Ep. 273: Friedrich Schelling’s Foundationalist Idealism (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 273 is something like, what is the relationship between mind and world? And this is the first of two episodes we'll be devoting to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's system of transcendental idealism from 1800. We read the introduction and parts one and two for today, we're going to give an overview of that material and go through the introduction in detail. And our next episode number 274, we'll hit the rest of that and add a little bit of part three. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, creating myself through the mere act of looking at myself. In Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, unconditioned but synthetic. In Austin, Texas.

0:51 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, a producing that becomes an object to itself. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

0:59 Dylan: cultivating my transcendental artifice by maintaining myself constantly in the duality of acting and thinking. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:06 Mark: Ain't you fancy?

1:07 Wes: All of our intros are so self centered,

1:12 Dylan: so subjective.

1:15 Mark: All right, Schelling. So this came out about the same time as the Fichte that we just covered, but Fichte had already done his larger system. Schelling was a younger guy, an adherent of Fichte's system. And this is a very early work of his, which a lot of this is like a secondary work, a reinterpretation, a representation of what we got out of Fichte, but in very, very different style. And then he has his own twist on it.

1:36 Wes: This text is reputed to be very Fichtean, and that is the way Schelling started out as kind of an apprentice to Fichte and a defender, although they do diverge. And I think once Fichte actually read this book, this became one of the things that led to their falling out. Basically they had been good friends and they basically broke up because of differences in their philosophy. And it's written in 1801. Even before writing this, Schelling has already worked on his philosophy of nature, which will form part of the basis of absolute idealism that later on him and Hegel are going to get into.

And we see glimpses of that here. So this is pretty straightforwardly a transcendental idealist or a subjective idealist text, as opposed to the absolute idealism that we get later with Schelling and Hegel. There are some things in here and in Schelling's philosophy of nature that are already laying the groundwork for absolute idealism. And there are also things in this text that Hegel directly picks up on and uses to his own purpose. So we didn't read it today, but maybe we'll read it for a future episode. The sort of stages of self consciousness that are very familiar to people from the phenomenology.

Well, Schelling did it first right here,

2:53 Seth: I'll tell you in the lead up to this. I was late doing the reading until this past weekend, and everybody's comments on it made me think we were entering in the realm of Hegel or Heidegger. I did not find it nearly that difficult to read. Now, understanding it is a different question, but stylistically it's not a terrible read by any stretch of the imagination. And I have to say the secondary literature helped to lay kind of a interpretive framework that made it easier for me to at least come to this with some kind of construct for trying to understand what was happening.

But I don't know. I'm really interested. It's one of these texts that you're just kind of like, yeah, okay. And then you turn around and you're like, wait, how did I get here? And that's my style of reading, right? Is to just go along with the argument and try to understand what the person's trying to accomplish before I go back and start to get critical with assumptions or interpretive moves or what have you. I don't like to get stuck early on on something, you know, I kind of like, take it in. And this is one where I feel like it flows. If this is the situation, you have to go either this way or that way.

But isn't there something that has to ground both of those things? We should look at that, and then we do this and then we do that. It felt very. I don't know if this is intended to be like a public text the way, like the Fichte that we read was designed to be.

4:14 Mark: I did not get that at all.

4:16 Seth: No. But it was not at all opaque or obscure.

4:19 Wes: But apparently, you know, he was famous. And he became famous well before Hegel, I think Hegel. It took him a long time to write the Phenomenology. He was too busy writing books about planets. So it was like 39 before Hegel became famous. And Schelling's star had already risen and fallen by then, even though Schelling was younger.

4:40 Dylan: Is this one of the things he wrote when he was 24 or something like that.

4:44 Wes: I think so. I think this is his early 20s and it's long.

4:48 Mark: This is not the later popularized version like we read from Fichte. This is the book, the system that

4:54 Wes: he was trying to do at the

4:55 Mark: time, his version of Hegel's phenomenology in terms of scope. We may well have a second episode that would not finish the book the way that the Fichte would. It would just be like, well, let's take another scoop of this giant tub of ice cream.

5:09 Wes: Very, very difficult ice cream. What is the flavor of this ice cream?

5:14 Dylan: I don't know.

5:15 Mark: Lemon Sherbet. Because there's a lot of mathematical pseudo mathematical and logical structures and outlines that go to AA through gg, making these various points a lot of deduction.

5:31 Wes: What is the ice cream of identity? Frozen yogurt.

5:35 Dylan: Piggybacking off a bit on what Seth was saying. There's something kind of straightforward about it in terms of reading it. One of the things that I really like about it, just in terms of structure, that's probably a consequence. It's a double edged sword on his sort of deduction process. But he's engaging in as well. There's the subjective transcendental track, there's this objective dogmatic track. And he's really trying to solve a big problem. I think at the very least he's doing a pretty interesting job of articulating what the conundrum is between the process of experiencing the world and perception and just acknowledging that we make ideas and we think ideas about the world.

And then that there's for him this objective fact that the world exists without us. And trying to make sense of that in a fairly careful way. And I found that just that part of it is super interesting. His articulation of the, I'll call it the wings of the problem along the way of coming up with a solution to try to meld them together. That I found very, very useful. And in some ways he's engaged in articulating a problem that permeates philosophy all the time from the beginning till now. How do we deal with those two pieces?

6:58 Wes: Yeah. So how do we know things and

7:00 Dylan: how do we jiving that knowing of things with what the world quote unquote is and making sense of what kind of question is that? What are the terms of answering that question? And what I like about it is he gnaws on the end of the bone that swell. The world's gotta exist out there and it's independent of us. It's objective and then goes on to the other end of the bone and starts gnawing on the fact that, well, I see things, I perceive things through my senses. Gnawing on the relative reliability of it. Gnawing on the fact that what I'm working on in my thinking is ideas and how does that possibly have any actual connection with something out there? Gnaws on that for a little while.

7:49 Wes: I think it's helpful for listeners who are going to try to read this to think about this in terms of. You could even think about this as a kind of elaborate. And you could think of Kant in the same way and Fichte in the same way, but as an elaborate retelling of the Cartesian story where epistemology has become really important to philosophers in light of the advent of natural science because people have much more detailed ideas about the way, you know, an external world can affect the senses, you know, light going into the eyes and producing brain activity and representations and that sort of stuff.

And then the question becomes, if all I have are my representations and how does that actually tell me anything about the external world and external objects and why can't I just become a full on skeptic about that stuff? And Descartes tells us, well, we can come up with a first principle. We can come up with something that is absolutely certain and even start out as skeptics, right? And then kind of win back the world by building it back on that first principle. And that first principle is self consciousness. And self consciousness for Descartes allows us to derive the existence of the world because first we have to prove God, interestingly enough, by using a variation of the ontological argument.

So I can prove God from my own existence. And then that tells me that my knowledge of the external world, that my propensity to attribute things, my representations to external objects is not mere deception. And German idealism is elaborating a lot on this idea. But by the time we've reached this point with Fichte and Schelling, they are going to tell us. Kant has already said, well, yes, we have knowledge of objects as long as we want to call them appearances and kind of in a way identify them with our representations. And outside of that are things in themselves that we can't know.

Fichte and Schelling kind of want to save the day and get rid of the thing in itself and tell us how the external objects are actually generated out of self consciousness. And that's really the. For what we read today, Schelling is going to give us a lot of detail on how that works.

9:59 Mark: So that's what I liked about this, is that it took Fichte's primary conclusion and actually tried to get into the mechanism and the derivation. I don't think it has any better a proof or more thorough proof of idealism itself. What Dylan was saying about him sort of chewing both sides of the bone of starting with the subject sometimes and starting with nature, like that sounds like a description of his overall project. I mean, he'd already written this earlier book, the Science of Nature. Is that what it's called?

10:26 Wes: Or Ideas for Philosophy of Nature? Probably, yeah.

10:28 Mark: But in this text he's explicitly about the transcendental science. Right, the transcendental idealism. What's a little confusing here is that we really read four different things. So there's the forward and the introduction, and those things are describing this overall system. And so he is saying, like, well, what is going to make an overall system that you end up having to have a science of nature, but then you also have to have this transcendental philosophy, and you need something that ultimately is going to unify them. So it sort of points toward we need this fundamental.

He calls it a principle at first, but it ends up not actually being a principle. We'll get into it. But it is the experience of self consciousness that somehow the experience of self consciousness itself is the fundamental thing. There's so many weird things about it that it's synthetic, yet it's also analytic. And it's a process, but it makes the thing and it ends up being a very crazy thing. And so that's what in this part one and part two. Part one is on the principle of transcendental idealism. So it's laying this out. And then part two, which is pretty short, general deduction of transcendental idealism.

Between the two of those, they end up elaborating what self consciousness actually amounts to. So in that sense, it is describing the mechanism again, how we get objects out of the notion of self. It's not answering the skeptical problem. It's kind of assuming the idealist solution is right, that even in our everyday experience of nature, the natural standpoint, he doesn't use that term, that's from Husserl, but he sort of uses the common viewpoint is that nature does not transcend our knowledge of it, which is really weird to me. And there's a defense we can give of it.

But he's kind of assuming right at the beginning this idealist principle.

12:14 Wes: All you can really Say to the dogmatist or the materialist, which is they're synonymous. And I think today we would call it the naturalistic framework or standpoint. Right? And most of us would be very sympathetic to that. That is kind of our default position to look at this naturalistically and to think this kind of idealism is kind of crazy. But all the idealists can really say to the naturalist, the dogmatist, is that you can't explain knowledge. You can't explain how knowledge is possible. And that's what, for instance, Kant was worried about.

If Hume is right about causality, if the skeptic is right, then we need to believe in causality. If we want to believe that we can explain the world. And we can't do that for Kant and for these other guys without saying that it comes from the self, that that and other categories is really about the structure of consciousness. So what these guys are selling is they're just saying, look, we're just assuming that you can know things, and we're also assuming that we can be free. We want to assume both of those things, and we want to find a way to reconcile freedom and determinism and science and freedom.

And so we can offer you a theory of how all those things can be done. We can't prove that it's right, but we can just come up with a model that will help us if we want to assume knowledge and assume freedom. But there are some other things that he has to say to the dogmatist in here. But that's basically what the transcendental idealist

13:43 Mark: is selling the ultimate judgment on. It is, does the system answer what have been traditionally philosophical problems?

13:50 Dylan: I mean, to me, there's a little bit of sense of it. You have something like Zeno's paradox, where you say, in order to get from here to there, I have to go halfway. Halfway, halfway, but therefore never reach. That's one side of it. And so you have this way with the transcendental and the materialist position. You have ways of thinking about things that lead you to contradictions, lead you to paradoxes. Those are embodied in what Wes was characterizing as the two things that you are going to say. Well, these two things are true by experience is, I think, the way Schelling would say it, freedom and knowledge.

I think that's directly related to something like causality. And so those two things are true. Despite all my protestations, the world seems to exist without me. And I can also make predictions about stuff that happens, and I make decisions about it. All those kinds of things. And when I start thinking about it, it starts to not make sense. And I get into this kind of paradoxical situation. And to me, I found one of the ways I was seeing Schelling acting was saying, just like you say, well, Zeno's paradox, the fact that you say in the way you're thinking that you can't get from here to there means you're not thinking about the problem correctly.

So you have to come up with a solution that allows you to think about the problem in a more sensible way. Because the is I get from here to there. And so to the extent that you argue yourself out of there being something that is intelligible about the world, that you can know things, and that you argue yourself out of there being something that is what we would call freedom, means that you've gone awry in some way in terms of really understanding what the world is like and how we are in it and how we know those things and how we hold our freedom.

And he's trying to solve that, right?

15:32 Mark: The two sides of the bone in this, it's not the world on the one side and us on the other side. It's the two arrows of connectivity between the two is that somehow we have knowledge. Which means that matter is affecting mind, right?

15:46 Wes: Somehow, according to the dogmatist.

15:49 Mark: Well, according to what we generally agree on. And then also mind affects matter, which I didn't understand initially, but he's definitely talking about freedom and will, right? He doesn't spell this out, but because we read Fichte, who just really got dramatic about this, like it's clear that he's talking about the fact that you can have an idea and you can put it into effect, and somehow those are supposed to be deeply, unsettlingly contradictory. And again, if we hadn't just read Fichte, it would not be obvious to me from this text why that would be because it seems, well, can't we know stuff and then we can also have ideas and do stuff like, why should those be contrad?

16:29 Wes: If that's our model of things and we're affected by sensations, then we are just another of one of material things being causally interacted with. And if we are part of the causal web, then we are completely determined and then we can't be free. The other problem is just the Cartesian problem of how mind and brain, if we're dualists, work together and how you could ever have the mind lead to something physical happening in the world.

16:54 Mark: I mean, it's funny to me that Schelling doesn't say that, that I noticed, at least in this section he does.

17:00 Wes: He gives a little throw off sentence, he's saying. And there's also that old Cartesian question of how mind and matter would interact.

17:07 Mark: I meant the determinism thing. The fact that we have knowledge of things means that they are determining us. And that should be worrying, like actually spelling out that bit of the logic I did not see in here. I only got that from Fichte. I didn't read as much of the secondary stuff as you did. So I guess the book in question, the one that I would not have to write 200 pages of to get, is German Philosophy 1760-1860, the legacy of Idealism by Terry Pinkard. So that had a kind of compact Schelling description. And I got far enough into that to see that Schelling announced to Hegel, who was his roommate, who was five years older than him and was his roommate in college, basically, but that later, you know, he sent Hegel a letter saying he'd become a Spinozist.

And this is the book that came out of that. So that you can see this. Oh, we're looking for some fundamental principle that underlies the subjective and the objective that needs to bring them together, needs to bring together mind and world. But he can't exactly be Spinoza because for Spinoza, as with Descartes, mind ends up being a type of substance, it ends up being an object. We're really talking about the subjective realm and the objective realm. The subjective realm is by necessity not an object at all. It's more like Sartre's Being and Nothingness, where being is the solid, the things, and then the nothingness is what consciousness introduces.

It's the consciousness world duality, not the mind body duality, where mind is a substance.

18:35 Wes: Spinoza is still a dogmatist. He's the best of the dogmatists. For Schelling, he's at least consistent, I

18:41 Mark: think, is what he says in here.

18:42 Wes: Right. I mean, ultimately where absolute idealism is going to end up is just with a subjective version of Spinoza ism. You can't do Spinoza here because Spinoza wants to say that everything is substance, including us. Our minds would just be modifications of that one great substance. Right. And so we get a kind of monism in which the objective and the subjective are just two different standpoints, two different ways that things can seem, but underlying it, they're grounded in one substantial reality. I think it might be hard to explain how that's going to differ from absolute Idealism in which there's this transcendent thing that is neither subject nor object, but which subject and object kind of emerge out of.

19:28 Mark: Sorry, can you just clarify those terms? That the way that distinguishes Fichte is a subjective idealist and Schelling is an absolute idealist. Is that right or what?

19:38 Wes: Yeah, I mean, at this point in this text, he's a subjective idealist, and we have hints of absolute idealism and

19:45 Mark: just say what the difference between those is.

19:47 Wes: The thing that Schelling will end up doing with absolute idealism is he'll take his philosophy of nature and he will start to suggest. I mean, ultimately he'll say it, that you can do the transcendental idealist thing and treat the world as a product of the subject, or maybe even some sort of super subject, but you could also just start from nature and especially from organic phenomena. So instead of asking, like, what are the grounds for the possibility of experience, in particular experience of the external world in the mind, you could say, well, what are the grounds for the possibility of the development of the mind in nature itself?

And there's some proto evolutionary ideas here. The way we would think about this is our minds, our brains develop in the context of a natural world. And that says something. If we want to talk about this link between mind and nature. The way the mind develops out of nature is relevant to all this. So you could start from either end. And I think Schelling says that in this text, before abandoning the nature side of things, you could start from nature as well, and then you'd have to start thinking about organic phenomenon, the way mind emerges from nature and all that stuff.

But it's good enough just to start from the subjective side and really the two amount to the same thing. This is something that Fichte did not like and led to their falling out.

21:03 Mark: In the course of what we've been saying so far, we've hit a lot of what's in the forward in the introduction, but can we get a few quotes out or specific points from, say, the foreword? Just start at the beginning of the text. I really felt like we didn't want to do too many pages of this text because we could just walk through and it's one of those ones where every paragraph is. I don't know if worth reading, but to me was puzzling enough that we could go through very slowly. But I do also think that part two was the most interesting of it and the most dense of it. So I don't want to never get there.

21:34 Dylan: So a good place that sort of restates some things that we say, but ends with something that I found. An interesting formulation is just the second paragraph of the introduction. After saying that the coincidence of presentations with their objects is what all knowledge is, says the intrinsic notion of everything merely objective in our knowledge we speak of as nature. The notion of everything subjective is called, on the contrary, the self or the intelligence. Two concepts are mutually opposed. The intelligence is initially conceived of as purely presentative nature, purely as what can be presented, the one as the conscious, the other as the unconscious. But now in every knowing, a reciprocal concurrence of the two is necessary. The problem is to explain this concurrence.

22:20 Mark: I found that puzzling enough that we should stop and just think. He's just stating this right at the beginning of the treatise. Like we know that what knowledge is is the coincidence of presentations with their objects. Is this taken from ancient philosophy? Like, how could he just think that a fairly novel sounding formulation like that is merely uncontroversial? Just throw it out.

22:41 Wes: Well, what does he mean by coincidence? Why is he using that term in particular? Right. I don't think we would have been surprised at all if he had just said something like knowledge is correspondence between representations and objects. Give us a straight up correspondence theory of truth. And here he's using the word presentation and then the word coincidence. I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if coincidence is something that is broader in a way where he's not trying to prejudice us to what that means. Or maybe it's more specific. He could just be so Kantian that the way he thinks of knowing is of objects as phenomena in which it is the coincidence of the subjective and the objective in the sense that they're in the mind in some sense. They're made of mind in some sense.

23:29 Dylan: And in the third paragraph he says that knowing as such, the fact of my knowing, the objective and the subjective are so united that we cannot say which of the two has priority.

23:40 Wes: Well, in saying that, what he's saying is the priority would be do I explain knowing in terms of external objects affecting a brain and then a mind emerging out of that, or do I explain objects as these things that arise within experience? So I start in the transcendental idealist way from the subjective side of things, or I give the subjective the priority

24:05 Dylan: and knowing is the coincidence of those two things. You can't tell the difference.

24:10 Seth: No, knowing is the coincidence of the presentations and their objects.

24:15 Dylan: Okay, so what's the difference between that coincidence and the fact that I can't tell the difference between characterizing knowing as me not being able to tell the difference between the objective and the subjective. It's not that they're equal, it's not that they're the same. Thing is that I can't tell the difference. They're coincident. Maybe coincident is making them be in time so much too much.

24:39 Wes: He's saying we don't know which one to give priority. He's going to spell this out down below, right? He's going to give you the options. Yeah, you can do nature philosophy and give the objective priority, or you can be a transcendental idealist.

24:51 Mark: The priority is how you're systematizing it in the individual experience. They are one and the same. I read coincidence very literally that this whole formulation is. So he can be an idealist. So you can say a presentation is something in the mind. An object is also something in the mind, but semantically when we talk about it, and also just the way we think about things, of course we recognize the difference between the moon and my idea of the moon. Russell or somebody like that takes this as a complete refutation of idealism, the fact that we distinguish these. But of course these guys are aware of that distinction. It's just they're both in the mind. And so when you're really accurately thinking of the moon, then the presentation and the object itself are coincident. They're right there together.

25:34 Wes: Think about the way it seems to a naive realist as well, it does seem that there's also complete coincidence. The naive realist doesn't even think about the difference between the ways in which they have representations which are only indirectly related to the world, or that there's some sort of mediation. But if we look at it in terms of the two options that he spells out below, A and B, he's suggesting with his philosophy of nature that. So this is a little bit different than actually what I described. I gave the dogmatists version of this, in which we talk about how the mind arises out of the brain and all that stuff.

What he's thinking about with natural philosophy, one of these two different approaches, is he's suggesting that you could show that what we call natural laws are in a way like the laws of thought. And he doesn't say this, but I'm wondering if this is true of some sort of great super subject. Right? Or here's another way to put it. You know, if we think about the formality of nature and scientific laws, there's already something quote unquote intelligent about that and you could think that nature as a whole becomes a kind of subject. I think he does say this.

And inanimate matter is that subject's kind of abortive attempts to reflect on itself. And that ultimately the goal is self consciousness through man, where nature returns back on herself, back to this original primordial identity. And that's kind of the absolute idealist possibility that he's spelling out right here, even before he's legitimately become one. He's just laying that out on the line. He says, I'm not going to do that project right now. I'm going to do B. But here's a.

27:21 Mark: This is point four on page five, option A that you were already describing. The subjective must be annexed to the objective, right? If the objective is primary. He says the concept of nature does not entail that there should also be an intelligence that is aware of it. So right here is the thing that people do think that idealism rejects. They think that an idealist can't explain or can't even account for the fact that. That there was nature before there were humans on earth. But no, the concept of nature as anybody, an idealist or anybody else does not entail that there should be an intelligence that is aware of it.

Nature, it seems, would exist even if there were nothing that was aware of it. Hence the problem can also be formulated. Thus, how does intelligence come to be added to nature? Or how does nature come to be presented? If you're an idealist, this is a problem, but you don't deny it. Like if you say this is one of the datum that comes into us. Sort of what might be taken as the dogmatic principle, but we're going to recast it in a different way. It problematize it.

28:22 Wes: So I don't think this is the problem for the idealist though, right? Because this in a. It's the objective that's made primary.

28:29 Dylan: He elaborates it by bringing theory to nature. At the top of six. The necessary tendency of all natural science is thus to move from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else is at the bottom of the urge to bring theory into the phenomena of nature. The phenomena, the matter must wholly disappear and only the laws, the form remain.

28:50 Seth: If you start with the objective, what he says is you can get concepts, you can get laws, right? You abstract from the particulars. Natural science is the observation of the particulars in order to generalize into concepts which are presentations, right, of not actual phenomenon. They're not making a presentation of this or that particular thing. You're Making a presentation of a law, a general law or what have you. And in doing so, that gets you close to subjectivity. Because you're saying, oh, well, nature has these regularities that can be conceptualized.

But the fact that the regularities exist in nature and can be conceptualized doesn't tell you. Conceptualized by whom and how that conceptualization works. So at the bottom of the page he says the natural science, in fact, and without knowing it, at least comes close to the solution of the problem. So this can only be shown briefly here. But what he's intending to say is that if you start from the objective, you can hint at subjectivity, but you can't quite get there.

29:59 Wes: Yeah. What he's impressed by is that he did a lot of this in his work on the philosophy of nature. But he's impressed by the fact that, say, light may not be a material thing. That that may be reducible in a way to geometry. Or that gravitation itself also can't be reduced to mechanics. Which is the way people were trying to think of this back then. Right. They wanted material things to be bouncing into each other. And the entire world to be explained in terms of the mechanical like that. But if gravitation is just kind of a brute law and it's not itself physical, then you can think about these laws as analogous to the forms of thought for the universe.

The universe is inherently formal once you start to get into all of this stuff. And the formal is not simply reducible to the material. So it gives you the sense that the completed theory of nature would be that whereby the whole of nature was resolved into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are merely abortive attempts that she makes to reflect herself. Inanimate nature, so called, is actually as such an immature intelligence. So that in her phenomena, the still unwitting character of intelligence is already peeping through.

So the intelligence peeps through in the laws. Human beings are ultimately the evolutionary product of all this. Right. So the absolute idealist's account of all this is that nature is designed to progressively develop more and more reflective awareness of itself. And it does that ultimately through human beings. But it's doing that in a kind of rudimentary way. Just by virtue of having natural laws.

31:47 Mark: I guess I want to separate out the genetic story here, which is that Hegelian one that folks that are familiar with Hegel's phenomenology of spirit would be familiar with. What you were just describing as the evolutionary endpoint of this is going to be like the world as God reflecting on itself. And human beings are a major step along that way. They're the first ones that rise out of the unconscious mass and can reflect. That's one kind of story, but it's a different kind of story to be saying that what we might assume to be brute matter we can analyze as form or as information would be a more modern way of putting it, that everything that is around here, you know, you could have the matrix.

In other words, it's all just zeros and ones, and it's the pattern of those that then gives rise to the world that we observe. And I feel like those are very different claims, even though Schelling believes both of them.

32:42 Wes: Yeah, I'm reading A as the. This is what I'm not doing in this book, which is the nature philosophy, slash, absolute idealism project. We're going to just be transcendental idealists in this book. And that's B. That's the road we're going to walk down. Then that's where the subjective is made primary. And then we have to ask ourselves how the objective supervenes. And that's a lot of what we did in this reading.

33:06 Mark: So we'll have to read something else in the future. I think Dylan had mentioned Whitehead or something as being an appropriate next step here for a number of reasons, but just somebody that reflects more explicitly on this idea of reduction of the mass of the natural world into patterns and laws and ultimately information and reading intelligence into nature such that there are hints of that later in this reading of teleology being the thing that connects the subjective and the objective. And to do science requires something like artistic apperception. And part of that is because, as we've been saying, natural law is sort of like human intelligence. And so to grasp it, to intuit what's going on in nature, is not unlike figuring out a work of art or figuring out somebody else's mind.

33:54 Wes: Also, he's doing process philosophy in this, right? The self is going to turn out to be an activity, a process.

33:59 Dylan: And that's to some level the big lever, right? Is the reason the nexus between the objective and the subjective is the self is the self is an activity. So I think we referred to B without reading B. So B is alternatively, the subject is made primary, and the problem is how an objective supervenes what coincides with it.

34:20 Wes: So that's the epistemological problem. Once we become skeptics, to some extent, we have to say, you know, if what we have are our representations, how does that have anything to do with the world? How could we even know there are things in themselves that are related to those representations? And this he calls the main problem of philosophy, because this is Kant. And Kant basically said there is no metaphysics, everything is just epistemology. And these guys are still on that track, although ultimately they're going to become metaphysicians again.

34:51 Dylan: He summarizes at the very end of Section 1 back to a To make the objective primary and to derive this objective from that is, as has just been shown, the problem of nature philosophy. If then there is a transcendental philosophy that remains in it only the opposite direction, that of proceeding from the subjective as primary and absolute, and having the objective arise from this. Thus nature philosophy and transcendental philosophy have divided into two directions possible to philosophy. And if all philosophy must go about either to make an intelligence out of nature or a nature out of intelligence, then transcendental philosophy, which has the latter task, is thus the necessary basic science of philosophy. This is underlining your comment, Wes, that he's going to go the transcendental philosophy route.

35:44 Mark: I promise I'm not going to keep trying to make this point over and over again, but I feel like he's being really careful about saying that what making this effective primary is figuring out how the objective supervenes which coincides with it. So he's not saying how does knowledge connect with the world? He's not even saying here how knowledge generates the world, though that's much closer. It's the idealist formulation. But how an objective supervenes, which to me is kind of like as if the objective were a class of thoughts of higher level concepts, so that we have our sensations and all this immediate stuff and then we organize and build upon those.

You know, this is just what we described in our Fichte episode, so that what ends up being an object ends up being a bunch of those individual things fit together in a systematic way. So doing science is building the edifice within our knowledge which could, if you were an individual by yourself and no other individuals in the world know God, would be an entirely solipsistic project. It doesn't get beyond that.

36:47 Wes: I mean, like Fichte, he's going to be saying that there is no given, we're not affected from anything outside of us. Everything is produced by self consciousness. So that includes the data. That's the way I'm going to read this.

37:02 Mark: Move to corollaries on page seven. Here is that one bad sign in the structure here.

37:11 Wes: Yeah. Seriously? Yeah. So the subject is the first and only Ground of all reality. And we start out as skeptics about the reality of the objective and whether or not there are things outside of us.

37:26 Mark: We start our method, not we start in the natural standpoint. We're not skeptics in the natural standpoint.

37:31 Wes: Once you're doing transcendental idealism, that's where you're beginning with this doubt about the reality of the objective.

37:37 Dylan: Yeah. He says if the subjective is the first and only ground of reality, is for transcendental philosophy the sole principal explanation. And then we're going to proceed from that. So he's saying that he then very quickly, this is again just a manifestation of. One of the things I like about him is he says we're going to start with transcendental philosophy. But then one basic prejudice to which all others reduce is no other than that there are things outside of us. But he has this kind of, in some ways very pleasant kind of oscillation. He's working on it. We'll start with the subjective side, transcendental philosophy. But then you're like, but isn't there stuff outside in the world besides us? Wait, isn't there?

38:24 Wes: Yeah. And he's setting us up here to tell us we feel in naive realism, we feel like we have this very immediate relationship to external objects. We don't even think about there being this sort of problem. It feels very immediate and certain. So how are we going to explain that as transcendental idealists? Yeah, we can be skeptics, but we have to give some origin story about where that feeling of immediacy and certitude, where those feelings come from. And he's going to say, well, they're derivative of self certainty, they're derivative of our immediate relation to ourselves. And that gets painted onto the objective. And the objective derives its sense of immediacy from what is really an immediacy of self consciousness, of self relation. And so in one here he says, that's what's going to happen here. I'm going to show you how that

39:21 Mark: works, which is what ends up taking up most of the rest of the story that we're going to tell today. And I still don't know that I find it ultimately that convincing or even understand exactly. You know, because like later he goes into a long thing about. You might think that like A equals A is the primary thing, the principle of non contradiction. But actually that assumes that there is an A, right? There are things that there's something that you can put as the value of the. And so in order to derive thingness at all, which is necessary to even think this purely formal truth of the principle of non contradiction.

You have to have I equals I. In other words, the experience of self consciousness. And somehow that example of, you know, a process made into a thing by the very apprehension of it. You know, we'll talk about this. But that somehow grounds the more you would think more general truth A equals A. But like, unless you have thingness in the first place, you can't even think the principle of non contradiction. That's how basic self consciousness is.

40:24 Wes: Yes, it's going to give you a synthetic ground to everything that. Even stuff that seems analytic. To put it in Kantian terms, it's a synthetic monad.

40:34 Dylan: This is Seth's opening statement, right?

40:37 Wes: A lot of this. He's going to really be asking the question of how a priori synthetic judgments are possible. Unfortunately, he uses the word identity instead of analytic. It's synonymous with analytic. And he's going to say they're possible only through self consciousness. For these guys, in order to have scientific knowledge, that just means to have a priori synthetic judgments. Because that's what allows us to avoid the Humean skepticism and say I can make these causal judgments about things, but have them be actual knowledge and not just regularities. And so on. Back to Corollary 2. That's where he tells us that the thing that is really actually immediately certain to us is I exist, and we can derive the certainty of the whole. There are things outside of us prejudice only if we can show that that's actually identical to I exist and that it borrows the certainty from I exist.

41:38 Seth: You want to read just that first paragraph from section Corollary 2.

41:42 Wes: But now, even for the common use of reason, nothing is immediately certain save the proposition I exist, which since it actually loses its meaning outside immediate consciousness, is the most individual of all truths and the absolute preconception which must first be accepted if anything else is to be certain. The proposition there are things outside of us will therefore only be certain for the transcendental philosopher, in virtue of its identity with the proposition I exist, and its certainty will likewise only be equal to the certainty of the proposition from which it borrows its own.

42:15 Mark: So I had described in Fichte that Fichte's fundamental phenomenological observation is not I exist, but it is something like Heidegger's being in the world. In other words, the very experience of perceiving anything involves a unification of it's me being the perceiver. So it's a notion of I with there being something that is the object. So in other words, the subjective and objective are always there in every bit of knowledge. And the purpose of the transcendental philosophy, says Schelling, is to explicitly pull these things apart. And he gives a lot of different wording for this of, you know, we normally don't look at knowledge, which this actually is different than.

Fichte says Fichte seems to have a notion that I don't want to disappear into this point. But I thought that Fichte had more of a notion that it was more explicit that you explicitly had this notion of I, as opposed to it being only something that is uncovered when the analyst, the transcendental philosopher, comes in and pulls apart that ordinary experience and says, look, there is the eye and there is the object it pulls apart in order to show how they are ultimately unified.

43:21 Wes: Yeah, he'll say, what normally is fused in consciousness together, The I exist and there are things outside of me. For the naive realist, right, fused. The transcendental idealist pulls them apart in order to prove the fact that they are identical at this reflective level. And so what's initially felt in naive realism can actually be demonstrated and it can be shown why we feel that way. We got one more. One more corollary is number three.

43:52 Mark: Give the last corollary.

43:53 Wes: He's continuing to contrast ordinary cognition and transcendental cognition.

43:58 Seth: What he's saying is if you're going to make this move to the transcendental mode of apprehension, then the only thing that has initial reality for you is the subjective, which means the only thing you can make the object of subjectivity is the subjective itself. So the quote unquote objective, the real nature, can be an object only indirectly, he says, whereas in ordinary cognition, the knowing itself, the act of knowing, vanishes into the object. So in other words, in ordinary cognition, when you are apprehending an object, you aren't aware of your apprehension of the object.

It's simply the fact that you're doing it just disappears into it. In transcendental cognition, on the contrary, the object as such vanishes into the act of knowing. Transcendental cognition is thus knowing of knowing. Insofar as purely subjective, the object, I don't want to say becomes irrelevant. But transcendental cognition is an abstraction to some extent from ordinary cognition of things, where the object of this transcendental approach to philosophy is the act of cognition itself, or the act of knowing itself is what becomes the object.

So you don't really care about nature in itself. Yeah.

45:24 Wes: So if I, instead of worrying about the thing that I'm intuiting, which is to say perceiving in space and time, I try to look at the act of intuiting itself. I sort of make the machinery of cognition my object, my subject matter, and see what's going on with that, which is to say making the subjective objective to itself. That's the way he ends this, which is a weird paradox, right? Because the subjective can't be an object in the usual sense. Kant was very insistent about this. I can't know myself as an object in space and time. I can have an empirical self consisting of kind of like a human bundle of thoughts and feelings and my body and all that stuff.

But as far as the transcendental subject that's outside of experience, that's not an object. So Schelling is talking about a new way of. He's going to have to tell us how we could make the subjective objective over and against Kant's objections to that. How do we make self consciousness an object for ourselves or the machinery of intuition an object for ourselves?

46:31 Mark: Right, because it has to be in experience. Right. It has to be within the realm of the phenomenological and not a truly transcendental, in Kant sense. You can't be talking about the machinery behind knowledge. Like the machinery has to somehow also be accessible to knowledge. If only you just turn around and look at it.

46:52 Wes: Well, he's going to say, and spoiler alert, he's going to say we can have what Kant said. We can't have intellectual intuition. And we can have that because there's a special kind of thing that's going on in the productivity. We can have an intellectual intuition of the self. Just because the self is constituted by the act of self consciousness. In a weird way, it's confusing. We'll get into it later on.

47:17 Mark: All right, well, there's a lot more to talk about. Supporters. You can get that in the next thing on your feed. Part two. See you then.