Geschichte/History () || History, Idealism, and Schelling

Karl Ameriks

History, Idealism, and Schelling

Der Beitrag konzentriert sich auf die allgemeine methodische Bedeutung des Ge-genstands „Geschichte“ im Deutschen Idealismus als Teil eines Phänomens, dasman die „geschichtliche Wende“ in der Philosophie nennen könnte. Innerhalb die-ser „Wende“ können zwei Strömungen im Deutschen Idealismus unterschiedenwerden. Die hauptsächliche und beherrschende Hegelianische Strömung ist einergrundsätzlich gewissen, notwendigen und vollständigen Konzeption von Ge-schichte, einschließlich der Geschichte der Philosophie, verpflichtet. Die alterna-tive Strömung, die insbesondere im Werk Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schellings undFriedrich Hölderlins wirksam ist, legt den Schwerpunkt dagegen stärker auf eineungewisse, kontingente und offene Konzeption von Geschichte, in der unsereästhetischen Fähigkeiten eine bedeutendere Rolle spielen. Der Beitrag befasst sichvor allem mit der Bedeutung dieser zweiten Strömung, wie sie sich in verschiede-nen Phasen im Werk Schellings zeigt.

I. Background and Preview

The very idea of an emphasis on an essential relation between history and philo-sophy is central to what is most distinctive and valuable about the classical peri-od of German Idealism. That period, along with this central idea, has its ownimmediate historical preconditions in the writings of figures such as Rousseau,Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, and Kant.1 Their work generated widespreadreflection about the complex cultural problem of philosophy’s role in latemodernity, that is, the era succeeding the momentous double impact of thetransitions from ancient Greco-Roman culture to the dominance of Christiani-ty, and then to the new conditions created by the Scientific Revolution and thefirst stages of the Enlightenment. The onset of this era contained several generaldevelopments that were especially influential on the philosophy of German Ide-alism, most notably: the intensive re-evaluation of the relevance of ancientaesthetic as well as political ideals, especially of tragedy and justice; the accelera-tion of liberal Protestantism’s movement toward what might be called, para-doxically, a framework of religious secularism; and the desperate attempt bypost-Newtonian philosophers to retain a foundational role for their discipline,even after the rise of the new physics appeared to have decided in principle thefundamental nature of objects. Each of these developments had a special signifi-

1 See Szondi, 1974a, Boyle, 2001, Ziolkowski, 2004. For background more specificallyon Schelling’s philosophy of history, see Rosenzweig, 2000, and Fackenheim, 1996.

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cance for the wide interests and diverse talents of the extraordinary Swabianseminarians Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling. When they all eventually followedFichte to Jena, they never left behind the impact of their days together in theTübingen Stift, where Fichte stopped over briefly in 1793 and 1794,2 and wherethe three were roommates during the heyday of local enthusiasm for Kantian-Reinholdian Idealism and the nearby French Revolution.

The common general approach taken by the Tübingen trio was always toapproach philosophy ultimately in relation to the issue of defining humanity’strajectory in terms of a history of reason. The significance of each of the terms“history” and “reason” is quite different for different writers, however, and thevery notion of combining history and reason can initially seem contradictory,since the first term generally designates the contingent and temporary whereasthe second designates the necessary and eternal. The common response to thisproblem was to acknowledge a superstructure of contingent historical pheno-mena while also contending, in different ways, that philosophy has access to anunderlying basis that constitutes a significant necessary structure that shapeshumanity’s path. For the Idealists, this is not a structure of mere formal rational-ity but a substantive structure of reason in a rich and broadly teleological sense,one that was spelled out variously – by even the same philosopher at differenttimes – in aesthetic, political, theological, and scientific as well as directly philo-sophical terms. Given the enormous variety of approaches here, it is impossibleto present in one essay even a fragment of an overview of all the significant posi-tions. The main aim of this essay is simply to air the implications of some rela-tively neglected early tendencies in this movement. These neglected tendenciesare most conveniently exhibited by focusing on Schelling, for he is the Idealistwho was for the longest time concerned with history, and yet he still has notreceived adequate attention in Anglophone philosophy. These tendencies are ofspecial importance for contemporary thought because they are the source of asignificant alternative to Idealism’s mainline Hegelian story of a demonstrable,albeit complexly dialectical, clear march of progress for humanity, a growingtriumph of reason that we now simply need to reconstruct and finalize, giventhat philosophy is a “recollection of one’s own time in thought” (HW 7, p. 26),and that our time is one that is at least on the threshold of a situation of absolutereconciliation.3

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2 See Tilliete, 2004, p. 27. For details on Fichte’s relations with the other Idealists, seeKühn, 2012.

3 See Beiser, 1995, p. xxvii, who cites this famous passage from the Philosophy of Rightand goes so far as to conclude that for Hegel, “the powers and limits of reason too willbe historical”. This Hegelian stress on history has been understood to apply in verydifferent areas – not only in social life and thought (see Hardimon, 1994), but also inlogic and formal thought (see Brandom, 2005).



This alternative strand of the Idealist impact involves two different and yetintricately related basic topics concerning history. One topic is defined by thecontent of the actual pattern of our history – whether it is ascending, descend-ing moving laterally, and so forth, and where and what its main beginning,intermediate, and end points are. A second topic – and the one that will receivespecial emphasis here – is defined by the formal or methodological issue of thetendency of philosophers in this period to build an explicit historical approachinto their regular writing strategy. In the end, I will argue that the GermanIdealists in general are especially valuable now because of the various ways inwhich they have revealed to us that philosophy should achieve, and has achiev-ed, a new kind of autonomous status in late modernity precisely through itscapacity to shift more and more, in at least many aspects of its argumentativework, toward an extensive historical, rather than pseudo-scientific, form of pre-sentation of its main points. This shift in the form, or ‘style’, of post-Kantianphilosophy – which I have labeled “the Historical Turn” – will also turn out toimply a significantly more cautious attitude toward the standard presumptionof a demonstrable teleological content in history and philosophy.

II. New First Steps

Elsewhere I have argued that the first key steps in this process were taken byReinhold, and, most explicitly, in his seminal 1791, “On the Concept of theHistory of Philosophy: An Academic Lecture”,4 and in a series of essays thatstruggle, first, with the mystery of the repeated “misunderstandings” of Kant’sIdealist revolution, even after Reinhold’s own clear and very popular exposi-tion, and then, even more frustratingly, with repeated apparent misunderstand-ings and harsh repudiations of Reinhold’s own supposedly more “fundamental”version of Idealism. This pattern of writing can be shown to be repeated inHegel’s earliest publications, which first mock and then appropriate Reinhold’sclaim, that “[e]ach step of further progress in philosophical reasoning presup-poses the preceding steps and is possible only through them” (Reinhold 1792b,p. 9).5 This very transition in Hegel – but not its Reinholdian background – has

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4 Reinhold, 1791 a, discussed in Ameriks, 2006, Chapter 8, “Reinhold on Systematicity,Popularity, and the Historical Turn”. In an important study, Kuhlmann, 1993, pp. 212–3, cites Fichte and Maimon as influential on Schelling’s stress on history in theSystem of Transcendental Idealism, 1800. Schelling’s concern with this topic startedearlier, however, in work that he did when still studying in Tübingen, where he wasalready concerned with Reinhold. See Baumgartner and Korten, 1996, pp. 26–30. OnSchelling, Reinhold, and history, see Jacobs, 1975; Stolz, 2010; Noller, 2012; andOnnasch, 2012.

5 The significance of this phrase in this essay is discussed in Ameriks, 2010.



been highlighted in Eckart Förster’s important recent volume, Die 25 Jahre derPhilosophie. Eine systematische Rekonstruktion, in a chapter appropriately ent-itled, “Does Philosophy Have a History?”6 Förster notes that at one pointHegel insisted, “true philosophy […] is the same in all times […] in regard to theinner essence of philosophy there are neither precursors nor successors” (HW 2,p. 17).7 Hegel soon came around, however, to also contending that: “The lastphilosophy thus contains the previous ones, including all its stages, and is theproduct and result of all [NB] the ones that preceded it” (HW 20, p. 461).8

There is a complex underlying ambiguity about philosophy here, and not amere inconsistency or simple development that occurred when Hegel, withoutacknowledgement, let Reinhold’s procedure sink in and realized how he himselfwas proceeding when presenting his own first systematic position in the 1801Differenzschrift – a work whose little-known full title reveals that it was explic-itly composed as a response to an 1801 volume by Reinhold assessing thehistorical state of philosophy at the turn of the century.9 The Differenzschrift isbest known for Hegel’s argument for a necessary transition from Fichte’s rela-tively subjective position to Schelling’s relatively objective system, and then,implicitly, toward his own absolute dialectical unity of subjectivity and objec-tivity. Hegel’s argument may appear to take place only at a timeless systematiclevel, but its fine-grained retrospective procedure indicates an ambiguousmethodological stance that already exhibits the main characteristic of theHistorical Turn, namely, an essential commitment to giving a detailed argumen-tative narrative about how the positions of one’s immediate predecessors pointto the “result” that one’s own new general philosophical position is exactlywhat is required by the course of history up to the present age. The ambiguityin Hegel’s work resides in the complex fact that, not only is there an underlyingnon-historical systematic sequence of propositions that has a timeless signifi-cance of its own (just as in the works of Fichte and Schelling, as well as in thoseof Kant and Reinhold only a few years earlier) but also that there is the recog-nition of a need to explain sequentially how we can, through a comprehensionof the past, come to understand and see the current necessity for precisely thissystem. Hence, it should be no surprise that in the very first years of the nine-teenth century, Hegel was simultaneously giving his first lectures on the historyof philosophy, from which the preceding quotation about a “result” was taken,

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6 Förster, 2011, pp. 277–302.7 Cited at Förster, 2011, p. 285. Cf. similar quotations at ibid., p. 286.8 This is from the draft (1805) of Hegel’s “Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philo-

sophie”, cited at Förster, 2011, p. 8. Cf. ibid., p. 292.9 The full title of Hegel’s work is Differenz des Ficht’schen und Schelling’schen Systems

der Philosophie in Beziehung auf Reinholds “Beyträge zur leichtern Übersicht desZustands der Philosophie zu Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. 1stes Heft” (Jena,1801).



and also beginning to draft the at least implicitly historically structured workthat would become the Phenomenology of Spirit.10

In this development, along with all its ambiguities, Hegel’s precocious asso-ciate, Schelling, had already taken the first steps.11 The relevant points here gofar beyond the basic fact that the “history of self-consciousness” and the seriesof “epochs” in Schelling’s 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism give someth-ing of a foretaste of the developmental structure of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenolo-gy, just as the logical relations of opposition in Schelling’s “identity philoso-phy” (1801) already provide some anticipation, albeit not fully dialectical, of thetimeless relations that structure Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812). This dual-strand character of Idealism’s original helix is reflected in the fact that, despitehis very early and continuing interest in history,12 Schelling, like the other Idea-lists, remains in his first publications enamored of the Cartesian ideal of a strict,certain, timeless system of philosophy, one that would be even more rigorous inits necessities than the truths of mathematics and physics that had become theparadigms of knowledge, in the sense that Kant called “Wissen” and “strengeWissenschaft”, and for which Schelling occasionally used the term “szienti-fisch” (long before William Whewell introduced its equivalent in English) (SW I/1, pp. 481–482).

It is this ‘Cartesian’ perspective that dominates a revealing 1797 essay bySchelling, entitled “Is a Philosophy of History Possible?”, in which he presentsa crisp negative answer to the eponymous question. The essay’s short argumentis that philosophy, as systematic, must concern what is a priori, while humanhistory, as a constantly shifting scene of action, is in principle not cognizable apriori; hence, in a strict sense, a philosophy of history is impossible (SW, I/1, p. 473). More specifically, for Schelling there is a complex progressive characterto history, which means that in its details it appears to us not as a predictablemechanism, but as an in principle opaque phenomenon wherein human agents,as finite and fallible, find themselves always short of the infinite practical idealstoward which they are striving. For the early Schelling, whose ontology is a


10 See Förster, 2011, p. 286.11 In a more concise and incomparably inspired way, Hölderlin had done this as well. It

is the common and lesser-known general pattern of the work of both Hölderlin andSchelling that I am most concerned with, but Hölderlin’s writing is too complex toaddress in this context, and so Schelling’s thought will have to be the main focus here.For more on Hölderlin and history, see Ameriks, 2012, Chapter 13, “On the Exten-sion of Kant’s Elliptical Path in Hölderlin and Novalis”, and Chapter 14, “Kant,Nietzsche, and the Tragic Turn in Late Modern Philosophy”, and Ameriks, “History,Succession, and German Romanticism” (forthcoming, 2014). An appropriate startingplace for further work in this direction is to reflect on the discussion by Szondi, 1994a,p. 324.

12 This concern with history is evidenced also by Schelling’s remarkable early work onPlato. See Baum, 2000.



kind of broadly naturalistic holism,13 human freedom is defined not in terms ofa non-natural and absolute capacity for choosing, but simply in terms of ouroccupying an in-between and constantly-striving position as non-mechanicalagents (see Schelling, 1810, pp. 458, 471). The events of human action in thisposition contrast with the encompassing realm of ordinary natural phenomena,because only the latter phenomena can be said to instantiate – and are all, sup-posedly, already known (in principle) to instantiate – strict and universal lawslike those of mechanics.14

Schelling’s denial of a strict philosophical, that is, perfectly scientific, statusfor the study of human history in no way detracts, however, from history’s deepsignificance for him; on the contrary, history always remains at the center of hisbroader philosophical concerns, despite his characterization of its status. LikeHegel, he constantly calls the domain of human action a sphere of “freedom”,and like Kant – but without Kant’s incompatibilist conception of freedom – thesystems of both the early Schelling and Hegel basically take philosophy to be anaccount of how nature and freedom occupy contrasting and yet not strictlyopposed realms, which can be combined in a unified and broadly naturalaccount of the teleological totality of human history.15 They also both expressthis account in vivid speculative and religiously secular reformulations of thetraditional providential story of human history. A pithy version of this refor-mulation is given in Schelling’s little-known 1798 essay, “On Revelation and

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13 Schelling adds the epistemological stipulation, against what he takes to be Kant’s no-tion of the thing in itself, that all reality must be treated as in principle accessible toconsciousness: “nothing can be real unless there is a spirit there to know it” (SW, I/1,p. 357). For arguments that Schelling in general has a basically realistic perspective, seeFrank, 2007 and 2008. Schelling’s version of naturalism is also complicated by hisshifting expressions concerning freedom, a much too complex topic to discuss here.See the discussion of the debate on freedom between Reinhold and Kant in Ameriks,2012, Chapter 8, “Ambiguities in the Will: Kant and Reinhold, Briefe II”, and the dis-cussion of Schelling’s reaction to this debate in Kuhlmann, 1993, pp. 224–30.

14 This is a fact that Schelling might have come to appreciate from accounts, for example,of the striking 1758 exact prediction of the return of Halley’s Comet. Schelling’sSystem of Transcendental Idealism concludes with a remark about the genius of Kep-ler and Newton in making exact explanations of nature possible (SW, I/3, p. 623). Onthe significance of Kepler for this whole era of philosophers, see Ameriks, 2012,Chapter 13.

15 Because of the influence of Jacobi, Schelling tends to assume, all too quickly, thatKant’s metaphysics is contradictory and operates with a strict opposition of nature andfreedom that does not allow for a consistent account of human action. Properlyunderstood, however, Kant’s idealism provides a way that is at least consistent, I be-lieve, to supplement a natural account of the sequence of human history with the pos-sibility of a non-natural human capacity for absolutely free choice. See Ameriks, 2012.Despite his belief in absolutely free choice, Kant does not shrink from stressing theways in which we expect the universal patterns of natural laws to fit human behavior.See Rorty and Schmidt, 2009.



Public Education”: “The history of religion is nothing other than the progres-sive revelation or symbolic presentation of Ideas [that is, the Ideas of GermanIdealism], just as the history of the human race in general is nothing other thanthe progressive development of the moral world plan, which we must assume aspredestined for us by reason (insofar as it is absolute)” (SW, I/1, p. 480). Theteleological invocation here of “the moral world plan” comes, of course, from amodification of the writings of Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte, which already doaway with many, but not all, non-natural, that is, transcendent, aspects of theorthodox Abrahamic tradition, whereas the holism of the early Schelling andHegel implies the quasi-Spinozist turn of excluding any kind of non-naturalagency, even for human beings.16

Schelling’s essay appears to have been composed in close connection withthe radical educational agenda of Friedrich Niethammer, another friend fromthe Tübingen Stift, whose political influence also played a significant role inHegel’s early career.17 Their common attitude toward revelation at the time wasto oppose, as nothing less than indecent deception (“Betrug”), not only thetraditional teaching of revelation as a supernatural action that human beingspassively receive, but also – and at least as vigorously – the ‘backdoor’ Kantianaccount of revelation as the making known, by rational means, of the signifi-cance of the moral law so that the final purpose of a supernaturally createdworld, namely, a non-naturally grounded moral world, can be achieved (SW, I/1,p. 476). The perceived problem with that account, as the Idealists saw it whenthey rejected the quasi-Kantian overtures of their orthodox teachers in the Stift,is that although it modifies the traditional approach by substituting for reli-gion’s miraculous historical claims the deliverances of pure practical reason, itstill employs the core supernatural idea of a transcendent personal God who hascreated human beings with a non-natural capacity for free choice and an appre-ciation for non-natural values.18

Long before Hegel’s similar lectures on the philosophy of history, Schellingprovided a number of vivid formulations that make clear how German Idea-lism’s systematic reformulation of traditional theological theodicies differs fromits predecessors. In his 1796–7 Treatise Explicatory of the Idealism in the “Scienceof Knowledge”, he distinguishes his own position from Fichte’s more subjectivesounding Idealism, and mocks similar quasi-Kantian pure moralistic philoso-phies such as Heydenreich’s Letters on Atheism. Schelling already asserts what


16 See Pinkard, 2012.17 On the significance of Niethammer, see Frank, 1997, pp. 428–456; Ameriks, 2000,

pp. 64–66, 102 n., and 157 n.; and Pinkard, 2000, pp. 251–255.18 Schelling denies individual immortality early on; although after the death of his wife

Caroline he shifts away from his early mocking of talk of a timeless aspect to humanbeings (SW, I/1, p. 352), speaking himself of a timeless, bodiless aspect (SW, VII, p. 477).



is in effect not a mere Naturphilosophie, but a holistic Idealism that posits an all-encompassing “spirit” that dirempts itself purposefully into all the opposedphenomena of history as well as brute nature: “the very essence of spirit invol-ves an original conflict in self-consciousness resulting in the creation of a realworld” (SW, I/1, p. 358). Like many of the expressions of this period, such asentence can at first sound absurdly psychological. Fortunately, as interpreterssuch as Dieter Jähnig have convincingly explained, such sentences make muchmore sense once one realizes that Schelling regularly uses terms such as “Ich”,and even “Selbstbewusstsein”, not merely to indicate ordinary finite and psy-chological phenomena, but also as shorthand for more general structures orprinciples that define what the Idealists, after Fichte, took to be the very essenceof the I – hence of even our everyday “I”.19 This essence is not consciousness inan explicit psychological sense, but rather the general capacity to engage in“self-positing”, that is, any process where, unlike the phenomena of mechanicalnature, action and product are internally related, and in that sense “self-deter-mined” – as, for example, but only as an example, when an ordinary subjectthinks of itself. The terms “spirit” and “self-consciousness” are therefore to beunderstood in the passage just quoted as referring not to a particular finite per-son, let alone the psychology of a non-natural individual literally transcendingus and the world – which would directly contradict Schelling’s views20 – butsimply to an entity that manifests the relevant self-positing structure, albeit inthis case on a literally global scale and initially without involving any explicitawareness. In other words, Schelling is already here speaking of the quasi-Spi-nozist absolute that, as Hegel would later say, must be thought of not as a mere-ly inert “substance”, but as a “subject” in a complexly dynamic ontologicalsense. More specifically, Schelling’s point is that the substance or “spirit” that isthe original essence of the world is not a simple being but is rather somethingthat has an internal necessity to distinguish or “create” finite components with-in it that are organized in an “original conflict”; for otherwise we could notmake sense of all the dynamic developments that we now experience as theopposed forces that drive human as well as natural history in its broadestsense.21

Schelling’s later formulations make the still heavily teleological and ‘reli-giously secular’ implications of this position abundantly clear, for example,when in his 1804 Philosophy and Religion, he declares “only history as a whole

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19 Jähnig, 1966, p. 35.20 See, for example, SW, VII, p. 438, which stresses thinking of God as the “universal

substance”, rather than as a particular thing.21 Just as Hegel does, Schelling tries to distinguish his views from Spinoza’s by

emphasizing the especially dynamic and organic aspects of nature and history. See,e.g., SW, VII, p. 443.



is a revelation of God” (Schelling, 1804, p. 63).22 This sentence can be read as areductive treatment of the words “revelation” and “God”, so that they becometantamount in extension simply to “history as a whole” – although it is crucialthat the implicit intension of these terms involves not just any kind of historybut one that necessarily involves the complex fulfillment of the “moral worldplan”, including all of its “narrowly” natural preconditions. Schelling’s 1810“Stuttgart Seminars” fills out the plan in these terms: “the entire process of thecreation of the world – which still lives on in the life process of nature andhistory – is in effect nothing but [NB] the process of the complete coming-to-consciousness, of the complete personalization of God” (SW, VII, p. 433).23 Hethen adds, in a provocative proto-Feuerbachian vein, “the greatest mystery isbeing prepared for, the complete humanization of God of which thus far onlythe beginning has taken place” (SW, VII, p. 481). Here again a reductive readingis appropriate, for, with the term “personalization”, Schelling is not proposingthat God is coming into being as one person among others; rather he is substi-tuting for the traditional transcendent notion of God the notion of mere “com-plete humanization” and “complete coming-to-consciousness” – albeit againwith the presumption that this is not just any kind of process of consciousness,but rather a progressive teleological realization of how the world has necessari-ly within it the capacity to develop, through us as a species, into a full realiza-tion of its ideal essence.24

Jürgen Habermas and others have shown how Schelling’s position herepoints back to speculative notions of a “contraction” of the divine in the tradi-tion of the Kabbalah as well as forward to the notions of natural self-develop-ment that are central to later nineteenth-century “materialism”.25 The aim of myinvocation of these connections, however, is not to try to make Schelling seemau courant or defensible in view of such historical continuities, but instead tounderline how overly ambitious and odd all such related positions on historycan appear to disenchanted philosophers now. Idealism is often inappropriatelyrejected by outsiders because of theoretical worries about its ontological posi-tion, but these are worries that can usually be attributed to simple misunder-standings,26 whereas the wildly ambitious teleological character of its central


22 See also Schelling, 2010, p. 44.23 Cf. SW, I/1, pp. 382–383.24 See e.g., SW, VII, p. 435: “matter is nothing but the unconscious aspect of God […]

God nevertheless obtains a point of rest with [the creation of man]; His principalobjective is reached in man”.

25 See Habermas, 2004, and Velkley, 2002, Chapter 7, “Realizing Nature in the Self:Schelling on Art and Intellectual Intuition in the System of Transcendental Idealism”,and Chapter 8, “The Necessity of Error: Schelling’s Auto-Critique and the History ofPhilosophy”.

26 See, e.g., Baldwin, 1984, for a clarification of some of the main misunderstandings inEnglish generated at the time of Moore and Russell.



doctrine, its mainline conception of history, can and should remain a genuineproblem for most contemporary philosophy. It should never seem anything lessthan very striking that so many writers in this era could, at one and the sametime, find totally implausible both the traditional theological and also the scaledback and pure morality-based theodicies of their immediate predecessors, andyet not hesitate to put forward on their own, with full confidence, a perfection-ist vision of a “world plan” that in content remains extraordinarily similar to,and just about as audaciously optimistic, as the core of the positions that they sovehemently rejected. Where even Kant hesitated to offer more than reflective“conjectures” and “hopes” about history, his successors, one after the other,presented a set of global constitutive teleological claims, supposedly rooted inmetaphysical insights into the necessities of ultimate reality.27 Most astonish-ingly, they presented these claims in the very era in which a genuinely fruitfuland universal conception of science, as a tracing of strictly lawful but not ulti-mately teleological phenomena, was finally establishing itself – and they evendid so with a steadfast insistence that their teleological claims were grounded inthe most certain science, a Wissenschaftslehre of the best kind.28 Given thissituation, it might well seem as if the relationship of Idealism and history endsonly in an embarrassing Sackgasse, a triumph of overly exuberant systematic“Pathos” over what Hölderlin calls our equally needed quality of “Nüchtern-heit” (sobriety).29

III. Idealism’s Alternative Historical Strand

Given the obvious difficulties with the most familiar and notorious strands ofthe Idealist’s substantive conception of history, it is only appropriate now tolook back again at the distinctive, and multiply ambiguous, historical features ofthe birth of Idealism itself, with the aim of trying to uncover an alternative to itsmainline conception of history, an alternative that is still genuinely Idealist andyet not overly presumptuous. One main formal feature that has already beenidentified is the methodological phenomenon of a sudden obsession with givingthorough and sharply critical narratives of the most recent stages in philoso-phy’s development – a practice that continued through the era of post-Hegeli-

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27 For these reasons Habermas, 2004, for example, understandably objects to the post-Kantian conversion of Kantian regulative ideas into constitutive ones, and Marquard,1975, p. 11, objects to the “immodesty” (“Unbescheidenheit”) arising already in Fich-te’s version of idealism.

28 Compare the more modest project of “intuitive understanding” that Förster proposesas an alternative to the “twenty-five years of philosophy” as a presumed strict science,or deductive “Wissenschaftslehre” (Förster, 2011).

29 See the discussion of Hölderlin’s notion of “Nüchternheit” in Szondi, 1994a, p. 194.



ans such as Feuerbach and Marx, and then was raised to yet another pitch in thesupposedly “untimely” “destructions” of the whole Western tradition by fig-ures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. When one looks at Schelling, for examp-le, one finds that at almost the very same time that he writes against the notionof a scientific philosophy of history, he feels obliged to preface a discussion ofhis main predecessor, Fichte, with nothing less than a “brief history of philoso-phy starting with Kant and leading up to the present”,30 that is, “to characterizethe spirit that currently dominates philosophy” by giving a “brief history of theentire [NB] Kantian epoch” (SW, I/1, p. 348). A similar painstaking narrativestrategy was repeatedly employed earlier by Reinhold and later by Hegel. In the1830s, it was repeated by Schelling himself in his Lectures on the History ofModern Philosophy, which contain a broader retrospective that includesaccounts of the content and fate of his own philosophy and Hegel’s. The mainpoint of these histories is surely not simply to settle accounts with one’s ene-mies, let alone to turn away from being a genuine philosopher to becoming a‘mere’ historian. These histories all arise from an acute sense – evident, forexample, already in Kant’s 1784 essay on enlightenment31 – that Europe hasreached a major turning point in philosophical as well as cultural history, andthat with the onset of late modernity it is especially difficult and important toget one’s bearings. Schelling’s lectures acknowledge this fact by opening withthe statement that “if there is a change in the concept of philosophy itself” (SW, X, p. 3)32 – and the presumption of his discussion is precisely that there hasbeen a rare change of this kind in his time – then there should be some way tomake this change appear as “a natural historical result”, a “necessary effect ofprecisely this time” (SW, X, p. 3).33

One side of this new obsession with history, of the desire to disclose a“necessary effect”, is the related but detachable preoccupation – shared by allthese later modern philosophers – with the “scientific” character of their dis-cipline. A plausible historical explanation for this preoccupation is that thesephilosophers obviously still harbored high hopes of holding on to the prestigethat their discipline had when it was led by early modern thinkers of truly uni-versal standing, such as Descartes and Leibniz. The next generations were in aquandary, because for them it was no longer even relatively easy to do philoso-phy in a comprehensive way and still keep up with all the latest exact sciences,


30 Schelling, letter to Niethammer, August 11, 1796, as quoted in “A Note on the Text”,Schelling, 1994a, p. 61.

31 Cf. Velkley, 2002.32 1994b, p. 41. Cf. ibid, p. 121, “a new species arose”.33 Cf. ibid., p. 122, “the respect with which [people] see their science and with which

they feel comfortable is itself only a consequence of the fact that in them every rela-tion to higher development, even if it is not stated, is seen as existing as a consequenceof previous philosophical developments”.



and yet it was also, for most of them, no longer attractive to tie their work tooclosely to anything like the tradition of theological ‘science’. Moreover, the veryfact that already in 1797 Schelling speaks of the “deplorable interlude of theKantians [die ganze Jammerepoche der Kantianer]” (SW, I/1, p. 348) reveals thateven well-known Enlightenment philosophers who were still fairly close to theexact sciences in a traditional way (and did not have constitutive “organic” prin-ciples) could no longer command respect, even in their own disciplines andhomelands. When a discipline is in this kind of a deep crisis, it is only naturalthat measures that can seem desperate will begin to be explored in all directions,and – just as with art – it can in a way be a matter of history itself to decidewhich of the new strategies is genuinely appropriate.

Given the intense preoccupation with science, it is understandable that oneof these strategies, very popular in some quarters ever since the eighteenth cen-tury, was to try to reconfigure philosophy itself, in both form and content, intosomething very close to what we would now call the “positivist” appearance ofwhat then seemed to be the eternally secure exact sciences – in contrast to themurky procedures of traditional art, politics, and theology, which were asso-ciated with the ancien régime and suddenly appeared not at all worthy of uni-versal respect. Hence there arose the (still widespread) and even more radicaltactic of trying to recast philosophy directly in a more scientific fashion alto-gether by making it appear as but a variation of one of the rising new exact dis-ciplines such as mechanics, psychology, economics, or linguistics. At the end ofhis lectures, Schelling showed an awareness of the threat of this tactic by devot-ing a chapter to probing the significance of the fact that the Idealist movement,which disdained such a ‘positivist’ appearance, was able, at least in his time, tomaintain dominance in Germany but not at all in other leading countries. Schel-ling seemed genuinely concerned, in a concluding section on “National Differ-ences in Philosophy”, about the issue of whether the less than universal impactof German Idealism could be a sign that it was not tracking the truth after all,for, as he concedes, “the French and English do not recognize philosophy in theGerman sense at all” (SW, X, p. 194).34

Schelling’s ultimate explanation of the foreign aversion to this philosophy isthat idealism in general tends to be closely associated with rationalism, which,with its “one-sided” emphasis on the a priori, cannot do justice to the non-a priori aspects of experience that play a prominent role in English and Frenchthought. Schelling’s somewhat surprising final position is that this kind of resis-

134 Karl Ameriks

34 Schelling noted, but did not accept as sufficient, the historical hypothesis that the unu-sually lively German interest in speculation could be explained by reference to theintensity of debates naturally arising in a land long divided religiously and politically,despite linguistic and cultural unity. He saw that this is an insufficient explanationbecause the fact is that the resistance in other countries was not to speculation or phi-losophy as such, but specifically to the idealism of German philosophy.



tance has a healthy ground, for he agrees that a purely rationalist philosophy isinadequate and offensive to humanity’s interest in concrete matters. What hetakes this to show, however, is simply that German Idealism is distinctive andneeds to be understood and presented primarily in terms of a “higher empiri-cism” – in his terms, a “positive”, in contrast to a “negative”, philosophy – thatis broader than rationalism and does better justice to the universal interest inconcrete issues such as freedom, that is, human action.35 This kind of idealism,Schelling now contends, was always the intention of his Naturphilosophie, andhe claims that its distinctive emphasis on natural history is finally beginning togain recognition beyond Germany, in the research of figures such as Cuvier.Schelling offers this as a sign that his philosophy, presumably in contrast toother versions of German Idealism, can eventually have a universal impact afterall, like exact science itself.

At the same time, Schelling realizes full well that within Germany his philo-sophy has been superseded in influence by Hegel, despite what he of course con-tinues to take to be its evident intrinsic superiority, and hence he must offer avindicating historical explanation to account for this fact. The content of hisexplanation also has a substantive connection to history, for Schelling argues thatthe prime notion of his Naturphilosophie is that the absolute, or what he else-where calls “God” as “the unmediated in itself of history” (Schelling, 1804, p. 63), is to be thought of in terms of continuous “becoming” (SW, X, p. 124)36 –and this is just a very difficult notion, one that he now sees was presented a bittoo early to be properly appreciated (here Schelling’s precocity was bad luck).Although Schelling points out that his version of this notion was “prepared” bythe work of Herder, Kant, and Goethe,37 he allows that its temporary eclipse byHegelianism was only understandable, given the intrinsic difficulty of this newway of thinking, and given the fact that Hegel’s system can be regarded as animpressive presentation of one main aspect of the true philosophy, namely its“negative” – that is, supposedly merely conceptual, a priori, and timeless – side.Whatever one thinks about the accuracy of Schelling’s historical account here,the important point in this context is simply that Schelling is again eager to pre-sent philosophy as essentially needing to be an historical enterprise. This fact fitsin with Schelling’s acceptance of Kant’s point that, although in one sense humanbeings are simply temporary parts of natural history, their distinctive nature as anatural species is precisely to have projects – such as the “moral world plan” –that need to be conceived of not as an endeavor of a mere individual or contem-poraneous group, but as the telos of our whole species, and therefore require thecomprehension of an extended series of connected stages of thought.38


35 Schelling, SW, X, p. 198 f.36 The German term, “Geschehen”, also means “happening”, event”, or “process”.37 SW, X, p. 112 f.38 SW, X, p. 115. For a defense of the relevance of this view, see Ameriks, 2006.



Because Schelling’s argument comes from lectures of the 1830s, it might besuspected that his main point is dependent on changes in his views that came inhis later period, especially after his 1809 essay on freedom (PhilosophischeUntersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit), and the devastatingdeath of his wife Caroline in the same year. What is most striking about the lec-tures, however, is the fact that, despite some terminological differences, theirbasic argument reveals an underlying continuity in Schelling’s position, a conti-nuity that ultimately has more to do with history than science. This continuityexplains how, by the time of the lectures, Schelling could loosen his conceptionof philosophy so that it could be open to stressing elements that are not a priori, and thus could directly allow a philosophy of history after all. From thisperspective, Schelling’s early presentation of much of his work in the pseudo-scientific style of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre can be looked back on as but atemporary strategy that in many ways was always secondary to a deeper com-mitment to the thought that Idealism’s special value depends more on its histor-ical than on its a priori features. As Schelling’s retrospective chapter on his ownphilosophy makes clear, the emphasis on “natural” features is part of a broaderunderstanding of philosophy in which mere Naturphilosophie is the beginning,but “is only a beginning”, a designation of “what came first in the system, butwhich was, as such, rather what was subordinate in it” (SW, X, p. 107). In parti-cular, he takes Naturphilosophie to be “subordinate” to the “philosophy ofspirit”, a subordination that “can also only be reached in stages” (SW, X, p. 111)and “in this way the same philosophy which was Naturphilosophie at an earlierstage here became philosophy of history” (SW, X, p. 116). More specifically, thisphilosophy is an historical account of spirit in its “highest” form, “art, religion,and philosophy” (SW, X, p. 119), and “here then a necessity is demanded forhistory itself […] in which everything finally now is subordinated and whichnow, not as a first beginning, just is spirit and Providence, but also declaresitself to be Providence and shows at the end what already was at the beginning”(SW, X, p. 117).39 The crucial point here is not the familiar Idealist use of theterm “providence”, but rather a formal point about the procedure of philoso-phy: the fact that Schelling is coming around to explaining that what might haveseemed to have been a prioritization of strict science in his philosophicalmethod is rather part of a broader conception according to which a deep sensi-tivity to history as such, along with a developmental historical form of presen-tation, is what has priority.

In retrospective terms that are not his own, Schelling’s initial stress on scienceand his presentation of his thought under the heading of Naturphilosophie

136 Karl Ameriks

39 The German term for “shows” (zeigt) is bold in the text, a rare double emphasis. Froma theological perspective, it appears that what is being proposed here is a revolution-ary, that is, broadly humanistic, notion of revelation.



can also be characterized, as Wolfgang Wieland has observed, as a result of a“self-criticism of philosophy” and a “doubt in general about any sense in thepossibility of philosophy”.40 That is, the very abstractness of the initial presen-tation of Idealism in Fichte, and even in Schelling’s own Fichtean early works,must have generated the thought even then41 that there was a need for philoso-phy to attach itself closely to some field of concrete phenomena – and so it wasmerely a function of the fashion of those times that a philosophy experiencingthis kind of failure of nerve in regard to its own status would be especiallytempted to go outside its traditional internal preoccupations and outfit itself insome kind of pseudo-scientific dress. This quasi-scientific appeal to naturecould be only a temporary strategy, however. The story of Schelling’s later workis too chaotic to review here, but fortunately Odo Marquard has provided aninimitable epitome of it: “Die Natur: die sollte das Ich tragen. Aber sie trugnicht das Ich; statt es zu retten, bedrohte sie es. Darum rief Schelling […]zugleich die Gegenmächte […] das Ich vor seinem Retter zu retten, und zwarsukzessiv mehrere: das Genie, das Identitätssystem, den Arzt, die Mythologie,die Religion”.42 Schelling’s main “savior”, however, and something that under-lies all the rest, from start to end – and perhaps for that reason is not listed sepa-rately by Marquard – was history, but history now ultimately thought of aspossibly a kind of Heideggerian “Geschick”, a runaway train that cannot bescientifically scheduled or tied down to traditional notions of providence orplanning but instead implies “an aesthetic of all reality”.43 Or, as Marquard alsosays, “Who was Schelling in this situation, after Kant and after Fichte, beforeHegel and next to Hegel and after Hegel? Schelling was uncertainty, and pre-


40 Wieland, 1968, p. 437, cited in Jähnig, 1969, p. 325 n. 5.41 See Beiser, 2002, p. 489.42 Marquard, 1975, p. 12: “Nature was supposed to support the I. But it didn’t support

it; instead of saving it, nature was a threat to it. Hence Schelling […] simultaneouslycalled on counterforces […] indeed on several in a row, to save the I from its savior:genius, the system of identity, medicine, mythology, religion” (my translation). Thispassage is too good not to present first in German. Marquard also quotes (ibid., p. 15)a vivid formulation of what he may take to be Schelling’s most revealing thought:“Der Grundstoff alles Lebens und Daseins ist das Schreckliche” (SW, VII, p. 268)(“the basic material of all life and existence is the terrifying”). As an antidote to thissense of terror, and in contrast to the triumphalist strain of German Idealism, Schel-ling often stresses the way in which history appears to remain radically open. SeeSzondi’s memorable characterization, 1974a, p. 236: “Anders als bei Hegel, dem dieGegenwart zum Hafen wird, in dem das Schiff der Geschichte zum Stillstand kommt,ist hier noch der auf der Zukunft ausgerichtete”. (“Here is someone who is still orient-ed toward the future, unlike Hegel, for whom the present time becomes a harbor inwhich the ship of history comes to a resting place”.)

43 Marquard, 1975, p. 17. Jähnig, 1969, offers a corrective to the worry that a renewedfocus on the aesthetic must result in a directionless aestheticism rather than a realisticcorrective to dangerous modern instrumentalist tendencies.



cisely this makes him relevant”.44 In other words, it is precisely Schelling’s “Un-sicherheit”, an “uncertainty” in the sense of a relative “systematic” weaknessand a growing openness to a kind of aesthetic, rather than quasi-scientific orglibly teleological way of making claims, which that reveals strength in his kindof Idealism that can be especially appealing to philosophers today.

IV. An Aesthetic Historical Turn

The aesthetic nature of Schelling’s ultimate understanding of history comes outin numerous passages from all periods of his work, especially when he repeat-edly returns to the theme of tragedy (which he takes to be the highest art form),that is, of participation in a necessity of fate that overwhelms our consciouspowers of choice in a way that still exhibits our dignity. “History”, he dramati-cally declares in 1810, “is most appropriately understood as a tragedy that isstaged on a stage of mourning for which the world provides merely the floor”(SW, VII, p. 480).45 In a more upbeat tone, Schelling’s 1800 System presentshistory, even as tragedy, as a “play” that highlights the theme of “freedom”, thatis, our status as active, even if individually defeated, participants in a coopera-tive enterprise:

Think of history as a play in which everyone performs his part quite freely. […]But now if the playwright were to exist independently of his drama, we should bemerely actors who speak the lines he has written. […] If he does not exist indepen-dently of us [i.e., Schelling’s position], but reveals and discloses himself successive-ly only through the very play of our own freedom, so that without this freedom hehimself would not be, then we are collaborators of the whole and have ourselvesinvented the particular roles we play (SW, I/3, p. 603).46

This passage suggests an uplifting way to reread a key statement in Schelling’sslightly earlier critical essay on the possibility of a scientific history, which con-cludes that the “historian is always at the same time a poet” (SW, I/1, p. 472).47

His later lectures on the history of philosophy take up this theme by attaching ahighly positive meaning to the notion of being a “Dichter” – that is, a specula-

138 Karl Ameriks

44 Marquard, 1975, p. 11.45 Compare Habermas’ interpretation of Schelling’s Die Weltalter: “History is the sub-

ject matter of the highest science; in its essence, philosophy is history, in its presenta-tion, it is fable” (2004, p. 161). Tilliete conjectures (2004, p. 37) that, already in 1795,discussions with Hölderlin influenced the insertion along these lines of a discussion ofthe topic of tragedy at the end of Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism andCriticism.

46 As quoted from Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, in Habermas, 2004, p. 44.

47 This remark comes, by no accident, at the very time that Friedrich Schiller had beenappointed professor of history at Jena.



tive philosophical writer, historian, or poet – or all at once. Here, rather than inany way suggesting that the “Dichterberuf”48 may be something that is inferiorinsofar as it is not strict science, Schelling clearly praises the writer’s work as thehigh point of the whole path of what he calls “providence”. The continuation ofthe key passage quoted earlier, about how spirit and providence “declare” and“show” themselves, is as follows: “The last task could only be to show the rela-tionship of this subject [that is, the overall pattern of history’s movement] […]to human consciousness” (SW, X, p. 117). What this means is that the culminat-ing process of history is the process of creating appropriate expressions to makeobjective to human beings what the unrevealed sequence of our history hasbeen up to this point, and what our co-determined place and role in that historyis now. Precisely because this task is as much a showing as a saying, and isalways far from a strict science, Schelling has no qualms about characterizing itas something like putting on a play exhibiting the course of our human situa-tion. Moreover, because the ultimate subject matter of this playwriting involvescomprehending our situation within the history of philosophy, to do justice tothis subject, the writer must be not only creative and effective, but must alsothoroughly understand how what is valid and necessary in the latest systematicphilosophy is a “result” of “all” that has come before – as Schelling was tryingto do in his lectures.

Schelling’s 1830s lectures and similar work can now be seen as a continua-tion, rather than an abdication, of the System of Transcendental Idealism’sfamous claim that art must be the “organon” of philosophy.49 Rather than beinga naive reduction of philosophy to a form of aestheticism, or a speculativerecourse to magical aesthetic “intuitions”, this claim should be taken, as Jähnighas shown, to be rooted in Schelling’s broad understanding of art as simply thegeneral human capacity to give a concrete and memorably objective form to theotherwise invisible, or “subjective”, meaning of human action.50 This point isalso consistent with understanding, in a non-subjectivistic way, how the writingof philosophy in a historical manner can be like a kind of “art” as well, especial-ly insofar as – like the Idealists and their successors, many of whom may noteven recognize themselves as such (for example, Rawls, Williams, Rorty, Taylor,MacIntyre, Cavell, Brandom) – such writing aims to incorporate a stylisticallyeffective, as well as at least partially persuasive, interpretation of the (often tra-


48 “Dichterberuf”, is one of several poems by Hölderlin on this theme.49 Schelling, SW, I/ 3, p. 627.50 Jähnig, 1969, p. 57, illustrates this point by referring to Schelling’s 1807 Munich lec-

ture, “On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature”. Cf. Szondi, 1974 a, pp. 223 and254, who argues that, in one sense, Schelling’s conception of art is unhistorical becauseof the presumption that art, as a basic faculty, is always available. Jähnig anticipates aresponse to this point by noting that it is open to Schellingians to stress that there canbe distinctive ways for us to apply this basic capacity at particular times in history,especially as a critical response to other tendencies that have taken over too much.



gic) “play” of recent history of philosophy. Writing of this sort can neverhonestly characterize itself as establishing general “results” like those of exactscience, but insofar as it also includes an explicitly and essentially argumentativeform, conscientious philosophy of this kind retains something very importantin common with science. In this way, such philosophical writing shows how itcan be and has been progressive (somewhat like its humanist cousins, such aspost-Enlightenment studies in classics, art, and legal history), albeit in a com-plex disjunctive, rather than convergent way, and without amounting to anexact discipline, let alone a new proof of traditional teleology. The enduringsuccess of its combination of creative style, historical sensitivity, and generalargumentative form is enough by itself to justify understanding this kind ofwriting as arguably German Idealism’s greatest – even if unintended as such –gift to philosophy. The ongoing influence of the Historical Turn, especially indirections opened up by Schelling and Hölderlin, is manifest in contemporarywriters who continue to work in the best spirit of Jena: by practicing philoso-phy as a uniquely valuable disputative as well as historical enterprise,51 one thatis not itself quite art or science in a strict sense, but is still productively contin-uous with its own rigorous past, even while tempered by a critical distance fromdogmatic, foundationalist, and purely rationalist programs.52

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51 I have highlighted terms such as “general argumentative” and “disputative” for thepurpose of signaling the crucial – and very hard to define but fairly easy to recognize– special quality of significant philosophical writing. The Historical Turn stresses thevalue of expressing arguments in a narrative form, but it is important to see that thisinvolves putting matters in an order with a general rational force that goes beyond thetypical nature of particular ordinary narratives. At the same time, the alternativestrand of the Historical Turn in Idealism, in contrast to necessitarian and stronglyconvergent teleological positions, is especially open to the consideration that there is avariety of different rational ways that forceful arguments (and rational traditions) candevelop – and have developed – in our history. Hence the phenomenon of what theRomantics and their followers, such as Charles Larmore and many others, have char-acterized as the philosophical “complexity” of rational life in late modernity. On thesignificance of Schelling’s pluralism for this development, see Sturma, 2000.

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