Spinoza in Schelling’s Early Conception of Intellectual Intuition1 Published in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Melamed (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Dalia Nassar Abstract: I examine Schelling’s earliest philosophical writings, and argue that until 1796, Schelling was much more influenced by Spinoza than by Fichte. Most significantly, I show that Schelling’s conception of intellectual intuition, which he first developed in Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795), mirrors Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge. In spite of his clear affinity with Spinoza, however, Schelling maintains a critical attitude toward Spinoza. I consider the reasons for Schelling’s distance from Spinoza, and conclude that, for Schelling, Spinoza was not immanent enough. In his letter from the 4th of February 1795 to Hegel, Schelling famously proclaims that he has “become a Spinozist!” “Don’t be surprised,” he continues, “you will soon hear, how? For Spinoza, the world (the absolute object opposed to the subject) was everything, for me it is the I” (HKA 3/1, 22).2 In his previous letter to Hegel, dated January 6, 1795, Schelling relates that he is working on an “Ethic à la Spinoza.” This ethic, he writes, “should present the highest principles of all philosophy, the principles in which theoretical and practical reason are unified” (HKA 3/1, 17). These letters have raised ample questions. What could Schelling mean when he describes himself as a Spinozist, and what would his project of a Spinoza-inspired ethics look like? How could Schelling avow Spinozism, as he was constructing a system that looked very much like Fichte’s? How was Schelling able, on the one hand, to claim solidarity with Fichte, as he did in his January letter, and, on the other hand, to call himself a Spinozist?3 Although in the last twenty years there has been a growing consensus that Schelling was never a fully-fledged Fichtean, the question remains concerning the extent of Schelling’s sympathies with Spinozist ideas, and their relation to his apparent Fichtean allegiances.4 This question becomes more striking when one observes that Schelling’s familiarity with Fichte’s goals and ideas is itself an issue of controversy. Although Schelling had received Fichte’s Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794) by January 1795, a year later he reports to Niethammer that he had not yet read the work in its entirety. Thus, in a letter from January 22, 1796, Schelling responds to Niethammer’s request to write a review of the Wissenschaftslehre as follows: “I take your request that I review Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre with yet greater pleasure, since I myself have not yet had enough time to truly study this work. The practical part of it I have not yet once read… Nevertheless I believe I have grasped the spirit of the work in general” (HKA 3/1, 40). In a follow-up letter from the 23rd of March of that year, Schelling asks Niethammer to seek another reviewer, as Schelling cannot promise to write the review by a certain date (HKA 3/1, 49). Indeed, as Xavier Tillliette has shown, Schelling’s 1795 work Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie evidences no familiarity with the Grundlage, relying, rather, on Fichte’s earlier Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (1794).5 Yet, Fichte, upon reading Schelling’s Vom Ich, appears to have been pleased and describes it to Reinhold (July 2, 1795) as “a commentary on my work” (GA 3/2, Nr. 294).6 The Spinozist perspective present in it, he continues, “particularly pleases me, as Spinoza’s system is the one which can most clearly explain mine” (ibid.). Reinhold, however, is not entirely in agreement with Fichte’s assessment. In December 1795 he writes to Fichte, “I had until now believed that the pure I … arises from out of moral laws – not that the moral laws must be deduced from it. I remain afraid that the true sense of the moral law can be in danger, if one derives it from the absolutely posited absolute I … in Mr. Schelling’s writing there are statements on this point…” (GA 3/2, Nr. 330). While Fichte sees in Schelling’s Spinozism a means by which to interpret the Wissenschaftslehre, Reinhold sees the reverse—Schelling is using Fichtean ideas and terminology to interpret Spinoza. Thus, Schelling’s employment of the I and his emphasis on freedom do not express a Fichtean approach, but rather a Spinozist approach that is merely using Fichtean terminology. More and more, this has become the accepted interpretation of Schelling’s Vom Ich, with some commentators going so far as to argue that Schelling’s conception of the I in this work is nothing but a “place-holder” for Spinoza’s substance that bears little relation to Fichte’s I.7 Although I think this claim is not entirely unjustified, it would be a mistake to understand Schelling’s I as a mere terminological substitute for Spinoza’s substance. For although Schelling’s description of the I shares much in common with Spinoza’s substance—it is an absolute indivisible unity, whose attributes are infinite, and which can best be described as “absolute power”—Schelling emphasizes, in his letters to Hegel, in Vom Ich, as well as in his later writings, that his starting point is the I, and not, as was the case with Spinoza, the not-I. Thus in his February 1795 letter to Hegel, Schelling, in spite of calling himself a Spinozist, underscores this difference. “The real difference between critical and dogmatic philosophy,” he writes, “appears to lie in the fact that critical philosophy begins with the absolute I (which is not determined [bedingten] by an object), while dogmatism begins with the absolute object, or not-I. Dogmatism in its most consistent form, leads to Spinoza’s system, criticism to Kant’s” (HKA 3/1, 22). If, as Schelling goes on to say, “philosophy must begin with the unconditioned,” then the only question remaining is, “where does this unconditioned lie—is it in the I or in the not-I? If this question is answered, then everything is decided” (ibid.). Schelling’s answer, in his early writings (Vom Ich, the Philosophische Briefe) and—though I will not cover this in my paper, in his “identity philosophy”—is that the unconditioned necessarily is the I. Given that Schelling’s notion of the absolute I so closely resembles Spinoza’s substance, why does he persist and emphasize that it is an I and not simply substance? The answer to this question, I think, can be found in Schelling’s notion of intellectual intuition. Schelling speaks of intellectual intuition for the first time in Vom Ich. Vom Ich is the text which Fichte considers to be nothing more than a “commentary” on his own, and to which Reinhold is responding in his letter to Fichte. It is also the first work in which Schelling clearly (and enthusiastically) embraces Spinoza. In Vom Ich, intellectual intuition plays a central, if not entirely worked out, role. Because of this ambiguity, Schelling’s understanding of intellectual intuition has often been interpreted as Fichtean.8 However, an examination of the text reveals that a more significant source of Schelling’s theory of knowledge and his concept of intellectual intuition is not Fichte, but Spinoza. Throughout Vom Ich Schelling references and at times defends Spinoza’s theory of knowledge and notion of truth. In Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, Schelling finds precisely what he is looking for: a nonobjectifying mode of knowing which would enable insight into a non-objective absolute I. It is in Schelling’s theory of intellectual intuition, however, that the difference between Schelling and Spinoza is also most clear. According to Schelling, intellectual intuition is necessarily self-intuition. The question that I would like to pose and consider is this: what is the significance that Schelling sees in the I, as opposed to substance, and why does he emphatically underscore this difference between himself and Spinoza? The answer to this question will not only illustrate the differences between Schelling and Spinoza but also enable us to better understand the direction of Schelling’s thought after 1795. I will proceed as follows. In the first section I provide a brief enumeration of Schelling and Fichte’s conceptions of the I. In section two I outline their differing understandings of intellectual intuition, as developed up until 1795. I then examine Schelling’s references to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge and argue that it is the same conception of intellectual intuition that Schelling is employing in Vom Ich. In the third and final section, I consider the ontological dimension of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s thought, and elaborate how this differentiates him from Spinoza. I have chosen to focus entirely on Vom Ich because it is the text in which Schelling’s affinities with and differences from Spinoza are, I believe, most clear. 1 I would like to thank Julie Klein, Michael Della Rocca and Michael Forster for helpful questions and insightful remarks on the topic of this paper. 2 All citations to Schelling’s work will be made to as follows: HKA: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. SW: Schelling Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling. I will cite SW only in the case where the HKA is not available. In both cases, I will cite the division (Abteilung) number, followed by “/” and then the volume and the page numbers. 3 Thus Schelling writes, “Fichte will raise philosophy to a height, from which even most of the Kantians will become dizzy,” and again, “Lucky enough, if I am one of the first to greet the new hero, Fichte, in the land of truth!” (HKA 3/1, 17). 4 By illustrating the significance of both Plato and Jacobi for the early Schelling, Birgit Sandkaulen-Bock convincingly argues that Schelling was “at no time only and exclusively a Fichtean.” See Birgit SandkaulenBock, Ausgang vom Unbedingten. Über den Anfang in der Philosophie Schellings (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 22-23. Klaus-Jürgen Grün’s study on Spinoza and Schelling similarly maintains that Schelling was not and could not have been, even at this early stage, a mere disciple of Fichte, and illustrates, in contrast to Sandkaulen-Bock, that it was Spinoza (and Spinozism) that played a formative role in Schelling’s philosophical development. See Klaus-Jürgen Grün, Das Erwachen der Materie. Studie über die spinozistischen Gehalte der Naturphilosophie Schellings (Hildesheim: Olms, 1993). However, in spite of its comprehensive and detailed quality, Grün’s study does not address the meaning of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s early work and its relation to Spinoza. In contrast, see Xavier Tilliette, Schelling. Une Philosophie de Devenir, vol. 1, Le System Vivant (Vrin: Paris, 1970). Tilliette claims that in his early writings, Schelling was, “at least in intention, a Fichtean” (Tilliette, Schelling. Une Philosophie de Devenir, vol. 1, 115). Ingtraud Görland similarly argues that “it is actually not possible that Schelling broke through Fichtean philosophy and put forth his own; rather it is only a further development of Fichte’s convoluted philosophy…” in Ingtraud Görland, Die Entwicklung der Frühphilosophie Schellings in der Auseinandersetzung mit Fichte (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973), 7. 5 Xavier Tilliette, Schelling. Une Philosophie de Devenir, vol. 1, 73. 6 All citations to Fichte’s works will be made as follows: GA: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Reinhard Lauth, et al. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962—). I will cite division number, followed by “/” and then volume number, followed by page number(s). 7 The remarks made by Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz, in their introduction to the collection of essays on Schelling’s early philosophy, Materialien zu Schellings Philosophischen Anfangen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), 10. See also Walter Schulz’s introduction to the Fichte-Schelling Briefwechsel (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1968), 29. 8 Thus Xavier Tilliette writes, “the writing Vom Ich does not only tolerate a Fichtean interpretation, it demands it,” see Xavier Tilliette, “Erste Fichte-Rezeption. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der intellektuellen Anschauung,” in Der Transzendentale Gedanke: die gegenwärtige Darstellung der Philosophie Fichtes, ed. Klaus Hammacher (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981): 532-545, here 536. Tilliette’s more recent work on intellectual intuition recognizes the fundamental differences in Schelling and Fichte’s accounts, writing that had they actually read each other’s works attentively, they may have recognized this difference themselves. See Xavier Tilliette, L’intuition intellectuelle de Kant à Hegel (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 57. In turn, Tilliette comes to place more significance on Spinoza’s notion of intellectual intuition (the third kind of knowledge, the intellectual love of God) as an influence on Vom Ich; however, Tilliette’s interpretation emphasizes—too much I think—the sense of intellectual intuition as a “quiet bliss [Stille Wonne – Schelling],” a giving over of oneself to the absolute (Tilliette, L’intuition intellectuelle, 58).