object of cognition.
The object of cognition is always only the product of both these fac¬
tors. However, because the intelligible is one of the factors of cogni¬
tion it is, as a presupposition of all real cognition, something which
appears against it as necessary, whilst cognition as such appears as
something contingent in relation to this presupposition of cognition.
If one were to admit, therefore, that it followed from this view that
the intelligible could not be the object of a real cognition, it would still
reveal itself as an object which necessarily had to be thought, and no
more than this - no more, e.g., than that God necessarily had to be
thought was required by the old metaphysics. But Kant’s critique re¬
ally is as it was already said to be; it does not, strictly speaking, just
refute and make impossible cognition of, but also all thinking of the
supersensuous, namely by, as it puts it, forbidding any application of
the concepts of the understanding to it. Now Kant is known, after he
has expelled God from the theoretical philosophy, to have neverthe¬
less brought Him back via the practical philosophy, by presenting at
least the belief in the existence of God as required by the moral law.
However, if this belief is not completely devoid of thought then God
is at least thought here. Now I should like to know how Kant can begin
to think God without thinking Him as substance, admittedly not as
substance in Spinoza’s sense, as id quod substat rebus [that which stands
under things], but he undoubtedly thinks of God as the absolutely
spiritual and moral personality. Now there is admittedly more in the
concept of such a personality than in the concept of substance. God is,
as such, not just substance; as, e.g., a person is not sufficiently char¬
acterised by saying that he is a substance. But is He for this reason in
no way substance? Just as little do I see what is left of the concept of
God if I may not think of Him as a cause. Kant has, therefore, over¬
shot his own mark by his critique.
If, after what has been shown so far, the material result of the Kan¬
tian critique now appears finally and fundamentally as so empty and
invalid, on what is its nevertheless undeniably great and extraordi¬
nary effect based, why does he nonetheless deserve to be called a re¬
storer of philosophy? One could for the moment cite various things:
106 On the History of Modern Philosophy

(1) Kant had a beneficial effect just by the fact that he really set to
work once more in a methodical and serious manner, and thereby put
an end to that philosophical anarchy which preceded him — I do not
mean by this the external anarchy that at that time there was no rul¬
ing head in philosophy, but rather the inner anarchy — the complete
lack of principles (it is known that apxq, whence avapxia derives,
means “principle”), that he therefore put an end to this complete lack
of principles in philosophy; (2) that, if he did not answer, indeed did
not even raise those deeper questions which related primarily to the
intelligible basis of all knowable being (Seyn), he did at least unavoid¬
ably provoke them; in particular, though, as already stated, that he
maintained the universality and necessity in human knowledge
against a destructive scepticism and sensualism. But the real historical
effect of Kant —what it was that made him determining for subse¬
quent German philosophy — is not to be sought in all this. This effect
was caused rather by the fact that he directed philosophy towards the sub¬
jective, a direction which it had completely lost since Spinoza; for what
is peculiar in Spinoza is precisely the substance which is just object, is
subject-less, which has completely destroyed itself as subject. It is true
that a certain timidity, which Kant could not overcome and which was
further increased because his philosophy was immediately met by ev¬
ery possible spiteful description, had led him to exchange passages in
the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he had even
almost declared himself to be an idealist, for others in the later edi¬
tions in which he apparently refuted idealism. But the way to idealism
was nevertheless opened, the thing in itself was something too inde-'
terminate, indeed too right (for everything that makes the object into
a thing, into something real, only came from the subject) for it to per¬
sist, and thus the next step was undoubtedly the one whereby the sub¬
ject, the I, alone remained. This step took place via Fichte, who
proclaimed frankly: the I, namely the I of every single individual (eines
jeden Ich), is the only substance.

FICHTE

It is not that Fichte understands the I as universal or absolute, but

only as a human I. The I as which everyone finds himself in his con¬
sciousness is the only true existent (Daseyende). For everyone, every¬
thing is posited only with and in their I. For every person is posited
with that transcendent act, i.e. with that act which first conditions and
therefore precedes empirical consciousness itself, with this act of self-
consciousness the whole universe is posited at the same time for every
person, and the universe is for that reason only in consciousness. With
this self-positing: I am, the world begins for every individual, this act
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 107

is in everyone the equally eternal, timeless beginning of himself and

of the world. Every person begins, so to speak, in an eternal manner
(modo aeterno), with him is posited his whole past, present and future
for his thinking (Vorstellung). But if Fichte could think he had escaped
the difficulties which the philosophical spirit encounters by presup¬
posing the objective existence of things in explaining the world, by
shifting the whole explanation into the I, then he had to feel all the
more bound to show in full how for every single person the whole so-
called external world with all its both necessary and contingent de¬
terminations was posited with just the I am. He could have proven the
things which are posited outside immediate consciousness to be points
of transition, to be mediations of that act of self-positing. But it is as if
Fichte perceived no distinctions at all in the external world. Nature
for him disappears in the abstract concept of the non-I, which desig¬
nates merely a limit, in the concept of the completely empty object, of
which nothing can be perceived except that it is opposed to the sub¬
ject - the whole of nature has disappeared so much for him in this
concept that he did not consider a deduction which went beyond this
concept to be necessary. In the last analysis there was more objectivity
in Kant’s critique than in Fichte’s Doctrine of Science. For Kant let him¬
self without thinking be led by experience in the Critique he under¬
took, in the survey of the faculty of cognition; in Fichte it was only his
own, and thus a contingent reflection which carried all the costs of
the development.1 According to Fichte, then, everything was only via

' If we take another general look back from here at the movement of philosophy, it
had in Descartes the empirical subject as immediately certain, to which other me¬
diate certainties were then to be connected by just subjective conceptual necessity
or necessity of thought. Spinoza forcibly broke through this barrier by jumping
from the empirical subject immediately to the absolute object, which destroys ev¬
erything subjective — the absolutely infinite, against which the philosophising sub¬
ject had no freedom, this absolutely infinite was also the absolutely immobile;
every attempt at movement only fell to the philosophising subject; as such, seen
formally, Spinozism had to appear as just subjectively dialectical, but every such
attempt ended with the negation of all movement and with hanging on to simple
being (Seyn). Dogmatism revolted against this compulsion, and, as such, admittedly
stood higher than Spinozism. It sought to restore the freedom of the philosophis¬
ing subject against the object and to assert, not by again making the empirical sub¬
ject into the point of departure, but by presupposing in the understanding certain
given, universal, transcendental concepts, via which all being (Seyn), thus includ¬
ing the being of the Absolute, would be determined. As these concepts were, on
the one hand, concepts of the pure understanding, on the other hand, however,
they had objective significance and supposedly the power themselves to determine
the Absolute, then it was as if a mediator had been found by this, whereby both the
Absolute and the philosophising subject could exist; there was, if this was success¬
ful, a free relationship between the philosophising subject and its object. But this
hope was destroyed and thwarted by Kant, by his declaring precisely those pure
and general concepts to be concepts of a merely subjective understanding, and by
io8 On the History of Modern Philosophy

the I and for the I. Fichte had thereby extended the independence or
autonomy which Kant attributed to the human self for its moral self-
determination to theoretical autonomy, or he had justified the same
autonomy to the human I for its ideas of the external world as well.
That proposition “Everything is only via the I and for the I ’ admit¬
tedly initially flatters human self-esteem and appears to give to the
inner person the last independence from everything external. But
looked at more closely it has something thrasonical and boastful, as
long as it is not shown how, in what manner, all that we have to ac¬
knowledge as existing is via the I and for the I. It could not be the
opinion of this subjective idealism itself that the I posited things out¬
side itself freely and of its own volition; for there is far too much that
the I would want to be completely different if external being (Seyn)
depended on it. The absolute idealist cannot avoid thinking of the I as
dependent in relation to its ideas (Vorstellungen) if the external world -
even if it is not dependent on a thing in itself, as Kant called it, or on
a cause outside itself, it is at least dependent on an inner necessity, and
if Fichte attributes a production of those ideas to the I, then this must
at least be a production which is blind and not grounded in the will
but rather in the nature of the I. Fichte showed himself unconcerned

his denying every possible transition from them, denying every possible break¬
through into the objective. There was no alternative here, if one did not wish to
move once again into the absolute object which destroys everything free in the
subject, than to move to the opposite - to the all-destroying subject, which was
now no longer the empirical subject of Descartes, but only the absolute subject, the
transcendental /. Already for Kant, the transcendental unity of apperception,
which was nothing other than transcendental egoity (Ichheit), was the only last
principle or creator of the only knowledge which he admitted as real, knowledge
through experience, Fichte raised this I from the partially obscuring surround¬
ings it had in Kant, and put it absolutely as the sole principle at the highest point
of philosophy, and thereby became the creator of transcendental idealism. Since
this I was not the empirical I, then for Fichte the / am, which he made into the
highest principle of philosophy, could also not be in an empirical fact — Fichte de¬
clared it to be an action (Thalhandlung [literally “deed-action”]), and showed how
the I could in no way exist independently of this action as a dead, immobile thing,
but only in this act of self-positing, in which he recognised not just a temporal, and
also not just a transitory beginning which had begun the movement at some time,
but the beginning which was always equally eternal - thus that, wherever and
whenever one wanted to begin, this act of self-positing always had to be the be¬
ginning. Fichte’s idealism thus is the complete opposite of Spinozism or is an in¬
verted Spinozism, because it opposes to Spinoza’s absolute object, which destroys
everything subjective, the subject in its absoluteness, opposes the deed to the
merely immobile being (Seyn) of Spinoza; the I is for Fichte, not, as it is for Des¬
cartes, just something assumed for the purposes of philosophising, but the real,
the true beginning, the absolute Prius of everything. (From an older (Erlangen)
manuscript.) [Translator's note: The footnote text was added by Schelling’s son ]
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism tog

about all this, he related to necessity as a whole more like someone

who indignantly negated it than someone who explained it. Left now
to take up philosophy where Fichte had left it, I had to see above all
how that undeniable and inevitable necessity, which Fichte, so to
speak, only tried to scare off with words, could be united with Fich-
tean concepts, thus with the assertion of the absolute substance of the
I. Here it was immediately evident, however, that the external world
is admittedly only there for me in so far as I myself am there at the
same time and am conscious of myself (this goes without saying), but
it was also evident that, conversely, the moment I am there for myself, I
am conscious of myself, with the statement “I am”, I also find the world
as already being — there, thus that the already conscious I cannot pos¬
sibly produce the world. But nothing stopped a return with this I
which is now conscious of itself in me to a moment when it was not yet
conscious of itself—the assumption of a region beyond now present
consciousness and an activity which no longer comes itself, but comes
only via its result into consciousness. This activity could be none other
than just the work of the coming-to-itself, of the process itself of be¬
coming conscious of itself, at which point it is then natural that, and
cannot happen any other way but that this activity stops, once con¬
sciousness has been attained, and that only its result is left. This mere
result in which the activity stops for consciousness is then precisely
the external world, of which for this very reason the I cannot be con¬
scious as of a world which has been produced by itself, but rather only
as one which is there at the same time as it is. I sought, therefore, in
a word, to explain the indestructible connection of the I with a world
which is necessarily thought as external to it via a preceding transcen¬
dental past of real or empirical consciousness, an explanation which
consequently led to a transcendental history of the I. And thereby the
tendency towards the historical already betrayed itself via my first
steps in philosophy, at least in the form of the I which is conscious of
itself and has come to itself. For the “I am” is precisely only the ex¬
pression of the coming-to-itself itself - therefore this coming-to-itself
which is stated in the “I am” presupposes a having-been-outside and
having-been-away from itself. For only what has previously been out¬
side itself can come to itself. The first state of the I is, then, a being-
outside-itself. In this connection it only remains to note (and this is a
very essential point), that the I, to the extent to which it is thought
beyond consciousness, is precisely not the individual I, for it deter¬
mines itself as individual I only in the coming-to-itself, thus the /
which is thought beyond consciousness, or the stated “I am”, is for all
human individuals the very same, it only becomes in everyone his I, his
individual I, precisely by coming to itself in him. From the fact that
i io On the History of Modern Philosophy

what is thought beyond consciousness is the same for all individuals,

that in this case the individual does not yet play a role, it is immedi¬
ately clear why I absolutely count for my idea of the external world,
without myself having first had experience of it, on the agreement of
all human individuals (the child which shows me an object already
presupposes that this object must exist just as much for me as for it).
Admittedly now, as the I becomes an individual I — which announces
itself precisely via the “I am” — having arrived, then, at the “/ am”, with
which its individual life begins, it does not remember the path amy
more which it has covered so far, for as it is only the end of this path
which is consciousness, it (the now individual I) has covered the path
unconsciously and without knowing it. By this the blindness and ne¬
cessity of its ideas of the external world is explained, as by the previ¬
ous point the sameness and universality of those ideas for all individ¬
uals is explained. The individual I finds in its consciousness only, as it
were, the monuments, the memorials of that path, not the path itself.
But for that very reason it is the task of science, indeed of the primal
science, philosophy, to make that I of consciousness come to itself, i.e.
into consciousness, with consciousness. Or: it is the task of philosophy
that the I of consciousness should itself cover the whole path from the
beginning of its being-outside-itself to the highest consciousness — with
consciousness. Philosophy is, as such, nothing but an anamnesis, a re¬
membrance for the I of what it has done and suffered in its general
(its pre-individual) being (Seyn), a result which is in agreement with
familiar Platonic views (although these had in part another meaning
and were not understood without a certain addition of the fanciful).
This, then, was the path that I first took, still coming from Fichte,
in order for my own part to get back to objectivity, and it is easy to
understand that this modification of the Fichtean conception, via
which that conception first became comprehensible and the main ob¬
jection against it was removed, did not lack approbation when it first
emerged. It was an attempt to reconcile Fichtean idealism with reality,
or to show how nevertheless, even by presupposing the Fichtean
proposition that everything is only via the I and for the I, the objective
world is comprehensible.
I was in so little hurry to put up my own system that I contented
myself for the time being, as was appropriate to my youthfulness at
that time, with making the Fichtean system comprehensible, in the
hope that Fichte himself would approve of this meaning given to his
system, which afterwards admittedly did not turn out like that. 1 was
not concerned with a system which I could boast of as my own, but
only with one which satisfied me. I was also not in the situation of so
many people, who, especially after the great stimulus of Kant and
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 111

Fichte, threw themselves into philosophy just because they had

learned nothing else, and because they thought that one could most
easily get by in philosophy without knowledge; I had more than One
region of human research in which I could indulge myself to my own
satisfaction, and to which my earliest inclinations drew me. I only
wanted therefore at that time to explain Fichte’s system, although I
had never been to Fichte’s lectures, a fact I just note as a historical cor¬
rection, but not to discharge myself from my gratitude to Fichte or to
deny him as a teacher and predecessor, for he was this for me, as he
was for everyone, inasmuch as he was the first to propose a philoso¬
phy based on freedom; inasmuch as he based not just, like Kant, the
practical philosophy, but just as much the theoretical philosophy, and
correspondingly the whole of philosophy, on the independence of the
I - at that time, then, I first sought only to show how one could think
everything as posited with the human I. This exposition of Fichtean
idealism is contained in my System of Transcendental Idealism, which ap¬
peared in the year 1800. If any of you wants now or in the future to
get to know the gradual course of development of modern philosophy
exactly and from the original texts, then I can do no better than rec¬
ommend to him the study of this System of Transcendental Idealism; in it
he will already recognize, under the exterior of Fichtean thinking, the
new system, which sooner or later had to break through this exterior;
he will already find the method fully applied in this work which was
only later used on a greater scale; because he already finds this
method here, which afterwards became the soul of the system which
was independent of Fichte, he will be convinced that this was precisely
what was particular to me, indeed was so natural to me that I almost
cannot boast of it as a discovery, but for precisely that reason I cannot
let it be stolen from me, or admit that someone else could boast of
having discovered it. I do not say this in order to boast, but solely be¬
cause one always has the duty to counter untruth, especially when it
is witnessed to by silence.1
The task that I had first set myself was, then: to explain the idea of
an objective world which was absolutely independent of our freedom,
indeed which limited this freedom, by a process in which the I sees it¬
self as unintentionally but necessarily engaged, precisely through the
act of self-positing. Namely, as the I makes itself into an object, it can¬
not but get involved with itself (sich selbst anziehen) [stc/i anziehen will
recur with many different senses in what follows] (in the sense in
which one says: I am not getting involved with this or that, I shall ig-

The following is taken from an Erlangen manuscript of 1822.

112 On the History of Modern Philosophy

nore it), and it could not get involved with itself without thereby lim¬
iting itself, without inhibiting its activity, which in itself strives into
infinity, without making itself, which was formerly pure freedom and
as nothing, into something for itself, thus into something limited. The
barrier which Fichte had fall outside the I fell in this manner in the I
itself, and the process became a completely immanent one, in which
the I was only concerned with itself, with its own contradiction, which
was posited in itself, concerned with being simultaneously subject and
object, finite and infinite. For the I had admittedly, by becoming an
object to itself, found itself, but not as the simple 1 it had been before,
but instead as a double 1, as subject and object at the same time - it was
now for itself, but had thereby precisely stopped being in itself; this con¬
tingency which was posited in it had to be overcome, the moments of
this successive overcoming were proven to be identical with the mo¬
ments of nature, and this process was continued from step to step,
from moment to moment, until the point where the I broke out again
from limitation into freedom and only now really had itself, or was for
itself as it was in itself — as pure freedom. With this the theoretical phi¬
losophy was closed and the practical philosophy began. I had here at¬
tempted historical development in philosophy for the first time — the
whole of philosophy for me was the history of self-consciousness,
which I formally divided into epochs, e.g., first epoch from the orig¬
inal sensation (of the limitation posited by the self-objectification of
the I) until productive intuition. But the instrument was too limited
to be able to perform the whole melody on it. The principle of pro¬
gression or the method rests on the differentiation of the I which is
developing or is concerned with the production of self-consciousness
from the I which is reflecting on this, which, so to speak, is watching
it, is thus philosophising. By this moment a determination was pos¬
ited in the objective 1, but this determination was posited in it only for
the watcher, not for it itself. Progress therefore always consisted in the
fact that what had been posited in the 1 in the preceding moment just
for the philosophiser was posited objectively in the succeeding mo¬
ment for the I itself — for the I itself in the philosophiser, and that in
this way the objective I itself was finally brought to the standpoint of
the philosophising I, or that the objective I became completely the
same as the philosophising, thus subjective I; the moment at which
this sameness begins, at which, then, exactly the same was posited in
the objective I as in the subjective I, was the closing moment of phi¬
losophy, which had thereby definitely assured itself at the same time
of its end. Between the objective I and the philosophising I there was
roughly the same relationship as between the pupil and the master in
the Socratic dialogues. In the objective I more was always posited in a
 Kant, Fichte, System of Transcendental Idealism 113

developed way than it itself knew; the activity of the subjective, of the
philosophising I now consisted in helping the objective I itself to
knowledge and consciousness of what is posited in it, and of finally
bringing it in this way to complete knowledge of itself. This process, in
which what is posited just subjectively in the preceding moment al-
ways joins the object in the next, has done sterling service in the sub¬
sequent greater development as well.
The beginnings of the presentation of idealism can be found in the
various essays which have been reprinted in the first part of my philo¬
sophical writings. If any of you wish to do me the honour of judging
the path of my philosophical development, and particularly if you
wish to get to know the real heuristic principle, the principle of dis¬
covery which led me, you must go back as far as that.
 The Philosophy of Nature
(Naturphilosophie)

I now move on to the presentation of the system as it emerged com¬

pletely independently of Fichte. Here, then, the beginning was no
longer the finite or human I, but the infinite subject, namely (1) the
absolute subject (das Subjekt iiberhaupt), because it alone is immediately
certain, but (2) the infinite subject, i.e. the subject which can never stop
being subject, can never be lost in the object, become mere object, as
it does for Spinoza via an act of which it itself is not conscious.
The subject, to the extent to which it is still thought in its pure sub¬
stantiality, is still free of all being (Seyn), and although not nothing, yet
as nothing. Not nothing because it is yet subject, as nothing because
not object, because it does not exist in objective being (nicht im gegen-
standlichen Seyn seyend). But it cannot remain in this abstraction, it is,
so to speak, natural for it to want itself as something, accordingly as
object. But the difference of this becoming object from what must also
be thought as preceding Spinoza’s substance is that the latter loses it¬
self completely, thus wholly without reservation, when it goes over
into the object, and thus is only encountered as such (as object); but
the subject is not blind, but rather infinite self-positing, i.e. it does not
stop being a subject in becoming object; infinite self-positing, then —
not in the merely negative sense that it is only not finite or could not
become finite at all, but rather in the positive sense, that it can make
itself finite (make itself into something), but emerges victorious from
that finitude, again as subject, or; it only raises itself again into a
higher potential of subjectivity by that becoming-finite, becoming-
object.
But for precisely this reason, because it is its nature not to be able
just to be an object but always and necessarily a subject at the same
time, once the movement has begun or its beginning is posited - it is
necessarily one which progresses.
The beginning is of course the first making of itself into something,
the first becoming-objective; for, with the first becoming-objective,
as a result of the infinity of the subject - according to which every

"4
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 115

becoming-objective is immediately only followed by a higher potential

of subjectivity - the foundation of all subsequent intensification, and
thus of movement itself was laid. The most important thing is, there¬
fore, the explanation of this beginning, of this first being-something.
This was now thought of as follows. The subject, still in its pure sub¬
stantiality or essentiality, thought of as before any act, is, as was already
remarked, admittedly not nothing, but as nothing; this as always ex¬
presses something that supervenes on the essence (Wesen), and relates
accordingly to the objective, to being that goes beyond the essence; if
it is said, therefore, that the subject or I in its pure substantiality was
“as nothing”, this expresses nothing more than the negation of all ob¬
jective being (alles gegenstandlichen Seyns). On the other hand, when
we now first say of it: “It is as something”, then one precisely ex¬
presses the fact that this being something is, as being, something extra,
something additional, something foreign (Zugezogenes), in a certain
respect something contingent. The as here designates a gravitation
(Anziehung), an attraction, a being that has been drawn to it (ein ang-
ezogenes Seyn). Let me explain! There are certain moral and other
qualities that one only has precisely to the extent that one does not
have them, or, as the German language splendidly expresses it, to the
extent to which one does not put on (sich anzieht) those qualities. E.g.,
true charm is only possible precisely if it does not know about itself,
whereas a person who knows of his charm, who puts it on, immedi¬
ately stops being charming, and if he conducts himself as being
charming will instead become the opposite. Thus it is also with unin¬
hibitedness. Uninhibited being is always that which does not know it¬
self; as soon as it becomes an object to itself it is also already inhibited.
Apply these remarks to the issue in hand and the subject is, in its pure
substantiality, as nothing — completely devoid of attributes - it is until
now only Itself, and thus, as such, a complete freedom from all being
and against all being (Seyn); but it inescapably attracts itself [sich an¬
zieht, with the sense of “putting on” and thus being inauthentic, and
of “drawing itself to” itself], for it is only a subject in order that it be¬
come an object to itself, since it has been presupposed that nothing is
outside it that could become an object for it; but as it attracts itself (sich
selbst anzieht), it is no more as nothing but as something - in this self¬
gravitation (Selbstanziehung) it makes itself into something; the origin
of all becoming something, or of objective, concrete being, then, lies
in this self-gravitation. But the subject cannot grasp itself as what it Is,
for precisely in attracting itself (im sich Anziehen) it becomes an other,
this is the basic contradiction, we can say the misfortune, in all be¬
ing — for either it leaves itself, then it is as nothing, or it attracts itself,
then it is an other and not identical with itself. No longer uninhibited
116 On the History of Modern Philosophy

by being as before, but that which has inhibited itself with being, it
itself feels this being as foreign (zugezogenes) and thus as contingent.
Note here that correspondingly the first beginning is expressly
thought of as a contingent beginning. The first being (Seyende), this
primum existens, as I have called it, is, therefore, at the same time the
first contingency (original coincidence) (Urzufall). This whole con¬
struction therefore begins with the emergence of the first contin¬
gency — which is not identical with itself — it begins with a dissonance,
and must begin this way. For previously - before the drawing to itself
(Zuziehung) of being (Seyn), in its being in and before itself, the subject
was also infinite, but only in as much as it still had finitude before
itself, but for that reason it is not yet posited there as infinite; to posit
itself as infinite it must have cleansed itself from this possibility of also
being the finite. Thus finitude itself becomes a means for it to posit
itself as infinite (i.e. as freedom from being (Freiheit vom Seyn)), for no
other concept is connected here with the word “infinite”. Only
through real opposition could it be raised into its true essence, could
it reach itself as infinite.
I would like to explain the last point again in another, though
wholly equivalent formulation.
The subject which is at first a subject which is pure and not present
to itself - in wishing to have itself, in becoming object to itself - is
tainted with contingency (contingency is the opposite of essence). But
it cannot in this way negate itself as essence, for it is not just essence in
general, but in an infinite manner. That contingency only becomes the
reason for it to posit itself as essence which it previously was not by
retreating into its essence. In and before itself it was essence (= free¬
dom from being), but not as essence, for it still had that, if I may say
it, fatal (verhangnisvoll) act of attracting itself (des sich-selbst-Anziehens)
before it; it was still standing at that slope from which it cannot hold
itself back. For either it remains still (remains as it is, thus pure sub¬
ject), then there is no life and it is itself as nothing, or it wants itself,
then it becomes an other, something not the same as itself {sich selbst
Ungleiches) sui dissimile. It admittedly wants itself as such, but precisely
this is impossible in an immediate way; in the very wanting itself (im
Wollen selbst) it already becomes an other and distorts itself, but it sur¬
renders itself into this (es ergibt sich darein) because it is only denied
positing itself immediately as essence; that finite or inhibited being
(Seyn) - the only one which is immediately possible - presents itself as
the same as itself only as the mediation of its being as infinite, as es¬
sence (Als Vermittlung seines als unendlich-, ah Wesen Seyns); as such it
can want that being, although it is not what it really wants. This finite
being leads it to posit itself on a second stage or potential (Potenz) -
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 117

now as essence. This essence which is posited in the second potential

is what the being without a beginning (das unanfangliche) is, with the
one difference that it (without its own assistance) is posited straight¬
away as essence and is correspondingly fixed. If we call the essence or
pure subject A, then the subject before every act [Actus, as opposed to
Potenz] is not as A, thus it is also not A in such a way that it could be
not-A or = B. But it now makes itself into B in the self-gravitation
(Selbstanziehung), where it becomes an other. But the necessity of its
nature is to be infinite subject, infinite A, i.e., not to be able to be ob¬
ject without being subject. Therefore it cannot be B without being as
A uno eodemque actu [in one and the same act], not as far as it is B but
in another form (Gestalt) of its essence. In this form it is no longer just
A, but as A, as A because the possibility of being not-A is already ex¬
cluded. But A which is posited as A is no longer simple A, but rather
A which is A, not - is and is not, but emphatically is. A which is A is A
which is duplicated with itself (in the older logic this kind of positing,
where A is not posited simpliciter but as A, was called “reduplicative” or
reduplicatio), thus A which is posited as A is no longer simple but du¬
plicated A, which we (after the concept has been explained) can call A2
for the sake of brevity, and we now have on the one side A which has
become B, on the other in opposition and in tension with this - but for
this reason at the same time in a more elevated position by this - A2 (A
which is elevated in itself, for that means A which has been posited
as such).
In this manner we have now left unity and have arrived at duality,
with which, as you can already see in advance, the foundation of a
further necessary progress is already laid. But before I move on to
this I must first reveal the more exact and more distinct significance
of that opposition.
In the A which is now posited as A, in A2, A has raised itself up to
the higher of itself, to the extent to which it is B. But it is necessarily
always the case that the higher is at the same time what grasps and
recognises the lower, which is immediately apparent here. The abso¬
lute subject, which is as nothing, makes itself into something, into a
bound, limited, inhibited being (Seyn). But it is the infinite subject, i.e.
the subject which can never be destroyed by anything, and, accord¬
ingly, as it is something it is also immediately again that which goes be¬
yond itself, thus that which grasps and knows itself in this being¬
something. As that which is something it is the Real, as that which
grasps this fact, it is the Ideal; here, then, these concepts (of the Real
and the Ideal) also come into our consideration for the first time. But
if this story of the subject which posits itself, which produces itself in
all determinations of its being, is a true, a real story, then this first
118 On the History of Modern Philosophy

being-something of the subject [i.e., as object] as well as that which is

opposed to it, in which it is as subject — the former the Real and the
latter the Ideal, these first two potentialities of self-positing — of self-
realisation — must be able to be proven in reality (Wirklichkeit) or must
have a corresponding expression in reality. That first being-something
at all of the subject which was previously free and as nothing, thus
the subject which was hampered or caught up with itself, was ex¬
plained as matter. In the concept of matter nothing more was thought
for the moment than something at all, the no longer nothing, i:e.,
being which was no longer free (das nicht mehr frei Seyende). This mat¬
ter, which is only the first being-something itself, is admittedly not
matter as we now see it before us, as matter which is formed in diverse
ways, thus also particularly not matter which is already corporeal;
what we designate as the beginning and first potential, as next to
nothing (das Ndchste am Nichts), is rather itself the matter of this mat¬
ter, namely of matter which is already formed, is sensuously knowable
by us, and is endowed with sensuous attributes, its material, its basis;
for that matter which is only the first being-something at all immedi¬
ately becomes, as we shall soon see, the object (Gegenstand) of a pro¬
cess in which it is transformed and made into the basis of a higher
being (Seyn), and only as it becomes this does it take on those sensu¬
ously recognisable attributes. To this first Real, to this first being¬
something, is opposed the Ideal, which, as such, is nothing (namely
the not-something), but because it is that which is opposed to the
something, the nothing which is posited as such or pure essence (We-
sen), to this extent it is for this very reason itself also something; we
will say, or rather in the first development of this philosophy it was
said, that this pure essence which is posited as such - which is as noth¬
ing against matter — is light. Light is as nothing and yet not nothing
against matter; that same thing which is as something in matter is as
nothing in light, and as such admittedly also as something, but pos¬
ited as another something than the purely ideal. Light is obviously not
matter, to which earlier hypotheses reduced it. If it is itself matter,
how could there be bodies which light penetrates not just in all direc¬
tions but penetrates in straight lines at every point of their substance?
If one wished to explain this by pores or gaps empty of matter, then
the transparent body would have to be pierced in straight lines at
every point of its surface (for it is transparent at every point of its sur¬
face), therefore it would have to be a pore at every point and be noth¬
ing but pore. (These days observational physics is more inclined to
assert the immateriality of light than its materiality. It is known that
the theory of undulation is preferred, according to which light is only
an accident, and as such not matter, but is the accident of something
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 119

material, which, as a hypothesis, makes certain calculations more easy,

and is indeed only permissible in the same way as atoms are, whose
weight stoichiometry is even able to determine, even though it has
never seen one of these atoms. Besides, it is thoroughly contradictory
to subsume the phenomena of light, in which movement in a straight
line dominates, under the idea of an undulating medium. Naturphilos¬
ophie does not declare light to be immaterial in the sense that it is just
accident, instead, for Naturphilosophie, it is also substance, but immate¬
rial substance — like Spinoza’s extended and thinking substance.)
Light is, therefore, itself not matter, but in the Ideal it is precisely
that which matter is in the Real; for it fills space in its way, i.e. in an
ideal way, precisely as matter fills space in all dimensions; light is,
therefore, the concept of matter, not just inwardly or merely subjec¬
tively, but it is the itself objectively posited concept of matter, a deter¬
mination that I shall spend a moment on because it gives me an
occasion to highlight an essential advance of this philosophy in rela¬
tion to Fichte and before.
Descartes and his successor Spinoza had completely excluded
thinking from extension and from what is extended. But light, for ex¬
ample, is obviously an analogy in the extended world for spirit or
thought, and if we reduce this indeterminate concept of an analogy to
a determinate concept, then light is nothing but spirit or thought on
a lower step or at a lower potential. Fichte had the opposition of I and
not-I in exactly the same way. Admittedly he would have had to rec¬
ognise the I, in accordance with his own doctrine that only the I truly
exists, as also the substance or as the last essence of nature, he would
have had to assert of nature that it also only truly exists to the extent
to which it = I, subject-object, inwardly or according to its essence.
He would have had to assert this if he did not wish to deny to nature
all reality outside our ideas (Vorstellungen). Thus Fichte as well knew
nothing subjective except in the human I or spirit, whilst one can,
e.g., say of light that it is something subjective, but is something pos¬
ited in nature itself, that in which nature is subjective in relation to
itself, or is subject, from which it also follows that nature is not merely
something objective - not merely not-I. For the I is, so to speak, the I
of, or the first subjective aspect of nature - the first subjective aspect
outside ourselves. Nowhere, not in any sphere, is there anything
merely subjective or merely objective, but only a unity of the two.
Light for me belongs admittedly to the world which is objective to me,
to the world which, for me, who is already raised up to a higher stage,
behaves as objective, but which in itself also has a subjective aspect.
Only in relation to something Ideal which is even higher, e.g., in re¬
lation to human knowledge, thus only relatively, as a relation, does
120 On the History of Modern Philosophy

light belong to the real world, but looked at for itself, or also in com¬
parison with matter, it is in its manner or its potential just as much
something Ideal as human thinking is something Ideal in its potential.
From the determinations so far it has turned out that the first mo¬
ments of the infinite self-positing, or, as the life of the subject consists
in this self-positing, that the first moments of this life are moments of
nature. From this it follows, then, that this philosophy is in nature with
its first steps, or it begins from nature — naturally not in order to re¬
main in it, but in order subsequently, via an ever progressing height¬
ening, to transcend it, to move beyond it, and to raise itself up to
spirit, into the really spiritual world. This philosophy could then be
called Naturphilosophie at the beginning, but Naturphilosophie was only
the first part or the foundation of the whole. Nature was itself only
one side of the universe or of the absolute totality in which the abso¬
lute subject is first completely realised; nature is the relatively ideal
world. The world of spirit was the other side. Philosophy had to de¬
scend into the depths of nature in order to raise itself from there to
the heights of spirit. The other side of the system was, therefore, the
philosophy of spirit. If the whole system was called Naturphilosophie
for that reason, then this was only a denominatio a potiori [designation
in terms of what is preferable], or really a priori, thus a designation of
what came first in the system, but which was, as such, rather what was
subordinate in it. It was basically difficult to find a name for this sys¬
tem, precisely because it contained annulled within itself the oppositions
of all earlier systems; it could in fact be called neither materialism nor
spiritualism, neither realism nor idealism. One might have called it
real-idealism, to the extent that in it idealism itself had a realism as its
basis and was developed from a realism. Only once, in the preface,
thus in the exoteric part of my first presentation of this system,* I had
called it the “identity system”, precisely in order to indicate that nei¬
ther a one-sided Real nor a one-sided Ideal was being asserted here,
but that instead only One last subject was being thought in what peo¬
ple were accustomed to call, following Fichte, the Real, and the Ideal.
But even this designation was badly interpreted and used by those
who never penetrated to the interior of the system to infer, or to make
the uneducated part of the public believe, that in this system all dif¬
ferences, namely every difference of matter and spirit, of good and
evil, even of truth and falsity, were annulled, that according to this
system it was, in the everyday sense, all the same. I will now, by the
way, continue the presentation of the system.
We now have, then, the two first potentials, matter on the one hand
as expression of the first being-inhibited with or by itself of the pre-

*Translalor's note: The reference is to 1/4 p. 113.

 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 121

viously pure and free subject, and light as expression of the subject
posited as free and uninhibited, which for just this reason can no
longer be the whole or the absolute subject, precisely because it is the
subject which is already posited as such. For the absolute subject is still
purely infinite, thus also not yet posited as such. Now it is to be shown
how the development progressed further from this point. Here the
real principle of progression or the method is first discussed, which de¬
pended on the presupposition that whatever at a preceding stage was
still posited subjectively, at a subsequent stage itself becomes objec¬
tive -joins the object, so that in this way at the end the most complete
object arises, but finally so that the last subject arises, which alone
stands still, which cannot become objective any more (because all
forms are there), thus which is really the highest subject posited as
such, for what appears in the course of the development as the sub¬
ject is, as it were, subject only for a moment, but in a subsequent mo¬
ment we already find it as belonging to the object, itself posited
objectively again. The subject has the necessary tendency to the ob¬
jective; this tendency exhausts itself.
You can easily see that this method is not just an external one, only
applied from outside to the objects, that it was an inner, immanent
one which inheres in the object itself. Not the philosophising subject -
instead the object itself (the absolute subject) moved itself in accor¬
dance with a law inherent in it, according to which that which at an
earlier stage is subject becomes object at a subsequent stage. Thus
now - at the present moment - light, i.e. the relatively Ideal, stands
opposed to nature, to matter, as subject is opposed to the object. But
this Ideal must now itself also join the object - become objective, so
that in this way the whole, the complete object should arise. In this
first Ideal there is hidden already again a higher one which lies fur¬
ther back, which does not emerge and become distinguishable until
the former has itself become real. But it cannot become real or ob¬
jective without precisely thereby taking part in the being (Scyn) of
matter (which has taken all the space of the objective), i.e. not without
depriving matter of its previous being-itself, not without producing a
Third of which matter and light are both themselves only accidents or
attributes. What was previously (in the preceding moment) still each
a being-itself - matter and light - these two are supposed, in a subse¬
quent moment, to be merely the common attributes of something
higher, of a Third, both are supposed to be subordinated to a still
higher potential. But matter cannot, if I may say so, put up with this
deprivation of its being-itself without resistance. Thereby a process is
posited, then, in which, as I already hinted in advance, matter is taken
as merely the foundation of a higher being, or is transformed into it.
This moment was called the dynamic process, which again has its own
122 On the History of Modern Philosophy

moments. The appearances which are now still recognisable in na¬

ture — magnetic, electrical and chemical — were regarded as appear¬
ances of those moments, or, more clearly: the three moments of a
process which is still perceivable and always progressing, which we
distinguish as magnetism, electricity and chemistry (Chemismus), these
three moments were assumed also as moments of the original emer¬
gence of formed and differentiated (endowed with qualities that can
be distinguished) matter. I called them in this context the “three cat¬
egories of all material emergence” or the “three categories of physics”.
Now this dynamic process is, though, just a transition and is still
founded on the mutual tension of the two potentials; chemistry, for
example, is only the phenomenon in which resisting matter repeat¬
edly succeeds in extinguishing and destroying the higher determina¬
tions which are posited in it by magnetism and electricity. In the
dynamic process, matter still maintains its self-reality (Selbstrealitat);
but from the moment where it loses its independence or its indepen¬
dent opposition to the Ideal, a higher subject enters, in relation to
which both now behave as just the common attributes; we shall call
this subject A3. It is the subject or the spirit of organic nature, the
spirit of life, which now works (wirkt) with those potentials, with light
and matter, as its potentials. Matter thereby no longer comes into con¬
sideration as substance; in fact the organism does not exist via mate¬
rial substance, which continually changes, but rather only via the
species or the form of its material being — only thereby does it exist as
organism. Life depends on the form of the substance, or the form has
become that which is most essential. The activity of the organism does
not even have the conservation of its substance as its purpose, but
rather the conservation of substance in this form, in which it is pre¬
cisely the form of existence of the higher potential (A3).
The organism derives its name precisely from the fact that what ap¬
peared previously to be for its own sake is for it only a tool, as organ of
something higher. In the earlier moment - still in the dynamic pro¬
cess — matter maintains its being-itself, only takes up those forms of
activity which we have designated as magnetism, electricity and chem¬
istry as accidents into itself. An inorganic body can be in an electric
state or not be in one without disadvantage to itself; the forms of ac¬
tivity of organic matter, on the other hand, are essential to it; a muscle,
e.g., thought of as without the capacity to expand and contract, would
not really be a muscle any more.
But if the Real is only there as such in the tension with the Ideal,
then now neither one nor the other, as they are both subordinated
to a higher potential, exists as such, instead only the Third exists, in
which they are one, which they have, so to speak, agreed to, and for
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 123

which there is precisely no longer any other name than that of

the living.
But this subordination can also only be reached in stages, thus via a
process. For matter always seeks to maintain its independence, as,
e.g., in those inorganic deposits of animals with shells, which testify to
their dependence on life only via the form which is externally im¬
pressed on them, but which are internally inanimate; the inorganic,
i.e. matter which lays claim to a being-itself, has here already entered
the service of the organism, but without being completely conquered
by it. The skeletal system of the higher animals is just this inorganic
matter which has now been forced back inside and taken up into the
inner life process, which in animals of a lower order (the mplluscs) is
still external and appears as shell and casing. Even the animal of the
higher classes still contains in the differentiation of its organs hints or
reminiscences of the steps which the whole organic process of nature
has climbed. During the process, via which organic nature itself arises,
that higher stage which we have termed A3 still behaves in part sub¬
jectively, for it is still not completely realised. The stages which it goes
through until its complete becoming-objective are designated by the
various organisms (Organisationen). (At this point of the complete de¬
velopment of the system the difference between the plant and the an¬
imal kingdoms was discussed; the sequence of stages of animal
organisms itself was also explained. I can only give just the outline
here, I cannot go into the individual examinations, into the numerous
mediations which constitute once more the transitions from one stage
of organic life to the other, since that system is no longer itself the
aim, but is just being discussed for historical reasons.)
This doctrine, that whatever presents itself at an earlier stage as be¬
ing (das Seyende) is relegated at a subsequent stage to the relatively
non-being (zum relativ nicht-Seyenden), namely just to being a stage,
thus to being a means, this doctrine, which, simple and founded in
the immediate nature of that progression as it is, was nonetheless first
of all a matter for philosophy and was stated by philosophy, has now
already penetrated into scientific research (Naturforschung) and is ap¬
plied on the widest scale.
If the (organic) process has now reached its goal, then what was up
to now subjective itself now joins the object again; its kingdom, its
power comes to an end in order to give way again to a higher poten¬
tial. (Now no original organisms arise any more. As such this principle,
which originally organises, gives rise to organisms, has also histori¬
cally become something past.) The principle of organic life still be¬
longs, therefore, with regard to or in relation to the higher principle
of the subsequent period itself, to the objective world, and is, as such,
124 On the History of Modern Philosophy

an object (Gegenstand), even of empirical scientific research. The mo¬

ment when what up to nou> was the highest, A3, now itself becomes
completely objective, thus subordinates itself to a still higher subject,
is — the birth of humankind, with which nature as such is completed
and a new world, a completely new sequence of developments begins.
For the beginning of nature was precisely that first being-something,
and the whole process of nature only aimed at overcoming that being¬
something in its independence or substantiality, only aimed at making
it itself into a mere form of existence of something higher again. After
this first being (Seyn) is redeemed from its inhibitedness and precisely
by subordinating itself to something higher is brought back to the
freedom which it has already in part attained in the organic sphere in
the voluntary movements of animals, the process of nature as such is
at an end; unlike the potentials which precede it, the subjective which
now occurs no longer has immediately to do with being (Seyn) by hav¬
ing being before it as something ready, completed, concluded; the
higher potential, which now elevates itself above this world of being,
now only has an ideal relationship to it, or this potential can now only
be knowledge. For what relates to the whole of being as something
higher again, what relates as that which grasps it, can only be knowl¬
edge. We have now, then, brought the subject to the point where it is
pure knowledge, or where it is that whose being (Seyn) precisely only
consists in knowledge, which we can no longer establish as a thing or
as matter (here the immateriality of the soul or of that in us which is
only knowledge was better and more plausibly explained than in all
previous theories, for which, besides, the existence of this simple and
immaterial thing, as they called it, itself was only a contingent exist¬
ence, whilst in the sequence we have just seen it is plausible as a nec¬
essary existence - a point must come in this sequence where the
subject no longer sinks down into matter, a point where it is now only
knowledge, thus pure knowledge, i.e. pure spirit, and where it already
has everything that it might be besides and might be immediately, out¬
side itself, as an other before itself, as something objective for itself. Nev¬
ertheless it admittedly only remains in ideal, but still in necessary
relation to that which it now has before it; for it is pure knowledge only
because it already has the whole of being outside itself, for in itself it is
not an other, but the same subject which became matter in its first and
immediate activity, appeared as light in a higher potential, in a still
higher potential as the principle of life; if one were able to take away
these earlier moments from before it, then the subject would only be¬
gin again precisely where it had begun, and it would - at this partic¬
ular stage - having been lifted up once again to this potential of itself,
be again as pure knowledge; posited as pure knowledge it is not in
 The Philosophy of Mature (Naturphilosophie) 125

itself, but only by virtue of this stage, i.e. to the extent that it has those
moments before itself, to the extent that it has already cleansed itself
of these moments which were in it, the absolute subject or the subject
regarded in itself, as possibilities, to the extent that it has excluded
them outside itself, thus at the same time from itself it is as pure knowl¬
edge, not in itself, but only via its potential, as A4, but as this it pre¬
supposes itself in the earlier potentials. For precisely this reason it
stands in a necessary and indispensable relationship to those preced¬
ing moments, but in an immediate relationship to that alone in which
there is the completion and end of the preceding being (Seyn), thus to
humankind (for the following moment must always hold onto the pre¬
ceding moment as its immediate basis) - it is, therefore, pure knowl¬
edge, which admittedly relates to the whole of nature, but has its
immediate relationship to humankind, and as such is human knowl¬
edge. With this a new sequence of moments arises which cannot avoid
being parallel to the sequence of moments which we have already rec¬
ognised in nature. But the difference is that here everything happens
only in the Ideal, which there is in the Real.
The first stage here will also be the objective or the finite, the sec¬
ond the subject posited as such or the infinite, the third - the unity of
both; but as in nature the Real and the Ideal, matter and light, are
both objective or real, here (in the spiritual world which is now begin¬
ning) Real and Ideal, despite their opposition, will both only be Ideal.
The subject which we have determined as elevated above the whole of
nature is immediately only pure knowledge, and is as such infinite
and in complete freedom; as such it stands again at the same point as
the first subject which was posited in its pure freedom and infinitude,
but it stands in an immediate relationship to something finite and
limited, to the human being, and since it cannot avoid becoming the
immediate soul thereof, it is also compelled to take part in all deter¬
minations, relations and limitations of the same, and in this way, by
entering all forms of finitude, it is compelled to make itself finite, and
although it itself always remains ideal, nevertheless to involve itself
(ideally) with the ruling necessity in the territory of being or of the
Real. From this relationship between knowledge which is infinite in
itself and something finite to which it relates, the whole system of nec¬
essary ideas (Vorstellungen) and of concepts according to which the ob¬
jective world determines itself to human consciousness was deduced;
the really cognitive or theoretical side of human consciousness was
developed here; the whole, albeit corrected, content of the Kantian
critique of reason, or what in this critique was the content of the
whole theoretical philosophy, was taken up here, but as the content of
just one moment, into the whole system. But the basis of a new in-
126 On the History of Modern Philosophy

tensification is laid precisely via the way knowledge, which is in itself

free and infinite, enters finite beings and gets caught up with neces¬
sity via a new sinking down into the real world and now itself appears
as necessary and bound knowledge; for the invincible subject once
again also withdraws into its essence from this restriction which it has
taken on in humankind and is posited, in opposition to its restriction,
as the free subject, as the second potential of itself and as external to
that necessity, as itself controlling, dealing with and comprehending
necessity; the opposition which went through the whole sequence
here receives its highest expression as opposition of necessity and
freedom. Necessity is what man is concerned with in his knowing, to
which he is subordinated in his cognition; freedom is freedom of ac¬
tion and doing; all action presupposes cognition; putting it another
way, man, in action, makes his own knowing objective again and raises
himself above it; what in knowing was subject becomes in action an
object, a tool, an organ; and if it should previously or up to now not
have been clear to you how that crossing over of the subject into the
object happens, or how the itself becoming objective of something
which was just now subjective happens, then you have here a very ob¬
vious example. (Image of the magnetic line).
In a new intensification, then, via which the necessity which is pos¬
ited in its cognition again becomes objective to it, the subject frees it¬
self from precisely this necessity and now appears as free, admittedly
not with regard to knowing or to knowledge, but indeed with regard
to action. But the opposition is not annulled thereby, but precisely
only posited; the opposition between freedom and necessity is pos¬
ited, which, via ever extended ramifications, which I cannot present
here, finally takes on that elevated significance which it has in history,
in which not the individual but the whole species acts.
Here, then, was the point of the system where it went over into the
sphere of action, into practical philosophy, where, correspondingly,
the moral freedom of man, the opposition of good and evil and the
significance of this opposition, were discussed; where then, in partic¬
ular, the state also, as an albeit subordinate mediation of freedom and
necessity, as a product of humanity’s struggle between the two, and
finally history itself, as the great process in which the whole of human¬
ity is involved, were discussed. And in this way the same philosophy
which was Naturphilosophie at an earlier stage here became philosophy
of history. In this it was evident that a boundless freedom which was
not curbed by any lawfulness led to a hopeless and despairing view of
history. Here, where the highest and most tragic dissonance emerges,
in which the misuse of freedom teaches us to recall necessity, here
man sees himself compelled to acknowledge something which is
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 127

higher than human freedom; duty itself could not command him,
once it has decided, to be quiet about the consequences, of his action
if he could not be aware that his action admittedly depends upon him¬
self, upon his freedom, but that the consequences or what develops
from this action for his whole species depend upon something else
and something higher, which implements and asserts a higher lawful¬
ness through the most free, indeed most lawless way of behaving of
the individual.
Without this presupposition a human being would never be in¬
spired by a courage which is wholly unconcerned about the conse¬
quences of its action to do what duty commands; without this
presupposition a person could never dare to undertake an action with
great consequences, even if it were dictated to him by the most sacred
duty. Here, then, a necessity is demanded for history itself which still
persists and asserts itself even against moral freedom, which, there¬
fore, cannot be blind necessity (above which freedom certainly is ele¬
vated), which rather only mediates freedom with necessity because it
does not itself (like human freedom) come into conflict with necessity,
and remains not just relatively but absolutely free in relation to neces¬
sity, which always remains Providence, thus at all times and in relation
to everything remains subject - pure, free, disinterested and therefore
truly infinite subject. Here, then, philosophy came to that last subject
which was victorious over everything, which itself no longer becomes
objective, but instead always remains subject, and which man can no
longer recognise, as he could in knowledge, as himself, but instead as
above himself and for precisely that reason as above everything, to
which finally everything is subordinated and which now, not as at the
first beginning, just is spirit and Providence, but also declares itself to
be Providence, and shows at the end what already was at the begin¬
ning. The last task could now only be to show the relationship of this
subject, whose nature is inaccessible and which lives as if in an inac¬
cessible light - because it cannot become an object - to human con¬
sciousness; for it had to have some relationship or other to this consciousness.
But as it has already been said that it itself could at no time and via no
further progression become an object, but rather remains as ruling
over everything, then no further relationship to human consciousness
can be thought than that of simple manifestation. For as it itself no
longer becomes, or can become, an object, one can only say that it
manifests itself. The question is, then, whether such manifestations
or, to use a Leibnizian expression which might be used more appro¬
priately here, whether such fulgurations of the Highest which is ele¬
vated above everything can be demonstrated in human consciousness,
appearances in which the human self behaves as tool or organ of the
128 On the History of Modern Philosophy

Highest; for that which just manifests itself does not act (wirkt) di¬
rectly, but rather only acts through an other. (Thus in the whole line
of progression.) Now we must remember that the highest subject is
admittedly in itself only One, but in relation to the two sides of the
universe which now stands completed before us it can be thought in
three forms; for it is, precisely because it is the Highest, and because
everything is beneath it, just as much the Last, that which finally brings
forth nature, the real world, as it is Lord of the spiritual, of the ideal
world, and again is that which mediates both and grasps both as one
beneath itself. As that which brings forth, it will now manifest itself in
man by a bringing forth, by real production; it will show itself (1) as
that which has the power over material, over matter to overcome it
and compel it to be the expression of spirit, indeed of the highest
ideas themselves — fine art just as fine art goes this far, but (2) in Po¬
etry (Poesie), which is presupposed by fine art and to which the former
itself only relates as a tool, in Poetry it will manifest itself as spirit itself
which has the power to bring forth or create the material as well.
The highest truth and excellence of the plastic work of art does not
just consist in the correspondence with the created being or the
model of the created being, but rather in the fact that the spirit of
nature itself appears to have brought it forth; in it an activity is re¬
vealed, therefore, which is itself not of the kind which is created but
rather in which one thinks one is seeing the creator. In the highest
work, Poetry united with art — in the highest work of Poetic art (Dicht-
kunst), tragedy, there appears, in the storms of passions which blindly
rage against each other, where for the actors themselves the voice of
reason goes silent, and despotism and lawlessness, entangling each
other ever more deeply, finally transform themselves into a hideous
necessity — in the midst of all these movements there appears the
spirit of the Poet as the quiet light which alone still shines, as the sub¬
ject which alone is not submerged, itself unmoving in the most violent
movement, as wise Providence which can yet lead the greatest con¬
tradictions finally to a satisfactory conclusion.
Here, the Highest manifests itself as the genius of art. If art is the
most objective side of human activity, then religion is the subjective
side of it, to the extent that the latter does not, unlike the former,
move towards positing a being (Seyn), but rather, in relation to that
highest subject, towards positing all beings as not being (alles Seyende
als nicht seyend). Here, then, the highest subject reveals itself precisely
as that in relation to which everything sinks into nothingness; it re¬
veals itself as such in the enthusiasm of those ethical-religious heroes
through which humankind itself appears as glorified and divine.
There is a third human activity which unites in itself the objectivity
(1das Objektive) of art and the subjectivity (das Subjektive) (or the subor-
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie) 129

dination) of religion — philosophy. It is objective like art, for it shows the

path of the creator, bringing forth, changing from stage to stage, go¬
ing through all stages but remaining in none of them. It is subjective
like religion, because it only brings everything into reality (Wirk-
lichkeit), shows it or posits it as being (als seyend), in order finally to
hand it over to the highest subject which is in itself the highest spirit.
Art, religion and philosophy, these are the three spheres of human
activity in which the highest spirit alone manifests itself as such; it is
the genius of art, the genius of religion, the genius of philosophy.
Only to these three spheres is granted divinity and thus also original
enthusiasm (all other enthusiasm is already only a derived enthusi¬
asm, and in the same way as Homer was called the “Divine” by the
unanimous testimony of all times, so also Plato was called the “Di¬
vine” by posterity). If we do not consider that highest subject in one of
those particular respects, but rather absolutely and generally, then we
are left with no other name for it than that which all peoples without
exception give, the name of God - not just of God, not 0eot), but
rather tot) ©eon, of the certain God, of Him who is God. Philosophy,
therefore, ends in this concept: this concept is, after the three poten¬
tials of the real and the ideal world, as though just as many successive
rulers disappeared and declined, the last sole surviving concept, in
which philosophy rests from its work and, so to speak, celebrates its
Sabbath.
In this way, then, One line, One constant and necessary progression
was shown from the deepest things that present themselves to us, to
the Highest that human nature is capable of.
Anybody who gets to know the system that has just been presented
in its genuine and original form will still today find himself in a pe¬
culiar situation. On the one hand it will, as it were, seem impossible to
him that this system should be wrong; on the other hand he will feel
something which at least prevents him from proclaiming it as the fi¬
nal truth. He will recognise it as true within a certain limitation, but
not absolutely and totally. In order, therefore, to have a well founded
opinion of it, it will primarily be a question of becoming conscious of
that limitation.
One cannot deny that the system (1) as regards its scope embraces
everything knowable, everything which can in any way become an ob¬
ject of cognition, that it has excluded nothing, and that it is, besides,
in possession of a method through which it assures itself of the com¬
pleteness of its inclusion; one can even assert that it already contains
in advance the location and, as it were, the place for every future ex¬
pansion of human knowledge. As far as (2) the method is concerned,
the method itself made sure that no influence of the subjectivity of
the philosopher was allowed. It was the object itself which continued
130 On the History of Modern Philosophy

to determine itself by a principle inherent within it; it was thought

which progressed according to an inner law which gave itself its con¬
tent. (3) In terms of form, the concept of process and of moments of
this process were first introduced into philosophy by this system. Its
content was the history of the subject which unavoidably made itself
finite but which victoriously emerged again from every being-finite,
which came to a halt at the end as elevated above all objectivity and
blindness, in the highest sense as conscious of itself, as Providence. If
one ponders as well what violence was done to any natural idea by
subjective Fichtean idealism, how consciousness tore itself apart by
the earlier absolute opposition of nature and spirit, but felt itself no
less wounded by the crass materialism and sensualism which had
spread over the rest of Europe (except Germany), then one can un¬
derstand that this system was initially taken up with a delight which
no earlier system had aroused or any later system would arouse again.
For now people no longer know any more how much had to be
achieved at that time, which today is common property and has, as it
were, become the article of faith of all people who think and feel in a
higher manner. To this, namely, belongs the conviction that what in
us knows is the same as what is known.
As that philosophy embraced the whole of reality (Wirklichkeit) — na¬
ture, history, art — everything lower and everything higher, and, so to
speak, showed man his whole knowledge, it had to affect the spirit of
the other sciences as well to a greater or lesser extent, and one can
really say that it was not just in philosophy as such that it produced a
change in the view of things and the way of considering things in gen¬
eral. A new species arose which felt itself, as it were, equipped with
new organs of thinking and of knowledge, which made completely
different demands on natural science and on history.
The previous mechanical and atomistic hypotheses in physics left
over for the phenomena of nature virtually no further interest than
the kind with which curiosity tries to get to the bottom of the tricks of
a conjurer. “You certainly explain things”, one might say to such the¬
oreticians, “you just about explain them, if you are granted these little
bodies, these configurations of the same, these fine materials, these
channels which sometimes are drilled one way, sometimes the other,
equipped in this or that direction with valves, but one thing you leave
unexplained; to what end all these measures themselves are taken,
how it is that nature likes such conjuring tricks”.
Fortunately the discoveries of recent experimental physics, which
fulfilled the predictions of philosophy and in part surpassed them,
were added to those deeper views of nature which had been achieved
by philosophy, according to which nature as well is something auton-
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie)

omous, something self-positing and self-activating. Nature which un¬

til then had been considered dead gave those signs of a deeper life
which revealed the secrets of its most hidden processes. What one had
hardly dared to think seemed to become an empirical question.
In the same way as nature had been turned into mere externality,
into a game without any inner life, without a real life-interest (Lebens-
Interesse), people liked no less to make history appear as the most con-
tingent game of lawless arbitrariness, of a meaningless and pointless
hustle and bustle; indeed the scholar who most emphasised the sense¬
lessness, indeed the absurdity of history, was regarded as the most in¬
telligent, and the bigger the event, the more sublime the historical
phenomenon was, the smaller, the more contingent and base were the
causes that he could come up with to explain it. This was, particularly
in this respect, basically the dominant spirit in the universities. There
are, of course, always exceptions. One great exception of this kind was
Johannes von Muller* who - whilst more or less all the estates were
undermining themselves, but particularly the majority of scholars
above all in the positive subjects, who, so to speak, were competing
with each other to make their own science contemptible by explaining
away any higher thinking - who, I say, was protected at such a time
from joining in this chorus by his innate respect for history, though it
was at best his scholarliness which was recognised; the acknowledge¬
ment of his spirit was reserved for a later time.
The value and interest of the sciences always increases in propor¬
tion with the extent to which they are seen as capable of a deep and
real relation to the highest of sciences, philosophy, and people who
try because of a regrettable misunderstanding to tear their particular
science as far as possible away from philosophy do not know what
they are doing; for the respect with which they see their science and
with which they feel comfortable is itself only a consequence of the
fact that in them every relation to higher development, even if it is
not stated, is really seen as existing as a consequence of previous philo¬
sophical developments. Once a change in the course of learning was
imminent it had to announce itself first in the higher, and for that rea¬
son more sensitive, organs (in Poetry and philosophy), in the way that
tender and more spiritually organised natures feel changes in the
weather, imminent storms and other natural (physische) events more
than more materially organised natures. It was Goethe who was the
first prophet of a new time, but he remained an isolated phenome¬
non, not only not understood by his time but even in part not by him¬
self; the true illumination was first given to him himself by the great

translator’s note: Johannes von Muller (1752-1809), Swiss historian.

 32 On the History of Modern Philosophy

change effected by Kant, from which point the spirit it had awakened
successively had to take hold of all the sciences and the whole of
learning. Herder as well deserves to be mentioned among the genii
who prepared this new spiritual movement, in part without knowing
it or willing it.
How did it happen, then, that in the form in which it at first exer¬
cised an almost universal power of attraction, this philosophy never¬
theless saw itself inhibited in its effect not long afterwards, revealed a
repelling pole which was less noticed at the beginning? It was not the
largely senseless and unjust attacks that it was exposed to from many
sides, to which belonged, e.g., the trivial, the ordinary view that it was
Spinozism, Pantheism - it was not these attacks that could really in¬
hibit it; it was rather a misunderstanding in which it found itself in
relation to itself by showing itself as something, or (one could rather
say) by letting itself be seen as something that it was not, which, ac¬
cording to the original thought, it was not supposed to be.
To explain this I must go back somewhat further.
The point at which every philosophy will find itself either in agree¬
ment or in conflict with common human consciousness lies in the man¬
ner in which it explains the Highest, explains God. What position did
God have in the philosophy just presented? Initially the position of a
mere result, of the highest and last thought which brings everything to
a conclusion — completely in accordance with the position which He
also had in previous metaphysics, and which Kant as well, for whom
God was just the necessary thought for the formal conclusion of hu¬
man knowledge, had left to Him. In the system just presented, God
was that subject which finally came to rest victoriously above every¬
thing, as subject which can no longer sink down into being an object;
it was this subject which had gone through the whole of nature,
through the whole of history, through the sequence of all the mo¬
ments of which it seemed only the last result, and this going-through
was thought of as a real movement (not as a progression in thought
alone), it was even thought of as a real process. Now I can indeed
think of God as the end and just the result of my thinking, as He was
in the old metaphysics, but I cannot think of Him as result of an ob¬
jective process; furthermore, this God which was assumed as result
could, if He is God, not have something outside Himself (praeter se), He
could at the most have Himself as presupposition; but in that presen¬
tation He really does have the earlier moments of the development as
His presupposition. From this - from the last moment, it follows that
this God must after all be determined at the end as He also was al¬
ready at the beginning, therefore that the subject which goes through
the whole process is already God at the beginning and during the pro-
 The Philosophy of Nature (Naturphilosophie)
133

cess, before it is also posited in the result as God - that in this sense
God is admittedly everything, that the subject going through nature is
also God, only not as God — thus God only outside His divinity or in
His externalisation (Entausserung) or in His otherness (Anderheit), as
an other of Himself as which He only is at the end. But again, if this
is assumed, then the following difficulties reveal themselves. God is
obviously in part involved in a process, and in order precisely to be at
least as God, is subjected to a Becoming, which offends the received
concepts too much ever to be able to rely on general consent. But phi¬
losophy is only philosophy in order to sustain universal understand¬
ing, conviction and thus also universal agreement, and everyone who
sets up a philosophical doctrine makes this claim. One can admittedly
say: “God exposes Himself to this Becoming precisely in order to
posit Himself as such”, and one really must say this. But as soon as this
is said, one can also see that one must immediately either assume a
time when God was not as such (but this again contradicts general re¬
ligious consciousness), or one denies that there ever was such a time,
i.e. that movement, that happening is explained as an eternal happen¬
ing. But an eternal happening is no happening at all. Consequently
the whole idea of that process and of that movement is itself illusory,
nothing has really happened, everything happened only in thoughts
and this whole movement was only a movement of thinking. That phi¬
losophy should have grasped this; it put itself beyond all contradiction
thereby, but precisely because of this it also gave up its claim to ob¬
jectivity, i.e. it had to confess to being a science in which there is no
question of existence, of that which really exists, and thus also not at all
of knowledge in this sense, but only of the relationships which the ob¬
jects take on in mere thinking, and since existence is always the Posi¬
tive, namely that which is posited, affirmed, asserted, then it had to
confess to being a purely negative philosophy, but precisely thereby had
to leave space free outside itself for the philosophy which relates to
existence, i.e. for the positive philosophy; it had not to present itself as
the absolute philosophy, as the philosophy which leaves nothing out¬
side itself. It took some time before philosophy became clear to itself
about this, for all progressions in philosophy only happen slowly.
Which meant, by the way, that that period of time was considerably
lengthened, was an episode which opposed this last development, and
about which at least what is necessary should also be mentioned.
 Hegel

The philosophy which has just been presented, which could rely on
universal assent if it presented itself as a science of thought or of rea¬
son and presented God, whom it reached at the end, as the merely
logical result of its earlier mediations, acquired, by assuming the ap¬
pearance of the opposite, a completely false reputation which even
contradicted its original thought (hence the changeable and very var¬
ious judgements that were expressed about it were quite natural).
Now one might hope that this philosophy really would withdraw to
within this boundary, would declare itself as negative, merely as log¬
ical philosophy when Hegel established precisely as the first demand
on philosophy that it should withdraw into pure thinking, and that it
should have as sole immediate object the pure concept. Hegel cannot
be denied the credit for having seen the merely logical nature of the
philosophy which he intended to work on and promised to bring to its
complete form. If he had stuck to that and if he had carried out this
thought by strictly, decisively renouncing everything positive, then he
would have brought about the decisive transition to the positive phi¬
losophy, for the Negative, the negative pole can never be there in
pure form without immediately calling for the positive pole. But that
withdrawal to pure thought, to the pure concept, was, as one can find
stated on the very first pages of Hegel’s Logic, linked to the claim that
the concept was everything and left nothing outside itself. Hegel’s own
words are the following: “The method is only the movement of the
concept itself, but in the sense that the concept is everything and its
movement is the universal absolute activity. The method is, therefore,
the infinite power of knowing” (here, according to this, after it was up
to then just a question of thinking and of the concept, suddenly the
claim to cognition {Erkennen) comes in. But cognition is the Positive
and only has being (das Seyende), reality (das Wirkliche), as its object,
whereas thinking just has the possible, and thus also only has what
can be known {das Erkennbare) and not what is known {das Erkannte)

34
 Hegel
*35

as its object) — “the method is, therefore, the infinite power of know¬
ing to which no object, to the extent to which it presents itself as ex¬
ternal, distant from reason and independent of reason, can put up
any resistance”.
1 he proposition: “1 he movement of the concept is the universal
absolute activity” leaves nothing left for God other than the move¬
ment of the concept, i.e. than for Himself to be only the concept. The
concept does not have the meaning here of just the concept (Hegel
protests most vigorously against this), but instead the meaning of the
thing itself {Sache selbst), and in the same way as the Zoroastrians say
that the true creator is time, one admittedly cannot reproach Hegel
with holding the opinion that God is just a concept; his opinion is
rather: the true creator is the concept; with the concept one has the
creator and needs no other outside this creator.
What Hegel primarily sought to avoid was precisely that God, as, of
course, it could not be otherwise within a logical philosophy, should
be posited only in the concept. For him God was not both just a con¬
cept and the concept God; for him the concept had the meaning that
it was God. His opinion is: God is nothing but the concept which step
by step becomes the self-conscious Idea {Idee), as self-conscious Idea
releases itself into nature, and, returning from nature into itself, be¬
comes absolute spirit.
Hegel is so little inclined to recognise his philosophy as the merely
negative philosophy that he asserts instead that it is the philosophy
which leaves absolutely nothing outside itself; his philosophy at¬
tributes to itself the most objective meaning and, in particular, a
wholly complete knowledge (Erkenntnis) of God and of divine things -
the knowledge which Kant denied to philosophy is supposedly
achieved by his philosophy. Indeed he even goes so far as to attribute
a knowledge of Christian dogmas to his philosophy; in this respect his
presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the most informative,
which is briefly as follows. God the Father, before the Creation, is the
purely logical concept which loses its way in the pure categories of be¬
ing (Seyn). But this God must reveal Himself, because His essence con¬
sists in a necessary process; this revelation or externalisation of
Himself is the world, and God is the Son. But God must also negate
(aufheben) this externalisation as well (which is a stepping outside of
the merely logical - Hegel so little recognised the merely logical char¬
acter of the whole of this philosophy that he declared he was stepping
outside it with the Naturphilosophie) - God must also negate this ex¬
ternalisation, this negation of his merely logical being {Seyn) as well,
and return to Himself, which happens through the human spirit in
136 On the History of Modern Philosophy

art, in religion and most completely in philosophy, and this human

spirit is at the same time the Holy Ghost, through which God first
comes to complete consciousness of Himself.
You can see how this process, which was introduced by previous
philosophy, is understood here, and how it is taken in the most em¬
phatic fashion as an objective and real process. Hence, however com¬
mendable one must find Hegel’s impulse to recognise the merely
logical nature and significance of the science which he found before
him, however commendable it is, in particular, that he revealed as log¬
ical relationships the logical relationships which previous philosophy
concealed in the Real, one must yet admit that his philosophy, when
it is really carried out (precisely because of the pretension to objec¬
tive, real significance), has become a good deal more monstrous than
the preceding philosophy ever was, and that I therefore did not do
this philosophy an injustice when I called it an “episode”.
I have now determined the place of the Hegelian system in general.
But in order to demonstrate this more distinctly, I want to give a more
detailed presentation of the course of its development.
In order, then, to enter the movement, Hegel must go back with the
concept to some beginning or other, where he is at the greatest distance
from that which is only to come into being via the movement. Now
within the logical or the Negative there is again that which is to a
greater or lesser extent merely logical or negative, because the concept
can be more or less fulfilled, can grasp more or less within itself. He¬
gel therefore goes back to the most negative of all that can be
thought, to the concept in which the least can be known, which, there¬
fore, he says, is as free as possible from any subjective determination,
and as such is the most objective. And this concept for him is that of pure
being (Seyn).
How Hegel arrives at this determination of the beginning can per¬
haps be explained in the following manner.
The subject which the preceding philosophy had as its beginning
point was, as opposed to the Fichtean “I”, which was only the subject
of our, of human or basically for everyone only the subject of his own
consciousness - as opposed to this subject which was itself merely sub¬
jective, the subject in the philosophy after Fichte was explained as an
objective subject (posited outside us, and independent of us), and to
the extent to which it was now explained at the same time that the
development had first to progress from this objective subject to the
subjective one (the one posited in us), then the course in general had
admittedly been determined as a progress from the objective into the
subjective; but the point of departure was the subjective in its com¬
plete objectivity, thus it was in fact always the subjective, and not the
 Hegel
*37
merely objective, as it is when Hegel determines his first concept as
pure being. For that system (the preceding one), what moves itself in
it is only not a subject which is already posited as such, but as remarked
earlier, is only subject in such a way that it is possible for it also to be
object; to this extent it is neither decisively subject nor decisively ob¬
ject, but rather an equal validity between both, which was expressed
as indifference of the subjective and the objective. For if it is thought
of before the process or, as it were, in and before itself, it is not object
to itself, but for precisely that reason it is also not subject in relation to
itself (it first makes itself into the subject of itself, which is, of course,
no less a relative concept, precisely when it first makes itself into the
object of itself), it is thus also indifference of subject and object relative
to itself (still not subject and object), but precisely because it is not sub¬
ject and object of itself, it is also not this indifference for itself, and is
accordingly merely objective, merely in itself. The transition to the
process is now, as you know, precisely that it wants itself as itself, and
the First thing in the process is accordingly the subject, which was
previously indifferent, in what is now its drawing-itself-to-itself (sich-
selbst-Anziehung). In this self-gravitation (Selbstanziehung), that which is
attracted (das Angezogene) (we will call it B), i.e. the subject to the ex¬
tent to which it is object of itself, is necessarily something restricted
and limited (the attraction (die Anziehung) itself is precisely what does
the limiting), but what attracts (we wish to call it A), precisely by the
fact that it has attracted being (das Seyn), is itself posited outside itself,
inhibited with this being; it is the first stage of objectivity (das erste Ob-
jektive). But this first stage of objectivity, this primum existens, is only
the occasion of and the first step to the higher potentials of inward¬
ness or spirituality, to which the subject raises itself to the extent to
which it keeps on going over into the object in each of its forms, joins
the object (for it is, so to speak, only concerned to raise its first being
to a being which is appropriate to itself, to equip it with ever more el¬
evated spiritual qualities, to transform it into something in which it
can recognise itself and in which it can therefore rest); but because
the following stage always held onto the earlier stage, this cannot hap¬
pen without creating a totality of forms; the movement therefore does
not cease until the object has become completely = to the subject.
Hence to the extent that in the process as well the primum existens is a
minimum of subjective and a maximum of objective, from which ever
more elevated potentials of subjective are achieved, here as well (be¬
ginning with what is First in the process) there is a progress from the
objective into the subjective.
In any case, then, Hegel also had to try to make an objective be¬
ginning, indeed, if possible, the most objective beginning, since he
i38 On the History of Modern Philosophy

wanted to establish the same system overall and in the main question
(in der Hauptsache). Here, though, he is faced with determining that
which is most objective as the negation of everything subjective, as
pure being, i.e. (how else can one understand it?) as being in which
there is nothing subjective (nichts von einem Subjekt). For the fact that
he does, by the way, attribute a movement, a transition into another
concept to this pure being, indeed attributes to it an inner restlessness
which drives it on to further determinations, does not prove that he
nevertheless thinks a subject in pure being, it only proves something
or other of which it can only be said that is not not, or is not nothing
at all, but in no way proves that it already is something — if this were
his thought, the progression would have to be completely different.
The fact that he nevertheless attributes an immanent movement to
pure being means no more, then, than that the thought which begins
with pure being feels it is impossible for it to stop at this most abstract
and most empty thing of all, which Hegel himself declares is pure be¬
ing. The compulsion to move on from this has its basis only in the fact
that thought is already used to a more concrete being, a being more
full of content, and thus cannot be satisfied with that meagre diet of
pure being in which only content in the abstract but no determinate
content is thought; in the last analysis, then, what does not allow him
to remain with that empty abstraction is only the fact that there really
is a more rich being which is more full of content, and the fact that the
thinking spirit itself is already such a being, thus the fact that it is not
a necessity which lies in the concept itself, but rather a necessity which
lies in the philosopher and which is imposed upon him by his mem¬
ory. Thus it is really always only the thought which first seeks to with¬
draw to the most minimal content possible, but then seeks again
successively to fulfil itself, seeks to get to a content, and finally to the
complete content of the world and of consciousness - admittedly, as
Hegel professes, not in a random, but rather in a necessary progres¬
sion; but what always tacitly leads this progression is always the termi¬
nus ad quem, the real world, at which science finally is to arrive; but at
any time it is only what we have understood of it that we call the real
world, and Hegel’s own philosophy shows how many sides of this real
world he has not grasped; thus contingency (Zufall) cannot be excluded
from the progression, namely what is contingent about the more nar¬
row or broader individual views of the world of the philosophising
subject. Thus there is a double deception in this supposedly necessary
movement: (1) by the thought being substituted for by the concept, and
by the latter being conceived of as something which moves itself, when
the concept for its own part would lie completely immobile if it were
not the concept of a thinking subject, i.e. if it were not thought
 Hegel
*39

(Gedanke); (2) by pretending that the thought is driven forward only

by a necessity which lies in itself, although it obviously has a goal that
it is striving towards, and this goal, however much the person philos¬
ophising seeks to hide consciousness thereof from himself, for this
reason unconsciously affects the course of philosophising all the more
decisively.
That the absolutely/irs/ thought is pure being is proven, though, by
the fact that nothing could exclude itself from this concept if it is
thought in its purity and complete abstraction — it is supposed to be
the purest and most immediate certainty, or pure certainty itself with¬
out further content, that which is presupposed along with all cer¬
tainty; it is not supposed to be an arbitrary action, but rather the most
complete necessity, first that being in general, then that all being in
being (in dem Seyn alles Seyn) should be thought. Hegel himself calls
such remarks trivial, but excuses them by saying that the first begin¬
nings must be trivial, since the beginnings of mathematics are also triv¬
ial; but if the beginnings of mathematics (I do not know what is meant
by this) - but if they could be called trivial, this would only be because
they are universally plausible; but the proposition cited does not have
the merit of being trivial in this sense; but that supposed necessity, of
thinking being in general and thinking all being in being - this neces¬
sity is itself merely pretence, since it is an impossibility to think being
in general, because there is no being in general, there is no being with¬
out a subject, being is rather necessarily and at all times something
determinate, either essential (wesend) being, which returns to the es¬
sence (Wesen) and is identical with it, or objective (gegenstandlich) be¬
ing—a distinction which Hegel completely ignores; but objective
being is already excluded from the absolutely first thought by its na¬
ture, it can, as is already evident in the word object (Gegemtand), only
be opposed to an other or only be posited for that to which it is an ob¬
ject; being of this kind can therefore only be the second; from this it
follows that the being of the absolutely first thought could only be non¬
objective, merely essential, purely primary (urstandlich) being, with
which nothing is posited except just the subject. Therefore the being
of the first thought is not a being in general but already a determinate
being. By being in general, completely indeterminate being, which
Hegel claims to begin with, one could only understand that which is
neither essential nor objective being, of which it is then immediately
clear that in it truly nothing is thought (generic concept of being,
wholly derived from scholasticism). To this one could reply: Hegel ad¬
mits this himself by having the proposition that pure being is nothing
follow immediately after the concept of pure being. But whatever
meaning he might give to this proposition, it cannot on any account
140 On the History of Modern Philosophy

be his intention to declare pure being to be an un-thought (Ungen-

danken), after he had just declared it to be the absolutely first thought.
However, Hegel tries to get further with that proposition, i.e. to get
into a becoming. The proposition states quite objectively: “Pure being
is nothing”. But, as was already remarked, the true sense is only this:
after I have posited pure being, I look for something in it and find
nothing, because I have forbidden myself to find anything in it pre¬
cisely by the fact that I have posited it as pure being, as mere being in
general. Therefore it is not at all being itself that finds itself, but
rather I find it as nothing, and say this in the proposition: “Pure be¬
ing is nothing”. Let us now investigate the specific meaning of the
proposition. Hegel uses without thinking the form of the proposition,
the copula, the is, before he has explained anything at all about the
meaning of this is. In the same way Hegel uses the concept nothing as
one that needs no explanation, which is completely self-evident. Now
the proposition (“Pure being is nothing”) is either meant merely tau¬
tologically, i.e. pure being and nothing are only two different expres¬
sions for one and the same thing, in which case the proposition, as a
tautological proposition, says nothing, it just contains a combination of
words, and therefore nothing can follow from it. Or it has the mean¬
ing of a judgement, in which case, because of the meaning of the cop¬
ula in the judgement, it means the same as: “Pure being is the subject,
that which carries nothingness”. In this way both pure being and
nothing would at least potentially (potentia) be something, the former
as that which carries, the latter as that which is carried, and one could
then get further from the proposition, by, for example, having pure
being emerge from that relationship of being a subject (of subjection)
with the desire itself to be something, by which it would now cease to
be equal to nothing and would exclude it from itself, whereby the lat¬
ter, as excluded from being, now would also become a something. But
it is not like this, and the proposition is therefore just meant as a tau¬
tology. Pure being is, as it is being in general, admittedly non-being in
an immediate way (without any mediation), and in this sense is noth¬
ing. One should not be surprised by this proposition, but rather by
that to which it is supposed to serve as a means or a transition. From
this connection of being and nothing, becoming is supposed to follow.
But I first want to note that Hegel wishes to explain that equation of
pure being and nothing by the example of the concept of beginning.
“ The thing (Sache)”, as he puts it, “is not yet in its beginning”.' The
little word yet is interpolated here. If one uses this, then the proposi¬
tion “Pure being is nothing” would only mean “Being is here - from

1 Encyclopedia, and ed., p. 103 (ist ed., p. 39).

 Hegel 141

the present point of view - still nothing”. But in the same way as in
the beginning, the non-being of the thing of which it is the beginning
is only the not yet real (wirklich) being of the thing, though not its com¬
plete non-being, but certainly also its being, admittedly not its being
in an indeterminate manner, as Hegel puts it, but its possible, its po¬
tential being, then the proposition: “Pure being is still (noch) nothing”
would just mean: “It is not yet (noch nicht) real being”. But precisely
thereby it would become itself determinate and no longer being in
general, but rather determinate being, namely being in potentid. How¬
ever, with that interpolated yet, something to come which has yet to be
is already promised, and with the help of this yet Hegel gets to becom¬
ing, of which he says in a very indeterminate manner that it is the
unity or unification of nothing and being - (one ought rather to say
that it is the transition from nothing, from not yet being, to real be¬
ing, so that, in becoming, nothing and being are not united but in¬
stead nothing is left behind. However, Hegel loves this inexact way of
expressing himself; but that way the most trivial things can be given
the appearance of something extraordinary).
One cannot really contradict these propositions, or declare them to
be false; for they are, rather, propositions that give one nothing. It is
as if one wanted to carry water in cupped hands, which also gives one
nothing. The work of just holding onto something which cannot be
held onto because it is not anything here replaces philosophising. One
can say the same thing about all of Hegel’s philosophy. One ought re¬
ally not to talk about it at all, because it is characteristic of it that in
many cases it consists of just such incomplete thoughts which cannot
even be held onto for long enough for a judgement about them to be
possible. However, Hegel does not arrive in the manner indicated at
some kind of determinate becoming, but rather only at the concept of
becoming in general, whereby again nothing is given. But this becom¬
ing immediately divides itself up for him into moments, so that he
moves over in this way to the category of quantity, and thus in general
to the Kantian table of categories.
The moments which have been presented thus far: pure being,
nothing, becoming are now the beginnings of the Logic, which Hegel
declares to be the purely speculative philosophy, specifying that here
the Idea is for the time being still enclosed in thought, or that the
Absolute is still enclosed in its eternity (the Idea and the Absolute are,
according to this, treated as synonymous, in the same way as thought,
because it is wholly atemporal, is regarded as identical with eternity).
Because it has to present the pure divine idea as it is before all time or
to the extent to which it is still just in thought, the Logic is in this sense
subjective science, the Idea is still just posited as Idea, and not also as
142 On the History of Modern Philosophy

reality (Wirklichkeit) and objectivity; but it is not subjective science in

the sense that it excludes the real world, but it is rather, by revealing
itself as the absolute basis of everything real, just as much real and
objective science; it still has the wealth both of the sensuous and the
spiritual concrete world outside itself; but, as the concrete world is
recognised in the subsequent real part, and it turns out in that part
that it goes back into the logical Idea and that it has its last basis, its
truth in this Idea, then logical universality thereby no longer appears
as a particularity in relation to that real wealth, but appears as con¬
taining it, as true universality.1 You can see that the Logic is here op¬
posed as one part, namely the ideal, to the other, as the real part of
philosophy, which itself comprehends within itself (a) Naturphiloso-
phie; (b) philosophy of the spiritual world. The Logic is only the cre¬
ation of the completed Idea. This creation takes place by assuming
that the Idea, or the “concept”, as it is called when it begins — that the
concept, via a moving force inherent in itself—which is called “dia¬
lectical” precisely because it exists just by virtue of the concept - that
the concept progresses via the dialectical movement peculiar to it
from those first determinations which are empty and devoid of con¬
tent to determinations which are ever more full of content; the
greater fullness of content of the later determinations arises precisely
via the fact that they contain subordinated to themselves, or as sub-
lated within themselves, the earlier moments which precede them;
every succeeding moment is the moment which sublates the earlier
moment, but it is this only to the extent to which the concept itself has
already achieved a higher stage of positivity in it; in the last moment
it is the completed Idea or, as it is also called, “the Idea which grasps
itself”, which now has all the ways of being that have previously been
gone through, all the moments of its being, as sublated moments
within itself.
One can see that it is the method of earlier philosophy which is
translated here into the Logic. In the same way as in that philosophy
the absolute subject surpasses every stage of its being so that it posits
itself in an even higher potential of subjectivity, or spirituality or in¬
wardness, until it finally comes to a halt as a pure subject, i.e. one
which cannot become objective any more, and thus remains with it¬
self, here the concept which goes through various moments or deter¬
minations is supposed, by finally taking up all of them into itself, to be
the concept which grasps itself. Hegel calls this progression of the con¬
cept a process as well. Only there is a difference between the imitation
and the original. In the earlier philosophy the beginning point at

1 Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, §17, 1st ed.

 Hegel
143

which the subject intensifies or raises itself up to a higher subjectivity

is a real opposition, a real dissonance, and in this way one under¬
stands an intensification. In the Hegelian philosophy the beginning
point behaves in relation to what follows it as a mere minus, as a lack,
an emptiness, which is filled and is admittedly, as such, negated as
emptiness, but in this there is as little to overcome as there is in filling
an empty vessel; it all happens quite peacefully - there is no opposi¬
tion between being and nothing, they do not do anything to each
other. The translation of the concept of process onto the dialectical
movement, where no struggle is possible, but only a monotonous, al¬
most soporific progression, therefore belongs to that misuse of words
which in Hegel is really a very great means of hiding the lack of true
life. I do not wish to say any more about the confusion of thought and
concept which also recurs here. Of the thought - if it in fact gets itself
involved in this sequence, one can say that it goes or moves through
these moments, but if this is said of the concept it is not at all a bold,
but in fact a cold metaphor. One can understand that the subject does
not remain still, it has an inner compulsion to go over into the object
and thus to intensify itself in its subjectivity at the same time. But an
empty concept, which Hegel declares even being to be, does not yet,
because it is empty, have any compulsion to fill itself. It is not the con¬
cept which fills itself, but rather the thought, i.e. I, the philosopher,
can feel a need to progress from the empty to the full. But since only
the thought is the animating principle of this movement, what guar¬
antee is there against arbitrariness, what prevents the philosopher, in
order to accommodate a concept, from also being satisfied with a
mere appearance of necessity or, conversely, being satisfied with a
mere appearance of the concept?
The identity philosophy was with its first steps in nature, thus in
the sphere of the empirical and thereby also of intuition (Anschauung).
Hegel wanted to erect his abstract Logic above the Naturphilosophie.
But he took the method of the Naturphilosophie there with him; it is
easy to see how forced the result had to be of wishing to elevate into the
merely logical the method which definitely had nature as its content
and the intuition of nature as its companion; it was forced because he
had to deny these forms of intuition and yet continually tacitly as¬
sumed them, whence it is also quite correct to remark, and not diffi¬
cult to discover, that Hegel already presupposed intuition with the first
step of his Logic and could not take a single step without assuming it.
The old metaphysics, which was built up out of various sciences,
had as its universal basis a science which also had concepts only as
concepts as its content: ontology. In his Logic Hegel had nothing in
mind but this ontology, which he wanted to elevate above the bad form
144 On the History of Modern Philosophy

which it had had in the Wolffian philosophy for example, where the
various categories were set up and dealt with in a more or less just
coincidental, more or less indifferent, juxtaposition and succession.
He sought to bring about this elevation by applying a method which
was invented for a completely different purpose, for real potentials, to
mere concepts, into which he in vain sought to breathe a life, an inner
compulsion to progression. One can see that there is nothing original
in this; the method would never have been invented for this purpose.
It is something which is only applied artificially and forcibly in this
case. But going back to this ontology at all was a retrograde step.
In Hegel’s Logic one finds every concept which just happened to be
accessible and available at his time taken up as a moment of the ab¬
solute Idea at a specific point. Linked to this is the pretension to com¬
plete systematisation, i.e. the claim that all concepts have been
included and that outside the circle of those that have been included
no other concept is possible. But what if concepts can be shown which
that system knows nothing about, or which it was only able to take up
into itself in a completely different sense from their real sense? In¬
stead of an impartial system which takes up everything with the same
fairness, we will have only a partial system before us that has only
taken up concepts of this kind, or has only taken up the ones it has
done in the sense in which they are compatible with the system once
the system has been presupposed. In the places where the system
comes to the concepts which are higher and thus more familiar to
people, to moral and religious concepts, at least, he has long since
been reproached with completely arbitrary manipulation of these
concepts.
One might like to ask where earlier philosophy had a location or a
place for concepts as concepts. One might think it has even been
claimed that this philosophy has no place for logic, for universal cat¬
egories, for concepts as such. It admittedly did not have a place for
concepts which still have the real (das Reale) outside themselves, for it
was, as was said, with its first steps in nature; but it progressed in na¬
ture to the point where the subject (the I), which has gone through
the whole of nature, has now come to itself, now possesses itself, ad¬
mittedly no longer finds the earlier moments themselves which have
been left behind in nature, but instead the concepts of these mo¬
ments, and it finds them as concepts with which consciousness can
now do as it pleases and apply in every direction, as it would with
something it owns which is completely independent of things. In this
way Hegel could at least be aware of the place in the system where the
world of concepts, in all its multiplicity and systematically complete
analysis, enters into the whole; he could even see the forms of what is
 Hegel
l45

generally called logic treated just like forms of nature - an analogy

which Hegel uses himself, at least when he talks about the figures of
the conclusions.* Here, where the infinite potential which has gone
through nature first becomes objective to itself, where it unfolds its
organism, which has up to now been objectively analysed, subjectively
in consciousness as an organism of reason, here, in a philosophy
which progresses naturally and really begins from the beginning, was
the only place for the concepts as such; for philosophy the concepts
could not be any different from the world of the body or of plants or
whatever else occurs in nature, they could only be objects which were
derived in a completely a priori manner, and thus could not be there
until they first step into reality (Wirklichkeit) (with consciousness), at
the end of the Naturphilosophie and at the beginning of the philosophy
of spirit. At this point the concepts are also themselves something real
and objective, whereas where Hegel deals with them they are only
something subjective, something which is artificially made objective.
Concepts as such do in fact exist nowhere but in consciousness, they
are, therefore, taken objectively, after nature, not before it; Hegel took
them from their natural position by putting them at the beginning of
philosophy. There he places the most abstract concepts first, becom¬
ing, existence, etc.; but abstractions cannot be there, be taken for re¬
alities, before that from which they are abstracted; becoming cannot
be there before something becomes, existence not before something
exists. When Hegel says philosophy begins by withdrawing completely
into pure thinking, he has splendidly expressed the essence of the
truly negative or purely rational philosophy; and we might be thank¬
ful to him for this characteristic expression; but in Hegel this with¬
drawal into pure thought is not meant or said of the whole of
philosophy, he only wishes to win us over for his Logic thereby, by
concerning himself with that which is notjust before real (wirklich) na¬
ture, but before all nature. It is not the objects or the things (Sachen) as
they present themselves a priori in pure thinking, and thus in the con¬
cept, but rather the concept should again only have the concept as its
content. He and his followers call only thinking which just has con¬
cepts as its content pure thinking. For him, withdrawing into thought
only means deciding to think about thinking. But that at least one
cannot call “real (wirklich) thinking”. Real thinking is where some¬
thing which is opposed to thinking is overcome. Where one has only
thinking, and indeed abstract thinking, as a content, thinking has
nothing to overcome. (Hegel himself describes this movement by

* Translator’s note: These are discussed in chapter 3 of “The Subjective Logic of the
Doctrine of the Concept” in Hegel’s Science of Logic.
146 On the History of Modern Philosophy

mere abstractions, like being, becoming, etc., as a movement in pure,

i.e. unresisting ether. The relationship is roughly as follows. Poetry
can, e.g., represent a poetic soul in relation to and in conflict with
reality, and it thereby has a really objective content. But poetry can
also have poetry in general and in abstracto as its object — it can be po¬
etry about poetry. Many of our so-called Romantic poets never got
further than such a glorification of poetry by poetry. But no one has
held this poetry to be real poetry.)
Hegel introduces as the antithesis of his assertion that the concept
alone is real (das einzig Reale) the opinion that truth rests on sensuous
reality (Realitat). But this could be only if the concept were a super-
sensuous, indeed the only supersensuous, reality (Realitat). Obviously
Hegel assumes this. This assumption derives directly from the Kan¬
tian assumption, according to which God is only a concept of reason,
an idea of reason. But opposed to the concept is not just sensuous re¬
ality, but reality in general, both sensuous and supersensuous. Hegel
thinks the only objection to or criticism of the idea of his Logic is that
these thoughts are only thoughts, because the true content is sup¬
posed to be only in sensuous perception. But it is not a question of that
(sensuous perception) here either. It cannot be said in any other way
than that the content of the highest science, of philosophy, is indeed
thoughts, and that philosophy itself is the science which comes about
only by thinking. Therefore the fact that the content of philosophy is
only thoughts cannot be criticised, but rather the fact that the object of
these thoughts is only the concept or concepts. Hegel is only able to
think sensuous reality outside concepts, which is obviously a petitio
principii [begging the question], since God, for example, is not just a
concept and yet is also not a sensuous reality (Realitat). Hegel often
refers to the fact that people have always thought that philosophy pri¬
marily entails thinking or reflection. This is true, but it does not fol¬
low from it that the object of this thinking is again only thinking itself
or the concept. In the same way: “The difference of man from ani¬
mals consists only in thinking”. Assuming this is right, the content of
this thinking remains completely indeterminate; for the geometer
who looks at sensuously imaginable figures, the scientist who looks at
sensuous objects or events, the theologian who regards God as a su¬
persensuous reality will not admit that he is not thinking because the
content of his thinking is not the pure concept.
It cannot be our intention to go further into the detail of the He¬
gelian Logic. What really gives rise to our interest is the system as a
whole. In relation to the system which is its basis, Hegel’s Logic is
something completely contingent, in as far as the system is only con¬
nected in a very loose way with it. Whoever just assesses the Logic has
 Hegel
*47

not assessed the system itself. And whoever in particular only takes to
the field against individual points of this Logic may not be wrong, and
may show much astuteness and correct insight in doing so, but in re¬
lation to the whole nothing is won thereby. I myself believe that one
could easily produce this so-called real logic in ten different ways. Yet
I do not for this reason underestimate the value of many uncom¬
monly clever, particularly methodological remarks which are to be
found in Hegel’s Logic. But Hegel threw himself into the methodolog¬
ical discussion in such a way that he thereby completely forgot the
questions which lay outside it.
I now turn to the system as such and will also, in doing so, not leave
unanswered the criticisms of the preceding system made by Hegel.
Although the concept cannot be the sole content of thought, what
Hegel asserts might at least remain true; that logic, in the metaphys¬
ical sense which he gives it, must be the real basts of all philosophy.
What Hegel so often emphasises might for this reason be true after
all: that everything that is is in the Idea or in the logical concept, and
that as a consequence the Idea is the truth of everything, into which
at the same time everything goes as into its beginning and into its
end. As far as this constantly repeated conception is concerned, it
might be admitted that everything is in the logical Idea, and indeed in
such a way that it could not be outside it, because what is senseless re¬
ally cannot ever exist anywhere. But in this way what is logical also
presents itself as the merely negative aspect of existence, as that with¬
out which nothing could exist, from which, however, it by no means
follows that everything only exists via what is logical. Everything can
be in the logical Idea without anything being explained thereby, as, for
example, everything in the sensuous world is grasped in number and
measure, which does not therefore mean that geometry or arithmetic
explain the sensuous world. The whole world lies, so to speak, in the
nets of the understanding or of reason, but the question is how exactly
it got into those nets, since there is obviously something other and
something more than mere reason in the world, indeed there is some¬
thing which strives beyond these barriers.
The main intention of the Hegelian Logic, and the one on which it
primarily prides itself, is that it should take on in its last result the
meaning of speculative theology, i.e. that it should be a real (eigentlich)
construction of the Idea of God, and that, accordingly, this Idea
or the Absolute should not just be a presupposition in it, as it was in
the immediately preceding system, but rather essentially a result. A
double reproach is made to earlier philosophy thereby: (1) it has the
Absolute merely as an unfounded presupposition instead of as a
founded result; (2) it thereby has a presupposition at all, whilst the
148 On the History of Modern Philosophy

Hegelian philosophy boasts of being a philosophy which presupposes

nothing, absolutely nothing. But as far as the latter is concerned, He¬
gel must, by setting up the Logic in that sublime sense as the first
philosophical science, use the common logical forms to do so, without
having justified them, i.e. he must presuppose them, when he says,
e.g.: “Pure being is nothing”, without in the least having proved any¬
thing about the meaning of this is. However, it is obviously not just the
logical forms, but virtually all concepts which we use in everyday life
without further reflection and without considering it necessary for us
to justify ourselves because of them, it is virtually all concepts of this
kind which Hegel uses at the very beginning, which he therefore pre¬
supposes. He admittedly pretends at the beginning to be asking for
very little, which is, as it were, not worth mentioning, as devoid of
content as being itself, so that one cannot, as it were, help allowing
him it. The Hegelian concept is the Indian God Vishnu in his third
incarnation, who opposes himself to Mahabala, the giant prince of
darkness (as if to the spirit of ignorance), who has gained supreme
power in all three worlds. He first appears to Mahabala in the form of
a small, dwarflike Brahmin and asks him for only three feet of land
(the three concepts of “being”, “nothing”, “becoming”); hardly has
the giant granted them than the dwarf swells up into a massive form,
seizes the earth with one step, the sky with the other, and is just in the
course of encompassing hell as well with the third, when the giant
throws himself at his feet and humbly recognizes the power of the
highest God, who for his part generously leaves to him the power in
the realm of darkness (under His supreme power, of course). Let us
admit, then, that the three concepts of being, nothing, becoming do
not presuppose anything outside themselves, and that they are the
first pure thoughts. But these concepts have in them a further deter¬
mination: one is the first, one the second, in all there are three, and
this trinity repeats itself in what follows, where more space has al¬
ready been gained, in ever greater dimensions. Hegel himself speaks
often enough of the tripartite division or trichotomy of the concepts.
But how do I end up, here at the farthest edge of philosophy, where
it hardly dare open its mouth yet, where it finds word and expression
only with great effort, using the concept of number'?
But besides this general boast of not presupposing anything, this
philosophy also claims to have surpassed the preceding system in the
fact that for this system the Absolute is a mere presupposition; for it,
on the other hand, it is a result, something produced, something
founded. Herein lies a misunderstanding which I want briefly to ana¬
lyse. As you know, for in that system the Absolute is, as point of de¬
parture (as terminus a quo), pure subject. In the same way as Hegel says
 Hegel
J49

that the truly first definition of the Absolute is “The Absolute is pure
being”, I might say: “The truly first definition of the Absolute is that
it is subject”. Only to the extent to which this subject must at the same
time also be thought in the possibility of its becoming object (=
subject deprived of itself) ((= entselbstetes Subjekt)), did I also call it the
absolute indifference of subject and object, in the same way as I later,
because it is already being thought in the actus, called it living, eter¬
nally moving and non-negatable identity of the subjective and the ob¬
jective. In the earlier system the Absolute is, then, not in any other
way a presupposition and only a presupposition in the way that in He¬
gel’s system pure being is a presupposition, about which he also does in
fact say: it is the first concept of the Absolute. But the Absolute is ad¬
mittedly not just a beginning or a mere presupposition, it is just as
much also a conclusion and in this sense a result - namely the Abso¬
lute in its completion. But the Absolute determined in this way, the
Absolute to the extent to which it now already has all moments of be¬
ing beneath and relatively outside itself, and as spirit which can no
longer descend into being, into becoming, i.e. as spirit which is and
remains — this Absolute is just as much end or result for the earlier sys¬
tem. The difference between the Hegelian and the earlier system as
far as the Absolute is concerned is only this. The earlier system does
not have a double becoming, a logical one and a real one, but, starting
out from the abstract subject, from the subject in its abstraction, it is
in nature with the first step, and it does not afterwards need a further
explanation of the transition from the logical into the real. Hegel, on
the other hand, declares his Logic to be that science in which the di¬
vine Idea logically completes itself, i.e. in mere thinking, before all re¬
ality, nature and time; here, then, he already has the completed
divine Idea as a logical result, but he wants immediately afterwards to
have it again (namely after it has gone through nature and the spir¬
itual world) as a real result. In this way Hegel admittedly has some¬
thing over the earlier system, namely, as was said, the double
becoming. But if the Logic is the science in which the divine Idea
completes itself merely in thinking, then one would have to expect that
philosophy would not be closed, or if it were to progress further the
progress could only be in a wholly different science, in which it is no
longer just a question of the Idea, as it is in the first science. For He¬
gel, however, the Logic is only a part of philosophy, the Idea has log¬
ically completed itself, and now the same Idea is supposed to
complete itself in reality. For it is the Idea which makes the transition
into nature. Before I talk about this transition, I want to mention an¬
other criticism of the identity system which has been made on the
part of Hegel. Namely, the reproach just touched upon (in the pre-
150 On the History of Modern Philosophy

ceding philosophy the Absolute was supposed to be just a presuppo¬

sition) was also put as follows: this philosophy, instead of proving the
Absolute in the scientific manner, had recourse to intellectual intuition,
and one did not know what this is; but it was certain that it was noth¬
ing scientific, rather something merely subjective, in the last analysis
perhaps only something individual, a certain mystical intuition, that
only a few favoured people could boast of, with the pretence of which,
therefore, one could make life easy for oneself in science.
Here one can note above all that in the first documentary Presen¬
tation of the Identity Philosophy, the only one which the author has al¬
ways recognised as strictly scientific,1 the term “intellectual intuition”
does not occur at all, and one could offer a reward to anybody who
discovered it there. On the other hand, intellectual intuition really is
discussed for the first time and originally in a treatise which preceded
that Presentation .“ But how is it discussed there? To explain this I must
go back to the significance of intellectual intuition in Fichte. For the
term already, it is true, derives from Kant, but the application of it to
the beginning of philosophy derives from Fichte. Fichte demanded
something immediately certain as the beginning. For him this was the
“I”, which he wanted to make sure of by intellectual intuition as some¬
thing immediately certain, i.e. as something which indubitably exists.
The expression of intellectual intuition was precisely the “I am”,
stated with immediate certainty. The act was called intellectual intu¬
ition because in this case, unlike in sensuous intuition, subject and ob¬
ject were not different from each other but the same. Now in the
treatise quoted I say, not that the I, as it is immediately certain in in¬
tellectual intuition, but rather that which has been gained by abstrac¬
tion from the subject in intellectual intuition, the subject-object which
has been removed from intellectual intuition, which is thus universal
and without determination, and as such now is no longer something
immediately certain, but, because it has been removed from intellec¬
tual intuition, can only be a matter (Sache) of pure thought: only this
is the beginning of the objective philosophy which is freed from all
subjectivity. Fichte had recourse to intellectual intuition in order to
prove the existence of the I: now how could his successor wish to
prove with the same intellectual intuition the existence of that which
is no longer the I any more, but is rather the absolute subject-object?
What has the force of proof in intellectual intuition in relation to the

'Journal of Speculative Physics, vol. 2, no. 2. [Translator’s note: 1/4 pp. 105ft.)
* “On the True Concept of Naturphilosophie”, Journal of Speculative Physics, vol. 2, no.
1, 1801. This treatise might also show that the author was aware of his method, as
well as of the contradiction which is posited in the first concept and is compelled
to progress-an awareness which some would have liked to deny that he pos¬
sessed. [Translator’s note: The citation is to 1/4 pp. 79ft.)
 Hegel
l5'

I is just its immediacy ; there is immediate certainty in the “I am” - but

is there also in the “it is” which is the universal subject-object? All
power of immediacy is lost here. In this it could no longer be a ques¬
tion of existence, but rather only of the pure content, of the essence
of what was contained in intellectual intuition. The I is only a partic¬
ular concept, a particular form of the subject-object; this was sup¬
posed to be shed, so that the subject-object in general should emerge
as the universal content of all being. The explanation that one should
take the universal concept of subject-object out of intellectual intu¬
ition was sufficient proof that it was a question of matter (Sache), of
content, not of existence. Hegel might criticise me for not having said
it clearly and expressly enough (although it was said clearly enough
that it was no longer a question, as it had been in Fichte, of being, of
existence),1 instead of which he presupposes that, because Fichte
proved the existence of the I with intellectual intuition, I wanted to
prove the existence of the universal subject-object in the same. He has
nothing against this intention, he only criticises the inadequate man¬
ner of the proof. Admittedly it is a question of that which is: but pre¬
cisely this is supposed first to be sought. One does not even yet have
it as something which is really thought, i.e. as something which has
been logically realised; it is rather from the very beginning merely
what is wanted; “the pistol from which it is fired” is the mere wanting
of that which is, which, though, in contradiction with not being able
to gain possession of that which is, with not being able to bring it to a
halt, is immediately carried away into the progressing and pulling
movement, in which being (das Seyende) behaves until the end as that
which is never realised, and must first be realised.
Indeed what is first of all in question is: What Is. How, therefore,
could that from which one begins already be in existence itself (selbst
schon seyend seyn) - be something existing, given that that which is,
that which exists (das Seyende, das Existirende) is supposed first to be
found? Hegel admittedly does not want the Absolute, but rather the
existing Absolute, and presupposes that the preceding philosophy
wanted it as well, and as he sees no attempt to prove the existence of
the Absolute in it (in the manner in which he wants to prove it by his
Logic), he thinks that the proof is simply supposed to have already
lain in intellectual intuition.

1 Because the identity philosophy concerned itself with the pure what of things,
without saying anything about real existence, it could only in this sense call itself
absolute Idealism, as opposed to merely relative Idealism, which denies the existence
of external things (for the latter still always keeps a relationship to existence). The
science of reason is absolute Idealism to the extent that it does not take up the
question of existence at all.
152 On the History of Modern Philosophy

I note that in that (first) Presentation of the Identity System the term
“the Absolute” did not occur at all, just as little as did “intellectual in¬
tuition”; the term could not occur in it, because the Presentation was not
brought to a conclusion. For that philosophy called the Absolute only
the potential which remained with itself, which existed, and was acquit¬
ted of all progression and further becoming-other. This was the Last,
was pure result. That philosophy did not call that which went through
the whole “the Absolute” but instead called it “absolute identity”, pre¬
cisely in order to remove every thought of a substrate, of a substance.
It becomes a substance, a being (zum Seyenden wird), precisely only at
the last moment, for the whole movement only intended to have be¬
ing (das Seyende) (that which is) as being (als das Seyende), which was
impossible at the beginning, which for that very reason was called in¬
difference. Before that it is not something of which I have a concept,
but is itself only the concept of all being (alles Seyenden) as something
which is to come. It is that which never was, which, as soon as it is
thought, disappears and Is only ever in what is to come, but is only in
a certain manner there as well, thus Is only really in the end. There,
then, it also first assumes the name of being (des Seyenden) as well as
that of the Absolute. The (first) Presentation had for that reason very
deliberately used nothing but abstract expressions such as “absolute
indifference”, “absolute identity”, only in later presentations did one
also allow oneself, perhaps out of a sort of condescension to those who
absolutely demanded a substrate, to use the expression “the Abso¬
lute” right at the beginning.
But in rejecting intellectual intuition in the sense in which Hegel
wants to attribute it to me, it does not follow that it did not have an¬
other sense for me, and that I do now still hold onto it in this sense.
1 hat which is absolutely mobile, of which I just spoke, which is con¬
tinually an other, which cannot be held onto for a moment, which is
only really thought in the last moment (take good note of this expres¬
sion!) — how does this relate to thought? Obviously not even as a real
object of thought; for by “object” one understands something which
keeps still, which stands still, which remains. It is not really an object,
but rather the mere material of thought throughout the whole sci¬
ence; for real thought expresses itself precisely only in the continual
determination and formation of this which is in itself indeterminate,
of this which is never the same as itself, which always becomes an
other. This first basis, this true prima materia of all thought, cannot,
therefore, be what is really thought, not be what is thought in the
sense that the single formation is. When thought is concerned with
the determination of this matter, it does not think about this substrate
(Unterlage) itself, but rather only of the determination of the concept
 Hegel
*53

which it puts into it - (sculptor-clay) - it is, therefore, what is not re¬

ally thought in thinking. A thinking which does not think (ein nicht
denkendes Denken) will, though, not be far from an intuiting thinking,
and, as such, a thinking which has an intellectual intuition as its
ground, goes through the whole of this philosophy, as it does through
geometry, in which the external intuition of the figure which is drawn
on the blackboard or whereever is always only the bearer of an inner
and spiritual intuition. This, then, is said in relation to a philosophy
without intuition.
Hegel, then (to come back to him), wants the Absolute, before he
takes it as a principle, as the result of a science, and this science is
precisely the Logic. Therefore the Idea continually develops through¬
out this whole science. By “Idea” Hegel also means what is to be re¬
alised, what develops and is wanted in the whole process; it is the Idea
which at the beginning is excluded from pure being, which, as it were,
eats up being, which happens via the determinations of concepts
which are put into being; after it has completely eaten up being and
transformed it into itself, it is itself, of course, the realised Idea. This
Idea which is realised at the end of the Logic is exactly as determinate
as the Absolute at the end of the identity philosophy was determinate,
as subject-object, as unity of thinking and being, of the Ideal and the
Real, etc.' But as the Idea realised in this way, it is precisely already at
the limit of the merely logical, and it is thus either not possible to
progress at all with it, or this can only be done outside this limit, so
that it must completely leave the position within logical science which
it still had as just the result of logical science and go over into the un-
logical world, indeed into the world which is opposed to what is log¬
ical. This world which is opposed to what is logical is nature; but this
nature is no longer a priori nature, fora priori nature would have had
to be in the Logic. But according to Hegel, the Logic still has nature
completely outside itself. Nature begins for him where what is logical
finishes. Here nature in general is for him nothing but the agony of the
concept. Hegel says in the first edition of his Encyclopedia of Philosoph¬
ical Sciences* that nature has rightly been determined as the Idea’s
breaking (Abfall) with itself. (In the second edition of his Encyclopedia3
Hegel leaves out the “rightly” and just says that nature has been de¬
termined as the break with the Idea, where the proposition therefore
only has the significance of a historical quotation.) What is otherwise
said of nature is in complete agreement with this “break”: in nature
the concept is supposed to be stripped of its splendour, powerless, to

1 Encyclopedia, §162, 1st ed. (§214, 2nd ed.).

* P 128.
P. 219.
154 On the History of Modern Philosophy

have become untrue to itself and incapable of sustaining itself any

more. Jacobi can hardly denigrate nature more than Hegel does in
relation to what is logical, from which he excludes nature and to
which he can only oppose nature. But in the Idea there is no necessity
at all for any kind of movement. The Idea could not, for instance,
progress further in itself (for that is impossible, because it is already
complete), but would rather have completely to break away from it¬
self. The Idea at the end of the Logic is subject and object, conscious
of itself, as the Ideal and the Real, which therefore has no need any
more to become more real and real in another way than it already is.
Therefore, if it is assumed despite this that something of this kind
happens, then it is not assumed because of a necessity in the Idea it¬
self, but simply because nature happens to exist. People have tried to
back up this idea, in order to give some reason or other for the Idea
to go further, by saying: the Idea admittedly exists at the end of the
Logic, but it is not yet proven, it must, therefore, go out of itself, in or¬
der to prove itself. But this is one of the numerous pretences with
which one can deceive only thoughtless people. But for whom should
the Idea prove itself? For itself? But the Idea is that which is sure and
certain of itself and knows in advance that it cannot perish in its
being-other; this battle would be devoid of any purpose for it. Would
it, then, have to prove itself for a third, for a spectator? But where is
the spectator? In the last analysis it is only supposed to prove itself for
the philosopher, i.e. the philosopher has to wish that the Idea is party
to this externalisation in order that he should be given the chance to
explain nature and the world of mind, the world of history. For one
would laugh at a philosophy that was just a Logic in Hegel’s sense,
and knew nothing of the real world; for it was not the Logic, but
rather the Idea of the philosophy of nature and of spirit which Hegel
already found before himself, that could attract the attention which
Hegelian philosophy has attracted. There is nothing earth-shaking
about the Logic. Hegel must come to reality. But in the Idea itself
there is, then, no necessity at all for progression or becoming-other.
“The Idea”, says Hegel,1 the Idea in the infinite freedom in which it
exists (thus the completed Idea, freedom, only is where there is com¬
pletion, only the Absolute is acquitted of every necessity for move-

Encyclopedia §191, 1st ed. (§244, 2nd ed.). [Translator’s note: Schelling’s quotation
from the Encyclopedia is inaccurate. The passage in question goes as follows: “But
the absolute/rm/om of the Idea is that it does not just pass over into life, nor that it
makes life appear in itself as finite cognition, but, rather, that in the absolute truth
of itself it resolves Ireely to release the moment of its particularity or of the first de¬
termination and being-other, the immediate Idea as its reflection, as nature, from it¬
self' (Hegel, 1959 p. 197).]
 Hegel
*55

mem) - the Idea in the infinite freedom, in the “truth of itself, resolves
to release itself as nature, or in the form of being-other, from itself”.
This expression “release” - the Idea releases nature - is one of the
strangest, most ambiguous and thus also timid expressions behind
which this philosophy retreats at difficult points. Jacob Bohme says:
divine freedom vomits itself into nature. Hegel says: divine freedom
releases nature. What is one to think in this notion of releasing? This
much is clear: the biggest compliment one can pay this notion is to
call it “theosophical”. Besides, anyone who was still able to doubt that
the Idea at the end of the Logic was meant as the really existing Idea
would now have to convince themselves of this fact; for that which is
supposed freely to decide must be something which really exists,
something that is just a concept cannot decide. It is a very awkward
point at which Hegel’s philosophy has arrived here, which was not
foreseen at the beginning of the Logic, a nasty broad ditch, the dem¬
onstration of which (it was mentioned in a few words for the first time
in the Preface to Cousin) has admittedly had much bad blood, but has
not had any at all useful and not merely deceptive information what¬
soever as a consequence.*
Now one can, it is true, not understand at all what should motivate
nature, after it has elevated itself to being the highest subject, and has
completely eaten up being (Seyn), to make itself subjectless again after
all, to reduce itself to mere being (Seyn) and to let itself disintegrate
into the bad externality of space and time. However, the Idea has now
thrown itself into nature, not in order to remain in matter, but rather
in order, through matter, to become spirit again, initially to become
human spirit. But the human spirit is only the scene on which spirit in
general again works off, by its own activity, alone, the subjectivity
which it has taken on in human spirit, and makes itself in this way into
absolute spirit, which finally takes up all moments of the movement
into itself as its own, and is God.
Here as well we will best capture the peculiarity of the system if we
see what relationship it gives itself to the immediately preceding phi¬
losophy in view of this Last and Highest. The preceding philosophy is
reproached with the fact that in it God is supposed to have been de¬
termined not as spirit but only as substance. By Christianity and by
the catechism everyone is admittedly instructed not only to think of
God as spirit but to wish and mean Him as spirit; in this way nobody
will be able to claim that they have discovered that God is spirit. It
cannot be meant in this way either. I do not in fact wish to enter into

* Translator’s note: Preface to a Philosophical Text of M. Victor Cousin, published in

1834 — virtually the only later text of Schelling to be published in his lifetime — the
reference is to 1/10 p. 213.
156 On the History of Modern Philosophy

a dispute about whether the identity philosophy uses the expression

“spirit” in order to express the nature of the Absolute, namely at the
end, or in so far as it is the last result. The word (“spirit”) would ad¬
mittedly have sounded more edifying. For the matter in question I
could, however, consider it sufficient that God was determined as the
existing, permanent self-object (subject-object), for in that way He was
also, to use the Aristotelian expression. He who thought Himself
(6 tavxov vowv) and, even if He was not called spirit, essentially was
spirit, and in this sense was not substance, if substance is supposed to
mean that which is in a blind manner (das blind Seyende). And there
could also be good reasons for the fact that He was not called spirit.
For one has no cause in philosophy to be wasteful with words, and
one should therefore think well before designating the Absolute
which is only the end with the word “spirit”. In a strict sense this ought
also to be true of the word “God”. For the God in so far as He is only
the end, as He can only be in the purely rational philosophy, the God
who has no future, who cannot initiate anything, who can only be as
final cause, and in no way a principle, an initiating, productive cause,
such a God is only spirit according to nature and essence, thus in fact
only substantial spirit, not spirit in the sense in which piety or normal
use of language understands the word; used here it would only be a
misleading expression. In Hegel as well the Absolute could only be
substantial spirit, in the same way as the term “spirit” in general could
only have more negative than positive meaning left, because this last
concept also only arises by successive negation of everything else. The
naming of the Last, i.e. the designation of its essence (Wesen), could not
be derived from anything physical, only the universal name “spirit”
was left, and since it is not human, finite spirit (for this is also already
posited at an earlier stage), it is necessarily infinite, absolute spirit,
but just according to its essence, for how should real (wirklich) spirit be
that which cannot move away from the end where it is posited, be that
which only has the function of taking up all the preceding moments
into itself as that which brings everything to an end, but not itself be
the beginning and principle of something?
Hegel as well was initially conscious of the negativity of this end, as
in fact the pressing power of the positive, which demanded satisfac¬
tion in this philosophy, only gradually succeeded in drawing out the
consciousness of its negativity from the identity system. This con¬
sciousness must have been present when it first arose, for otherwise
this philosophy would not have been able to emerge. In Hegel as well,
at least in his earliest presentation, there is still an echo, when he
comes to the Last, of the fact that it is not at all a question of thinking
of something real happening or having happened. I mean by this a
 Hegel
157

paragraph of the first edition of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical

Sciences,1 which is already distorted in the second edition; in this para¬
graph he says that the self-conscious Idea purifies itself of all appear¬
ance of happening, of contingency and of the being-outside and
being-in-succession of the moments (the content of the Idea still has
this appearance in religion, which pulls the content apart into a tem¬
poral and external sequence just so it can be imagined (fiir die blosse
Vorstellung)).
Later Hegel tried a further greater intensification, and even sought
to get to the Idea of a free creation of the world. A curious passage in
which this attempt is made is to be found in the second edition of his
Logic - the passage was different in the first edition of the Logic and
also obviously had a completely different sense there. In the second
passage it is as follows:2 the Last, into which everything goes as into its
ground, is then also that from which the First, which was initially es¬
tablished as something immediate, emerges, and “in this way the ab¬
solute spirit, which results as the concrete and last, the highest truth
of all being, is known as externalising itself with freedom and as re¬
leasing itself into the form of an immediate being at the end of the
development - as resolving itself to the creation of a world which con¬
tains everything which fell into the development which had preceded
that result, so that all this (everything which preceded in the devel¬
opment) is transformed along with its beginning, via this reversed po¬
sition, into something which is dependent upon the result as a
principle”,3 i.e., therefore, what was at first result becomes principle,
what in the first development was a beginning which led to the result
becomes conversely something dependent on the result which has
now rather become a principle, and thereby also something which
must undoubtedly be deduced. Now if this reversal were possible in
the way Hegel wishes, and if he had not just spoken of this reversal but
had tried it and really established it, then he would already himself
have put a second philosophy by the side of his first, the converse of
the first, which would have been roughly what we want under the
name of the positive philosophy. But a necessary consequence of this
would then have had to have been (because two philosophies cannot
have the same significance and status) to recognise his first philoso¬
phy as the merely logical and negative philosophy (in which the tran-

' §472.
* P 43, 1832 edition. [Translator’s note: Hegel 1969, vol. 1, p. 70.]
H The First edition of the Logic of 1812 (p. 9) stated: “Thus spirit will also externalise
itself with freedom at the end of the development of pure knowledge, and release
itself into the form of an immediate consciousness, as consciousness of a being
which stands opposite it as an other”.
i58 On the History of Modern Philosophy

sition into the Naturphilosophie could then only happen hypothetically,

whereby nature as well is sustained merely as a possibility). But the
very way in which he sought only occasionally and in passing to in¬
terpolate this expression, by changing the original text, shows that he
never made a serious attempt really to undertake that reversal, which,
in the way he presented it, would have simply consisted in one’s going
back down the steps that one had gone up in the first philosophy. Let
us see what could result from this.
In the identity philosophy it is admittedly the case that whatever
precedes only had its truth in what follows and is relatively higher, and
thus it had its truth finally only in God. It is, it is true, not exactly the
way that Hegel puts the fact that in the Last everything goes as into
its ground; one ought rather to say: everything preceding grounded
itself by the fact that it lowers itself to being the ground of what fol¬
lows, i.e. to that which is no longer itself being (das Seyende) but is in¬
stead ground of being (des Seyns) for an other; it grounds itself by its
going-to-ground (zu-Grunde-Gehen), it itself is ground thereby, not
what follows. Thus the earth, whose nature it is to fall, whose falling
is thus infinite — because everything which follows from the nature of
a thing follows infinitely — finds its ground by the fact that it makes it¬
self into the ground of something higher, and generally remains in
this way in its place (at the same average distance from the centre);
and in this way everything finally grounds itself by the fact that it sub¬
ordinates itself as ground to the Absolute, to the Last. (After this cor¬
rection of the terms used, let us move to the matter in question itself
(zur Sache selbst)). Since, according to Hegel, even that which is the end
only makes itself the beginning after it is the end, it does not yet be¬
have in the first movement (and therefore in philosophy, in which it is
a result) as effective, but rather as final cause, which is a cause only to
the extent to which everything strives towards it. But if the Last is the
highest and last final cause, then the whole sequence, with the excep¬
tion only of the first member - the whole sequence is nothing but an
uninterrupted and continuous succession of final causes; each in its
place is just as much final cause for what precedes it as the Last is
final cause for everything. If we go back as far as matter which can
only be thought of as without form, which is what lies at the ground of
everything, then inorganic nature is the final cause of matter, organic
nature is the final cause of inorganic nature, in organic nature the
animal is the final cause of the plant, humankind is the final cause of
the animal world. If, then, in order to get to a creation no more is nec¬
essary than to go back down the steps which one has climbed, and if
the Absolute already becomes an effective cause simply by this rever¬
sal, then through this reversal humankind as well would have to ap-
 Hegel
l59

pear as the effective or productive cause of the animal realm, the

animal realm as the productive cause of the plant realm, the organism
in general as the cause of inorganic nature, etc., for we do not know
how far in Hegel’s opinion this should be continued, whether perhaps
into the Logic, so that one would come back as far as pure being,
which = nothing; enough, we can see what inconsistencies the rever¬
sal would lead to if understood in this way, and see how illusory the
opinion is that one could, by such a simple reversal, transform phi¬
losophy into a philosophy which could also comprehend a free cre¬
ation of the world.
Besides, the expression with which the externalisation of absolute
spirit is described in the passage cited from the Logic, “that it releases
itself with freedom into the form of an immediate being”, shows com¬
plete agreement with the expressions which were used in the transi¬
tion from the Logic to the Naturphilosophie, and in this way, then,
absolute spirit, which otherwise was very definitely posited only at the
end of the whole development, thus after the philosophy of nature and
the philosophy of spirit, is now that which already externalises itself
into nature. But even if one disregards this contradiction as well, noth¬
ing would be gained by this formal approach to the doctrine of a free
creation of the world after all; one was just as far away from it objec¬
tively (der Sache nach) as before, and at the end one was even further
away. For absolute spirit externalises itself into the world, it suffers in
nature, it surrenders itself to a process from which it can no longer
escape, against which it has no freedom, in which, so to speak, it is
irretrievably involved. This God is not free of the world, but bur¬
dened with it instead. As such, therefore, this doctrine is Pantheism,
but not the pure, quiet Pantheism of Spinoza, in which the things are
pure, logical emanations of the divine nature; this is given up, in or¬
der to introduce a system of divine activity and effect, in which divine
freedom is all the more ignominiously lost because one had given
oneself the appearance of wanting to save it and sustain it. The region
of the purely rational science is left, for every externalisation is an act
which is freely decided and which absolutely interrupts the merely
logical succession; and yet this freedom as well appears as illusory, be¬
cause at the end one nevertheless sees oneself unavoidably pushed to¬
wards the thought which negates all having-happened, everything
historical, because one, on reflection, must return again after all into
the purely rational.
If one were to ask a follower of this philosophy whether absolute
spirit externalised itself at any particular moment into the world, he
would have to answer: God has not thrown Himself into nature, but
rather He throws Himself over and over into it, in order in the same
160 On the History of Modern Philosophy

way to keep on putting Himself at the top again; it is an eternal hap¬

pening, i.e. a perpetual happening, but precisely for that reason ac¬
tually not a genuine, i.e. real (wirklich) happening. This God is,
furthermore, certainly free to externalise Himself into nature, i.e. He
is free to sacrifice His freedom, for the act of free externalisation is at
the same time the grave of His freedom; from now on He is in the
process or is the process Himself; He is certainly not the God who has
nothing to do (as He would be if He, as the real God, were merely the
end), He is rather the God of eternal, perpetual doing, of incessant
agitation, who never finds the Sabbath, He is the God who only ever
does what He has always done, and who therefore cannot create any¬
thing new; His life is a cycle of forms in which He perpetually exter¬
nalises Himself, in order to return to Himself again, and always
returns to Himself, only in order to externalise Himself anew.
In the last, most popular version, which is calculated to please the
greater public, this theme of externalisation is usually argued as fol¬
lows: “God is admittedly already in Himself the Absolute (i.e. without
also being it for Himself), beforehand (what is this “beforehand” do¬
ing in a purely rational development?) He is already the First, the Ab¬
solute, but in order to be conscious of Himself He externalises
Himself, He opposes the world to Himself as an other, in order to as¬
cend from the lowest stage of externalisation, where He still hovers
between consciousness and unconsciousness, to humankind, in whose
consciousness of God He has His own. For the knowledge of human¬
kind, the knowledge humankind has of God, is the only knowledge
God has of Himself”. Such a presentation sets the basest tone of af¬
fability for this system; it can already be gauged from this in which
strata of society it had to sustain itself the longest. For it is easy to ob¬
serve how certain ideas always first arise in the higher, namely the
scholarly or generally more educated ranks; when they have then al¬
ready lost their validity in these ranks, they have in the meanwhile
sunk down into the lower strata of society, and still survive there when
they are no longer talked about higher up. Thus it is easy to see that
this new religion which has emerged from Hegelian philosophy has
found its main followers in the so-called greater public, among those in
industry and commerce and other members of this class of society
which is, by the way, in other ways very worthy of respect; this new
religion will also go through its last stages among this public eager
for enlightenment. One has the right to assume that this popularisa¬
tion (Breittreten) of his thoughts would have least of all pleased Hegel
himself. However, this all derives from the One mistake of converting
true relationships which were true in themselves, namely when taken
merely logically, into real relationships, whereby all necessity disap¬
pears from them.
 Hegel 161

SUPPLEMENT FROM AN OLDER

(ERLANGEN) MANUSCRIPT*

A general saying of Hegel’s is: man should be taken beyond mere rep¬
resentation (Vorstellung) by philosophy. If one understands by “repre¬
sentation” that in us which relates to the present (vorhanden) object as
present, then no one will disagree with this saying. For philosophy
should accept nothing as present — and should not, for example, reflect
only on the given. But if this “taking beyond” is meant absolutely,
then the saying is only a petitio principii, because it is presupposed as
self-evident that the higher relationships through which the world be¬
comes comprehensible cannot also be introduced into representation
and made plausible to it, but instead that they are above all represen¬
tation, or, conversely, that whatever is assumed about these relation¬
ships within the sphere of representation must in itself and already
because it is within the sphere of representation be contrary to rea¬
son. Admittedly, if one has first presupposed that those higher rela¬
tionships must be above all representation (a presupposition which
most people are encumbered with when they come to philosophy),
then one must oneself in fact seek an unnatural philosophy. But the
highest triumph of science would be precisely to lead down into the
realm of representation that which can only be known by raising one¬
self above representation, which is therefore for itself not accessible to
mere representation, but rather only to pure thinking. Thus the Co-
pernican world system could not be established without driving the
world beyond mere representation and without offending mere rep¬
resentation, and it was initially a system which was highly unpopular
and which contradicted all representations. But the same system,
when it is fully developed and even the representation of the move¬
ment of the sun around the earth is made comprehensible by it, rec¬
onciles mere representation with itself and becomes as clear to
representation as the opposite representatiori was, and on the con¬
trary the latter now appears to representation as confused and un¬
clear. This philosophy boasts of presupposing nothing, but this is not
the case: if one looks at its ground, at that which it does not say, but
quietly presupposes, and which is for this reason difficult to recog¬
nise, then one finds as this last basis, which has its effects throughout,

* Translator’s note: Schelling moved to Erlangen in 1820 and began lecturing there
in 1821. It is not clear how many semesters he actually lectured in Erlangen, but
it is clear that ideas on the history of modern philosophy which found their way
into the Lectures were already being developed in this period: hence the son’s ad¬
dition of this passage. See my discussion of the Erlangen Initia Philosophiae Uni-
versae in the Introduction, and the more extensive discussion in Bowie 1993,
chapter 6, pp. 130-40.
162 On the History of Modern Philosophy

the maxims of the most comfortable rationalism, which are valid for
it as self-evident foundations that supposedly nobody has ever
doubted or could doubt. Precisely what Kant assumes as only proven
for dogmatism, Hegel assumes as absolutely and universally proven.
But whoever wants to raise himself above all natural concepts with the
excuse that they are merely finite determinations of the understand¬
ing even deprives himself thereby of all organs of comprehensibility,
for only in these forms can everything become comprehensible to us.
The mistake which Kant showed up in the application of these forms
of understanding lies in the fact that it was a mere application of con¬
cepts to objects which were already presupposed independently of the
concepts — and these objects were really objects, i.e. things opposed to
the understanding; the mistake lies also in the fact that the concepts
and the objects did not arise together, which meant that a mere phi¬
losophy of reflection had to arise and all living creation of science was
made impossible. But there is a great difference between the rejection
of a mistaken application of these concepts and a complete exclusion of
them, whereby all comprehensible debate is made impossible at the
same time. Whence the conspicuous narrow-chestedness of this phi¬
losophy, which means that it cannot speak openly and express itself
and it is as though breath and voice have been taken from it, so that
it can only murmur incomprehensible words. People complain about
the incomprehensibility of this philosophy and seem to seek the rea¬
son for this in a failing on the part of the individual, whereby one is,
for example, being unfair to Hegel, who, when he comes out of his
confinement or Speaks of matters which are closer to life, certainly
knows how to express himself very decisively, very comprehensibly, in¬
deed very wittily. The incomprehensibility lies in the thing itself (in
der Sache selbstp, what is above all understanding can never become
comprehensible; if it were supposed to become comprehensible it
would first have to change its nature. It is a very bad objection to a
philosopher to say that he is incomprehensible. Incomprehensibility
is a relative concept, and what the oft-praised Caius or Titius does not
understand is not therefore incomprehensible. Philosophy also has, it
must be said, certain things that by their very nature will always re¬
main incomprehensible to many people. But it is something quite dif¬
ferent if the incomprehensibility lies in the thing itself. It often
happens that thinkers, who set out to solve mechanical tasks with a lot
of practice and skill but without real capacity for invention, who, e.g.,
set out to invent a machine for spinning flax — succeed in making one,
but the mechanism is so difficult and overly complex or the wheels
grate so much that one prefers to go back to the old method of spin¬
ning flax by hand. It can be like this in philosophy too. The pain of
 Hegel 163

ignorance about the first, about the greatest matters is great and can
become unbearable for every person who feels and is not.mindless or
narrowly self-sufficient. But if the torment of an unnatural system is
greater than the burden of ignorance, then one prefers still to carry
the latter. One has the right to assume that the task of philosophy as
well, if it can be solved at all, must finally be unlocked in a few great
and simple moves, and that it should not be the case that, in the great¬
est human task of all places, the invention which one acknowledges in
all lesser tasks should have no validity.
 Jacobi and Theosophy

JACOBI

If empiricism alone were to be sufficient in philosophy, then the high¬

est concept, i.e. the concept of the highest being (Wesen) would have to
be given to us, by experience alone, at the same time as the existence
of that being. Various possibilities offer themselves here. May we
consider it possible that the concept and with it the existence of the
highest being should be given by immediate experience? Immediate
experience is either outer or inner experience. But how could a con¬
cept, which is always a matter for the understanding, be given by outer
experience? Obviously only by a fact or an effect which immediately
affects our understanding. But an outer effect which immediately
makes claims on our understanding, and thus also has an immediate
effect upon it, can only be doctrine, teaching. The highest concept
would have to be given to us by a doctrine which comes to us from
outside, indeed a doctrine of irrefragable, irresistible authority, and
as such an irresistible authority could only be ascribed to that doctrine
which came from the highest being Himself (for the highest being
alone is the unchallengeable authority with regard to Himself), then
the highest concept would have to be given to us by a doctrine which
could be traced back in its last source to the highest being Himself.
This tracing could only happen historically. Besides, if an external au¬
thority is assumed as the highest principle of philosophy, then only
two things can be thought. Either a completely blind submission is
meant, or one wants this authority itself also to be grounded, one
wants it to be supported by grounds of reason of whatever kind they
may be. If one wants the first of these, then this assumption is to be
regarded as being the same as a complete negation of philosophy. If
one wants the second of these, then (if there is not to be a circle) an¬
other philosophy which was independent of this authority would be
required to ground it, and the compass of this philosophy would have
to be so broadly and comprehensively drawn as only the compass of
free and independent philosophy is always drawn.

164
 Jacobi and Theosophy
65

But instead of supporting itself on an immediate outer experience,

the philosophy could now perhaps appeal to an immediately inner ex¬
perience, to an inner light, to an inner feeling. Now this again could
happen in two ways. In the first place by using this (true or supposed)
feeling just as a polemical means, say against the merely rationalistic
systems, without making claims to knowledge, namely to a science
drawn from this feeling or from this spiritual intuition {Intuition). Or
this (true or supposed) inner experience would seek at the same time
to develop itself into a science, to assert itself as a science. We will
again initially keep to the first possibility. By renouncing science that
feeling would already declare itself of its own accord as a merely
subjective and individual feeling. For if it were an objective and gen¬
erally valid feeling it would also have to be able to form itself into a
science. In this way, however, the expression of this feeling in opposi¬
tion to the rationalistic systems only has the value of an individual
declaration: “/ do not want this result, I find it revolting, it goes
against my feeling”. We cannot declare such an expression to be for¬
bidden, for we ourselves allow a great importance, at least for the ini¬
tial determination of concepts in philosophy, to wanting. The first
declaration of philosophy (which even precedes philosophy) can in
fact only be the expression of a wanting. To this extent it must be per¬
mitted, after a way of thinking has adequately expounded or ex¬
plained, to say: “I do not like it, I do not want it, I cannot bring it into
accord with myself”. It is all very well to say, like Jacobi: “I demand a
personal God, a highest being (Wesen) to whom a personal relation¬
ship is possible, an eternal Thou which answers my I, not a being
which is merely in my thought, which completely disappears in my
thought and is completely identical with it-I do not demand a
merely immanent being in this sense, which is nothing outside of my
thought, I demand a transcendent being which is also something for
me outside of my thought” - it is praiseworthy to say this, but these
expressions for themselves alone are fine words, to which no deeds
correspond. If there is, in contradiction with our feeling and with
what we would rather wish, a knowledge which can even give itself the
appearance of being necessary and inevitable, then we have no other
reasonable alternative than to choose either to surrender ourselves to
necessity, to command our feeling to be silent, or to overcome that
knowledge by a real (wirklich) deed. But that kind of philosophy, which
we now consider as the next stage of empirical philosophy, and as
whose representative we can regard F. H. Jacobi [1743-1819], this
philosophy, instead of really attacking the knowledge which displeases
it, completely gives way to it, by withdrawing into not-knowing, with the
assurance that only in not-knowing does salvation lie. From this it fol-
i66 On the History of Modern Philosophy

lows, then, that it considers that merely substantial knowledge which

excludes the actus, which dominates in rationalism, itself to be the
only possible real (echt) and true knowledge, not by opposing another
knowledge to it, but by opposing mere not-knowing to it, as this ratio¬
nal knowledge is really itself = not -knowing. Jacobi makes no secret
of his own opinion that this substantial knowledge is the only pos¬
sible knowledge. Of his earliest assertions, the assertion that all scien¬
tific philosophy leads inevitably to fatalism, i.e., to a system of neces¬
sity, is top of the list, Jacobi had his own particular relationship to
Kant, Fichte and the person who came after Fichte [i.e., Schelling
himself]. It was not the truth of reason, the consequence of their sys¬
tems, which he attacked; he conceded this to them, but rejoiced all
the more that it was now plain where real knowledge, knowledge
which was all of a piece, led, namely unavoidably to Spinozism, fatal¬
ism, etc. Jacobi admitted himself, therefore, that nothing was left
against that superior knowledge which he acknowledged in the purely
rational systems but the appeal to feeling; he admitted that he
could not overcome it in a scientific way; he confessed that he himself
knew nothing better from the point of view of knowledge and, for ex¬
ample, in terms of his scientific understanding would himself only be
a Spinozist. No other philosopher had conceded so much to pure ra¬
tionalism (by which, as you know, I do not mean a special theological
way of thinking, but a philosophical one) as Jacobi. He really laid
down his arms before it. It will thus be clear to everyone that I am
right to place Jacobi at the point of transition from rationalism to em¬
piricism. With his understanding he belonged completely and undi-
videdly to rationalism, with his feeling he strove, though in vain,
beyond it. As such he is perhaps the most instructive personality in the
whole history of modern philosophy, by which I do not mean to say
that he will be this for everyone — for the beginner as well, for example:
for his writings, however much value they have for the expert, can re¬
ally only confuse the beginner, precisely because of the ambiguous
position of the author, and they will imperceptibly habituate the be¬
ginner to a certain slackness of spirit in relation to the highest tasks of
human understanding, a slackening which is not compensated for
by ecstatic expressions of feeling. However, I cannot be more just to
Jacobi than by conceding to him that he of all modern philosophers
felt the need for a historical philosophy (in our sense) most vividly.
There was in him from his youth onwards something which, as it
were, rebelled against a system which reduced everything to mere re¬
lations of reason, and excluded freedom and personality. This is tes¬
tified to by some of his earlier writings, e.g., his letter about theism to
 Jacobi a?id Theosophy 167

Schlosser,* in which he still completely saw the emptiness of abso¬

lutely unhistorical theism, of the so-called pure religion of reason. If
he had continued along this path, he above all would have had to ar¬
rive at the concept of a historical philosophy. He had recognised the
true character of all modern systems, namely that they, instead of of¬
fering us what we really desire to know, and, if we want to be honest,
alone consider it is worth the effort to know, offer only a tiresome sub¬
stitute, a knowledge in which thought never gets beyond itself and
only progresses within itself, whilst we really desire to get beyond
thinking, in order, via that which is higher than thinking, to be re¬
deemed from the torment of thinking. Thus the earlier Jacobi. In his
earliest writings he had even used the expression “historical philoso¬
phy”; the context admittedly shows that he did not mean an internally
historical philosophy thereby, but rather one which has Revelation
and history as an external basis. As such his philosophy could appear
to belong to the first kind of empirical philosophy. At that time he
seemed in complete agreement with the real believers in Revelation,
the so-called superrationalists or supernaturalists, e.g., with Lavater
and Schlosser. For a while this gave him a very bad reputation with
the age, which at that time was making a great effort to reach a uni¬
versal, namely merely subjective reasonableness, which was all the so-
called Enlightenment consisted in, and against which he sought to
assert the claims of the soul (Gemiith) and of a poetic nature. He has
that bad reputation he acquired at that time to thank even nowadays
when writers who are, incidentally, of a serious and Christian dispo¬
sition cite him, so to speak, among the witnesses of truth. He subse¬
quently strove more and more to cleanse himself of this bad
reputation and completely to reassure the world about his supposed
superrationalism, although one of his last followers still found it nec¬
essary to look after him in this respect, and to declare after Jacobi’s
death that it was bitterly unjust to the man if one took him for some¬
one who believed in Revelation in the common sense: Jacobi’s belief
was (this he could testify) a pure belief of reason. This was not nec¬
essary, especially as towards the end of his life, to the true distress not
just of the better of his admirers, but even of those whom he had at¬
tacked and pursued, who, though, did not for that reason cease to
recognise by their freedom and independence of spirit that he was
one of the better minds - later he threw himself, as I was saying, into

* Translator's note: The letter referred to is “Some observations on pious deception

and on a reason which is not reason”, to Johann Georg Schlosser, Dusseldorf, 8th
December 1787. It first appeared in Deutsches Museum February 1788; reprinted
in Jacobi Werke, Vol. 2, Leipzig, 1815.
168 On the History of Modern Philosophy

the arms of the most empty rationalism, not that rationalism which
had achieved such an advanced development in philosophy and
which boasted that reason recognised itself in it, but rather into
the arms of that meagre, merely subjective rationalism in which the
main content of what was generally called Enlightenment really con¬
sists, whereby he fell out of the company of Spinoza, Leibniz and
other great spirits of an earlier time, ending on the same line
as, and in the company of the most abject philosophical mediocrity.
His remarks about Christ and Christianity in his later writings are
completely in agreement with the views of the most rabid theological
rationalism.
By this final result of his philosophy Jacobi became very unlike two
men who had had great influence on his education, and whom it
would be wrong to overlook in this historical development.
One of these men is Pascal. Whoever is still seeking, whoever de¬
mands a measure of how comprehensible and understandable a truly
historical philosophy must become, should read Pascal’s Pensees. Who¬
ever has not already irretrievably lost all sense of what is natural and
healthy via the unnaturalness of some other philosophy will come via
an attentive reading of Pascal’s thoughts to think of the idea of a his¬
torical system, at least in a general way.
The other of these men is Johann Georg Hamann [1730-1788],
whose now collected writings, which were previously scattered like
sibylline pages and were not easy to obtain, are without any question
the most important enrichment the literature of recent times has re¬
ceived; I do not say this with the direct intention of recommending
the writings to you; one requires extensive erudition to understand
their numerous allusions, deeper experience to grasp them in their
full significance; they are not reading matter for youths, but rather
for men, writings which a man should never put down, which he
should constantly regard as the touchstone of his own understand¬
ing - Hamann, whom Jacobi judged to be a true Jtav [universe] of
consistency and inconsistency (Gereimtheit und Ungerevntheit), light and
darkness, spiritualism and materialism.
Hamann did not have a system and did not establish one either; but
anyone who was aware of a whole which combined in one understand¬
ing all the various and disparate sayings, the consistent and the ap¬
parently inconsistent, the most free and, on the other hand, the
crassly orthodox statements of Hamann, that person would have the
right, in so far as any person may think he understands something, to
say to himself that he had achieved some insight. Philosophy really is a
deep science, a work of great experience; people without spiritual ex¬
perience, mere mechanics, cannot judge here, although they are free
 Jacobi and Theosophy 169

to exhibit their nature in a judgement about Hamann, and, since they

cannot penetrate to the core of his way of thinking, to concentrate on
his personal mistakes and weaknesses, without which, by the way, the
man would scarcely have been this man, and which are so connected
with the virtues and splendours of his spirit that they cannot be sep¬
arated from it. Jacobi reproaches his friend with inconsistencies. He, it
must be said, would have had no part in many statements at any price.
It is easy to say that everything hangs together just by virtue of rea¬
son, but this is the most blind presupposition which certain systems
admittedly must make. But if it were not like that! and it is not like
that; this cannot admittedly be understood a priori; for that which is
can only be understood a posteriori; what is understood a priori is only
what cannot be otherwise.
Everything does not hang together as smoothly and simply as peo¬
ple think, but rather in a really strange (Wunderlich) and, as such, if
you like, inconsistent way. God in the Old Testament is Himself called
a strange God, i.e. a God about whom one must wonder, and Hamann
understands in this sense with his own peculiar wit the famous words
which Simonides said to the tyrant of Syracuse, “The longer I think
about God, the less I comprehend Him”. (He understands these
words no differently from the way one would understand them if they
were said of a strange or paradoxical person.) One has to admit this
from time to time about an extraordinary person, and yet even a nor¬
mal person is more than can be grasped a priori.
We will now return to Jacobi. If we have up to now distinguished
two periods in Jacobi, one where his philosophy was able to seem to be
a supernaturalistic one, another where he declares himself against su¬
pernaturalism, against dependence on Revelation (on the historical),
and stopped at a merely subjective feeling, contenting himself with
the same empty theism which he had previously attacked, then in the
later period he did not just seek to make his peace with common sub¬
jective rationalism, but he also sought to approach [I translate sich zu
nahern here, though the German says nicht zu nahern, which seems to
me to make no sense] objective scientific rationalism via an invention
peculiar to him which consisted in putting the word “reason” instead
of the word “feeling”, which had originally been used, and in attrib¬
uting to reason an immediate, so to speak blind knowledge of God, in¬
deed of passing off reason as an immediate organ of God and divine
things. This was the worst present Jacobi gave to philosophy: this
comfortable immediate knowledge, via which one is lifted over all dif¬
ficulties as if with One word, was taken up by many incompetent
thinkers who did enormous damage in higher and lower schools to
which they were promoted by Jacobi’s influence, as well as doing
170 On the History of Modern Philosophy

damage to the really scientific education of our youth. One could al¬
most recognise in this determination given to reason only a misun¬
derstanding of the philosophy of the time, or an attempt to secure
itself against this philosophy by this adaptation to it. What was incon¬
sistent about it was that this God of an immediate knowledge of rea¬
son was not the universal substance but was supposed really to be the
personal God with all fullness of spiritual and moral qualities with
which common belief is used to think of Him. An immediate relation¬
ship to a personal being (Wesen) can, though, also only be a personal
one: I must deal with Him, be in a truly empirical relationship with
Him; but such an empirical relationship is just as excluded from rea¬
son as everything personal is excluded from it; it is supposed precisely
to be that which is impersonal. What reason immediately knows must
be just as free as itself of all empirical, and thus of all personal deter¬
minations. If God is already posited and known immediately with rea¬
son, then there is, of course, no need for mediating knowledge, i.e.
for a science, neither in order to get to the concept of God nor to con¬
vince oneself of His existence. There is no question that it was pre¬
cisely because of this exclusion of every personal relation to reason
that Jacobi had in his earlier writings and in his better period always
put “reason” which excludes everything empirical beneath “under¬
standing”. The fact that he had completely moved away from his first
wish and his initial goal is proven by the fact that in the complete edi¬
tion of his works which he arranged towards the end of his life, in all
the places where he had earlier put “reason” and had suggested its
negative character, he informs his readers that, instead of “reason”,
“understanding” should be read and instead of “understanding”,
“reason” should be read — in order thereby, as it were, to eradicate all
traces of his earlier better aspirations. For the fact that the under¬
standing, as he had earlier recognised, deserves first place in philos¬
ophy, reason the second, is clear precisely from the demand that
everything should be made comprehensible to reason, from which it
follows as a matter of course that reason is not that which originally
comprehends, that there is much that it originally does not compre¬
hend. If one does not wish to call that which makes clear to reason
everything which goes beyond its own immediate content, if one does
not wish to call this “understanding”, what, then, does one wish to call
it? God is known precisely only with the understanding, indeed only
the most highly developed understanding which has arrived at the
goal of thinking knows God. Reason only knows what is immediate,
that which cannot be; reason, is like the woman in the house, reliant
upon the substance, the otjoia, it must hold onto this in order that
prosperity and order should remain in the house, it is precisely that
 Jacobi and Theosophy iyi

which holds together, that which limits, whilst understanding is that

which widens, progresses, is active. Reason is that which is unmoving,
the ground upon which everthing has to be erected, but precisely be¬
cause of this it is not itself what does the erecting. It relates immedi¬
ately only to the pure substance, this is what is immediately certain to
it, and everything which it is supposed to comprehend besides must
f irst be mediated to it by the understanding. But it is exactly the func¬
tion of reason to hold on to what is negative, whereby the under¬
standing is precisely compelled to seek the positive, to which alone
the negative subordinates itself. Reason is so little the immediate or¬
gan of the positive that understanding only raises itself to the concept
of the positive via reason’s contradiction of understanding.
Jacobi’s earlier relationship to or behaviour towards reason was
that he granted too little to it, that he wished to get to the divine, the
positive in an immediate manner, i.e. by excluding the negative and
without overcoming it. The relationship he liked to have later was,
though, the most wrong of all, namely now to attribute that immedi¬
ate knowledge, which he had earlier sought to assert by excluding rea¬
son, to reason itself.
If the immediate knowledge of reason were a knowledge of God,
then God could also only be that which is immediately (das unmittelbar
Seyende), i.e. he could only be substance, to which Jacobi is otherwise
keenly opposed because of the fact that he wants a personal, empirical
God. The immediate knowledge of God could only be a blind, i.e. a
non-knowing knowledge; but then God could also only be the being
which is not (das nicht seyend Seyende seyn), to pf| dvtooo 6v, for being¬
something being (das-seyend Seyende), the 5vroo 6v, could also only
be known in a positive, overt, knowing way. The well-known saying of
Jacobi, “A God which could be known would not be a God at all”,
sounds exactly as if God were only being which is not (das nicht seyend
Seyende) (the negative), i.e. (one really ought to understand the state¬
ment like this) God is something so negative that He would stop being
God if He could be known, if He could be pulled out into the light of
knowledge. The Jacobian proposition sounds exactly the same as the
proposition: “Darkness which was seen would not be darkness any
more” (the ancients already said it was that which could be seen nei¬
ther with nor without light). One cannot, admittedly, ascribe this
sense to Jacobi. For he was both in general a moderate man who did
not in the last analysis want to assert anything extreme, and this con¬
tradicts his other wish, because he also wanted a personal, a human
God, with whom a personal or human relationship was also possible.
In terms of his original way of thinking or of his original conviction,
what he wanted to say was rather, stated correctly, this: the God who
172 On the History of Modern Philosophy

was known or could be known in the manner that something is known

in mathematics, namely in a knowing which is not really knowing (in
einem eigentlich nicht wissenden Wissen), such a God would not be a God
at all. But if this is his true opinion, then it follows that God could not
be known immediately, for immediate knowledge can only be blind
knowledge, knowledge which is not knowing = the knowledge which
does not know via movement (for in every movement there is media¬
tion), but rather only knows by not moving. How wavering — truly a
reed which is moved to and fro by the wind — Jacobi was can be seen
precisely in this proposition which (in the last interpretation) is com¬
pletely correct (a God, etc.), and in the assertion which was made
afterwards of an immediate knowledge by reason (Vernunftwissen)
of God.
When Jacobi later substituted reason for feeling in order to make
his peace with rationalism, his philosophy also lost the truth which it
had previously had. Feeling expresses a personal relationship. But
now an immediate relationship to the personal God was to be attrib¬
uted to impersonal reason, which is completely unthinkable. Jacobi
had the clearest insight into the fact that rational systems do not really
explain anything in the last analysis (as little as geometry really ex¬
plains anything, or says; “It Is thus”). To Jacobi belongs the witty com¬
parison of all systems of reason with the Nuremberg Grillenspiel, a
game which does not disgust us, so long as we have got to know all
its moves.* Nevertheless — via a particular misfortune — he saw no
other possibility of knowledge outside that negative knowledge. The
only knowledge left to him in relation to this substantial knowledge
was to close his eyes in the face of it, to want to know nothing about it.
That way, though, he deprived himself of every means of getting to
the higher science. Every philosophy which does not keep its basis in
the negative, and which wishes to reach the positive, the divine in
an immediate manner, without the negative, finally dies of unavoid¬
able spiritual exhaustion. The true character of the Jacobian philos¬
ophy is such a scientific haste. For even that aspect of God and divine
things he reaches in his way reduces itself to so little, is so meagre
and poor in relation to the fullness and richness of really religious in¬
sight (Erkenntnis), that one would have to mourn the lot of the human
spirit if it were not able to gain greater insight. The end of the Jaco¬
bian philosophy is the declaration that it not only does not really
know, namely in a scientific manner, anything about God and divine
things, but also does not know about the profane, that which is op¬
posed to the divine.

* Translator’s note: The Grillenspiel is a version of solitaire.

 Jacobi and Theosophy
»73

Jacobi distinguished himself early by an elevated striving for the

spiritual, the supersensuous, if you like; only his nature lacked the
necessary counterbalance. For the spiritual can only truly be gained
in relation to what is not spiritual, by overcoming it. Everything exclu¬
sive, even if it reveals the better side, is bad in philosophy. Jacobi had
excluded nature from his philosophical reflection from the very be¬
ginning; in this he was very different from Kant, who showed through
all his writings a great love of nature and a rich knowledge of it, whilst
Jacobi always seemed gripped by a panic-stricken terror of nature,
and, to the extent to which he took notice of it, only ever remarked
upon the aspect of lacking freedom, divinity and spirituality in na¬
ture; a coincidental circumstance perhaps contributed to this: namely
that he had as a teacher in physics and philosophy Professor Le Sage
in Geneva, an excellent man,* by the way, who was a convinced Car¬
tesian, and, even after the middle of the eighteenth century, thought
out an atomistic-mechanical system of gravity which was similar to the
Cartesian vortices. Perhaps Jacobi’s idiosyncrasy of not even, as he of¬
ten said to me, being able to think matter as living derived from this
teacher, whilst Goethe, e.g., once said he did not know how he should
start to think matter as not being living. Jacobi retained this peculiar¬
ity in later years as well; neither Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Nat¬
ural Science nor his Critique of Judgement - Kant’s deepest work, which,
if he could have begun with it in the way he finished with it, would
have probably given his whole philosophy another direction, changed
anything in this. When Jacobi saw nature taken up fully as an essen¬
tial element into philosophy [the German says in die Natur, which is
presumably an error], the only weapon left to him was to accuse this
system of Pantheism in the commonest and crudest sense, and to pur¬
sue it in every possible way. But philosophy cannot just concern itself
with the highest things, it must, if it is to be the science which grasps
everything, really connect the highest with the lowest. Whoever
throws nature away in advance, as that which is absolutely devoid of
spirit, thereby deprives himself even of the material in which and
from which he could develop the spiritual. The power of the eagle in
flight does not prove itself by the fact that the eagle does not feel any
pull downwards, but by the fact that it overcomes this pull, indeed
makes it into the means of its elevation. The tree which strikes its roots
deep into the earth can still hope to raise its blossom-laden crown into
heaven, but thoughts which separate themselves from nature from
the outset are like plants without roots, or can at best be compared to

* Translator’s note: George Louis Lesage (1724-1803), mathematician and physicist,

who proposed a teleological theory of probability which explained all natural
events and processes without any interference from God.
*74 On the History of Modern Philosophy

those delicate threads which swim in the air in late summer, incapable
both of reaching heaven and of touching the earth through their
own weight. Such an Indian summer of ideas is especially only to be
found in Jacobi’s thoughts, which are, incidentally, wittily and deli¬
cately expressed.
The end of the Jacobian philosophy is, then, universal non¬
knowledge. If Jacobi maintains that philosophy cannot grant precisely
what is most eagerly desired of it, namely an explanation of what lies
beyond the border of common experience, then he is in complete
agreement and harmony with rationalism, only differing by the fact
that he refers, in relation to everything which ought really to be the
highest prize of philosophy, to non-philosophy, to non-knowledge —
to feeling, to a certain vague idea, or else, particularly in his earlier
writings, to belief, for which he later substituted (because for a com¬
pletely rationalistic age belief is somewhat offensive) immediate
knowledge by reason, which, however, proved just as little able as feel¬
ing to be formed into science (contradiction) [i.e. the term “imme¬
diate knowledge by reason” excludes the possibility of theoretical
articulation]. The advice to refer people to belief in relation to every¬
thing really and truly positive was, by the way, not peculiar to Jaco¬
bian philosophy, it was always the usual thing to do: for the lack of
content of normal philosophy in relation to the rich content of Rev¬
elation always had to be evident. Since it is here a question of the re¬
lationship between knowledge and belief, I want to give my view
about this. One must make the following distinctions. (1) Those who
are indifferent to philosophy, or are even interested in philosophy’s
appearing deficient, cite precisely the fact that belief, by which,
though, they understand historical, Christian belief, contains what
philosophy does not contain and is incapable of containing. Knowl¬
edge and belief, or philosophy and belief, thereby remain outside each
other, like two separate areas, and one is quite able to grasp this op¬
position and can even see how it had to arise since the emancipation
of philosophy by Descartes. For from that point onwards philosophy
left the content of positive religion outside itself. (Descartes protests
in all his works that he does not wish to assert anything which is op¬
posed to the doctrine of the Church; on the other hand his aim is to get
the material of his philosophy completely by his own means. But since
philosophy - already accustomed since scholasticism only to presup¬
pose the positive content - now made itself completely independent
of it, it had naturally to move into the negative.) But it is (2) less com¬
prehensible if this difference between belief and knowledge is moved
into knowledge, into philosophy itself, so that both knowledge and be¬
lief are supposed to be philosophical, so that a philosophical knowl-
 Jacobi and Theosophy !75

edge on the one hand, and a philosophical belief on the other is

asserted. This can, though, always happen in two ways, either in such
a way that belief and knowledge are thereby thought of as united (at
least not as in conflict), or that they are thought of as opposed to each
other. The latter is the case in Jacobi, who sees knowledge as unavoid¬
ably leading to fatalism and atheism, but sees belief alone as leading
to a God who is Providence, freedom and will. But if, in relation to
such an opposition, both belief and knowledge are supposed to be in
philosophy, are supposed to be philosophical (and Jacobi certainly
made a determined claim, despite his doctrine of non-knowledge, that
he had also established a philosophical doctrine), then both belief and
knowledge had to be explained philosophically. But a system which
asserted a philosophical knowledge and a belief that was totally opposed
to philosophical knowledge, yet was likewise philosophical, would have, in
order even only formally to exist, to be the system of a philosophical,
i.e. philosophically grasped, dualism. One might be able to think such
a system somewhat as follows. On the one side there would be rational
or merely substantial knowledge which was thought of as complete, in
such a way, namely, that reason now recognised itself as all being
(Seyn) — namely as all finite being (for if it recognised itself absolutely
as all being, then it would have also to recognise itself as God, and
God would be nothing but reason). Knowledge would recognise itself
as all finite being, or to put it more distinctly, as the principle of all
finite being, precisely at the point where it had recognised itself in its
pure subjectivity, which subjectivity (as infinite in its way) would then
of its own accord include within itself the relationship to an objectivity
which was just as infinite. The path which reason had travelled up to
that point, which would have led it to the knowledge of itself as the
general substance, would then be the way of completed knowledge,
but knowledge would also recognise itself precisely in this goal, in this
completion as mere 5u6-stance, and thus necessarily distinguish that to
which it is substance or is subordinated, or in relation to which it be¬
haves as the merely not being (das bloss nicht Seyende), from itself, and
would determine it as being (Seyende) which is not just in a substantial
or subjective way, but as being (Seyende) [the German does not capit¬
alise the s, but it clearly should be a noun] in pure infinite objectiv¬
ity - in infinite freedom from all subjectivity. In this last act it would
therefore rather recognise itself as that which is not everything —
namely not also what is truly objective, and, in this destruction of itself
as that which is everything, precisely posit that being in an infinitely
positive or objective manner - in God. This last act of positing God
would precisely depend upon its having retreated from its earlier self¬
objectivity (being object to itself) (Selbst-Objektseyn) into complete sub-
176 On the History of Modern Philosophy

jectivity; this act would itself necessarily be a subjective act, roughly

comparable to the act of worship, which depends upon just such a
self-destruction in relation to something higher, in relation to which
we posit ourselves in the relationship of completely being subject, not
being ourselves. This purely subjective act could then be called an act
of belief or even be called belief in relation to knowledge — for the fol¬
lowing reason. Knowledge assures itself of exuberant being (des uber-
schwenglich Seyenden) by its self-destruction; but it does not see
exuberant being as long as there is still a residue of objectivity in it¬
self, as long as it has not destroyed itself; it therefore only destroys it¬
self in the belief that it will reach what is exuberant by this self-
destruction - so to speak as the price/prize (Preis) of its surrendered
selfhood. Nonetheless, since it destroys itself only in its objectivity, but
not in its subjectivity as well, and since it is rather only completed
knowledge in subjectivity (before this, as long as it still wished to be ob¬
jective, it was that which produces in nature), then it would stand still
as knowledge, and the last and simultaneous result would be - knowl¬
edge which was completed and which destroys itself in belief, but pre¬
cisely thereby posits what is truly positive and divine. In this way,
then, there would be a transition from knowledge to belief inside phi¬
losophy itself. Jacobi was, though, a long way from such an explana¬
tion. The end of his philosophy is a pure dissonance which is not
resolved by anything, by any higher Idea.
Anyway, an explanation like the one just hinted at would only be
thinkable in a system which would have to contain the answer to the
following questions which necessarily impose themselves. If that
which in its inwardness is pure knowledge — is, as such, non -being (das
nicht Seyende) (for that which knows is necessarily non-being in rela¬
tion to that which is (das Seyende)) — if, then, what is, in its inwardness,
pure knowledge and non-being is the product of objective being
(Seyn), whence does this principle derive the power to posit itself ob¬
jectively as being (als seyend), when it is not only supposed really to be
that which is not, but in fact originally is without doubt that which is
not? Whence its “ex-sistence” (Ex-sistenz), i.e. its being (Seyn) outside
itself, being outside the one place where it ought really to be, namely
outside the inside? If it is the world-producing principle in this ex¬
ternality, how did it become external? For it must have become external.
Since it is not supposed to be external, as the end shows, then it also
could not originally be external. And if it is or was originally internal,
how was it posited as internal? For this must really be explained as
well. In short, the explanation would itself only be possible in a system
that was already a historical system, or which was approaching a his¬
torical system. But Jacobi declared once and for all that such a system
 Jacobi and Theosophy 177

was impossible; for as far as knowledge is concerned he was in complete

agreement with rationalism. But if one wishes to ascribe a system to
him, then one can only regard his philosophy as absolutely dualistic,
but one must add: it is a dualism which is a wholly unresolved, but for
that very reason unexplained dualism. On the one side is freedom, on
the other necessity, but about how - if there is freedom - then there is
also necessity, or if necessity then there is also freedom, and how both
are connected, not only is nothing to be known, according to him, but
there is not even anything to be thought. Jacobi explained that contra¬
diction as so irreconcilable that a unification was supposed not even
to be thinkable.
The most apt view that one could still develop of Jacobi after all this
would be to regard him as standing on the border of two times, one
of which lay before him as a desolate, fruitless desert, which he in fact
felt to be such, into the other of which he only looked as if into a
Promised Land from a great distance; but there is the big difference
between him and the Israelite law-giver who led his people through
the desert: that Moses himself admittedly was not to enter the Prom¬
ised Land, but foresaw with certainty and the greatest confidence that
his people would enter it and one day would dwell in it, Jacobi, on the
other hand, did not only not enter it himself, but also maintained that
it was impossible for anybody else to enter it. Accordingly we must ho¬
nour and recognise him as a living objection to an earlier era and as
the involuntary prophet of a better era, involuntary because this time
which in his opinion could never come was one which he did not wish
to prophesy, but as a prophet because he prophesied it against his
will, like the seer Bileam, who came to curse Israel and had to bless it.
There is the knowledge which Jacobi did not wish to recognise, and
which, whilst on the one hand it is a rationalistic knowledge, on the
other hand also includes belief materially, according to its objects,
within itself-a knowledge which really grasps freedom and Provi¬
dence as cause of the world, which grasps freedom of human will, in¬
dividual persistence after death - which, however, does not exclude
belief, not just in this sense, but which has it in itself in a formal, an
essential manner.
I only want here above all to recall the universal and lasting dictum
according to which belief is not absolutely opposed to knowledge in
every sense, but is only opposed to immediate knowledge, to looking, as
is already clear just from the saying: Happy are they who do not see
and yet believe. Belief is not at all opposed to mediated knowledge,
knowledge which is only possible via mediation, but is rather essen¬
tially connected with it, so that where there is mediated knowledge
there is necessarily also belief, and belief precisely shows itself and af-
178 On the History of Modern Philosophy

fects one primarily in mediated knowledge. In everyday life belief

means considering with confidence something to be possible which is
not immediately possible, which is only possible by virtue of a se¬
quence and an interconnection of circumstances and actions, in short
which is only possible via more or less numerous mediations. As such,
one can say that everything happens in belief. The artist who has the
marble before himself from which a work of art is to emerge does not
see this work of art; but if he did not have the belief, i.e. the confi¬
dence that what he cannot now see could become visible via his effort,
via a sequence of actions which he carries out with the marble, he
would never put his hand to it. Belief always presupposes a goal and
is present in every activity which wishes to achieve something specific.
Columbus believed in the existence of a part of the world which was
unknown at his time and steered boldly westwards. Would we be able
to say Columbus believed in this part of the world if he had never left
the Spanish coast? Hence there is no belief where there is not wanting
and doing at the same time; to believe and not to move at the same
time is a contradiction, as it is a contradiction if one pretends to believe
in the goal and does not move to achieve it. It was therefore a con¬
tradiction when Jacobi boasted about belief and at the same time
folded his hands in his lap. True belief would have had to prove itself
here by the fact that no effort was spared to discover the mediations
via which that in which belief believes was also made plausible to rea¬
son and the strictest science. If belief is a necessary element of all
goal-directed activity, then it is also an essential element of the true
philosophy. All science only arises in belief; whoever has just learnt
the first theorems of Euclid would not only consider the greatest
achievements of geometry to be impossible, he would not even un¬
derstand them - the same theorems which he then grasps easily when
he was been through all the mediations. All science, and thus in par¬
ticular philosophy, continuously includes belief as something which
proves itself within science, and thus is in science in an immanent and
essential way. Those who separate knowledge and belief, indeed op¬
pose them, therefore belong to the class of people, who these days are
unfortunately extremely numerous, who do not themselves know
what they want: the saddest thing which one can ever encounter in
any being endowed with reason. Such believers either do not think any
vision in belief, in which case they must not reject knowledge in gen¬
eral, and with it mediate knowledge as well, but rather acknowledge it
all the more, or they understand by belief an immediate cognition, a
true vision, in which case they must not call themselves believers by
reason, but rather regard themselves as the same as people who pass
themselves off as immediately enthused by God, and thus not call
themselves philosophers, but rather theosophers.
 Jacobi and Theosophy 179

With regard to the philosophers of not-knowing, the theosophers

admittedly declare themselves, like them, to be those who do not
know in a scientific way, but not at all for that reason, like them, as
those who do not know in every respect, but rather as those who know
to a great extent, indeed we must say as those who know more than
anyone else or to the greatest extent. The doctrine of not-knowing
may show itself to be poor and empty of content, and theosophy ap¬
pears in contrast as so rich and full of content, boasting of being
wholly in vision (Schauen) or in immediate experience, and seeing as
if in an ecstasy all things as they are in God, in their true original
condition.
This form of empiricism therefore does not assert a feeling which is
simple, articulates nothing and expresses itself at best polemically, i.e.
negatively, it does not assert an immediate knowledge by reason,
which cannot form itself into knowledge, but rather attributes an im¬
mediate vision of divine nature and of the divine origin or things to
itself. (Theosophy is, then, a second subdivision of that sort of phi¬
losophy which professes to base itself on immediate inner experience.)
Since this vision cannot be communicated and therefore is something
mysterious, something mystical, theosophy is to this extent a kind of
mysticism. There is, namely (1) a merely practical or subjective mys¬
ticism which makes no claims to science. But there is (2) an objective
mysticism, which makes claims to objective knowledge. This is theos¬
ophy, which is speculative or theoretical mysticism, and although re¬
linquishing scientific (rational) form, it nevertheless makes a claim to a
speculative content.
How, then, can that immediate vision, not only of the divine but
even of the course of creation, or really of the emanation, of the de¬
veloping of things out of God, which the theosophist asserts, be jus¬
tified? If you recall what was said about the Naturphilosophic, what in
humankind is conscious of itself and has come to itself is what has
gone through the whole of nature, which has, as it were, carried ev¬
erything, experienced everything, it is that which has brought every¬
thing back into itself, into its essence, from self-alienation. But if it is
the beginning which has been brought back, then the essence of hu¬
mankind is again that which was in the beginning of creation, it is no
longer the same as what has been created, but is again the same as the
source of creation — human consciousness is, therefore, by being the
end, at the same time the beginning of creation as well; the whole
movement from the beginning to the end ought to be transparent to
it, it would be innate science, by nature, as it were: that which knows
universally via its own becoming. But it does not in fact find itself like
that, and even if such a science is thought of as substantially present in
the essence of humankind, it is at the least not actually present in it,
180 On the History of Modern Philosophy

but is darkened and submerged in the deepest potentiality. This can be

explained, if one presupposes that the theory (that what in human¬
kind is conscious has gone through the whole of creation) is correct,
by the fact that the essence of humankind has not remained in the
place where it was placed by the original creation, that humankind
has again lost its central position in relation to things, has again be¬
come a thing, because it was not able to remain in its freedom from all
things and to remain above them as a principle, as a source, and to see
itself in this universality, but rather wanted itself as a particularity, de¬
manded its own being (Seyn), and thus became the same as things, in¬
deed came in part to stand beneath them, was moved out of the central
perspective (Centralanschauung) in which it was originally and fell prey
to peripheral knowledge, where things are not just opposed to each
other but are opposed to humanity itself—where they are external
things that exclude themselves not only from each other but also from
humankind. Such a catastrophe of humanity is assumed in some form
or other in all religions, under the name of a “Fall” in Christian reli¬
gion. Humankind has therefore lost that central knowledge. Even
the theosopher admits this. But, people say, even assuming this catas¬
trophe, the substance of human knowledge could not cease to be
substantial or material, cease still to be that which knows all; it would
not cease to be that in which the material of all knowledge is con¬
tained, the substance was simply no longer that which actually [as op¬
posed to potentially] knows all, which is now, as that which craves
knowledge (as understanding), outside humankind. Humankind is,
therefore, no longer in the place in which it - through creation it¬
self — was posited; it is posited by a false ecstasis outside the centre in
which it was that which knew all things. Is it not now to move back
again via an inverse ecstasis to the centre of things, and be able
thereby to be enraptured into the Godhead Himself? This is how the¬
osophy ought to explain itself.
We cannot now go into the question of the possibility of exceptional
states of human beings here (psychology), but assuming the possibility
for individuals of such a move back into the original essence, into the
centre, the possibility of an intensification of inwardness to the point
of sinking into the Godhead would have to be admitted, then this state
could only be compared to the one of which the Apostle (1 Cor. 14)
says, that in it language and knowledge (Erkenntnis) cease, namely pre¬
cisely that sort of knowledge which is analytical, discursive, bound up
with differentiation by means of language. But such a state would also
then make all communication of knowledge impossible; what such
an enraptured person would himself hear would be, as the Apostle
(2 Cor. 12.4) says of himself: &ppr)xa prjpaxa, “words that cannot be
 Jacobi and Theosophy 181

spoken”. Furthermore, to whom should they communicate this knowl¬

edge? Unquestionably to those who are outside this state, for whom
they would for that very reason be speaking absolutely incomprehen¬
sible words. Their speech would be like that mysterious speaking with
tongues of which the Apostle speaks, who, by the way, (1 Cor. 14.19)
himself declares: “In the congregation I prefer to speak five words
with my sense (i.e. in which I am myself aware of a sense), so that I can
instruct others as well, than speak ten thousand words with tongues”,
where the opposition shows, therefore, that speaking with tongues is
the same as speaking incomprehensibly for other people. And the
greater part of the speeches of the theoretical mystics, of the real
theosophers, are to a large extent incomprehensible, and we do not
see them in the blissful calm in which we ought to think of those who
are really enraptured, but see them rather engaged in a violent strug¬
gle, in a great battle; their utterances are of such an involuntary kind
that we have to think of them as involved in a process. If they were re¬
ally in the Centre, then they would have to go silent, but — they want
to talk at the same time, to speak out, and to speak out for those people
who are outside the Centre. Herein lies the contradiction in theoso¬
phy. If that principle in which the impression, but only the faded im¬
pression, the chaos of all earlier moments is only found as feeling, if
this principle wishes to work for itself, thus pushing back the free
spirit (which is assigned to it in the present state as a moderator, as a
facilitator (Entbinder)), it can only appear as a nature which is not in
control of itself. The individual spirit in which it works in this way
loses all moderation and is not master of its thoughts, but is rather
without any security in the vain struggle yet to express what it has no
means to express, (as Jacob Bohme himself says of his spirit) “it hits
what it hits”, but without being certain of it, without placing it firmly
before itself and being able to look at it in the understanding as in a
mirror (in reflection); instead of being lord of the object and above
the object, the theosopher himself rather becomes the object; instead
of explaining, he himself becomes a phenomenon which requires ex¬
planation. I am talking about those who are really primordially theos¬
ophers via a real peculiarity of their nature, not about those who, so
to speak, set off on scientific adventures as wandering knights or af¬
fect theosophy to give themselves the appearance of deeper insight
and because they think they can thereby more quickly and easily
cause a stir than with honest scientific work. Theosophy is in com¬
plete conflict with the vocation of contemporary life, the theosopher
deprives himself of the greatest advantage of the contemporary state
of affairs, of knowledge which distinguishes, differentiates, analyses
everything and keeps it separate, which is admittedly also a transition,
182 On the History of Modern Philosophy

but in the same way as the whole of contemporary life is a transi¬

tion. It is not our vocation to live in visions, but rather in belief, i.e. in
mediated knowledge. Our knowledge is incomplete, i.e. it has to be
created bit by bit, successively, according to gradations and classifica¬
tions. Whoever has ever felt the beneficial effect of the analysis of his
thoughts, of a successive creation of knowledge and cognition will, so
to speak, not give up that considered duality at any price. There is no
understanding in vision in and for itself. In the external world every¬
one sees more or less the same, and yet not everyone can express it.
Every thing goes through certain moments in order to reach its com¬
pletion: a series of successive processes where each succeeding mo¬
ment intervenes in the preceding one, bringing it to its completion;
the farmer sees this process as well as the scholar, e.g. in the plant,
and yet he does not really know it, because he cannot separate the
moments, cannot express them as separated, express them in their
opposition. In the same way a person might also experience in himself
that transcendent process through which everything has developed,
as the theosopher boasts he can, but this would not lead to real sci¬
ence. For all experience, feeling, vision is in itself mute, and needs a
mediating organ to be expressed; if the visionary lacks this or inten¬
tionally rejects it in order to speak immediately out of the vision, then
he is, as was said, one with the object, and something as incompre¬
hensible for every third person as the object itself. Everything we can
call the real substance of the soul that is contained potentia in that prin¬
ciple must first be brought to real reflection (in the understanding or
in the spirit), in order to achieve the highest representation. Here,
then, lies the border between theosophy and philosophy which the
lover of science will chastely seek to preserve, without being led astray
by the apparent wealth of the material in the theosophical systems.
For it is true that, e.g., the earlier philosophy of non-knowledge is dis¬
tinguished from theosophy primarily by its complete substanceless-
ness. Both forms have, as it were, separated themselves into two
principles from whose interaction alone real science results. In Jaco¬
bi’s philosophy the principle of which we can say that it is the princi¬
ple which substantially does not know, but for that very reason is greedy
for, hungry for knowledge, is the understanding. Jacobi’s feeling is re¬
ally just the hunger for knowledge. The understanding, the positive
principle of knowledge, is a sort of half-will (Halbwille) in this philos¬
ophy, which does not have the strength to negate (aufheben) the mere
feeling by which it is driven as a feeling, in the way that the feeling of
hunger negates itself by attracting or eating food. Jacobi does not at¬
tack substance, he even rejects it, and thus leaves nature completely
 Jacobi and Theosophy i83

outside himself; his philosophy is the opposite of any Naturphilosophie.

The theosopher, however, to the extent to which he is speculative, is
also essentially and primarily a natural philosopher. But as the phi¬
losophy of non-knowledge suffers from a lack of knowledge, the
theosopher suffers from the surfeit of the mere matter of knowledge.
With the general description given so far of theosophy I have also de¬
scribed at the same time the oddest individual of this species, the fa¬
mous Jacob Bohme.
One must, of course, distinguish Jacob Bohme, in whom everything
is still pure and original, from another class of mystics, in whom one
no longer encounters anything living and original, where everything
is already corrupt; the well-known Saint Martin* particularly belongs
in this class: one no longer hears in him, as one could in J. Bohme, the
person who has been originally stirred, but only the mouthpiece or
secretary of alien ideas, which have, moreover, been prepared for
purposes of a different kind; what in J. Bohme is still living, is dead in
him, only, so to speak, the cadaver, the embalmed corpse, the mummy
of something originally living, of the kind that is displayed in secret
societies which simultaneously pursue alchemical, magical, theurgic
purposes. It is one’s duty to warn about such mysteries, especially
when one knows, as one easily can, that this mysticism has found its
followers not in the healthy, but rather in precisely the most corrupt
classes of society. Such a wine which has been fermented with spices,
if not with far worse ingredients, which is at best good for and in¬
tended for stimulating a taste which has long since been dulled, be¬
longs in the witches’ kitchen to which Goethe banished it in Faust. May
God preserve German youth now and ever from such hellish brews!
Nowadays the concept “mysticism”, “mystic”, is used by ignorant
people in the strangest way, by, e.g., already calling everyone who be¬
lieves in Revelation at all, even if it were to happen in the most his¬
torical sense, a mystic. To such people Johannes Muller would, e.g.,
be a mystic as well. But this is a misuse of an era which mixes every¬
thing together, and differentiates neither concepts nor words. How¬
ever, the false use of the words “mystical”, “mysticism”, has its basis in
an even more general misunderstanding of these words, in which
they are used to hint at a certain material constitution of doctrines or
assertions. The shorthand concept of mystical which many people
have made for themselves is the following: everything which goes

* Translator’s note: Louis-Claude de Saint Martin (1743-1803), French visionary phi¬

losopher, influenced by Bohme and Swedenborg, and exponent of Illuminism,
which opposed rationalistic philosophies of the period.
184 On the History of Modern Philosophy

beyond my individual capacity for understanding I shall call mysti¬

cal” — even assuming that it were a proposition which had been
gained by purely scientific and completely methodical development,
for first, nothing should go beyond our capacity for understanding,
and second, nobody should assert that he has achieved what we have
once and for all declared to be unachievable. This ruse of grounding,
against an assertion which ought above all to be tested, a prejudice by
a mere word is admittedly more easy than scientific investigation. To
puaxiKOV means everything which is hidden, secret. But looked at ma¬

terially, everything is hidden, everything mystical, and people who

make do with the popular saying: “No spirit in creation penetrates
into the interior of nature”, thereby declare nature itself to be mysti¬
cal. Indeed that which is mystical above all is precisely nature, and
again, what is most material in nature, which those enemies of all
mysticism consider to be the least mystical, e.g., their feeling for good
food and drink — sensuousness in general and the way in which the
senses work, this is what is most hidden of all that occurs in nature.
Those words with which people seek to exclude or silence certain con¬
cepts and assertions in advance are wholly worthy of an era which
boasts of being liberal but actually is to the greatest extent illiberal, in
which narrow-mindedness, shallowness and obvious ignorance desire
the freedom of thought for themselves which they only deny to in¬
sight and to genius.
The word “mystical” has in scholarly contexts always initially meant
only a formal distinction. If one wanted to extend this concept to the
material, then rationalism in its highest objective form would, e.g.,
have to be called mysticism, for both are in accordance with each other
in terms of material, of content, both know only substantial move¬
ment. Nevertheless mysticism has always been determined as an an¬
tithesis of rationalism. Nobody, then, is a mystic because of what they
assert, but rather because of the manner in which they assert it. Mys¬
ticism only expresses the antithesis to formally scientific cognition. No
assertion is to be called mystical just because of its content, however it
might be constituted, not even when it is in agreement in terms of this
content with the assertion of some mystic or other. For if one is not
supposed to assert anything that a mystic has asserted at some time or
other, then one would finally not be allowed to assert anything at all.
Only that constitution of mind can be called mysticism which spurns
all scientific justification or argument, which wants to derive all true
knowledge only from a so-called inner light which is not even univer¬
sally illuminating, but rather enclosed in the individual, from an im¬
mediate revelation, just from ecstatic intuition (Intuition), or just from
feeling, so that, if one agrees about the expression, the Jacobian phi-
 Jacobi and Theosophy !85

losophy of feeling, for example, can also be called mystical and has
been called it often enough; except that it is totally lacking in the sub¬
stantial content of really speculative mysticism. The same truth can,
then, be mystical to one person which is scientific to the other, and
vice versa. For to the person who expresses the truth on the basis of
a merely subjective feeling (Empfindung) or a supposed revelation, it is
mystical; to the person who derives the truth from the depths of sci¬
ence and hence alone truly understands it, it is scientific.
The true mark of mysticism is the hatred of clear knowledge (Ein-
sicht) - of understanding, which has received such a welcome predom¬
inance in our time - of science in general. But as not just mystics but
even many people who shout about and against mysticism are just as
much enemies of science as any mystic, then one would really have to
call them mystics themselves, if one did not prefer to declare them re¬
ally to be the true obscurantists.
 On National Differences in Philosophy

Whoever has followed the historical development to this point could

easily remark that, as it developed, it more and more narrowed down
to German philosophy. If they have, furthermore, got to know the na¬
ture of German philosophy and what it concerns itself with from
these lectures and want to cast a glance at the state of philosophy in
the rest of Europe, then they will have no alternative but to judge that
philosophy in this sense does indeed exist in Germany, but not in the
world. But this is more serious than one might think at first glance.
For if we do not consider that sense of philosophy as merely contin¬
gent, but as essential, then one would be compelled to go on to say:
“Only in Germany is there philosophy, but not in the rest of the
world”. It is, then, worth the effort at the end of this development to
throw up the question whether and to what extent this difference be¬
tween the Germans and the other European nations really exists, and,
in this case, how it is to be understood and explained. But, since the
difference itself does not seem deniable, because it is obvious that,
whilst the Germans still demonstrate a great interest of mind and
spirit in philosophy, the other European peoples, in particular the
English and the French, show a great aversion to speculation and
completely gave up the enterprise of scientific philosophy some time
ago, then it seems that it can initially only be a question of the cause
of this difference. In that case, though, it could be difficult to find a
generally valid answer, i.e. one which the German as well as the
Frenchman, and conversely the Englishman as well as the German,
would be disposed to accept. For we can roughly imagine how the
Frenchman explains our preference for speculation and philosophy,
even if we did not actually know how he does so, and we can also well
imagine how the Englishman would regard it if the German wished to
explain his advantage with regard to philosophy via the deeper state
of mind and spirit of his nation. If the German, for example, wanted
to assert the merits of his language, which Leibniz judged to be in¬
nately speculative, then the same would have to be valid at least to a

186
 On National Differences in Philosophy 187

certain extent of English; the Englishman would counter: precisely in

the expressions for basic concepts, which are to be sought in the roots
of a language, his language is largely related to German; besides,
though, a greater depth of the structure as well as the philosophical
constitution of the language would indeed explain a difference in suc¬
cess at philosophy, but not, which is really what is in question, the fact
that the French and the English do not recognise philosophy in the
German sense at all.
A historical explanation could perhaps be more acceptable, which
derived the continual and repeatedly stimulated interest of the Ger¬
mans in philosophy from the conflict of beliefs, from the coexistence
of equally legitimate religious confessions in Germany, and who will
not be able to see, even if they just wish to glance at the course of
philosophy in Germany, in the really religious seriousness, in the en¬
thusiastic way itself in which philosophy has in part been pursued in
Germany, a desire, as it were, to reconcile that deed of emancipation,
in which it is known that all German peoples without exception have
more or less participated, and to restore internally and in the field of
science the unity which has been lost externally? This historical ref¬
erence would then admittedly explain how and why in Germany the
interest in philosophy was always kept active, and, whenever it wanted
to fall asleep, was always aroused and awakened once more. But it is
not just a question of more or less, it is a question of an antithesis in
the question itself, for the others do not reject philosophy in general
and in every sense (it was, of course, the French who first granted the
honorary title of “philosopher” in the last century, and philosophy
was for long enough the motto of the most important writers and even
of statesmen) - thus the others do not reject philosophy in general,
but only philosophy in the German sense. We are admittedly now free
to reply that what they consider to be philosophy is not philosophy at
all, and that only we know what philosophy is. But this does not say as
much as it might appear at first, for in our country as well many a
person has been told that what he claims to be philosophy is anything
but that: Germans are not lacking in courtesy to each other; further¬
more, it seems contrary to all reason to attribute an incapacity for phi¬
losophy to whole nations which are otherwise superbly gifted, an
explanation which would be all the more strange because it could in
any case only be a temporary one; for one would not be able to justify
to oneself completely denying, to a people which produced a Des¬
cartes, a Malebranche and Pascal, the disposition of mind and spirit
for philosophy. And so we see ourselves finally compelled after all at
least to consider it possible that the distance from philosophy in the
German sense which we perceive in other peoples might be based on
i88 On the History of Modern Philosophy

something true and right. And so the impossibility of finding another

adequate answer to the second question than the assumption that the
others can have been to some extent right after all in their aversion so
far to philosophy in the German sense, leads us back to the first ques¬
tion, the question as to what the difference really consists in in this
respect, and since this can only lie in the kind of philosophy, to the
question of what kind of philosophy it may be which appeals only to
other peoples, and to the question of how the kind which we prefer to
call philosophy relates to that kind.
One does not need to reflect very long on this. The others assert,
namely, that philosophy is a science of experience and only want it as
such; the German, however, asserts until now at least that philosophy
is a pure science of reason and wishes it only as such. If one under¬
stands by empiricism the assertion that there is no other knowledge
except knowledge from experience, and correspondingly that only
what is experiential (Erfahrungsmassiges) can be known, then, none the
less, depending on whether one connects a different sense with the
word “experiential”, the sense of that assertion is also different.
What is usually initially understood by experience is the certainty
which we receive via the senses of external things and their constitu¬
tion. Following this one also speaks of an experience of the inner
sense, which is gained by observing oneself, by observing the pro¬
cesses and changes in one’s own interior. If one now stops at this and
only thinks as experiential what can immediately become an object of
outer and inner sense, then the experience of the outer senses is mo¬
nopolised by the empirical natural sciences; for philosophy, therefore,
only the experiences of the inner sense would be left. Philosophy
would accordingly just consist in an analysis, at best at the same time
in a combination, of inner appearances and of processes of conscious¬
ness: in short, in what we call a good (complete) empirical psychology.
Now this is roughly the conception that the French have of philoso¬
phy; and this conception is admittedly quite insignificant in terms of
the concepts with which we, e.g., have so far looked at philosophy. But
if one considers that there are many people among us who not only
do not have any higher concept of philosophy but also assert exactly
the same thing, namely that philosophy cannot in general go beyond
the facts of consciousness, i.e., therefore, beyond the scope of a psy¬
chology or a subjective anthropology, then one cannot really see in
what the big difference, at least between a considerable part of what
calls itself philosophy in Germany and what is called that in France, is
supposed to consist.
However great the admiration we owe to the name of Kant, it is ob¬
vious that if we just consider the result it is not clear how much better
 On National Differences in Philosophy 189

off somebody is who stops at Kant than someone who stops even ear¬
lier at Locke and Condillac. For Locke wrote an Essay on Human Un¬
derstanding, Kant a Critique of Pure Reason, which is much more
methodical, but also a great deal not just more ponderous, but, as far
as the main question is concerned, more incomprehensible. Locke
maintains that not only all human ideas (Vorstellungen), but also all our
concepts, not even excepting the scientific concepts, are indirectly de¬
rived from experience. Kant admittedly allows us certain concepts
which are independent of experience; but since they are after all only
capable of application to objects of experience we do not become more
independent of experience via them - the result for us is the same;
for the particular way into the supersensuous which Kant found in his
moral philosophy could in a certain way still be tolerated by empiri¬
cism as well. For just as Kant, as it were, makes the absolutely impe¬
rious moral law in us into the witness of the existence of God, Locke
also does not omit to demonstrate guarantees of this existence in our
consciousness. But there is the big difference between them that Kant
nevertheless makes God the object of an Idea of reason in the theo¬
retical philosophy. This is, though, the Jtpcbxov i|>ei>6oa of modern
philosophy; it is incomprehensible how, if no personality exists, how¬
ever insignificant it may be, which does not demand something more
and something more real than reason if it is to be known, precisely the
highest and most perfect personality should announce itself to us by
means of nothing other than the Idea of reason. Rationalism was
therefore proclaimed by Kant in philosophy (previously people were
not so clear about this, particularly with regard to the Idea of God).
Kant admittedly refused and forbade any theoretical use of this Idea,
but it was all very well his refusing; if God is an Idea of reason, then
reason cannot be prevented from realising this Idea as such; naturally
this can only happen in a mere system of reason as well - and this,
nothing else, was undertaken by later philosophy. Empiricism, by al¬
ways only deducing the existence of God, like the existence of another
personality, from empirical, experiential traces, features, footprints
or characteristics, thereby founds that agreeable free relationship to
God which rationalism negates, and since one must admit that if even
today, as was the case in the later times of the Greek and Roman de¬
cline when the question was only between Stoicism and Epicureanism,
the Epicurean system is a refuge, precisely because of what appears
absurd in it, the so-called clinamen atomorum [inclination of atoms], via
which it introduces coincidence as, so to speak, the highest principle,
since even today, I say, the Epicurean system would have to be seized
upon and sought after, despite or rather because of this inconsistency,
as a refuge of freedom of every free and freedom-loving spirit, in
igo On the History of Modern Philosophy

preference to the Stoic system, then, if we had the choice between em¬
piricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism
which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be
able to object to deciding in favour of empiricism.
Empiricism itself, then, allows a higher way of looking at things, or
can be grasped from a higher perspective than the received, or, at
least since Kant, the usual concept grasps it, which expels everything
intelligible not only beyond the concepts of the understanding, but
originally and first of all beyond all experience. Hence the now usual
explanation that empiricism denies everything supernatural, but this
is not the case. Because it is empiricism, it does not necessarily for
that reason deny the supernatural, neither does it assume the legal
and moral laws and the content of religion as something merely con¬
tingent, namely in the sense that it reduces everything to mere feel¬
ings, which themselves would only be the product of education and
habit, as David Hume admittedly did, who, by the way, asserted the
same thing in relation to the sort of necessity with which we link cause
and effect in our thoughts. There is even a higher and lower concept
of empiricism. For if the highest goal, which philosophy can, by gen¬
eral consent even of those who up to now think differently, certainly
reach, is precisely to grasp the world as freely produced and created,
then philosophy, with regard to the main thing it can achieve, or pre¬
cisely by reaching its highest goal, would be a science of experience; I
do not mean in the formal sense, but I do mean in the material sense,
that what is highest for it would itself be something experiential in
nature. If up to now, then, that national difference with regard to
philosophy really exists, then this rift initially only shows that the phi¬
losophy in which humankind could recognise itself, the truly univer¬
sal philosophy, does not yet exist. The truly universal philosophy
cannot possibly be the property of a single nation, and as long as any
philosophy does not go beyond the borders of a single people one can
be safe in assuming that it is not yet the true philosophy, even if it is
perhaps on the way to it.
It is admittedly miserable pusillanimity and narrow-mindedness if
philosophy, e.g. in France, claims nothing for itself but the slender
and narrow area of petty, psychologically named observations and
analyses from the whole wide and great realm of experience. In
France itself the indigenous philosophy, or, as it has recently been
termed, “ideology”, lacks any real respect, is more politely tolerated
and politely treated than acknowledged. If a few younger men in
France have succeeded in arousing a certain enthusiasm for philoso¬
phy, it was mainly only in so far as they opposed the external morality
of Kant to the thoughtless frivolity of their nation and thought they
 On National Differences in Philosophy lgi

had found in it the means, initially in the moral sphere, for a regen¬
eration of their people. The true promoters of philosophy in France
and England are their great natural scientists, and it is not to the dis¬
credit of the English if philosophy for them mainly, indeed almost ex¬
clusively, means physics. German ideas seem to gain entry to France
mainly in the realm of the natural sciences. Whoever, e.g., reads many
recent French investigations of the anatomy of the brain will be sur¬
prised to find a new language, a new kind of expression which until
very recently people in Germany thought they could insult by using
the epithet “poetic”, a new, thoroughly German sort of conception;
even Cuvier shows in his latest writings on geology and the natural
history of the prehistoric world that in relation to these great phe¬
nomena German ideas about the natural history of the earth and
even German expressions have had a great influence on him.* And,
as one can deduce from various factors, German science might mainly
gain entry to France and England in the realm of history and of re¬
search into the ancient world. It would be wrong, really wrong, then,
to want to call back those other nations from the doctrine of empir¬
icism which they pursue to such great advantage in other areas; for
them this would indeed be a retrograde movement. It is not up to
them, it is up to us Germans, who, since the existence of Naturphilos-
ophie, have emerged from the sad alternative of a metaphysics which
floats in the air, lacking any foundation (that they rightly make fun
of) and an infertile, arid psychology - it is up to us, I say, to develop
the system, which we may hope to grasp and to reach, the positive
system whose principle, precisely because of its absolute positivity
cannot itself be knowable a priori any more, but only a posteriori, to the
point where it will flow together with that empiricism which has been
expanded and purified to the same extent.

* Translator’s note: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) French comparative anatomist, pa¬

leontologist, and geologist.
■
 Index

I have not attempted to detail references to “being", “subject”, “object", “substance”,

“infinite”, “finite”, “reason” and other general philosophical terms, as they recur so
often in so many differing senses that such references would not be useful. Bold type
indicates extended discussion of a thinker or work.

Absolute, 4, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16-18, 24, 26, German Idealism, 2, 3—5, 7
28, 32, 141, 147-50, 151, 152, God, 19-21, 30, 61, 73, 103—4, 129,
>53- >54. i56- '58. 160 132-3, 160, 169, 171-2, 175-6
absolute identity, 17, 152 cosmological proof of, 87, 89-90
Anselm of Canterbury, 54 as creator, 66, 85, 87, 91, 103, 157
Aristotle, 89, 90 doctrine of attributes of, 91—2
art (and Poetry), 11—12, 128—9, 131 and freedom, 54, 55-6, 65—7, 74, 80,
82, 85, 103, 159
Bacon, F., 61—3 and nature, 20-1, 159-60
Baumgarten, A., 103 ontological proof of, 31-2, 33, 34,
Berkeley G., 100 49-56. 87-9
Bohme, J., 22, 155, 181, 183-4 as personality, 74, 105, 165, 170, 171,
189
Cuvier, G., 191 physico-theological proof of, 90-1
Goethe, J. W. von, 131—2
Descartes, R., 16, 31, 42-63, 107, 174 ground, 19-20, 21, 102, 158
and Bacon, 61—3
Hamann.J. G., 22, 168-9
and Cogito ergo sum, 31, 42-8
Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 13, 16, 19, 20, 23-25,
and dualism, 56-60, 67-8, 79
88,134-63
and ontological proof of God, 49—56
on “concept”, 134-5, 136, 138,
142-6, 147-8
empirical psychology, 93, 98, 188 on God, 135-6, 146, 147, 155-6
empiricism (experience), 61—3, 95-8, Logic, 3, 25, 30, 32-3, 134-5, '4'.
104—5, *64—5, 166, 179, 188-90, 144, 146-7, 155, 157
»9i and Logic (his conception of, for phi¬
evil, 81-3, 126 losophy), 141-2, 143, 145,
146-9, 153-4
Fichte, J. G., 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13—14, 15, Phenomenology of Mind, 18, 24
28-9, 30, 33, 106-11, 136 and transition from Logic to nature,
on intellectual intuition, 5, 150—1 •49. '53-5. '57-8. 159
final cause, 90, 156, 158 Heidegger, M., 35
Frank, M., 26, 29 Henrich, D., 24
freedom, 10, 20, 21, 26-7, 28, 29, 30, Herder, J. G., 132
66, 75, 115—16, 118, 124, 125, history, 3, 10, 11, 34, 41, 42, 61, 65, 82,
126-7, >54-5. »77 83-4,94, 112, 117-18, 126-7,

!93
194 Index

»3°. '3‘. ‘32, 154. '59. '66- l67. Novalis, 11, 24

169,187
transcendental past, 109-10 Pantheism, 72—4, 132, 159, 173
Hogrebe, W., 21 Pantheism controversy, 4
Holderlin, F., 7, 14-15 Pascal, B., 168
Hume, D., 95-8, 104, 190 positive philosophy, 3, 23, 25, 30, 95,
Kant and causality in, 96-8 ‘33. ‘34. *56> '57- ‘7‘. ‘72. '9'

idealism, 48, 100, 104, 108, 151 rational psychology, 87

intellectual intuition, 5, 26, 150—3 rational theology, 87-92
reflection, 24, 25-6, 27-30, 32—3, 47—8,
Jacobi, F. H., 4-5, 7, 25, 30, 154, 146
164-79, '^2 Revelation, 167, 169, 174, 183
and belief, 167, 174, 176, 177—8
and belief and knowledge, 174-8 Schelling, F. W. J. von,
and dualism, 175, 177 identity philosophy (identity system)
judgement, 6, 17, 27, 29, 100, 140 of, 2-3, 13-19, 22, 120, 143,
'49-53. ‘56- ‘58
Kabbala, 78 Schelling, F. W. J. von, works of,
Kant, I., 5, 6, 15, 16, 84, 85, 94—106, Inilia Philosophiae Universae (1820—1),
107-8, 125, 132, 141, 162, 25-3°
188—90 Introduction to the Philosophy of Revela¬
and cosmological ideas, 85 tion or Foundation of the Positive
Critique of Judgement, 9, 11, 12, 173 Philosophy (c. 1842—3), 34
Critique of Pure Reason, 98—105, 106 Naturphilosophie, 2, 8—9, 14, 19, 22,
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural 23.30. 114-33. ‘43- ‘79-8°.
Science, 173 182-3, '9'
on ontological proof of God, 50 On the Essence of Human Freedom
and supersensuous, 101-4, 105 (1809), 3, 19
on thing in itself, 100, 101, 102, 104 On the I as Principle of Philosophy
transcendental deduction, 86 (1795). 6-7
On the True Concept of Naturphiloso¬
Leibniz, G. W., 75—84 phie and the Correct Way to
and God, 76—8, 80—4 Solve its Problems (1801), 150
Monadology, 81 Philosophical Introduction to the Philoso¬
and monism, 75—80 phy of Mythology or Presentation
and prestabilised harmony, 79 of the Purely Rational Philosophy
and Spinoza, 75—81, 84 (Between 1847 and 1852), 25
Theodicy, 80—3 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Lesage, G. L., 173 Criticism (1795), 6-7
Locke J„ 95, 189 Philosophy and Religion (1804), 18, 19,
21
Muller, J. von, 131, 183 Preface to a Philosophical Text of M. Vic¬
mysticism, 179—85 tor Cousin (1834), 155
Presentation of the Identity Philoso¬
nature, 3, 4, 8-11, 30, 57, 68, 103, 107, phy/System (1801) (= Presenta¬
119—20, 122, 124, 131, 132, 143, tion of My System of Philosophy),
144, 149, 153-4, *59. *73 150,152
and identity with mind, 8—12, 13—17, System of the Whole of Philosophy and of
34,67, 109-10, 112-13, 119, Naturphilosophie in Particular
120,130 (1804), 14-18
purposiveness of, 90-1, 122 System of Transcendental Idealism
negation of the negation, 33 (1800), 2, 8, 10—13, 20,
negative philosophy, 3, 23, 25, 30, 95, 109-13

'33- '34. '35. 145. '56. 157. Schlegel, Friedrich, 11, 12

171, 172 Schlosser, J. G., 167
Nietzsche, F., 35 scholasticism, 61-3, 84-5, 89
 Index
*95
Spinoza and Spinozism, 4, 8, 16, 19, 60, theosophy, 178-85
64“75- *06, 107, 108, 114, 166 Theunissen, M., 34
and God, 64, 65-7, 69-71, 73-4, 92,
103, 105 Wittgenstein, L., 35
and monism, 67—9, 72 Wolff, C., 84-93, '°3. 144
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