Ep. 274: Schelling on Self-Consciousness (Part One)

0:07 Mark: 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 274 is something like what is the significance of self consciousness? And we're continuing from our previous episode in reading Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schellings system of transcendental idealism from 1800. Since we apparently only finished the introduction in the last discussion, this time we'd like to finish part one, look at the very brief part two, maybe get in the very beginning of part three. Who knows? For more information please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, deriving all truths from just me being me in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin exhibiting consciousness itself through the aesthetic in Austin, Texas.

0:52 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, self supporting and internally consistent with myself in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:58 Mark: All right, so Wes was just saying that we only finished the intro. I see. At the end of the intro is my note. Is it psychologism, which I used to kick off part two of our last discussion? Maybe I put that in the wrong place, but I don't know. Seth, you seem to think that we got up to page 14, which is about where I thought I actually saw things that we had covered very thoroughly in our expository stuff up to a few pages after that. So I don't really care.

1:26 Seth: Well, I agree with Wes. I don't think we worked through the argument conversation. You touched up to page 20. I think you jumped ahead. But 14 substantively was about as much meat on the bone. I agree with Wes. I think it would be good to kind of work through the argument a little bit.

1:40 Wes: Yeah.

1:41 Mark: Okay. So page 15 is the beginning of part one on the principle of transcendental idealism. Section one on the necessity and character of a supreme principle of knowledge. I'm going to read everything in that voice. That is how I imagine. Can we just give it away though, that just, you know, I gave him an intro. Question is, what is self consciousness? The supreme principle of knowledge is going to be self consciousness. Everything that we're going to be discussing from this point on is what self consciousness is. Why supposedly it is the foundation for all philosophy.

Drilling deeper into self consciousness is the same thing as actually doing empirical science, for instance, or transcendental philosophy the other way around. It ends up being everything that we know, which would make sense. If you're an idealist and you think that knowing the world is just knowing parts of your mind, then yeah, self consciousness should be the key to everything.

2:29 Wes: Well, even for Descartes, right, it was the key. So what's the first principle of all knowledge for Descartes? Well, it's the cogito, it's self consciousness. And the reason why it's the first principle is it's the only thing that we can know with complete certainty, right? So even if we're being deceived by an evil deceiver or if we're dreaming whatever else is going on, we can know that we exist or we can know our own minds, our own consciousness, even if everything that's going on in them is false. Ultimately, once you start that way, you say, well, how do we get the external world?

And for Descartes, he says, well, I'm going to use the ontological argument and I'm going to, from the mere existence of our idea of God, I'm going to derive the actual existence of God and therefore I can say that he's not deceiving us. And when we think there are things external to our mind, then there really are. And for someone like Berkeley, it's how do we know about the external world? Well, it just kind of is in our heads, but God ensures that it's objective because he's putting all the same ideas in our minds. He's ensuring a kind of harmony.

In this case, we get the external world by virtue of its being produced by that very act of self consciousness which grounds the certitude of knowledge. So a lot of this is going to be Schelling saying, all right, we know that the ultimate principle of our knowledge is self knowledge, but then we are stuck in this quandary of how we get back objectivity in a satisfying way. And the way he's going to do that, this German idealism way, is really, really kind of nutty when you think about it. But self consciousness produces external reality. That's kind of my overall summary of what's going on here.

But we could start to work through the argument.

4:19 Seth: So I'm going to recapitulate something that I think we talked about last time. Although honestly guys, I'm so out of my head right now, so many things going on, I'm not sure if we did so correct me if I'm wrong, but Schelling accepts the structure of the or the subject and the object. And you can pick one of two places to start. You can start from the subjective, or you can start from the objective. You can try to derive one from the other, or you can try to get one one from the other. What he says is, because the only thing that we are immediately aware of, the only thing that we have access to as subjects, is our own subjectivity, our own subjective activity.

We have to start from there. Now, he doesn't think that that means that we're picking one pole versus the other. What he's saying is, we talked about this. It's almost phenomenological, where he's just saying this is the standpoint from which we're starting. So we have to start there. And he cashes that out, starting off early on in the first section. So I'm going to read a quote. If all knowledge rests upon the coincidence of an objective and a subjective, the whole of our knowledge consists of propositions which are not immediately true, which derive their reality from something else.

The mere putting together of a subjective with a subjective gives no basis for knowledge proper. And conversely, knowledge proper presupposes a concurrence of opposites whose concurrence can only be a mediated one. Hence there must be some universally mediating factor in our knowledge, which is the sole ground thereof.

5:52 Mark: So an example that he gives in a bit here of a purely subjective piece of knowledge would be an empty logical statement. It's really just something about form. So saying A equals A when you don't know what A means. You haven't even posited that there isn't even any A's in the world. Anything that that refers to that would not actually give you any knowledge, that would be completely empty.

6:15 Seth: No, I don't think that's exactly right. I don't want to jump ahead too far, but he makes the point on page 17 where he says the question is about being, not about knowledge. So in other words, starting from the subjective, you can absolutely have knowledge, but you can't say anything about the being or the reality. That's the purpose of the A equals A, A equals A. If you posit A equals A and you do so completely without regard to there being any A's, I was just

6:47 Mark: trying to elucidate a piece of the quote you just read. So if you have an alternate interpretation of your quote, then I'm happy to hear it.

6:54 Wes: So when we talk about the subjective

6:55 Seth: coinciding with the objective, it's just my subjective. I don't want to use the term experience. What's the right word?

7:04 Mark: Presentation.

7:05 Seth: Yes, the presentation of. Let's just pick a thing. The presentation of a thing that I have. Does it coincide? Does it representative or does it accurately. Is it an accurate representation? Does it coincide with the thing itself.

7:21 Wes: Yeah, it's something like that. He's putting it in a very general way where he's saying when we talk about knowledge, we're talking about intentionality, we're talking about a relationship between our minds and something external. It can't just be of our minds to our minds, although it'll kind of turn out to be that way. But there must be some sense in which that there's a division into two. Otherwise it just doesn't even make sense to talk about knowledge. So this idea of coincidence I take to be a very general way of the subjective must coincide with the objective as a very general way of talking about the fact.

Whether it's a correspondence theory of truth or some other theory of truth. You've got to be able to relate the mind to some kind of mind independent reality. Which doesn't mean that we're going to follow the dogmatist and say that the mind independent reality is matter and that self consciousness is secondary where ourselves are sort of constructed in the material world. We're going to flip that, but we're still talking about this kind of relation.

8:26 Mark: All right, so this is definitely repeating a point from last time, but I think you're trying to explain it in a way that people can understand and say something outside the mind. But I just think he's very careful to say it's about coincidence between presentation on the one hand and object on the other hand. And he doesn't say that the object is something outside the mind or that's the definition of object as being something outside the mind. But we know in our experience that a presentation is I can close my eyes and think of things, it's a thought, and an object is an object. And don't give it any stronger ontological status than that at this point.

8:59 Wes: Well, when I say mind independent reality, the independence doesn't have to mean that it's outside of the mind, right? So in Berkeleyanism the idea is everything's in our mind, but there has to be a mind independent reality that grounds all that. And that's God. And that's why there can be such a thing as objectivity, right? It's not just solipsism, it's not just I'm creating my own world and there's no such thing as objectivity. It's all relative, man. There is objectivity. It must be grounded in something mind independent. But in this case the mind, strangely enough, the mind independent thing is just going to be the act of self consciousness, which even though it grounds Our subjectivity, in a sense, it is also outside of subjectivity.

9:45 Mark: Right. I think maybe instead of saying mind independent, just independent of our wills, that if you're merely imagining something, if you're merely thinking something, then it is not an object for you. I'm not sure about this because clearly when I'm looking at a red ball, well, unless you're Sartre, then I can't choose what presentation hits me. And in the same way, if I'm thinking about geometry. So these are all abstract things. They are literally in my head, they are literally my thoughts. But if I contemplate them, I can't just change them on a whim by my will in the way that I can with imagination. So I'm not sure if independent of the will actually gets at what we're looking for here.

10:26 Wes: Well, yeah, we saw in Fichte, Right, that he was perfectly willing to say this is all grounded in the will in the sense that we're producing our external reality. In a way, it is an act of willing. Right. Fichte and Schelling at this point are looking for a principle that grounds both practical reason, both freedom and theoretical knowledge and objectivity. And the way Fichte rigged it is just to say, well, we're all part of one larger will. And the way arguably the absolute idealists Schelling and Hegel are going to rig it is to talk about, yes, he's talking about self consciousness, but none of this makes sense if he's talking about a particular self consciousness.

This all has to be ultimately a collective self consciousness or maybe even God. So it does start to look very Berkeleyan. It does start to look like the same trick that they're all using. Even Descartes. Right. Depends on God. Everyone in the end gets back to either God or this kind of super subject that looks a lot like God in order to ground all of this. So I don't think willing is the wrong way to put it, Mark.

11:28 Mark: It would have to be conscious willing.

11:30 Wes: Yeah. Or my individual particular will can't be the product of my individual particular will.

11:34 Seth: Help me work through this. I think what he's saying at the beginning here is he says it will be assumed, meantime, as a hypothesis, that there is indeed reality in our knowledge. And we shall ask what the conditions of this reality may be. So we have the subjective experience, we are having perceptions of objects, or we think we're having perceptions of objects. And then there's a further thing, whether it's we're questioning whether those perceptions are accurate or there's a judgment that that coincidence, that it's true and correct, however you want to put it. And he wants to point out that that is a third term, the truth conditions, if you will, or the propositional conditions for saying I have knowledge, or this, that I know is true, that that is outside of and actually makes possible the coincidence between the subject and the object. Does that sound right?

12:32 Wes: Yeah. Well, I think what he's concerned about doing here, these guys are all starting the same way and they're wondering how knowledge is doing a few things, but one is to say how knowledge is possible in the face of skepticism, like Hume, and the other is to say how freedom is possible. So in this case he wants to say we're looking for this ultimate principle of our knowledge and at the same time he's doing something very Cartesian, looking for some point of certainty to start with. And that means that it's going to connect the subjective to the objective.

Where do we find that principle? Well, he's going to say the principle itself, we got to conceive of that either subjectively or objectively. If we go objectively, we can go the Spinozan route, right? We can do the Spinozan style metaphysics where we talk about minds as attributes of this larger God reality. We could go a dogmatist route and we could try and derive mind from the activity of the brain, whatever. But in this case he's going to say if we want to really develop a system of knowledge, the principle itself must be internal to consciousness.

So we got to start with subjectivity. And you can look at this as analogous to Descartes. You know, Descartes says we got to start with self consciousness just because that's the only thing we know immediately, he's kind of saying something similar to that. So that's why he says we're looking for an absolute principle of knowledge not being. Right? We don't want to be metaphysicians and try to ground things in positive claims about being. We're starting on the subjective side. So this gives us a clue to what our principle is going to look like.

And then he's just going to come out and say it. The principle involves self consciousness, which is just a foreshadowing of what he's going to try to do, which he's going to try to prove that it's about self consciousness. He's going to try and show us that this principle must be self consciousness.

14:23 Mark: And since part of that is, you know, math seems important here somewhere, just as it was for Kant. I had a quote on page 13, unfortunately digging back into the introduction, but he's talking about the organ of transcendental philosophy, what this subjective activity is that philosophy is doing. Number two, the objects of the transcendental philosopher exist not at all, save insofar as they are freely produced. So the subjective is freely produced. One cannot be compelled to such production, as one can say by the external depiction of a mathematical figure, be compelled to intuit this internally.

Hence, just as the existence of a mathematical figure depends on outer sense, so the entire reality of a philosophical concept depends solely on inner sense. So I thought that was interesting, that even mathematical figures are outer and then we can represent them. So the fact that math is abstract and we're thinking it in our head, that doesn't matter. There are more objects in the world than merely physical objects. The objective is something wider that includes the objects of mathematics.

15:23 Wes: Yeah, outer sense includes spatial intuition, right?

15:27 Mark: Just because it includes spatial intuition, that doesn't mean it necessarily includes structures of reason or something like that, does it? I mean, for Kant those are very different things.

15:37 Wes: There's some kind of complicated relationship between the categories of the understanding and then what we do with intuition. But yeah, I think for Kant our spatial intuition stands alone and grounds are, say geometrical knowledge. Inner sense for Kant is the non spatial temporal stuff, stuff that's going on in our minds that we wouldn't say is happening in space around us. So emotions for instance. And then the outer sense is temporal and spatial. So outer is kind of inside inner.

16:10 Mark: I'm just trying to feel a little more. We're talking about the subjective and the objective coinciding in any true knowledge. And we're going to get to how self consciousness is an example is like the example of when the two of them actually can, in some interesting, hard to describe way, he spends 40 pages describing it coalesce, then we should have some idea about what an object is foreshelling if it is not merely physical objects, because it seems like anything, I kind of want to. Despite the fact that everything is ultimately our will, so everything is ultimately not only a production of our mind, but a free production of our mind.

There are still things that don't seem to be productions of our mind and some that obviously seem to be just that I can change at a will. And that is the traditional distinction between the subjective and the objective. And I think even in doing philosophy, I'm putting this as a question for you. In doing philosophy, are we doing something like Husserl would describe, as we're Contemplating essences. And yeah, they're essences that are inside our heads in some ways, but they're still objective for all that. And in fact, if you think the existence of the external world is something that can be doubted, then there really is no strong division between the inner and the outer.

It all is objects to be contemplated.

17:30 Wes: I mean, I think it's a good question. I think objectivity, right? Yes. Is broader than external physical objects. You know, mathematics. Right. For Kant is sort of the paradigmatic example of science or objectivity. And that's part of his argument. It's like, look, we all know math is certain and it's a form of knowledge, so we got to explain how that's possible. But I do tend to think about this very simply in terms of I like to think about physical objects in the external world and the physical sciences. And that's a simpler way to get at this distinction.

18:06 Seth: So the move, the argumentative move that he's making there is this relationship between subject and object. We experience it from the subjective perspective, and there is something outside of just that. It's not something we do without questioning whether it's accurate or not. There's a condition, a principle that makes it possible to even make sense of the relationship. So if I'm trying to understand that model, I want to understand what is this principle that makes it possible to even talk about knowledge between a subject and an object. I can't take a perspective outside of my own subjectivity to look at this principle.

So I have to come up with a strategy for how I'm going to model the subjective and objective relationship from my perspective, from my position as a subject that will get me to an understanding of that principle from where I stand. And in that sense, it's a very easy move. It's very obvious to say, well, what's something that I can take as an object but which doesn't have objectivity? It extracts itself. It's separate from the other objects, the objective world, whatever that looks like. Is there something that I can treat like an object that isn't an object, that can teach me something about a subject object relationship?

The only thing is my own subjectivity. I can only take myself as an object in order to be able to try to understand the subject object relationship and to understand what the principle might be?

19:51 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the section one, the work it's doing is, I think, just exactly what you've described, Seth. Yeah, he's trying to say that we could be dogmatists. And we could try to derive the subjective from the objective, which is kind of, like I've said several times now, the way most of us are inclined to approach it as people who embrace a kind of naturalistic framework and say, hey, look, we're just physical beings and among other physical beings in the world, and we have brains, and consciousness arises out of that. And let's explain it in those terms.

And he'll say, that's not going to actually do us any good if we are Kantians, because all of that stuff we just described, brains, those are just appearances in the first place. So we never get out of consciousness that way. And I think he calls this dogmatism's infinite regress. So he does give a little bit of an allusion again to his science of nature stuff, which takes a different tack and is a kind of foreshadowing of absolute idealism, where it does describe self consciousness as arising from nature developmentally, starting with biology and life and moving on from there.

But for his purposes in this book, he is going to say we are looking for a principle in subjectivity. We're not going to say, hey, the mind is a modification of God, or something like that. My particular mind is a modification of God. We're not going to be metaphysicians. Start with subjectivity. We need something that produces its own object. Because it's hopeless for us to talk about things in themselves affecting us and producing representations in us. That's a hopeless route. These guys have rejected the Kantian thing in itself. So how do we get out of that quandary?

Hey, we need something within subjectivity, which actually, inarguably in being knowledge actually produces its own object. So self consciousness is just consciousness of self consciousness. Or it's like, I believe in myself, therefore I exist. Or self consciousness just lies in self representation. So to say I think is to actually generate the I. So we produce the object of knowledge by knowing there's a perfect way out.

22:13 Mark: Dogmatism, for which being is fundamental, can explain things no otherwise than by an infinite regress. For the series of causes and effects by which its explanation proceeds could be closed only by something that is at once cause and effect of itself, but by the very fact it would be transformed into a science of nature, which itself again reverts on completion into the principle of transcendental idealism. That's where he refers to Spinoza as a consistent dogmatism is the infinite regress. The actual one of cause and effects is in the cosmological argument. In other words, you need God, the

22:47 Wes: unconditioned can take many forms, right? We saw in Kant they are all looking for the quote unquote, the unconditioned. There's a terminus to the chain of cause and effect. So that could be soul, that could be cosmos, that could be God. We've talked about it in the show. In terms of ultimate particles, I think those would count as unconditioned as well. But ultimately you need self causing beings where, you know, if you reach the ultimate particle, for instance, and you say, why does it have its properties? You can't say why it has its properties. It becomes absurd, it becomes unexplainable. Because to explain things is to attribute causes to them.

23:21 Mark: I mean, it seems quite different to talk about a metaphysical chain of causation, right? The kind that we're familiar with, that would lead to a God and an epistemological one to say, how do I explain this thing? Well, instead of looking for causes behind this red ball that's in front of me, I look to, well, what gives me the idea that there's a red ball and that chain has to lead back to the self? So you said soul is one of the legitimate endpoints to this cosmological chain. That's certainly not something that, say, Aristotle would have considered, you know, because he was a dogmatist in this way that it all ends up being illusion. It all ends up being the veil of Maya. That is what the ultimate unexplainable is for the idealist.

24:02 Seth: I mean, I think this ties back to what Wes said at the beginning about the concern with freedom and knowledge dogmatism, for which being is fundamental. In other words, if you're taking the objective stance. So for the rest of this conversation, right, objectivity or the objective is related to being and subjectivity is related to knowledge, or they're interchangeable terms in some respect. So what he's saying is if you're functioning in the realm of being, you're functioning in the realm of nature. What does that mean? It means physical laws.

It means cause and effect. So you can categorize and you can create taxonomies and you can show how causal relationships exist in nature. But the only way you can get out of that is if you could posit something that's at once cause and effect of itself. The unmoved mover. Exactly what Wes said. So what he's saying is that's just ultimately unsatisfying. And he's kind of saying this thing that is cause and effect at the same time is what transcendental philosophy. It is what idealism is. So he's saying dogmatism ultimately ends in idealism anyway because you have to posit something that cannot be caused or that isn't caused.

25:22 Wes: So the reason why this fails is the Kantian antinomies or paralogisms. All those sections are basically Kant saying, yes, reason demands the unconditioned, but we can't know the unconditioned. And it's a kind of illegitimate use of reason to get metaphysical and talk about the soul and all that stuff. It just doesn't work. That's part of the motivation for transcendental idealism is all those insoluble metaphysical problems. And Kant thinks he does a lot of work. He thinks he lends a lot of justification to his system by showing us how we are sort of deceived into talking about them.

Because the grounds for the condition of the possibility of consciousness get sort of hypostasized or reified into these objects as if they were part of consciousness, when really they're almost the structural elements behind consciousness. So, anyway, I think that's what Schelling is alluding to here, is the quest for the unconditioned always collapses into transcendental idealism.

26:24 Mark: Yes, I think the point about antinomies is good. And the way you were putting it, Wes, is that there are lots of endpoints for the unconditioned. Whereas Avicenna, or anybody that we've read that's talking about God wants to rule out the other ones, wants to say there can't be an irreducible plurality. But really it is a violation of our reason. We just can't know whether the unconditioned would be a unified God or whether it would be a. A bunch of atoms, for instance, the primordial matter, as we discussed in our Indian philosophy episode. And so somehow, by saying, well, it has to be the mind that's actually the source of all these things, that's supposed to be more satisfying than this indecidable pluralism of physical explanations.

27:03 Seth: I don't think Schelling's saying the mind has to be the source of all this. In fact, that implies causality that he's trying to circumscribe for the subject by delineating, by talking about dogmatism and the objective and being in the realm of causality and talking about the subjective and knowledge in this relationship between the subject and the object. He doesn't want to say that we cause, because that's a being thing. What he's saying is, and this is what I was trying to get to on page 18. He's saying, I just want to seek within knowledge itself for that by which all individual knowing is determined. You can't determine how all being is caused by looking at being, but you can, according to him, figure out how all knowledge is possible or grounded by looking at knowledge itself.

27:55 Mark: And I think maybe the word dependence is nicely neutral between those two. Because even Kant, in talking about the thing in itself, is not going to say, like Aristotle, that there's a chain of causality that goes back to God. Whatever the relationship between the thing itself, which is going to, for Kant, include God and the phenomenal world, it's not going to be a causal one. It's not that the things in themselves cause our appearances, because as you said, causality for a Kantian is a descriptor that we use within the phenomenal world, not behind the phenomenal world.

But if you say just dependence, I don't know what kind of dependence. Maybe it's a kind of dependence we can't even understand. Then that could be something that's pseudo cause like or quasi causal, or could be something that is more knowledge based that you can say knowledge in the way you're described. It is a quasi causal concept, is a concept of dependency. All these things that are in our field of experience are dependent upon the mind. If you say they're caused by the mind, you're right. That is thinking that the mind is already an object out in the world causing these appearances.

That's very psychologistic. But to transcend that, to go right in the realm of the subjective, you can use this lame word dependence. I don't think it actually is very convincing myself.

29:12 Wes: So I think we've reached five where he's concluded that what we need is to ground science is a principle of knowledge, not of being. So we're not going to try to talk about grounding things and things in themselves and get into all kinds of problems there. We are going to look within. And then he says, well, if we're starting from the subjective side, if we're going to start from within knowledge, so to speak, then how do we get the objective? How do we get outside of it? Because there's got to be a relation to something that is in some sense external.

And the only way to do that is, you know, he calls this an indivisible act of primordial cognition. I love that phrase. That is going to generate both content and form. So for Kant it was all about form, right? The intuition and the categories. You know, there's going to be causality, there's going to be unity, there's going to be all these formal elements that are absolutely necessary if we're going to have an experience at all, and necessary if we're going to be self conscious at all. And self consciousness and the possibility of experience are very closely related.

In this case, he's going to say, nope, content also has to be generated.

30:23 Mark: Content is conditioned by form and form in turn by content in reciprocity.

30:28 Seth: No, I just like the. The beginning of that section 5 where he says, you know, the first task of our science is to discover whether a passage can be found from knowledge as such so far as it is an act to the objective element therein, which is no act but a being or subsistent. I like that notion of knowledge as act. And so when you get to the notion of form, then the form and content, you have this sense of trying to make yet another analogy. And then I just realized that we're confusing it yet again. Object being subject, knowledge, object content. But then it's not exactly subject form, it's knowledge form. But it's not subject form.

31:15 Mark: No, because the form, right there's the form and the content. The form and the content create the aspects of the object. One is not more subjective.

31:24 Seth: No, no, no. In my head it was probably clearer than what I was saying.

31:28 Wes: Well, I think one might be more subjective in the sense that the content for Kant was the given. Or we might think of it as the data and that was the result of causal or some kind of dependency on things in themselves. The data comes into consciousness and then it's formally arranged. And that formal arrangement is necessary for experience and necessary for consciousness and self consciousness. In this case, form and content are going to be the grounds for the possibility of each other and they are going to be produced in the same act of self consciousness.

And it's going to turn out right. The content, which I associate with the external world of objects is just going to be posited by. This is foreshadowing to what we're going to get to, but posited by the self in order to limit itself. And that self limitation is the only way that we can actually have self consciousness. So that's. We'll flesh that out in greater detail as we go on. Why that's.

32:26 Seth: So let's jump to A equals A because I think, yeah, sure. Since we're on form and content. All right, so page 20. Let us consider any formal proposition, say A equals A, as the Highest the logical element in this proposition is merely the form of identity between A and A. But where then do I get A itself from? If A exists, that is, if A has content, it is equal to itself, but where does it come from? This question can assuredly be answered not from the proposition itself, but only from a higher one. The analysis A equals A presupposes the

33:10 Wes: synthesis A. I think ultimately what he's trying to do here is he's trying to say that the analytic is conditioned on the synthetic. So you guys can correct me if you think I'm wrong on this, but the talk of identity, often the word identity is just Schelling's word and Fichte's word for the analytic. And so when they do these identities, A equals A is just sort of the most obvious representation of analytic truths and the law of non contradiction. So for Kant, Kant was very into this distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. So an example of an analytic proposition might be bachelors are unmarried males.

Or Kant's example was all bodies are extended because the concept of extension is just contained within the concept of body. He contrasts that to all bodies are heavy. That's a synthetic proposition, because concept of body doesn't include heaviness in it. We have to look at the world and see that they are synthesized right in the world. And then we can make that claim. And then part of Kant's project is just asking how a priori synthetic propositions are possible because he thinks that they are necessary for science. So he'll say things like seven plus five equals 12.

That's a synthetic a priori proposition. Newton's laws are synthetic a priori, and so on and so forth. So I think what Schelling is doing here is he's saying that the analytic in a way is reducible, that it requires the synthetic, so that there isn't any part of our. It's almost Quinian, right? It's kind of reminiscent of Quine's argument against the analytic synthetic distinction, I think.

34:54 Seth: I don't remember Quine well enough to say that, but I think I agree with what you're saying, Wes. The language he uses is slightly different, but the point he's making is we say A equals A is an analytic truth, which for him means it's unconditioned.

35:09 Wes: Yeah, that's really important.

35:11 Seth: But he says I can't think of A equals A without also having to get an A. I can't think A equals A purely formally, maybe not without thinking, but without there also structurally being the need to Fill that A with content. We think of it as a purely formal, unconditioned axiom. But in reality we always presuppose that there's something, and we have to, otherwise it wouldn't have any meaning. If there was no necessary connection to the material, then the principle itself would have no meaning. And given that A equals A is kind of like the most uncontroversial, purely empty formal proposition.

He says, if I can't think that without presupposing the material principle, then really any formal idea, any formal principle is also going to have a material principle just tied up within it. So any logical principle we think of, we are not just thinking of the form. There's also always content. So form and content always have to go together, even if you're representing to yourself as purely formal and analytic. In reality, they're all synthetic, they're all conditioned because it has no meaning until you go and prove it out in the world, if you will.

You have to bring a conditioned element to it and actually put something in there and say, does Seth equals Seth? Okay, there's your content. Yes, you have to do something like that.

36:46 Mark: I'm wondering then what he might say about artificial intelligence, you know, if he knew of this being an option. It seems like you've given a good argument for just because a computer can represent something, right? The whole Searle's Chinese Room argument. You can have a functional system. Unless it actually reaches out to a material thing, then it does not count as actual thinking at all. If it did, then, well, if the rest of what Schelling was said was correct, you should be able to program a computer to have its own recognition of sense of self and thereby generate the world in the same way. You know, it's either going to be all or nothing. It's either going to actually be a full blown artificial intelligence or it's not going to be thinking at all. There's nothing in between.

37:27 Wes: I think for Schelling, I guess, the motivation for this section, you know, he wants to show that in a way that the external world and content in particular are going to be predicated on the categories and intuitions, basically in Kantian terms, that they are going to be results of form. And that's important to him, right? Because he thinks it's important to show that our task is essentially to show that the external world is generated by self consciousness. So this unconditioned principle that we're looking for, it's not a logical truth. So he's rejecting that as a candidate here.

It's ultimately going to be the synthetic activity of self consciousness. But it's kind of weird when you think about Kant's insistence on causality being synthetic, unity being synthetic, all the categories, very basic categories of reality. But somehow there's this analytic domain having to do with the law of non contradiction that transcends that and seems to transcend consciousness in that sense. Right. It's almost. You get with logic, it seems like the principles of logic, you might get something akin to a metaphysics, or at least in the sense that it's not conditioned on subjectivity, it's not conditioned on consciousness.

We can think of the law of non contradiction as kind of being in itself, regardless of how our cognition is constituted. But I think Schelling is going to say no, self consciousness is going to be prior to everything, including logic. Logic is going to flow out of the productivity and the synthetic activity of self consciousness.

39:08 Seth: Let me go a little further down on the page because I think the first mistaken assumption of the above argument consists therefore in taking the principles of logic to be unconditioned, that is derivative from no higher propositions. But now the principles of logic arise for us in this way only, that we turn what in other propositions is merely form into the actual content of the principles in question. Thus logic can only arise as such by abstraction from determinate propositions.

39:36 Wes: Sounds very Lockean. Yeah, yeah.

39:38 Mark: Very empiricist. Yep.

39:39 Seth: But to your point, Wes, about ruling out logical propositions as the thing to which you can appeal to ground, he's basically saying that logical propositions are abstractions from particular determinant. Which suggests then that the unmediated self consciousness is going to be essentially unmediated by anything synthetically determinant that we would experience prior to it.

40:07 Wes: Maybe one way to think about this, if we're thinking about it in Lockean terms. Right. Instead of having innate. It's kind of weird to say, because to be Kantian in a way is to talk a lot about innate ideas, or at least to reconceive of them as faculties. But I think what you might see him as saying is you could think of this in Lockean terms like we produce the empirical world from inside ourselves and then abstract from it to get logic and perhaps even other categories. You can go both ways. In other words, with him, for Kant, it's all the formal stuff within subjectivity gets fed, all the data gets shaped. In this case, you can't say which one is first. We could be abstracting from the data, or we could be imposing the forms on the data, those two things are not a real dilemma for him because they get produced together.

40:59 Mark: Yeah, well, let me just continue reading where Seth stopped. So very bottom of page 20. If logic arises in a scientific manner, in other words, the principles of transcendental philosophy being scientific, not natural science being scientific, it can do so only by abstraction from the highest principles of knowledge. And since these as principles themselves, on the other hand already presuppose the logical form, they must be such that in them both factors, the form and the content reciprocally condition involve each other. So the highest principles of knowledge.

That is not going to be the most abstracted from. I don't think this means it's the most abstracted from what we take to be material objects in the Lockean sense that for Locke. You'd have to have a story for Locke that yes, we only have these sensations and we kind of cobble them together somehow in our minds and then we come up with these very high level principles and then those in turn become instantly applicable. So that any actual experience that we have is not going to be best described as sensation. We'd have to go through a genetic analysis.

Right. Which is what he's doing in his long the Inquiry book to unwrap this kind of thing. Well that's the same kind of unwrapping that is going on in this book. It's just that the basic thing ends up not being sensation, but being self consciousness itself. Yeah, although there's more to say about that because what ends up being the rest of this book is, well, to understand self consciousness, to really unwrap that, you have to talk about its epochs. So even though self consciousness is a single act, I just apprehend myself within that act. There are innumerable many tiny acts, logical components that somehow you can stretch out and look at individually.

And it does turn out that one of the first of these is going to be something like Locke's brute sensation. So this is very weird and seemingly self contradicting. It's very hard for me to get a firm grasp on what is it. Actually when we say self consciousness is ultimate and foundational, what actual phenomena, what experience are we referring to? Because it turns out that the experience can be analyzed into its logical components. Well, those are no longer experiences. That is a theory.

43:17 Wes: These are transcendental arguments. Right. So transcendental deductions, which is to say, maybe I'm misinterpreting you Mark, but it's not like we are going to be able to justify this in experience. We can only explain the possibility of experience in this way. So grounds for the possibility of experience.

43:34 Mark: For example, the Avicenna self consciousness argument. A thing you could picture, just close your eyes, your senses are all turned off, you're in a sensory deprivation tank, you have no sense of gravity, you have no sense of anything, yet you have a sense of self. That self consciousness right there, it is unmediated, it is direct. But Schelling's story about self consciousness is much more complicated, that it ends up containing the principle of mediation. By apprehending yourself, you create the self. And this exposes a principle that then is the principle by which all other knowledge is possible. That's a lot more packed into one experience that it seemed that this ancient figure described in a much simpler way.

44:17 Wes: Yeah, I think we're not talking about the phenomenal experience of self consciousness right. As we might typically think of it. Although you are reminding me of something Fichte used to do with his students, which is to tell them to stare at a blank wall and then try and find the I in that experience. But when we talk about self consciousness here, strangely enough, I think a lot of it is going to happen unconsciously. And Schelling is going to talk a lot about the unconscious in this book.

44:49 Mark: Well, if we want to unwrap that, maybe we should in part two of this discussion, get into section two of part one of this book. Supporters, you can get that as the next thing in your feed.