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Manfred Frank
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profundity, Schelling has been decried for a geniality that lacks seriousness,
his works dismissed as a delirium of ideas brought forth by opium and
romanticism.
What concerns me much more, however, than the injustice wrought Schelling is that his "original insight" has been lost in the process. His work was
an attempt (not always a successful one) to give birth to an idea that transcended the vision of his age, an idea which-in the Blochian sense-was
transcontemporary (iibergleichzeitig). Exaggerating somewhat, I argue that
Schelling's insight could never have been adequately articulated in the discursive quilt offered by idealistic grammar. Stressing this helps us to critically
evaluate the idealistic position of Hegel's Phenomenology in comparison
with Schelling's 1801 system, with its alleged argumentative weaknesses.
One cannot, of course, deny the tremendous historical impact of the
Phenomenology. It embodied the major breakthrough through which idealism
became recognized in its maturity and thus gained its followers. It constitutes,
moreover, an important corrective to the growing sklerosis of a dogmatic
and subhuman materialism, a corrective that carries weight to this day.
At the beginning and at the end of the movement named dialectical
materialism stands the figure of Hegel. No thinking-apart from that of
Marx-has been so important for the general understanding of materialism,
or of the modern era as a whole. In the interim, however,-and for a period
lasting more than a century-the Weltgeist oversimplified matters by calling,
against the background of turbulent changes in the institutional structure of
our intellectual and social reality, for an overcoming of idealism. By doing
so it took a characteristic turn and deviated from Hegel's legacy. It is this
critical relation that (from the young Marx to the student movement of the
1960's) sustained interest in Hegel's oeuvre, but in what one today might
call a deconstructive guise. The reading that resulted certainly reflected an
heretical position towards idealism, but it never really penetrated to the crux
of Hegel's arguments.
You may already guess where I am headed. At the outset of the materialistic
rejection of idealism, the only philosophy that could boast a truly revolutionary critique of Hegel's idealistic dialectics was Schelling's. It was contained
in his-mostly unpublished-late works, available in student transcripts of
lectures in Erlangen, Munich and Berlin. These transcripts, which commanded stiff prices, were sold-without the control and to the grief of their
author. They made their way even into Russia and France, where they were
eagerly received by intellectuals among the nobility. People like Pavlov,
Cadae, Herzen, Bakunin, Belinskij and Turgenev found in these transcripts
their speculative acid test. They also reached the pupils of St. Simon (among
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I suspect that even today, when the issue has lost its relevancy, one will
sense the irony in Marx's compliment: No one who strives to attain his
intellectual identity will find it easy to face his own caricature, especially
when it is a matter of world philosophy, which must be affirmed in its basic
righteousness. Nor does it help to be told that its fanciful air will dissolve
only when confronted in a "manly" way. Feuerbach' s dilemma is exasperated
by the fact that his "positive philosophy" does in fact owe something to
Schelling and that his deviation from Schelling's original intention makes
them natural enemies. Marx was not the first to encourage him to take this
step, although no one else insisted upon it so resolutely. IfFeuerbach hesitated
for more than a decade to follow Marx's advice, it was presumably because
he realized the delicacy of confronting his own caricature.
Three fairly extensive outlines for letters mirror Feuerbach's embarrassment. He made diligent excerpts from the Paulus transcript of Schelling's
lectures, tossed and turned for some weeks, and then confessed that Marx
had "thrown him into a difficult connict with himself."4 It seems that Marx
had touched upon a trauma: Feuerbach had always tried to fend off Schelling's
obvious priority as being a presumptuous "fantasy." (Marx cites this with
a certain sense of delicacy.) He had never found a better name to characterize
his own position than Schelling's own expression, "positive philosophy,"
although he asserts that for him in contrast to Schelling the aim is "the actual
rather than the merely imaginary absolute identity of all oppositions and
contradictions."5 One has to be aware of all of this when seeking to elucidate
Feuerbach's relationship to Schelling.
After these fragmentary suggestions, I will set aside the biographicalphilological search for points of contact between Schelling's materialism
and that of Feuerbach and Marx. I would next like to assert that not only
in the materialism of Feuerbach and Marx, but also in French Socialism, in
Bakunin and Cieszkowski,6 there existed a powerful tradition of materialistic
argumentation which, nourished by Schelling's late lectures, was critical of
Hegel. The obscurity of this tradition, which can be followed all the way
to Lenin's notebooks, can be explained in part by the fact that Schelling
did not publish a single lecture during his lifetime. The short Vorrede zu
Cousin and the pirated edition of notes from his first Berlin lecture were
the only documents of his tum to "positive philosophy" that could be cited.
Another reason for the obscurity of this tradition is that, for reasons of
political identity, leftist theoreticians refuse to think of Schelling as a predecessor. It is indeed necessary to challenge the usual terms of political
semantics by considering what antiliberal romanticism and anticapitalistic
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socialism have in common. One might begin by noting that the dichotomy
was not always evident. This was particularly the case in the beginning:
Ruge's interest in the details of Schelling's tum was so great that he offered
to edit his lectures; Feuerbach, who seemed to have been inspired by a
transcript of a Schelling lecture, sent his dissertation to the philosopher with
an obviously genuine respect (one might ask what would have happened if
Schelling had liked it, but beyond any doubt the style of thinking was too
Hegelian for him); Cieszkowski, whose historiography Schelling seems to
have known, always sustained a lively interest in Schelling, was drawn to
the latter's religiosity, and kept himself informed about the Berlin lectures
from his Polish home (there also are two outlines for letters from him to
Schelling). Bakunin wrote home: "You would not be able to imagine the
great impatience with which I look forward to Schelling's lectures."7
Schelling, who saw himself as the inadvertent spiritual father of Young
Hegelianism, acknowledged that these young people were striving for something like positive philosophy. Their mistake was that they searched for it
with Hegelian means and were thus doomed to failure. In order truly to
transform the system, it was first necessary to dismantle the edifice of
"logical necessity." One had to emancipate oneself from the immanent legitimation of a teleologically conceived intellectual process. 8 The emotion
directed against Schelling, by Fr. Engels, for example, was the reaction of
a young man who felt that the basis for group solidarity-the enthusiasm
for Hegel-was threatened. That is the recurring theme in the Young Hegelian
petition to Schelling: he would be welcome in Berlin as a teacher in the
spirit of Hegel, but he should not desecrate the name of the symbolic father.
He should not, in effect, attack idealism.
It should be clear that Marx, however, would not make such restrictions.
He praised Feuerbach, for instance, for overcoming the Young Hegelian
idealism of "Bruno Bauer and his consorts." (In this regard he was like
Bakunin, who was also outspoken in his criticisms of leftist idealism.) He
relied on Schelling as he parodied their "irritation towards any praxis, which
is different than theory, and towards any theory, which seeks to be anything
but the dissolution of a given category in the 'limitless universality of selfconsciousness."'9 As Schelling taught (and here he impressed not only Marx
but Bakunin and Cieszkowski as well),
there is in the Logic nothing that could change the world ... The
transition cannot proceed from thinking . . . One cannot begin anything
with the highest principle of rational philosophy [that is, with the concept
of absolute self-consciousness] .... Rational philosophy must lead
beyond itself and press towards a reversal. The reversal itself cannot
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says that negation is the ground of Being, insofar as through the negation
of negation something positive is posited, one must nonetheless understand
that the possibility of self-negation does not imply the actual productive
force of Being, but only its ideal ground (Ideal-Grund). For one has in fact
said no more than this: there is no concept of Being apart from that which
is posited through the self-sublation of reflection; on this count there is no
difference between Hegel and Schelling. What Schelling asserted is that it
is possible for the negation, when applied to itself, to abolish itself for the
sake of Being , thereby letting Being come to appearance (in this way negation
is the ground of the appearance of Being). But in this way neither the being
of negation nor of that which it negates is actually affirmed.
This can be immediately and analytically grasped: negativity can destroy
(and can destroy itself), but it cannot create. If through its play of opposition
it does affirm a being (or even its own being), it must nonetheless be clear
that it does not establish its own being. With Sartre one might call this the
"ontological proof of reflection." It has several important consequences.
First of all, in simple terms, Being precedes consciousness; the realization
of this is confirmed within the inevitable collapse of any attempt to ground
Being through an immanent and autonomous self-deduction (Selbstbegrundung). Secondly, and this is closely connected to the first point, although
the essence (das Wesen) is the epistemological ground (Erkenntnisgrund)
of Being (and of its own Being), it is not the real ground. For as soon as
Being is, it is in a way that cannot be pre-conceived, it is "unvordenklicherweise seiend." That means that---even if only to fulfill the formal-ontological
condition of its being an essence-it must first of all be. Sartre characterized
this with the technical term etre he. What he wants to say thereby is that
conceptual Being---essence-is derived from a transreflective Being that
always already "was," it is thus supported in its being and lacks genuine
independence. Without a foundation in a Being that is not reflection, the
being of essence would dissolve into nothing. This is the reason for Schelling's talk about "negative philosophy": it describes a form of speculation
that has forgotten Being. It absolves itself from its own existence by reducing
the transcendence of Being to a determination of essence.
I admit that to this point Schelling's critique has been quite abstract. But
before 1 tum to more concrete consequences (especially those that were
elaborated by Marx), I might point out that precisely the abstractness of
Schelling's critique of Hegel made plausible its claim to universal validity,
a claim that in tum facilitated its deep undercurrent effect. Schelling confronted Hegel at the level of Hegel's own logic of essence. He formulated
his objections in such a way that Hegel could not have defused them by
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early wlitings. I would also like to refer to Alfred Schmidt's still unsurpassed
work on the concept of nature in Marx. It lacks only the recognition that
Marx's argumentation derives largely from the late work of Schelling.
But before I begin with Marx, I want to present two further consequences
that result from Schelling's objection to Hegel. One concerns the culmination
of the system in the idea of absolute self-consciousness. This idea marks
the place where, according to Hegel, the system reaches its truth. This truth
emerges insofar as difference, which characterizes reflection, sheds its quality
of otherness, and becomes, as Hegel liked to put it, completely self-transparent. Hegel insisted beyond this that the absolute suspension of the difference between otherness and selfhood must itself be reconfirmed in the mirrorplay of reflection. Schelling objected and asserted that the thought of
absolute identity destroys itself by the very means it uses to actualize itself.
We can once again hear H6lderlin speaking through him: a real difference
would never be able to account for an ideal unity. Within the Hegelian
system such unity can only be postulated. Its disclosure remains the subject
of another science, which Schelling and Feuerbach referred to as "positive
philosophy." Marx, in a similar spirit, pointed to the "one-sidedness
and . . . limited nature of Hegel" that is made manifest in the final chapter
of the Phenomenology. 23
The last consequence that I want to present here is perhaps the most
surprising. Schelling believed that, judging from certain formulations in the
foreword to the second edition of the Logic, Hegel had himself started to
realize the abstract negative character of his philosophy of reflection. If not
for Hegel's death, the revision might have been continued. Be this as it
may, the formulations from the introductory essay of the Logic are worth
listening to. According to Hegel:
The absolute spirit, which discloses itself as the concrete and the last
and highest truth, will be recognized all the more when at the end of
the development it abandons itself with freedom, lets itself into the
fonn of immediate Being, and resolves to create a world, a world which
will contain everything given in the development which preceded this
result, but by virtue of its reversed position over against the beginning
will be transformed into something that depends upon the result as upon
a principle. 24
The general context shows that Hegel did not mean by creation the self-abandonment of the idea into nature. Instead, he was reflecting in a radical way
upon the implications of the concept of reflection that underlies his entire
argumentation. Consider a passage preceding our quote:
One must concede that it is an essential observation, and one that will
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There are in fact at least three important slogans of Marx that can be read
as loose Schelling citations (in other cases they might also be allusions to
Feuerbach). One of them stems from Schelling's parody of Hegel's belief
that spirit would, after realizing its perverted relation to Being, have to
descend the same steps that it ascended, so that
through this reversal man would appear as the productive cause of the
world of animals, animals as the productive cause of plants, and
organisms as the productive cause of inorganic nature, and so forth. 28
Marx echoed the parody when he wrote:
In Hegel's philosophy of history the son gives birth to the mother, spirit
gives birth to nature, Christian religion gives birth to paganism, and in
general the result gives birth to the beginning.29
At another juncture Marx wrote "that the abstraction, or the abstract thinker,"
permitted the idea to surrender itself "in its otherness" only because "he had
been informed of its truth through experience. "30 In the Paulus transcript,
Schelling had mocked Hegel in the same terms, as the thinker who, after
the alleged completion of the idea, is compelled to work through the process
of nature, not because of the force of logical necessity, but because he has
happened to have an experience of nature. 31
Marx seems to have particularly enjoyed Schelling's sarcasm from the
Vorrede zu Cousin:
The logical self-development of the concept sustains itself, as one might
have anticipated, only as long as the system is devoted to what is purely
logical. Once it dares the difficult step into reality, the thread of the dialectical development is tom apart. A second hypothesis suddenly becomes
necessary, that it occurs to the idea to let its moments fall apart in order
to create the world of nature. Why this takes place is a mystery, unless it
is to break the boring monotony of its logical development. 32
Marx wrote in a similar vein:
This entire transition from logic to the philosophy of nature is nothing
other than transition from abstraction to intuition, a step that is so difficult for an abstract thinker that it can only be presented in an adventurous
spirit. The mystical feeling, which forces the philosopher to abandon abstraction for intuition, is boredom, the longing for a content . . . . Insofar as the abstraction grasps itself and perceives its own infinite boredom,
Hegel is moved to describe the abandonment of such abstract thinking
which thinks only itself . . . as a decision to acknowledge nature as the
essential and to shift the emphasis to intuition. 33
For the sake of brevity I will have to end here the philological catalog of
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Schelling excerpts in the early work of Marx. I have presented much more
evidence elsewhere.
I now want to speak to an objection I have often encountered. What use, one
asks, is the most complete catalog of Schelling quotations in Marx, if their differences in spirit remain insurmountable? I am myself not very bothered by
this question. Both Schelling and Marx regarded their work as scientific. In a
scientific context, the political-moralistic position of an author is significant
only insofar as it is defended with arguments. Marx and Engels viewed Hegel
as the seismographer, indeed, as the ideological leader of the Prussian restoration. This did not give them second thoughts about learning from him. One
must presume that they would have regarded Schelling in the same manner. It
is one thing to oppose Schelling as the "38th ranking officer" who had command of the entire Prussian police, and something entirely different to study
and often find agreement with the afterword to his first Berlin lecture. It is of no
use to debate the matter abstractly. The evidence indicates that Marx did both.
One observes repeatedly in the history of philosophy that systems are
appropriated by later generations that no longer share the original concerns
of the author. This does not mean that the structure of the system is violated.
According to its structure-and quite apart from the political-theological
concerns of its author-Schelling's concept of history is closer to historical
materialism than is Hegel's. "True dialectic," he taught in Berlin, "exists only
in the realm of freedom, which will solve all mysteries." By breaking the
closed circuit of "logical necessitation," freedom gained a central position in
the late phase of Schelling's philosophy. It constitutes a warning to humanity
to discover its practical essence through the contrast with a Being that it has
not itself created. This was an idea that clearly appealed to Pierre Leroux,
Michail Bakunin and August Cieszkowski. 34 Even if his personal attitude
might have been counterrevolutionary, Schelling unmasked the state as an
association of force and did so with an acidic tone that only anarchists like
Bakunin or Proudhon could reiterate.
Marx's thought of a "resurrection of nature" in communism is noteworthy,
but should not be overly emphasized. There are similar formulations in
Schelling, but even if these are the source of Marx's thought, they still point
to an entire tradition, from the neoPlatonism of the Renaissance to Jakob
Bohme, that Marx and Schelling were both equally aware of. More important
is the convergence in their idea of "alienation" (Entfremdung). Schelling
used the expression, which one finds already in the conservative critique of
capitalism developed by such thinkers as Franz Baader and Adam Miiller,
to depict a dialectical reversal of the real and the ideal, that is, of what is
and of what should be. The thesis of the primacy of being before essence
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Notes
II have verified and documented this in two publications: Der unendliche Mangel an Sein.
Schellings Hegelkritik and die Anfiinge der Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main 1975
and in the introduction as well as in the documentation part to F. W. 1. Schelling's Philosophie
der Offenbarung 184112, Frankfurt am Main 1977.
2Schelling's Philosophie der Offenbarung, p. 421.
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I'Dieter Henrich, Hegel im Kontext, Frankfurt am Main 1971; within that mainly "Hegel
and Holderlin," esp. pp. 22ff.
l2Holderlin, Siimmtliche Werke, 7 vols., Stuttgart 1943-1972, vol. VI, p. 137, Letter to
Neuffer of to. to. 1794.
I'Compare Holderlin, vol. IV, pp. 253/4 (the long footnote on the Verfahrungsweise des
poetischen Geistes).
18Feuerbach, Zur Kritikder Hegelschell Philosophie, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 40.
19Ibid., pp. 37 and 38.
2lbid., vol. to, pp. 155-56; see Schelling SW (vol. to, p. 152).
2lSW (4, 358) and (6, 185). I have reconstructed both arguments and documented them in
the Unendlichen Mangel an Sein, pp. 75ff., and pp. 109ff.
22SW (vol. to, p. 137). See Feuerbach, vol. 9, pp. 252-53.
2'MEW, 1. Additional Volume, p. 574.
"Pierre Leroux, "De Dieu," in: La Revue Independante, Vol. 3 (April 1842), pp. 29-30.
translated by Joseph P. Lawrence