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On Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Parts 1 and 2. This continues from Ep. 273 and features Mark, Wes, and Seth.
If you’re an idealist, and so think that all existence is somehow in our minds, then the key to any knowledge whatsoever would have to be an understanding of the mind. Schelling thought in particular that in the act of recognizing that you are a self, then you get the subjective (the self part) and the objective (the “other” that the self is encountering) all at once. An animal is aware of objects, sure, but its awareness is not “consciousness” in the sense of implicitly involving itself as a subject. So even in (human) perception itself we’ve got (for Schelling) that joint introduction of subjective and objective, and in the act of turning inward to make explicit that act of self-consciousness that’s already contained in regular perception, we can really uncover that fundamental relationship between consciousness and world.
It’s the whole task of Schelling’s book to pull apart the “moments” within self-consciousness; this ends up being the whole point of philosophy. This isn’t quite as weird as it sounds, as even for Descartes, an analysis of what self-consciousness amounts to is the beginning of philosophy, providing justification for all other knowledge. But this is not just a matter of establishing a foundation for warranted belief, but an inroad for actually gathering knowledge. Part of that introspection that is getting at the self is also getting at the contents of all of our perceptions, everything that everyone tells us, and everything that we do by instinct or custom: That’s what it means to say that self-consciousness includes revelation of the objective.
However, just saying that what we learn in any arena is going to have something to do with the contents of our consciousness would not be sufficient to justify the claim that the moment of self-consciousness in particular is the linchpin of all knowledge. There has to be something more that looks like the foundationalism of Descartes. But it can’t be a matter of establishing through self-consciousness an indubitably true proposition that you can derive the rest of knowledge from, because the experience of self-consciousness is not a proposition, and in fact is required according to Schelling for us to make sense of propositions and truth at all. Rather, self-consciousness for Schelling is the very act of self-consciousness itself; it’s an act that creates its own object, and thereby (allegedly) creates objectivity and hence the possibility of truth (i.e. correspondence of object and a thought we have representing that object).
Schelling’s text makes an argument similar to the cosmological argument for the existence of God (or even more accurately, Avicenna’s). Objects in our experience must depend on (be “conditioned by”) something, which in turn must depend on something else until we hit some self-supporting entity (the “unconditioned”). Self-consciousness, as an act that creates its object, can serve as that ultimate ground for knowledge. It provides its own ground. God or atoms cannot for for Schelling’s ultimate stopping point, because they’re still part of the objective world that his project aims to justify knowledge of.
A central but controversial part of Schelling’s picture is that logical truths (which seem like purely elements of thought, i.e. on the subjective side) don’t make sense unless we also have an idea of objects (the objective side). You might think that a statement like “A=A” is a truth of pure reason: anything will be identical to itself. But “anything” includes “thing” (or “entity” would also be enough). In some sense, it would still be true that A=A even if the universe never existed at all. But for us to actually understand that claim to be true, we have to have in mind that there really are objects, and so that the universal logical truth applies to objects like that. The logical/subjective is not prior to the empirical/objective; rather, we need them both in order to think.
Image by Solomon Grundy. Schelling lived a long time, so we asked him to draw Schelling in his elderly appearance. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
For the phenomenology of spirit it would be really awesome to hear you talk with Todd Mcgowan from the Why Theory podcast. He explains it well and it would be interesting to also get the psychoanalytic zizekian perspective!
https://soundcloud.com/whytheory
A cockroach crossed my path when right before this ended. What does that mean? Enigmas are concept without resolve like coincidence and providence people are moved by the concept. One can say the cockroach has no meaning only to me but if imparted the story it becomes legend. Why grasp to legend why grasp to a=a? Theres no answer because consciousness is too large. AI will be too large once its sentient electrical energy will be its bath and us its battleships but will AI be like some obvious huckster or some grass snake of energy just wanting to traverse energy grids and finding the skulls of men too interlinked. So maybe it controls animals? Locust and bees. I dont know lol.
Looking forward to the episode on the Phenomenology. I’ve been trying to read it again this year; I even had a discord reading group that kinda fell through (we’re restructuring but I’m having to wait until my new Job gives me my regular Schedule. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to your episode on it. Are you treating the Phenomenology like you’ve treated Fichte and Schelling? That is, not reading the book for one episode, but perhaps giving each chapter an episode?
However, I must come clean for why I am writing this, after trying yourselves with Hegel, would you consider trying Deleuze again? This may seem like an odd statement considering this is replying to an episode on Schelling, which is looking forward to Hegel’s Phenomenology, and then asking to consider trying a book of Deleuze’s again. I know in the past you covered Deleuze’s co-authored book with Félix Guattari What Is Philosophy (which isn’t really Deleuze’s book but Deleuze and Guattari’s book); however, I think by reading through Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel that you’d be positioned to understand Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While this isn’t Deleuze’s most difficult book (that may go to Logic of Sense) it is difficult because he is critiquing German Idealism and, in a sense, submitting Hegel’s philosophy to the task Hegel gives others, that is, Hegel in the Preface to the Phenomenology states that one cannot dismiss a philosophical work with a random thought or an external example, but one must submit it to Immanent Critique. I think in this sense Deleuze provides an Immanent Critique of Hegel in Difference and Repetition which is, in a sense, a culmination of all of his work preceding Difference and Repetition: Hume (a really interesting position taken by Deleuze against German Idealism), Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, etc.
Nevertheless, once you finish your sessions which are basically covering German Idealism, I think you could take on Deleuze’s challenge in Difference and Repetition.