The Schellingian Alternative to Hegel.. From Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain

8/3/2019 The Schellingian Alternative to Hegel.. From Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain

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The Schellingian Alternative

Andrew Bowie, Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge

The criticisms of Schelling and Modern European Philosophy by my interlocutors fall

into two broad categories: criticisms of my approach and objections to my philosophicalarguments. The issues raised have, I think, more than local significance, hence my fairly

extensive attention to some of them here. Concerning my approach, Alan White remarks

upon the disproportion in the number of my quotations from Schelling, as opposed to

those from Hegel, claiming that the '"Hegel" refuted by Bowie's Schelling is thus

constituted, for the most part, from Bowie's own free-floating paraphrases'.1 Given the

lack, apart from White's own excellent accounts, of philosophically serious books in

English on Schelling that deal with the Hegel-critique, as opposed to the ever-growing

wealth of interpretations and translations of Hegel, it was, I think, inevitable that there bean imbalance in the attention paid to the thinkers. Next, however, one reads John

Burbidge: 'One can legitimately suspect, then, that the real Schelling has hardly received

a hearing'. - A piece of 'shadow boxing', then, if ever there was one! - The idea that

Schelling has not received a hearing is, I presume, answered by White on my behalf. The

validity of my interpretation of Schelling's arguments is a question for the readers of this

essay and SMEP. I will, after briefly trying to clarify my position in relation to Frederick

Beiser, concentrate mainly on Alan White's detailed and challenging objections to my

arguments. I find it hard to reply to John Burbidge because he does not address any of my

main arguments concerning Schelling - or, after his initial contention, very much else thatI say - preferring to give his own account of Schelling. Some of the points I shall make in

relation to Beiser and White seem relevant to Burbidge's account, so I hope this will

constitute a kind of reply.

Beiser formulates the problems with my approach very cogently. My worry

concerning his suggestion that one take Schelling 'on his own terms' was that too many of

those terms would have to be seen within the kind of detailed context which his own

invaluable work in this period has provided. The terms are also, crucially, open to a wide

variety of interpretations, as a comparison of Burbidge's account of the question of'immediacy' and 'intuition' with my own linking of it to 'world-disclosure' can suggest.2 I

opted, therefore, to take those of Schelling's terms which seemed to fit the broader

context of philosophical 'actuality', understood in the sense of a constellation that

emerges between past and present, and tried thereby to combine hermeneutic

reconstruction with an approach relevant to contemporary philosophy. Whether we can

finally separate out the horizon of our own understanding from the attempt to reconstruct


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past contexts seems doubtful to me. I was, then, essentially trying to answer my own

question as to why certain major aspects of Schelling's philosophy are still very much

alive now.

In this respect Beiser may have read me in a somewhat tendentious manner on the

question of 'metaphysics'. He asserts that 'there simply is no generally accepted criterionof metaphysics': I agree. My intention was, therefore, to read Schelling as critical of a

view of metaphysics which has dominated so much philosophical discussion in the wake

of Heidegger, Derrida and others - a view which is often, rightly or wrongly, associated

with the name of Hegel - namely that metaphysical thinking is:

inherently reflexive, in that it relies on reason recognising itself in the mirror

of the world: 'Philosophy remains true to its metaphysical beginnings as long

as it can assume that cognitive reason can recognise itself in the rationallystructured world or can itself give a rational structure to nature and history'

(SMEP p. 10, quotation from Jrgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches

Denken, Frankfurt 1988, p. 42).

I understood metaphysics, then, in terms of the problem of reflection as it is set out in

SMEP.3 My refusal to write off Schelling's alternative metaphysical conceptions (as

opposed to his theological ones) should be apparent from the conclusion of SMEP and

from my use of Schelling's arguments against both past and contemporary philosophical

positions.4 Furthermore, even Schelling's more 'metaphorical' insights into manymetaphysical problems still retain a revelatory aesthetic and cognitive power rare in

modern philosophy. My main point concerning metaphysics was, though, to suggest via

Schelling that Hegel was not going to provide us with a viable modern metaphysics,

which leads me to Alan White.

For White's Hegel the real is that which is grasped in the 'science of the determinations

fundamental to things and to thought' (AK p. 74, quoted SMEP p. 141), which, importantly, he sees as 'first

philosophy'.My remarks here can only claim to question White's Hegel, albeit with some evidence from

Hegel's own texts: the fact that White's is a pretty deflationary Hegel may or may not suggest the moregeneral applicability of what I say to central ideas in Hegel. My contention, backed by aspects of

Schelling's work from the whole of his career and by Manfred Frank's re-interpretation of Schelling, is that

philosophy which purports finally to show that determinations are fundamental both to things and to

thought lays claim to a position which cannot be articulated in a philosophical system. This renders such

first philosophy impossible, though it does not invalidate all of the central insights of Kantian and post-

Kantian transcendental philosophy concerning the constitutive role of the subject in the articulation of truth.


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What I propose is, therefore, not the late Schelling's own position, because he has recourse to

theology as a way of responding to the failure of first philosophy.5 My assumption is that, even though this

is an invalid let-out, the reasons which led Schelling to reject the Hegelian solution to the problem of

grounding a modern philosophical system, are far more important than his taking a theological route.

Where White pleads for that aspect of Hegel which he thinks can be converted into 'transcendental

reconstruction', and thereby says farewell to the 'metaphysically constructive' Hegel, I plead for the

Schelling who leads in the direction of modern hermeneutics and Critical Theory, while saying farewell to

Schelling the 'metaphysical theologian'.6

Significantly, the idea that the only alternative to Hegel offered by Schelling's

criticisms is metaphysical theology dominates White's arguments. When White cites

Schelling, as quoted in SMEP p. 163-4, on 'why is there anything at all, why is there not

nothing' he misses out the vital last part of the quotation: 'I cannot answer this question

with mere abstractions from real being...I must first of all admit some reality or otherbefore I can come to that abstract being'. This hardly squares with White's contention that

Schelling means there now 'might yet be nothing' (though there is an initial verbal

ambiguity of the kind White suggests in Schelling's formulation). In AK, e.g. p. 80,

White invariably sees the 'real ground' in theological terms, but there is no necessary

reason to do so, unless one thinks, as White does, that a complete 'transcendental

ontology' is possible without reference to the 'real ground', and that transcendental

ontology, rather than theology, is the answer to 'nihilism'. The real ground can, though, be

understood in terms of facticity, which is how the later Schelling initially does understand

it, before attempting to move from facticity to a viable philosophical religion. Despite mydisregarding the theological issue, I would, then, claim my position is supported by

Schelling's best philosophical arguments, and that the subsequent direct and indirect

reception of Schelling's ideas by Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger,

Adorno and others helps confirm my position. This reception seems incomprehensible if

one takes Burbidge's reading as the only way to understand what Schelling was trying to

get at. Why would such a failed theologian's thoughts find their way into nearly every

significant anti-idealist philosopher after Hegel? This is, admittedly, not a philosophical

argument, but a hermeneutic demand to make more sense of Schelling'sWirkungsgeschichte.

My case against Hegel does not just hinge on my 'acceptance of Henrich's

interpretation of "negation of negation"' (HS), but rather on 'Frank's demonstration that

Schelling does not simply invoke pre-reflexive being, because it is the necessary ground

of the self-cancellation of reflection, not a consequence of the failure to go through the

exertion of the concept' (SMEP p. 176). Henrich, White maintains, holds to the


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'misconception that Hegel conceived of formal-logical negation as propositional rather

than conceptual' (AK p. 167), but why does that invalidate such a fundamental point as

Henrich's concerning the Logic? Surely this needs explaining in detail. In the light of the

problems of conceptual negation I discuss below, if Hegel does hold a conceptual notion

of negation that actually makes things worse. White also does not deal anywhere withFrank's use of Henrich's position, which is to my mind by far the most cogent defense of

Schelling's position against Hegel.7

White is insistent that his 'version of the move from thinking to being' does not

require a version of the ontological proof, which Hegel thought he had to defend in order

to establish his version of the relationship between thinking and being. I suspect, though,

that the very notion of 'transcendental ontology' as 'first philosophy' which grounds

'absolute knowledge' is actually just another ontological proof, which moves from

necessities in thought to necessities in reality by defining the real in idealist terms as thatwhich can be determinately thought within a system. Given White's insistence that the

categorial system cannot, for transcendental reasons, be dependent on the 'factical realm'

(AK p. 85), that the categories are 'fundamental to all possible worlds' (AK p. 86), and,

most strikingly, that 'reality is incapable of testing the truths of philosophy' (AK p. 146)

this suspicion is hardly unfounded.

White's Hegelianism begins with 'actuality', which leads him to what initially

sounds like a kind of neo-Kantianism. The vital question here concerns the understanding

of 'actuality', which White equates with 'determinate thinking', claiming that actuality's

condition of possibility can be described by philosophy in terms of 'absolute knowledge'.In this sense our whole disagreement comes down to whether one can describe any kind

of knowledge as 'absolute'. White's example of water/sulfuric acid confronts one with a

restatement of a Kantian problem, with the Alfa-Centaurians playing the role of the

possible knowers of 'things in themselves', as opposed to our being mere knowers of

phenomena. Schelling's objection to the Kantian dichotomy was simple: 'to the extent to

which [the thing in itself] is a thing (object) it is not in itself, and if it is in itself it is not a

thing' (OHMP p. 102): things are objects determined by subjects in judgements, being is

not a thing. The real issue is the primacy of being, not of 'things in themselves', a notionwhich, as Schelling shows, already involves the reflexive category 'thing', in the sense of

object determinable by a predicate. This primacy does not, as we shall see below, depend

upon knowledge of things in themselves in a post-Kantian sense (or on knowledge of

anything else for that matter). The question is whether, to use Sartre's formulation of the

issue at hand, 'the phenomenon of being' can be reduced to the 'being of phenomena' (to

Hegelian 'essence', knowledge). If White's point about water were a pragmatic one,


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concerning the everyday sense of 'real', one could hardly disagree, in that we usually have

to use whatever we think is water, but it is not a pragmatic point, as the rest of his

arguments concerning absolute knowledge confirm.

My problem is with the necessary circularity suggested by assertions like 'a

transcendentally interpreted Hegel asks about the conditions of possibility of determinatethinking, given the determinate thinking that leads him to raise this question' (HS).

Heidegger famously suggests that all interpretation and all cognitive claims inherently

involve circularity, because we must already have initially understood that which we

wish to interpret, so that 'The decisive thing is not to get out of the circle but to get into it

in the right way' (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit Tbingen 1979 p. 153). I think White gets

into it in the wrong way. The key issues here are what is meant by 'given' and what is to

be said about the fact that thinking is determinate at all. I raise the latter issue as follows

in SMEP, in a discussion of Schelling's approach to ontological difference:

As Frank suggests, what makes the world intelligible, thinking: 'cannot

enlighten itself about its own facticity (Bestand), about the contingency of

what imposes itself as a law of thought upon it; it experiences its necessity

every time de facto. As such one can say that the a priori status of the logical

is (...) not itself logically grounded (Frank 1975 p. 139)'. It is this insight

which has prophetic import for the future of philosophy (SMEP p. 138).8

In Schelling's terms:

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, as there is

obviously something other and something more than mere reason in the

world, indeed there is something which strives beyond these barriers (OHMP

p. 147).

White suggests that Hegel treats the contingent as of 'no greater value than thecontingently non-existent' (AK p. 156). It is, of course, such conjuring away of the 'non-

identical', the supposedly merely contingent, which makes someone like Adorno, who

thereby follows in the tradition of Schelling, so suspicious of the kind of systematic

enterprise in which White follows Hegel.

When White claims 'that there is such [determinate] thinking (...) is established by

the asking of the question' (HS), he ignores the problem that the existential fact that there


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is such thinking must be independent of and prior to how we reflect upon its determinacy

in the 'determinate intellectual event'. Pre-reflexive awareness must, as Schelling's

critique of Descartes in OHMP makes clear, precede our ability to reflect in a 'categorial'

way upon what that awareness is:

'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 thinking that reflects upon it (...)

Indeed, true thinking must even be objectively independent of the subject that

reflects upon it; in other words, it will think all the more truly the less the

subject interferes with it (OHMP p. 47-8).

The asking of the question must be based upon that which can provide the answer, whichmust already be conscious, otherwise one would not know whether the answer is an

answer to that with which one began.9 The intersubjectively communicable truth of this

thinking is no doubt subsequent to the fact of its existence, but the question is whether we

can then lay claim to a philosophically defensible way of grounding that truth beyond our

fallibilistic interpretative praxis in relation to what is always already disclosed to us;

otherwise the structure of grounding the truth required to render it absolute must be

reflexive in the manner which I claim is invalid. White's claim that 'reality is incapable of

testing the truths of philosophy' shows, of course, how far he is reliant upon the notion of

a first philosophy which would provide a reflexive grounding.Some readers may be suspicious of my use of the word 'grounding' in this context.

White, though, claims at the end of AK that to be a Hegelian is 'to recognize the capacity

of the categorial absolute for grounding investigation into all problems of philosophical

interest and importance, and to be convinced that an adequate account of the categorial

absolute may, in principle, be developed' (AK p. 160). How, though, does one arrive at

this 'in principle', unless it is just presupposed or taken as an act of faith, by assuming the

categorial absolute really can ground philosophical investigation? One is led by this

either to a regress, or to the necessity of a ground which cannot be further articulated interms of knowledge itself. How would one know when the adequate account had actually

been achieved, unless it can be known to mirror what one began with, which means it

must presuppose it and already be familiar with it in a non-reflexive manner? This I take

to be Schelling's key question.

Underlying White's position are the claims that anything which 'resists the tooth of the concept' is

meaningless, and that, concomitantly, the question of being is meaningless, in that the concept of being is


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empty. The first of these requires a strong defense, which White does not anywhere provide, against all

those directions in modern philosophy, from the Kant of the third Critique to Heidegger and Adorno, which

locate what resists the concept in aesthetics, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is precisely the realm of the

non-conceptual, or 'non-identical'.10White (AK p. 149) cites Ernst Bloch, who claims that Hegel makes the

'thing in itself' a 'thing for us', via the metaphor of the dog unhesitatingly eating the bone. One thinks here,

though, of Schelling's objections to Fichte's conception of nature in a letter of 1801:

are you really of the opinion, for example, that light is only there so that

rational beings can also see each other when they talk to each other, and that

air is there so that when they hear each other they can talk to each other? (in

ed. Walter Schulz, Fichte-Schelling Briefwechsel, Frankfurt 1968, p.

140,.quoted SMEP p. 58).

Does White (let alone Bloch) really just mean that the only alternative way of considering

nature is 'worshipping' it 'as impenetrable' (AK p. 149)? I make clear at the end of

Chapter 2 that Schelling rejects such a mystical option, and Schelling expressly does so

in the chapter on Jacobi in OHMP, let alone in the Naturphilosophie. The second claim

must answer Schelling's detailed objections to Hegel's treatment of being.

White's Hegel deals with the question of being by providing the 'categories...under

which I can think anything at all as real - those under which alone I can have any

awareness at all' (HS). One of those 'categories' is 'being' as 'pure, unmediated,

indeterminate' and, as Hegel puts it, 'in principle inaccessible to further determinationthrough thought' (cited in HS, my emphasis): 'further', of course, means that it is already

determined. I can see no real difference in this description from that of Klaus Brinkmann,

which I cite in the following manner on SMEP p. 142:

Brinkmann sees the basis of Schelling's critique of Hegel as the idea that

'there is something which is wholly other (...) in relation to thought, which

cannot be represented conceptually'. He objects that 'This other, which is

called the reality of the real (Wirklichkeit des Wirklichen) in Schelling, isnaturally itself a category, which, as it means absolute otherness in relation to

thought, is normally designated by "being"' (Brinkmann quotations from

Klaus Hartmann ed. Die ontologische Option, Berlin 1976, p. 131).

My objection to Brinkmann's conception, which seems, in this respect at least, congruent

with that of White, goes as follows:


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The problem with this argument lies in explaining how thought can

encompass its own relationship to what is absolutely other to it in a 'category'

which identifies it. The only way a category can be determined is by its

difference from other categories in thought (...) but this difference has to beabsolute: there cannot be any other 'category' of this kind. Such a category

requires the articulation of a structure which includes a) this particular

thought (of absolute otherness, or 'being'), b) what really is the absolute other

of thought, c) that which encompasses both as negatively related but actually

identical aspects of itself. In fact to have such a thought presupposes the

success of the whole of Hegel's System (SMEP p. 142).

The crucial question is what sort of concept or category 'being' therefore is: Schelling'scontention is that being cannot be contained within any logic of concepts.

Is it, then, meaningful, as Schelling often does, to make a distinction between

what Heidegger will term 'being', and 'entities'? The denial of such a distinction in fact

forms the basis of White's 'first philosophy'; Terry Pinkard (Hegel's Dialectic,

Philadelphia 1988, p. 184) also suggests in relation to Heidegger and Hegel that Hegel

shows the notion of 'ontological difference' is incoherent. Heidegger's frequent over-

dramatisation of the notion of 'ontological difference', and the obscurity of many of his

formulations of the notion have tended to lead many people to reject it as irrational. This

is demonstrably a mistake, as the following argument can show.It is usually accepted that Hegel begins the Logic with a Parmenidean conception

of being. The fact is, though, that the endless problems over the beginning of the Logic,

particularly over the equivalence of being and nothing, arise because Hegel fails to

understand ontological difference, in much the same way as Parmenides fails to do so.11

Ernst Tugendhat has shown how Parmenides' problem of non-being - the problem of

saying something is not - results because Parmenides assimilates all thought, including

that of 'being', to the structure of perceptions (which is also where one is led by a logic of

concepts in White's sense). In perception one, for example, either hears something orhears nothing: taking perception for a model of dealing with being means that 'thinking x

is not' is falsely equated with 'thinking nothing'. Because

the complex structure of 'something as something' is compressed into a simple

'something' it can no longer be said of the 'something' that it 'is not' because

the 'is' has, so to speak, become one with the 'something' ('being' is 'mistaken


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for', as Heidegger says, 'entities') (Ernst Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufstze,

Frankfurt a.M. 1992, p. 46).

Tugendhat claims, much as Schelling did, that Hegel's notion of 'pure being' corresponds

to the Parmenidean conception, and leads to similar problems (see OHMP p. 139-40).The issue just raised becomes significant in White's discussion of the

'transcendental ideal'. The determinacy of a concept in relation to contradictory (as

opposed to contrary) predicates must, surely, entail the law of excluded middle. Now

clearly neither 'bald' nor 'hairy' applies to the concept 'animal', or, for that matter, to the

concept 'concept'. How, though, can we actually say a predicate is applicable to a

concept, except in a judgement concerning that to which we think the concept refers,

which has the structure 'there is x such that y'? In AK (p. 52) White insists (as he does

against Henrich) that Hegel's is a 'logic of concepts', not of propositions, in which eachconcept is only determinate as what it is in relation to its other (e.g. being/nothing,

presence/absence, etc.), and to the totality. The first problem is that this will not work in

relation to the question of being, as I show below. It probably, though, does not work in

any other way either, in that 'forgetting the way in which the structure of identity that

makes meaning possible at all is constituted at the level of propositions, not of signifiers'

(SMEP p. 75). Both Hegelian concepts (in the sense I take it White intends) and

semiotically conceived signifiers are differentially constituted: each object's identity

comes about via what it is not, but unless one moves to the semantic level (which

Schelling does via his ontology, as I show in Chapter 4) one ends up in the logical troublesuggested by Tugendhat, which Kant himself only sometimes avoids. To avoid this

trouble the assumption must be that only propositions, not concepts or predicates, can be

negated, on the assumption that, as Frank is cited as saying in SMEP: '"The world is not

the totality of objects [for which the concepts stand], but rather of what can be established

in statements about these objects: the totality of states of affairs"' (SMEP p. 74) - of the

form 'something as something'.

White's way of stating the problem strictly leads to the nonsensical statement:

'The determinate concept animal is either hairy or not hairy'. There are, admittedly,problems in making sense of what Kant means by the transcendental ideal, as White

suggests, but what I assumed was meant, based on the law of contradiction, are

judgements of the kind that 'All animals are hairy/triangular' and 'Some animals are not

hairy/triangular'. These are contradictories, and cannot both be true, in that the law of

excluded middle must apply because of the very form of the judgement. The apparently

odd 'Some animals are not triangular' is correct, on the assumption that we cannot be sure


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that we will not find an animal or animals which are in fact triangular, even though we

know there are lots which are not, so that the content of a judgement of this form is

empirically underdetermined. The main point is that this does not prevent 'Some animals

are not triangular' rendering the first, universal judgement false. The real problem lies,

therefore, in how a concept is understood to be determinate.Schelling's point is a point about the real ground, which could only be finally

determined if one were able to complete the process of determining the totality, by

reducing the being of the phenomena to the phenomena of being: hence the ultimate

objection to any theoretical claim to be able to do so of the kind suggested by Hegel. The

determinate concept 'animal' can, in Schelling's ontological understanding of the issue,

only be determinate when applied to that of which it is a true predicate, which these days

is generally stated in the form 'there is an x such that x is an animal'. As White states it

the 'determinate concept' 'animal' cannot be determinate: how do we know what he meansuntil it is specified in a judgement? In White's terms 'animal' is determinate in relation to

'not-animal' ('no concept can be concretely understood in isolation from its opposite' (AK

p. 144)), but does this give sufficient criteria for concretely identifying the object x as an

animal? This was what led Schelling to his oft-cited (and often misunderstood) argument

against Hegel:

Concepts as such do in fact exist nowhere but in consciousness, they are,

therefore, taken objectively, after nature, not before it...abstractions cannot be

there, be taken for realities, before that from which they are abstracted;becoming cannot be there before something becomes, existence not before

something exists (OHMP p. 145).

This obviously cashes out into the form 'There is an x such that x is/is not an animal'. 12

What White claims with regard to the law of excluded middle is the case in relation to

contrary propositions, such as 'All animals are hairy', as opposed to 'no animal is hairy',

which are (if they can be interpreted appropriately) both false, even though they are

mutually exclusive, so that the law of excluded middle does not apply. In the case oftriangles and hairiness the latter may, of course, be true, but not because of anything to do

with the law of excluded middle. Schelling was both very aware of the importance of the

difference between contradictories and contraries, as his extended remarks on negation in

Aristotle in the Philosophy of Mythology show, and suspicious of a 'logic of concepts', in

Hegel's sense of one which begins with 'pure being', which Schelling saw as 'negative

philosophy'.13


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White's related objection to my adherence to Schelling's insistence on affirmation

before negation can now be used to make our disagreement clearer. The problem is

complicated by the fact that separating the logical aspects of this problem from its

semantic aspects is tricky. Tugendhat suggests there is a 'tension between the sense of

predication which demands a determinacy in the sense of a "yes or no" and the predicateswhich are actually available, which are always only more or less determined'.14

Presumably 'non-bald', if it is to be of equivalent status with 'hairy' must actually be an

example of a 'negation of the negation', arrived at by negating the term for 'not-hairy'.

The question is whether we can make sense of such a negation of the negation without

presupposing that which can be either hairy or not-hairy, via the always necessary 'there

is an x such that x is...'. Furthermore, understanding the absence of something must

presuppose understanding what it is that is absent, which must already have, to use

Heidegger's terms, 'disclosed' itself in a 'world' as part of what there is. The ability to say'there is no x' must be analysed in terms of a world in which the possibility of predicating

x of something is already understood.

An important problem in White's position is revealed if one tries out the predicate

'true'. In White's formulation: 'Which then is the affirmation, "true" or "false"? Is "true an

affirmation one must have as a ground before one can understand the negation "false"?

Why not the reverse? And could one be said to know the meaning of "true" without

knowing it to be the opposite of "false"?' This does not work. 'False' can only be arrived

at by the negation of the propositional content of a statement, in the form 'It is not the

case that x', which necessarily presupposes a truth claim if it is to be intelligible at all.15

White's position suggests that 'It is true that x' is strictly equivalent to 'It is not the case

that x is not the case', which, though, still has to presuppose a positive truth claim. True

and false are not symmetrical, much as 'being' and 'nothing' are not symmetrical. Clearly

we in one rather indeterminate sense grasp what it is for something to be via our sense of

non-existence, but we can only do so in an already disclosed world which 'ex-sists',

where we speak of 'x as y', not just of 'x', as we saw above. Predicates may require their

opposites to be distinct (though this will nearly always involve semantic problems), but

saying that there are x's cannot be established by saying there are x's because they are noty's, etc. ad infinitum.16 As is well known, Hegel does see all particular judgements as

false or 'at best merely correct' (AK p. 146) inasmuch as they can only be fully

determinate when speculatively aufgehoben in the totality: the problem again is whether

this final position, which would ground the truth as the final Aufhebung of these

judgements, can be articulated without presupposing it, which is where we came in.

Can there, then, be a philosophy which articulates the Absolute by being able to


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say it has finally reached the truth, as opposed to the position of the late Schelling where

the idea of such closure is rejected, at times in the following startling manner:

All is just a product of time and we do not know what is absolutely true, but

just what the time allows within which we are enclosed. We are beginning tograsp that eternal truths are really only propositions which are abstracted from

the present state of things (Schelling, System der Weltalter (1827-8), ed. S.

Peetz, Frankfurt 1990, p. 16)?

What does this do to Schelling's view of truth and its relation to negation? I suggest in

detail in SMEP, following Wolfram Hogrebe's Prdikation und Genesis (Frankfurt 1989),

that Schelling, especially in the Weltalter philosophy, is a theorist of predication, who

begins to explore issues usually associated with Frege and his successors as a way ofdoing ontology. Schelling's view of negation is summarised in his claim that 'the properly

understood 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 (I/8 p. 213-4)' (Quoted SMEP p. 110, see also pp. 64-

7 of SMEP). To take one of Schelling's examples:

E.g. the statement this body is red. Obviously the quality of the colour red is

here what could not be for itself, but is now, via the identity with the subject,

the body: it is what is predicated. To the extent to which what predicates, thebody, is the Esse of this attribute it really is this attribute (as the statement

says); but it does not follow that the concept of the subject body is for that

reason (logically) the same as the concept of the predicate red. (I/7 p. 204-5,

Quoted SMEP p. 65-6).

The claim here is clearly that being is not entities, and that being must be understood

propositionally.17This version of ontological difference is vital to explain White's way of

stating the conclusion that the 'entirety of reality', the real ground, is in Schelling's terms'both hairy and bald...and animalian and triangular'. In the first sense Schelling points to

in the passage just cited this is true, via the universal applicability of the existential

quantifier in Schelling's ontology,18 but it does not mean that the real ground is logically

of the same order as its predicates, including, of course, 'body' when it is a predicate.

White claims that those who view 'the object, rather than the determinations of

thought, as the ground of truth' (AK p. 146) fall prey to pre-Kantian dogmatism, but this


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misses the crucial point that it is not the object, which can, for Schelling as for Kant, only

be such for a subject, but being as the real ground of the relationship of the two which is

the issue here. The same animal can be hairy one moment and bald the next, the animal

can also be alive or dead, or even no longer an animal, in that its constituent parts have

been processed into new, perhaps triangular, forms. In the present case we require a wayof dealing with 'That which is an animal is steak, shoes, bone-meal, triangular etc.', or,

changing the temporal sequence, 'That which is grass is a cow', which require the positive

x that Schelling insists must ground predication (see I/8 pp. 213-4, cited SMEP p. 110).

The x need not, as White claims it must, be conceived of as a 'perfect being', it is just the

real ground of all predicates, the universal underlying 'argument' which is made

determinate by its 'functions'. This explains what Schelling means by the 'absolute

subject', namely that which cannot itself be characterised by a predicate, on pain of it

ceasing to be the 'argument'. This, then, is the basis of how Schelling understands 'being'.It does not, I hasten to add, solve anything like all the problems at issue here! 19

What, then, of Hegel's treatment of 'being' in this respect? White claims that 'the

first thought, as first, can have no content' (AK p. 40), so being, as first thought, is

revealed 'to be Nothingness'. The aim, upon which White insists, is that 'thought can

exhaustively think itself' (AK p. 41). This must, I presume, be understood as an act of

reflection, where the 'first' thought sees the 'second' thought as itself and knows that it has

done so exhaustively (though how something empty could do this is already a mystery).

Earlier White claims that 'only with the return to the Logic's beginning at the end of the

circular system is pure Being [the first thought] finally confirmed as the starting point forthe comprehensive absolute science' (AK p. 24). It is this confirmation, which is

expressly required in White's position if we are to talk of 'absolute knowledge', that I

question. The return to the beginning at the end must, surely, entail the ability to

recognise the beginning as the beginning:

The problem (...) is simply this: how can something re-cognise itself without

already knowing itself before ceasing to be itself? The attempt to use the

negation of the negation as the immanent principle (...) will invalidate Hegel'swhole attempt at a self-bounded metaphysical system (SMEP p. 142).

I think it also invalidates the ability of 'transcendental reconstruction' to demonstrate that

it gives us the determinations fundamental to things and to thought. Frank, following

Henrich's interpretation of Fichte, uses the metaphor of the mirror in this context: how

could I see myself as myself in a mirror if I did not already have a pre-reflexive


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familiarity with myself that allows me to recognise that the image is an image of me,

rather than of a random world-object? This means that any initial immediacy cannot be

empty in the manner Hegel sometimes - see below - maintains, and that a further

reflexive determination of it is impossible, on pain of a regress. 20 Immediacy thus will fall

outside the play of reflection, in the same way as the criterion of my self-identificationmust already be there before I reflect myself in the mirror.

For White even being, as we saw, must be understood within the 'logic of

concepts', which are understood as being determinate by their not being other concepts

('presence'/'absence' etc.): otherwise the claim that 'Neither any individual category nor

the Absolute Idea is dependent for concreteness, determinacy or reality - in the logical

sense of distinctness from others - upon a factical realm' (AK p. 85) makes no sense, in

that the principle which makes them determinate at all must be immanent to them. The

'method', White claims, depends upon the fact that the return to the beginning is where'the logician truly knows that point for the first time, and knows also how it was reached'

(AK p. 57). This means that at the outset the logician did not 'truly know' the beginning.

The question is, though, whether the beginning is wholly indeterminate, which would

mean that 're-cognising' it becomes impossible: the logician must, surely, already be

familiar with the beginning in some way which is not just empty. Schelling insists that

'Hegel presupposed intuition with the first step of his Logic and could not take a single

step without assuming it' ((I/10 p. 138), OHMP p. 143).21 If Hegel's objection in both the

Phenomenology and the Logic to Schelling's beginning with 'intellectual intuition', 'as if

shot from the pistol', is to be valid, and if it is the crux of the argument which supposedlysolves or obviates the question of being, there must be a convincing alternative which

does not require any initial sense of 'intuition'.

White claims that 'From the standpoint of the Absolute Idea, it is clear that pure

Being is in fact concrete totality, in that its development to the articulated totality is

logically necessary' (AK p. 58). This could, however, only be the case if it is

presupposed, as otherwise the end would not have the cognitive access to 'pure being' at

the beginning that would enable it to know it as itself. The fact is, of course, that Hegel

himself quite expressly invokes intuition in the Logic, as both Frank and MichaelTheunissen have shown. In the final chapter of the Logic Hegel asserts that 'the

beginning...is not something immediate for sensuous perception or representation, but for

thought, which one, on account of its immediacy can also call a supersensuous inner

intuition' (Wissenschaft der Logik I and II, Werke 5 and 6, Frankfurt 1969, II p. 553).

This corresponds, as Schelling himself maintains in OHMP, to the insistence on the need

for 'intellectual intuition', as otherwise thought could not recognise itself in the process of


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reflection and there could be no circular return that establishes the completeness of the

Logic.22 Hegel says as much in the later-added Introduction to the Logic of Being, by

admitting the need to presuppose that the path of the Phenomenology - understood as that

which articulates the truth contained in the immediacy of 'intellectual intuition' (see ibid.

I p. 76) - be included in the beginning of the Logic.23 In the passage from the 'AbsoluteIdea' Hegel goes on to say, thereby approaching Schelling's position: 'But in the absolute

method the universal is not to be seen just as something abstract, but as that which is

objectively universal, i.e. which is in itself the concrete totality, but this latter is not yet

posited, not yet for itself' (ibid. II p. 555): it may not yet be 'for itself', but it is clearly

there and must sustain itself through the process of negation, to which it cannot be

reduced if it is to be revealed in its truth at the end.

In the Introduction to the Logic of Being, problems with the idea that the Logic is

presuppositionless emerge most clearly:

One must admit that it is an essential observation - which will reveal itself

more clearly in the Logic itself - that going forwards is a return into the

ground, to the original and the true, from which that with which the beginning

was made [i.e. the concept of being] depends and by which it is in fact

produced (ibid. I p. 70).

Here the concept of being and the ground are explicitly differentiated, thereby preventing

White's limitation of the issue to the cognitive ground. As I show in detail in SMEP,without, admittedly, linking the demonstration by quotation to such remarks in Hegel, it

is precisely this reversal (Umkehrung) of the primacy of thought and being which

Schelling undertakes in the Erlangen lectures in the 1820's (see SMEP p. 130-140 and

Frank 1975 and the New Introduction to the 1992 edition), which forms the basis of his

critique of Hegel's system, and of the adoption of this reversal by Marx and others. Hegel

himself, then, begins to see towards the end of his life that he must rely upon the 'factical

realm', upon the real as opposed to the cognitive ground. White claims that 'some of

Hegel's locutions suggest that he is concerned with the real ground', but this means, asusual, for White that he is concerned with 'a transcendent, theological idealism' (AK p.

80). Although from Jacobi onwards concern with the real ground is often understood in

theological terms, it seems odd to omit to mention the thoroughly non-theological

approaches to this issue in Marx, Heidegger and others, all of whom were demonstrably

influenced by Schelling.

What is apparent in the passages just cited from the Logic is, as Frank puts it, that:


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the dialectical process, which leads from being [qua concept] to reflection, in

truth leads from reflection to being, admittedly with the proviso that this

being only becomes visible as the limit of reflection and can no longer be

thematised within the science of reason (Frank 1992 New Introduction).

White claims that there 'is nothing more to be said' about being, once it has been shown

to be subsumable within the Logic as the category identical with 'nothing', and that

'Regardless of the nature or accessibility of the real ground, the ideal is both accessible

and explicable' (AK p. 80). But the question is now whether this is defensible, given the

Umkehrung. It is surely only if being could be adequately dealt with in the Logic in the

manner White suggests that White's more modest Hegelianism could work.

The difficulties with Hegel's determination of being at the beginning of the Logicare explored by Schelling in terms which we considered when questioning the idea of a

logic of concepts: either 'Pure being is nothing' is a tautology (identity), which has said

nothing and allows no further development, or it must be a judgement (predication), in

which case pure being would have to be the 'subject, that which carries nothingness'

(OHMP p. 140), thus being of which essence - the movement of negation - is the

predicate. One might suggest again that being would have to be, so to speak, the universal

'argument': because it is of an ontologically different order from its 'functions' it cannot

be reduced to being a 'function'. In the 1841 Philosophy of Revelation Schelling insists

that 'The true prima materia of thought cannot be that which is thought [i.e. Hegelian'essence'] in the manner in which the particular form is that which is thought. It is only

that which lies at the basis, it relates to real thinking only as that which cannot not be

thought', which he terms 'intuition' (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung (1841-2)

(PO) Frankfurt 1977, p. 126, cf. OHMP p.152-3). Without this 'intuition', in the sense of

'immediacy', which cannot be characterised by a predicate, the basis of the differing

judgements of the same - cf. the example of the animal changed into other forms of its

constituents - is lost; as Frank says: 'If I change, in whatever way I wish, the external

form (the essence) of something...I have not touched its being in the least manner'. InSchelling's terms: 'That which blindly is does not exist, but it is rather existence

itself...For this reason one cannot attribute being to it' (PO p. 157): existence is not a

result of its concept. If being is to appear it must do so to a subject, in 'essence': in this

sense the subject is the cognitive ground. What the subject can know, though, is that

which can be predicated of being - not being itself, which always transcends its

appearances and is thus the result of the realisation of the failure of reflection, of the


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inherent 'lack of being' revealed in 'essence'.24 Being, as the real ground, therefore falls

outside Hegelian Logic, and idealism, including transcendental ontology, cannot fulfil its

programme of an articulated return to the beginning.

White sees his Hegelianism as enabling him to avoid 'nihilism' (AK p. 160).

Nihilism, the term brought into currency by Jacobi in relation to the Pantheism debate,was the realisation that, although one might establish a philosophical system to deal with

the issue of the cognitive ground, by realising the holistic nature of the interdependent

judgements that constitute what we know, this did not allow us to reach the

'unconditioned', the real ground:25

If rational comprehension consists in nothing other than the logical

'mediation' of ground and consequence in the 'dissection, linking, judging

concluding and grasping again' then it obviously always only moves in aconnection which it has constructed itself (Birgit Sandkaulen-Bock, Ausgang

vom Unbedingten. ber den Anfang in der Philosophie Schellings, Gttingen

1990, p. 15, quoting Jacobi, cited SMEP p. 21).

White sees no problem with Schelling's claim that one could construct any number of

analogous logics in Hegel's manner, because the essential claim has to be that Hegel's

Logic is complete in itself and returns into its ground. However, without showing how

the Logic relates to the real ground, this does not overcome the problem Jacobi saw in

Kant, which haunted German Idealism, and the later Schelling, namely that 'all ourknowledge is nothing but a consciousness of linked determinations of our own self, on

the basis of which one cannot infer to anything else' (F.H. Jacobi, David Hume ber den

Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus ein Gesprch, Breslau 1787, p. 225), or, as

Schelling puts it in the 1842-3 Introduction to the Philosophy of Revelation:

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 manand his activity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which

is most incomprehensible (II/3 p. 5-7).

It seems to me simply false to assume that only a theological approach would make this

problem meaningful.

The contemporary rejection of the idea that philosophy could show how thought


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or language re-present the real is prefigured in the strand of Western philosophy which

emerges from Jacobi and Schelling. In terms of the significance of the issues of German

Idealism for contemporary philosophy one can accept the need for a holistic view if the

determinations of the 'real' are to be made intelligible: much recent philosophy from

Heidegger, to Davidson, to Gadamer assumes some kind of holism. The question is, ofcourse, whether one wishes one's account of the real to be in terms of 'absolute

knowledge'. If White were a holistic hermeneutic pragmatist, for example, some of the

questions raised here would be immaterial. However, White's claim that the enterprise at

issue in his view of Hegel is really the answer to the problem of nihilism means his

position must entail the further move of showing how questions posed by the real ground

are overcome within a philosophical system. It seems to me that any engagement with

Hegel today which wishes to use Hegel to answer contemporary problems must face up

to these issues, which Schelling began to articulate for modern philosophy.


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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 Kojve's interpretation of

Hegel, but rather of the use of Kojve to argue 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. Other Schelling

references will be given according to the standard mode of citing Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Smmtliche Werke,

ed. K.F.A. Schelling, I Abtheilung Vols. 1-10, II Abtheilung Vols. 1-4, Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61, e.g.. I/7 p. 204.

2 In 1806 Schelling says, using a word Heidegger sometimes also uses:

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

(Selbstoffenbarung). 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 thisother 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. Peter Dews and Simon Critchley, Deconstructive

Subjectivities, forthcoming, SUNY Press 1995.

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 casethat 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' (Hilary Putnam, Realism

with a Human Face, Cambridge and London 1990, p. 176). 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


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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.

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), 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 Ernst Tugendhat, Logisch-semantische Propdeutik Stuttgart 1986 p. 62. 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.


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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 Sptphilosophie Schellings" in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 83 1976, p. 16, 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 isattachable which would identify it. This later becomes the insight that being cannot be subsumed into logic, as the

Umkehrung suggests.

The Schellingian Alternative to Hegel.. From Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain

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