Thanks Matt. I really enjoyed this summary. As a scientist and not a philosopher I found your summary of Schelling's thought to be quite helpful. When I looked into the philosophy of science as a graduate student I found Carnap, which is all they taught in the philosophy of science at the U of Michigan at that time. I found Goethe through Rudolf Steiner and spent a good deal of time trying to bring his ideas into modern science. The largest effect I had was in education, but that is a story for another time.
As a scientist I am less sanguine than you are about the hope for an organic science. There have been quite a few attempts at this and they tend to influence only the student's of the thought-leader. In my field, Rolf Sattler and his ideas of complementarity is a prime example (https://www.beyondwilber.ca/). He and his students pursed the idea of complementarity in quite a few publications and talks, but I am not aware of anyone other than his students who took up these ideas as a central aspect of their work. Sattler's ideas were influential on some of my work, but they were certainly not a central point of anything that I did. This, in my experience, has been the case will all of the "alternative/organic" biological ideas that I have seen develop in the past half century or more.
There may be one counter example. That is work in restoration ecology. Restoration ecologists have to take an organic, holistic approach to their discipline because it is the only approach that works. They do not spend much time on theorizing or expostulating on the origins of an organic science, they do their work, which requires an organic/holistic approach. This holistic approach should underlie all of ecology, and for some it does. There is a definite current of organic holism in much of ecology. You might look at the work of H. T. Odem, one of the most famous ecologists of his day, for an example of these currents (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28313830/).
If we ask why restoration ecology has produced a more acceptable holism than Sattler, I think we are faced with the fact that restoration ecologists are addressing something that every scientist recognizes as a problem. They address the problem of habitat restoration in a holistic way, and they get results. This is in contrast to Sattler's approach, which while it has greater intellectual merit than the other systems of thought he reacted against, had no practical application. As a scientist once commented on some of my work "That is interesting, what is it good for?" Unless the organic science addresses and provides a solution to some problem, I am doubtful that it every gain wide acceptance.
Fantastic article again Matt. Really illuminating many important facets of the history of philosophy, really support how you put Kant (and the intellectual milieu as a whole) central, your distinction between mechanistic and organicist scientists and how Goethe fits in to all this. Happy to have found your work!
Hegel's additional question, regarding Schelling's idea of the a priori of Nature would be the following: Not only the Kantian "what must mind be such that nature could appear to it?", nor only the schellingian "what must nature be such that mind could emerge from it?", but also "what must metaphysics/logic be like so that nature is, so that mind could emerge from it?" these three modes of God (Logic-Nature-spirit) and their logic are then related to matters of phenomenology, politics, art, religion and more. The dialectical method of Hegel, to use your metaphor, is about that we can only swim back upstream (not just to nature but also to logic (which as you know is not merely A=A according to Hegel), because we have come downstream, and when we reach the very orginative top of the stream, we come to see that our discovery is nothing but a discovery of what we have ourselves created, that is, substance as subject. This dialectical procedure of negativity can in turn be flipped into positive abiding of speculative philosophy (unity of mysticism and science), based on unity of, e.g. thought & being, mind and heart, being and nothing etc. So no wonder we get the beauty of the Absolute Idea as the epitome of the logical mode of God, i.e. concept. Besides, on my own substack you can find a short article called "Who can philosophize" in which I write about the oldest systematic program of GI. Perhaps you would be interested to read it, just like you I find it an important document. I see Hegel's mature work as still being fundamentally in line with it, inclusive of its mythical nature.
One more thing, the critique you mentioned that Kierkegaard had about Hegel precisely mirrors the critique Marx had about Goethe! This idea that the duality of their pathetic daily lives (shack) persists while they (in this case Hegel & Goethe) are seen as being stuck in the fantasy of their creative projects.
Please understand that I do not want to say Schelling's project is reducible to Hegel. I do not believe so at all. I am especially interested in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift, since his point of departure is totally different than the one Hegel works with in his Logik, and Hegel did not adequately think it through, is my suspicion. Thanks for again for your work.
Thanks for spelling this out, Dimitri. I have a long, ongoing friendly debate going with my colleague Sean Kelly about the relative merits of Schelling's and Hegel's approaches. Have you read Schelling's late works on Positive Philosophy?
Just found individuation and the absolute by Sean, will read into it. I have not read Schelling on Positive Philosophy. I haven't studied him deeply as of yet. Do you have any recommendations on where to start, texts that you deem most essential?
One way to distinguish negative and positive philosophy is to say the former seeks conditions of possibility, while the latter seeks conditions of actuality. Conditions of possibility, no matter how elaborately worked out, can never themselves produce actual existence, since our very reflection upon them already presupposed our existence. We can think about what exists only because it already does. This is why Schelling says existence as such will always exceed thought. It is unprethinkable. Hegel’s view, on the contrary, seems to me to be that, once we’ve been led to absolute consciousness by tracing thought’s dialectical development through all its shapes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can then consider the pure logical movement of the concept (ie, the Science of Logic) free of any residue of personal existence. Please help better represent Hegel's views here!
One other important detail to keep in mind: Schelling had already used the “pure night” metaphor in a criticism of the view that the Absolute is some kind of undifferentiated soup in his own article in 1803, so Hegel’s use of it later, in the 1807 Phenomenology really could not have been meant as a criticism of Schelling’s supposed view.
Here's the relevant Schelling excerpt: "For most people see in the essence of the Absolute nothing but pure night and cannot recognise anything in it; it shrinks before them into a mere negation of difference, and is for them something purely privative, whence they cleverly make it into the end of their philosophy (…) I want to show here (…) how that night of the Absolute can be turned into day for knowledge" (SW I/4, p. 403).
I agree with your point that "conditions of possibility can never themselves produce actual existence, since our reflection upon them already presupposed our existence."
What you say makes me think about right now, or the present. In Dutch we call this 'tegenwoordig'. If we separate the two words it consists of, we get 'against wordness'. We can read this in multiple ways, one possible way is that the present is against words, against concepts of our thoughts. In other words, we're never able to fully totalize actuality with any kind of wordy conceptual system, at least not in the way that we can let our system take the rear and let it unfold our existence logically for us. Therefore I am suspicious of philosophies telling me what I 'ought' to do, or that pretends to be able to instruct me on how to act. We can not let philosophy instruct us on what do do, we can not let it speak about the future, we cannot incorporate the becoming of spirit (or what have you) so that we ward off the anxiety that we are left alone to our freedom; the anxiety to make the 'leap of faith' cannot be grounded in pre-established logic, it is a jump, a leap into the unknown. The pretense that we can think ourselves away from this leap, won't do us much good as we start to look down on this actuality (reality as a working-in-becoming (wirklichkeit)), from the view-point of whatever abstraction we anxiously and rigidly cling to.
I let myself go a bit. You asked about Hegel. What I scribbled above is precisely why I am interested in Hegel! My (Zizek's) reading of Hegel is not the usual one. It is not the idea that Hegel is a panlogicist swallowing up the world into the sublation of the totalizing concept, and it is not the Pippinesque Hegel, which proposes a reformist-unfolding type reading, which is moreso 'epistemological', but still instructive. In the bad sense.
Our Hegel (and I truly believe this to be supported by the primary text), is the Hegel of the Entscheidung! The Hegel centered on the groundless nature of The Decision, the abyssal and unfounded leap into the unknown. The decision that is truly a decision since it cannot rely on what has been pre-established, but is forced to make a decision in an undecidable situation. At the very end of the Science of Logic, it is logic (qua mode of God), that freely decides to release itself into Nature. Logic is pre-natural/spiritual according to Hegel, but the caveat is that we can only come to think God in his logical mode as Absolute Spirit (the very end of Hegel's sytem). The absolute beginning opens up to us at the very end, and the very end presupposes the absolute beginning. But the beginning is never enough, so on we go. I hope that makes sense, what I'm trying to say, is even though Hegel might have a gargantuan system, this system can strictly never tell us on what to do, on what decision to make, or how to make it, or what the future holds. If there is anything beyond Absolute Spirit, it is that which we come into contact with the moment we close the book we're reading. That which comes to us (toekomst/zukunft/future) as against wordness (tegenwoordig/gegenwart/present). The Schelling quote you shared is where Hegel and Schelling are deeply in agreement. Again and again, Hegel will assert in his corpus that we the negative is not merely negative, but that by thinking, and notionally meditating with the present, we can see the positive in the negative, the light in the dark, so to say. The status of contradiction (negativity), as positive, is something I take to heart, and find to be very personal. As he says in the Encyclopedia, the goal of philosophy is reconciliation (with the present). I have much more to say, but this little box I'm typping in is not suited for it. If it's fine with you, you can respond to my email (dimitricrooijmans@gmail.com). Next two weeks I'm going to be very busy, but I will definitely respond afterwards.
I appreciate these reflections very much, thank you. As I continue to deepen my grasp of Hegel, I find over and over again that he and Schelling are far closer than it may appear based on Schelling's late reply to Hegel. On the other hand, I do wonder if Zizek's reading of Hegel is itself a Schellingian one!
Thanks Matt. I really enjoyed this summary. As a scientist and not a philosopher I found your summary of Schelling's thought to be quite helpful. When I looked into the philosophy of science as a graduate student I found Carnap, which is all they taught in the philosophy of science at the U of Michigan at that time. I found Goethe through Rudolf Steiner and spent a good deal of time trying to bring his ideas into modern science. The largest effect I had was in education, but that is a story for another time.
As a scientist I am less sanguine than you are about the hope for an organic science. There have been quite a few attempts at this and they tend to influence only the student's of the thought-leader. In my field, Rolf Sattler and his ideas of complementarity is a prime example (https://www.beyondwilber.ca/). He and his students pursed the idea of complementarity in quite a few publications and talks, but I am not aware of anyone other than his students who took up these ideas as a central aspect of their work. Sattler's ideas were influential on some of my work, but they were certainly not a central point of anything that I did. This, in my experience, has been the case will all of the "alternative/organic" biological ideas that I have seen develop in the past half century or more.
There may be one counter example. That is work in restoration ecology. Restoration ecologists have to take an organic, holistic approach to their discipline because it is the only approach that works. They do not spend much time on theorizing or expostulating on the origins of an organic science, they do their work, which requires an organic/holistic approach. This holistic approach should underlie all of ecology, and for some it does. There is a definite current of organic holism in much of ecology. You might look at the work of H. T. Odem, one of the most famous ecologists of his day, for an example of these currents (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28313830/).
If we ask why restoration ecology has produced a more acceptable holism than Sattler, I think we are faced with the fact that restoration ecologists are addressing something that every scientist recognizes as a problem. They address the problem of habitat restoration in a holistic way, and they get results. This is in contrast to Sattler's approach, which while it has greater intellectual merit than the other systems of thought he reacted against, had no practical application. As a scientist once commented on some of my work "That is interesting, what is it good for?" Unless the organic science addresses and provides a solution to some problem, I am doubtful that it every gain wide acceptance.
Fantastic article again Matt. Really illuminating many important facets of the history of philosophy, really support how you put Kant (and the intellectual milieu as a whole) central, your distinction between mechanistic and organicist scientists and how Goethe fits in to all this. Happy to have found your work!
Hegel's additional question, regarding Schelling's idea of the a priori of Nature would be the following: Not only the Kantian "what must mind be such that nature could appear to it?", nor only the schellingian "what must nature be such that mind could emerge from it?", but also "what must metaphysics/logic be like so that nature is, so that mind could emerge from it?" these three modes of God (Logic-Nature-spirit) and their logic are then related to matters of phenomenology, politics, art, religion and more. The dialectical method of Hegel, to use your metaphor, is about that we can only swim back upstream (not just to nature but also to logic (which as you know is not merely A=A according to Hegel), because we have come downstream, and when we reach the very orginative top of the stream, we come to see that our discovery is nothing but a discovery of what we have ourselves created, that is, substance as subject. This dialectical procedure of negativity can in turn be flipped into positive abiding of speculative philosophy (unity of mysticism and science), based on unity of, e.g. thought & being, mind and heart, being and nothing etc. So no wonder we get the beauty of the Absolute Idea as the epitome of the logical mode of God, i.e. concept. Besides, on my own substack you can find a short article called "Who can philosophize" in which I write about the oldest systematic program of GI. Perhaps you would be interested to read it, just like you I find it an important document. I see Hegel's mature work as still being fundamentally in line with it, inclusive of its mythical nature.
One more thing, the critique you mentioned that Kierkegaard had about Hegel precisely mirrors the critique Marx had about Goethe! This idea that the duality of their pathetic daily lives (shack) persists while they (in this case Hegel & Goethe) are seen as being stuck in the fantasy of their creative projects.
Please understand that I do not want to say Schelling's project is reducible to Hegel. I do not believe so at all. I am especially interested in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift, since his point of departure is totally different than the one Hegel works with in his Logik, and Hegel did not adequately think it through, is my suspicion. Thanks for again for your work.
Thanks for spelling this out, Dimitri. I have a long, ongoing friendly debate going with my colleague Sean Kelly about the relative merits of Schelling's and Hegel's approaches. Have you read Schelling's late works on Positive Philosophy?
Just found individuation and the absolute by Sean, will read into it. I have not read Schelling on Positive Philosophy. I haven't studied him deeply as of yet. Do you have any recommendations on where to start, texts that you deem most essential?
One way to distinguish negative and positive philosophy is to say the former seeks conditions of possibility, while the latter seeks conditions of actuality. Conditions of possibility, no matter how elaborately worked out, can never themselves produce actual existence, since our very reflection upon them already presupposed our existence. We can think about what exists only because it already does. This is why Schelling says existence as such will always exceed thought. It is unprethinkable. Hegel’s view, on the contrary, seems to me to be that, once we’ve been led to absolute consciousness by tracing thought’s dialectical development through all its shapes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can then consider the pure logical movement of the concept (ie, the Science of Logic) free of any residue of personal existence. Please help better represent Hegel's views here!
One other important detail to keep in mind: Schelling had already used the “pure night” metaphor in a criticism of the view that the Absolute is some kind of undifferentiated soup in his own article in 1803, so Hegel’s use of it later, in the 1807 Phenomenology really could not have been meant as a criticism of Schelling’s supposed view.
Here's the relevant Schelling excerpt: "For most people see in the essence of the Absolute nothing but pure night and cannot recognise anything in it; it shrinks before them into a mere negation of difference, and is for them something purely privative, whence they cleverly make it into the end of their philosophy (…) I want to show here (…) how that night of the Absolute can be turned into day for knowledge" (SW I/4, p. 403).
I agree with your point that "conditions of possibility can never themselves produce actual existence, since our reflection upon them already presupposed our existence."
What you say makes me think about right now, or the present. In Dutch we call this 'tegenwoordig'. If we separate the two words it consists of, we get 'against wordness'. We can read this in multiple ways, one possible way is that the present is against words, against concepts of our thoughts. In other words, we're never able to fully totalize actuality with any kind of wordy conceptual system, at least not in the way that we can let our system take the rear and let it unfold our existence logically for us. Therefore I am suspicious of philosophies telling me what I 'ought' to do, or that pretends to be able to instruct me on how to act. We can not let philosophy instruct us on what do do, we can not let it speak about the future, we cannot incorporate the becoming of spirit (or what have you) so that we ward off the anxiety that we are left alone to our freedom; the anxiety to make the 'leap of faith' cannot be grounded in pre-established logic, it is a jump, a leap into the unknown. The pretense that we can think ourselves away from this leap, won't do us much good as we start to look down on this actuality (reality as a working-in-becoming (wirklichkeit)), from the view-point of whatever abstraction we anxiously and rigidly cling to.
I let myself go a bit. You asked about Hegel. What I scribbled above is precisely why I am interested in Hegel! My (Zizek's) reading of Hegel is not the usual one. It is not the idea that Hegel is a panlogicist swallowing up the world into the sublation of the totalizing concept, and it is not the Pippinesque Hegel, which proposes a reformist-unfolding type reading, which is moreso 'epistemological', but still instructive. In the bad sense.
Our Hegel (and I truly believe this to be supported by the primary text), is the Hegel of the Entscheidung! The Hegel centered on the groundless nature of The Decision, the abyssal and unfounded leap into the unknown. The decision that is truly a decision since it cannot rely on what has been pre-established, but is forced to make a decision in an undecidable situation. At the very end of the Science of Logic, it is logic (qua mode of God), that freely decides to release itself into Nature. Logic is pre-natural/spiritual according to Hegel, but the caveat is that we can only come to think God in his logical mode as Absolute Spirit (the very end of Hegel's sytem). The absolute beginning opens up to us at the very end, and the very end presupposes the absolute beginning. But the beginning is never enough, so on we go. I hope that makes sense, what I'm trying to say, is even though Hegel might have a gargantuan system, this system can strictly never tell us on what to do, on what decision to make, or how to make it, or what the future holds. If there is anything beyond Absolute Spirit, it is that which we come into contact with the moment we close the book we're reading. That which comes to us (toekomst/zukunft/future) as against wordness (tegenwoordig/gegenwart/present). The Schelling quote you shared is where Hegel and Schelling are deeply in agreement. Again and again, Hegel will assert in his corpus that we the negative is not merely negative, but that by thinking, and notionally meditating with the present, we can see the positive in the negative, the light in the dark, so to say. The status of contradiction (negativity), as positive, is something I take to heart, and find to be very personal. As he says in the Encyclopedia, the goal of philosophy is reconciliation (with the present). I have much more to say, but this little box I'm typping in is not suited for it. If it's fine with you, you can respond to my email (dimitricrooijmans@gmail.com). Next two weeks I'm going to be very busy, but I will definitely respond afterwards.
I appreciate these reflections very much, thank you. As I continue to deepen my grasp of Hegel, I find over and over again that he and Schelling are far closer than it may appear based on Schelling's late reply to Hegel. On the other hand, I do wonder if Zizek's reading of Hegel is itself a Schellingian one!
The 'Freedom' essay, as you already hinted, is very important. I've discussed the Schelling-Hegel nexus in some videos: https://youtu.be/Xwodffm9f90?si=ZSPdb-qkuTTtE7JX I also wrote about this in Ch. 3 of my short monograph on Schelling: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/the-re-emergence-of-schelling-philosophy-in-a-time-of-emergency.pdf