Bowie - Schelling and Modern European Philosophy

The significance of the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (17751854) in the history of modern philosophy has only recently begun to be understood. For too long the importance of Schellings later work in particular was obscured by the demise of German Idealism, which led to him being seen as merely a precursor of Hegel. I want to argue that, in the light of the contemporary concern with the end of Western metaphysics and with post-metaphysical thinking, Schellings work is in need of reassessment. Most recent work on Schelling in English has continued to regard him as an adjunct to Hegel. This has meant that he is understood either as the target of Hegels revelation of previous philosophys failure to overcome immediacy, the failure to articulate the relationship of being and thinking within philosophy, or as merely an episode in the story which sees Hegel as definitive of all that happens in philosophy until Nietzsche and Heidegger begin the real process of liberation from Western metaphysics. In the following I will try to show that, rather than being merely a foil to Hegel, Schelling in fact helps define key structures in modern philosophy by revealing the flaws in Hegel in ways which help set the agenda for philosophy even today. My aim here is to facilitate access to Schellings work by a reconsideration of his philosophical project in the light both of the recent attempts to establish new conceptions of reason and of the attacks on the very notion of reason that have been associated with post-modern thinking.

Having dominated the philosophical scene until his death in 1831, Hegels philosophy was then subject to massive attack from many directions. What is too rarely realised is how significant Schellings contribution was to this attack. The fact is that some of the Young Hegelians heard Schellings lectures in Berlin in 18412, when he took up Hegels chair of philosophy, or were aware via others lecture notes of some of the content of these lectures, as well as of Schellings earlier criticisms of Hegel. Clearly Schelling was regarded, not least because of his undoubted conservatism in later life, as another enemy of the philosophy of the future (Feuerbach). This was in part an apt judgement, in that Schelling remained faithful to many Idealist conceptions even as he was undermining them in other ways. In histories of philosophy in the Idealist tradition, the vital stage is the highest and final one, which has to comprehend the preceding stages within itself. The aim, the common aim of the German Idealists from Fichte onwards, is nothing less than the completion of metaphysics, the understanding of the Absolute (the meaning of this notorious term will become clear later) in the light of Kants critiques of dogmatic metaphysics. In order to achieve this understanding, the philosopher has to make sure that his own philosophy is the last possible philosophy. For the later Schelling this was to be his positive philosophy, which would lead beyond Hegels Idealist system to a new historically based philosophical religion by showing the impossibility of a system of reason grounding itself. Schelling does lead beyond Hegel, but he does not achieve a higher synthesis: the ideas of the later Schelling that matter now are those that reveal the impossibility of the sort of metaphysics advocated by Hegel.

One hardly needs to suggest that the ambitions of the philosophy of the period of Schelling and Hegel belong to a bygone era. We are now more likely to ponder what comes after philosophy, given the failure of totalising projects like Hegels. The situation these days, as Richard Rorty puts it, is one where we find Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and pragmatical commentators on Derrida like myself jostling for the position of historys first really radical anti-Platonist (Rorty 1991b p. 96). Rorty cites Michel Foucaults contention that the crucial danger now is that philosophers are doomed to find Hegel waiting patiently at the end of whatever road we travel (ibid.), because attempts to get beyond metaphysical concepts will always at some level presuppose precisely such concepts. The very notion of overcoming metaphysics keeps revealing itself as dialectically dependent on what is to be overcome. Schelling was one of the first philosophers to try to avoid the fate of really being Hegel despite oneself. In this he was followed by the Young Hegelians, who were the first to talk of the end of philosophy, much in the sense that has become familiar again in recent years.