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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
1 White does not specify whether he thinks my paraphrases are inaccurate, so the sense of their being “free-floating” is, I presume, that they are not anchored in a sufficient number of quotations from Hegel. In that case the question is whether what I say about Hegel is true or not. I do not, incidentally, assert the “intellectual bankruptcy” of Kojève's interpretation of Hegel, but rather of the use of Kojève to argue a la Fukayama for the “end of history”, as the grammar of the relevant sentences should make clear. Quotations from White's essay, where there is any chance of ambiguity, will be cited as HS, from his Absolute Knowledge as AK, from my Schelling and Modern European Philosophy as SMEP, and from my translation of the Munich Lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge 1994) as OHMP Google Scholar. Other Schelling references will be given according to the standard mode of citing Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Sammtliche Werke, ed Schelling, K F A, I Abtheilung Vols 1–10, II Abtheilung Vols 1-4, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–1861, eg I/7 p 204 Google Scholar.
2 In 1806 Schelling says, using a word Heidegger sometimes also uses: “for being, actual, real (wirkliche) being is precisely self-disclosure/revelation (Selbstoffenbartung). If it is to be as One then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/reveal itself if it is just 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 [Band, in the sense of copula] of itself and an other” (I/7 p 54).
An obvious term for this is, surely, “ontological difference”, albeit not entirely in Heidegger's sense (on this see below). As a further illustration of the interpretative problems involved here, compare Burbidge's objection, in favour of his version of Hegel, to the approach which “starts by assuming conditioned existence, and reflectively explores the conditions that make it possible”, which he associates with Schelling, Kant, and Fichte, with White's account of the “conditions of possibility” of “actuality” in Hegel. Who is the real Hegel here?
3 This view seems to me first to become an object of explicit criticism in the work of Jacobi. See also my “Rethinking the History of the Subject: Jacobi, Schelling, and Heidegger” in eds Dews, Peter and Critchley, Simon, Deconstnictive Subjectivities, forthcoming, SUNY Press 1995 Google Scholar.
4 I also think one can, despite Beiser's doubts, show that the kind of problems dealt with in relation to the Absolute by Schelling and the Romantics are analogous in interesting ways to contemporary concerns about self-referentiality (though the “just” was inappropriate). Bernard Williams, for example, thinks it is meaningful to talk of the “absolute conception” in terms of what “fundamental physics” will tell us. The very notion of an absolute conception of the world is problematic, though, for reasons which were central to the Romantic tradition. Hilary Putnam claims against Williams, in line with aspects of the Romantic and Schellingian positions concerning the irreducibility of being to reflection: “It cannot be the case that scientific knowledge (future fundamental physics) is absolute and nothing else is; for fundamental physics cannot explain the possibility of referring to or stating anything, including fundamental physics itself” ( Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge and London 1990, p 176 Google Scholar). Assuming we understand fundamental physics to be dependent upon the principle of sufficient reason, this is a version of the problem of grounding established by Jacobi and carried on in other ways by Fichte's and Schelling's insistence that one cannot conjure a knowing and acting subject out of an object (an issue which Putnam sees in terms of the irreducibility of “intentionality”, but which shares an analogous structure). See SMEP p 17-22.
5 Whether my exclusion of Schelling's theology as a serious philosophical topic is so different from the anti-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel, in which God in a strictly theological sense does not get a look-in either, is such a complex hermeneutic problem that I will not try to address it here. Given Hegel's attachment to the ontological proof, which I presume one secularises into a conception of the identity of thinking and being, my own secularisation of Schelling's questions about being and God into questions concerning the prior facticity of the world and of its intelligibility can be understood as a similar manoeuvre.
6 I do, pace John Burbidge, think Schelling's ideas may still be important to theology, but this was not my reason for writing about Schelling.
7 Frank is not regarded as one of the “most important of the recent commentators” on Schelling, whom White names as Walter Schulz, Horst Fuhrmans and Harald Holz (AK p 162). I disagree.
8 References to Frank are to Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, Frankfurt 1975, new edition Munich 1992 Google Scholar.
9 Hegel himself began to realise this, as the passages from the later introduction to the Logic of Being cited below will suggest.
10 Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester University Press 1993)Google Scholar, especially in the chapter on Hegel.
11 This does not mean that he uses the conception only in order to move beyond it, having shown its inadequacy. Clearly this is the pattern of the Logic, but the inadequacy Hegel shows is not the one which matters here.
12 For Schelling's way of dealing with this see SMEP p 110.
13 That Schelling was to a degree also just a logical child of his time should not obscure the ways in which he was also ahead of his time: this may involve a degree of reading against the grain, but the evidence of his sophisticated logical conception is clearly there, as I try to show in Chapters 4 and 5 in particular.
14 Tugendhat, Ernst, Logisch-semantische Propädeutik Stuttgart 1986 p 62 Google Scholar. There is no doubt that Schelling is much closer to recent logic than Hegel, as the opposition between a “logic of concepts” and Schelling's analysis of propositions makes clear. As such it is not merely an anachronism, as White suggests it is (AK p 52), to look at the issue in these terms.
15 This is one reason why Heidegger sometimes understands “being” as “being true”.
16 Following Fichte, whom Schelling follows in the Weltalter, I suggest that “Even to discriminate that A is not B is actually a proposition, a judgement which must be grounded in identity, in that A is that which is not B” (SMEP p 110). Identity and difference, as relations between terms, must be grounded in that which allows them to be identified or differentiated.
17 This does not commit one to any more than Gadamer's “Being that can be understood is language”: see SMEP p 117-20.
18 Hogrebe talks of the existential quantifier in Schelling, as “the predicative, rational echo of our non-predicative pre-rational relationship to something or other that exists” (Hogrebe 1989 p 125-6).
19 Most notably the problem of the relationship of self-consciousness to this account of ontology.
20 The impossibility of reflexive determination of it means that only negative predicates can be attached to it: this does not mean, though, that it is just another negative category, as I hope I have already shown.
21 I cannot give a detailed account of Schelling's arguments in OHMP here. I would claim, though, that read in the framework I provide here they do have the force which White denies them in AK.
22 The term “intellectual intuition” is problematic, because it suggests a relationship between intellect and intuition when what is in fact required is something which is irrelational: otherwise the failed model of the subject looking at itself as an object, which Fichte realised could never explain subjectivity, is reintroduced. The requirement in terms of the Logic is for something “immediate” which yet has “subjective”, epistemological status, rather than being an object of a category (or a proposition) which identifies it. Hegel, as both Frank and Henrich show, never really got beyond the idea that self-consciousness was a category which designates an object like any other. This thought is more and more discredited in the contemporary philosophy of mind. Notice how circumspect Schelling is about the term “intellectual intuition” in OHMP and how he insists on the need for there to be a subject to begin with. On this issue see Theunissen, , “Die Aufhebung des Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings” in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 83 1976, p 16 Google Scholar, and, above all, Frank's Introduction to the new edition of Frank 1975 (Munich 1992).
23 Which, of course, renders the location of a “Phenomenology” in the Encyclopedia very problematic.
24 There is no space here to deal with the issue of the ontological status of the cognitive subject. On this see the New Introduction in Frank 1992: the issue is recurrently dealt with in Frank's work.
25 The early Schelling associates “unbedingt” with that which cannot be talked of as a thing, thus to which no predicate is attachable which would identify it This later becomes the insight that being cannot be subsumed into logic, as the Umkehrung suggests.