Identitätphilosophie and the Sensibility that Understands

By Graham Bounds and Jon Cogburn

ABSTRACT. Many contemporary scholars argue that Schelling’s conception of intellectual intuition retains certain central features from the Kantian and Fichtean conceptions. One of the common claims is that, as with Kant and Fichte, Schelling’s intellectual intuition is the power of the subject’s productive understanding. However, we show that for the mature Schelling of the Identitätphilosophie, intellectual intuition is the power not of an understanding that intuits, or a productive intellect, but of a receptive and penetrating sensibility that understands.

I. IntroductionThe concept of intellectual intuition is one of the most important in understanding the development of German idealism. Appreciating the evolution of the idea—from its original formulation as a negative principle in Kant’s thought to its role in Maimon’s philosophy of reinstating a form of rationalism, to its adoption as the basis of Fichte’s subjective idealism, and subsequent inversion in Schelling’s absolute idealism—is the key to expositing the motivations and macro-scale trajectory of immediate post-Kantian thought.

While Kant solved, in his own way, a number of problems that plagued both rationalism and empiricism, his radical dualism between sensibility and understanding—among other issues—left transcendental idealism open to critique itself. One of the early solutions, proposed by Maimon, was a merging of the two faculties, yielding a capability of the human mind for intellectual intuition. The question then became one of interpretation of this monism. While Kant had already postulated the notion of intellectual intuition, he restricted its possibility to a divine, rather than human, understanding, since such a capability would be inextricably tied with knowledge of things-in-themselves. Therefore, a careful formulation of the nature of intellectual intuition, as possible for humans, was needed in order to preserve the spirit of the Critical philosophy and avoid a relapse into the naïvety of dogmatism.

With these important factors in mind, Fichte and Schelling both adopted intellectual intuition as crucial elements of their systems, but viewed it differently. Moltke Gram1 has correctly assessed that the idea of intellectual intuition, and even the motivations behind its investigation, differ strongly from Kant to Fichte to Schelling, an assessment which Frederick Beiser has also emphasized in his comprehensive study of the development of German idealism.2 But we have serious concerns regarding Gram's account of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s corpus, as exemplified when he says that “[Schelling] begins by claiming that any case of our acquaintance with our own mental acts constitutes a case of intellectual intuition, and he concludes finally that any case of such acquaintance constitutes the creation of an object by its knowing subject.”3 Following Gram, other commentators have read Schelling in a similar fashion, with 1 Gram, Moltke. “Intellectual Intuition: The Continuity Thesis.”2 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801.3 Gram, Moltke. “Intellectual Intuition: The Continuity Thesis,” p. 289.

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intellectual intuition taking the form of a productive power. Daniel Whistler has recently and emphatically declared that even in the Identitätphilosophie, intellectual intuition is nothing like perception, and has instead stressed that it is a productive activity.4

It seems to us that these sorts of claims have arisen as a result of a mistake in contemporary scholarship about how to interpret Schelling’s unity of sensibility and understanding in intellection intuition. Specifically, this view appears to claim that intellectual intuition consists of an intuition of the intellect, thus putting the emphasis on understanding in the unity. This type of account is not flatly incorrect, but we believe it is narrowly focused, and within the context of the Identitätphilosophie, misleading. Intellectual intuition seen in this way gives the impression that it has nothing to do with sensibility, and therefore that it belongs merely to an understanding that intuits. In accordance with this view, the philosopher’s intellectual intuitions involve merely the constructions of the subject that “push out” onto nature, even creating it.

On the contrary, we argue that for Schelling’s Identitätphilosophie (and therefore, his mature philosophy, after escaping the overpowering influence of Fichte), intellectual intuition denotes with equal validity the power of a sensibility that understands. Beiser (we believe, correctly) insists on the committed naturalism of Schelling's overarching philosophy, and we will attempt to show why this naturalism means Schelling's notion of intellectual intuition is even more distinct from the Kantian and Fichtean accounts than Gram and Whistler suppose, because it denotes an intellectual or rational element within intuition. Schelling’s variety of intellectual intuition highlights the role of sensibility, and, accordingly, receptivity over productivity. Indeed, we will argue that even Beiser is incorrect insofar as he claims that for Schelling intellectual intuition remains a nonsensible intuition.5

Even further, however, intellectual intuitions are found in empirical sensibility, or perception. Whereas the intellectual intuition of transcendental idealism creates the objects it intuits, and, a fortiori, is a strictly apriori capability, as we shall show, much of what is said by Schelling about intellectual intuition in the Identitätphilosophie implies there are aposteriori manifestations of it. Accordingly, intellectual intuition does not create its object, as Kant had proclaimed. Instead, to understand how Schelling understands creation through intellectual intuition, one needs to recognize certain aspects of his Spinozist commitments. 

Our central point is that the contrast between sensible and intellectual intuition, so stark in Kant and Fichte, is muddled in Schelling. His brand of transcendental naturalism is sufficient to establish a strongly divergent view of intellectual intuition as possible within sensible intuition. The reason we hold that intellectual intuition is possible in sensible intuition—and therefore the operation of an understanding sensibility—is simply in order to insist that for Schelling the perception of an autonomous nature, if properly penetrating, can qualify as intellectual intuition.

II. Kant and Fichte on the Understanding that IntuitsIn one stroke, Kant’s transcendental idealism solves the question of the ontological status of space and time which had long concerned rationalist schools; it accounts for the

4 Whistler, Daniel. Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity, p. 134-5.5 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism, p. 580, 586.

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universality and validity of certain synthetic apriori judgments, such as the principle of causality, thus securing the way for the conduct of the natural sciences; and it denies the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, shrinking the domain of pure reason in order to “make room for faith,” thereby anticipating Jacobian concerns regarding the encroachment of the Enlightenment on matters of religion. Kant accomplishes all of this through his account of the faculties of sensibility and understanding, and their interplay. The content of experience is provided by the things-in-themselves, given in intuitions, or objective representations, by the receptive faculty of sensibility (in accordance with the pure forms of intuition, space and time). Over and against this receptivity, however, the pure categories—such as existence, unity, causality, negation, et al.—are provided by the subject itself. They consist, therefore, not in features of things-in-themselves, but as the forms of the faculty of understanding; they are the necessary prerequisites, provided by the subject, for any and all experience whatsoever. When these categories are synthesized by the faculty of imagination with the given manifold of intuition, the result is a genuine cognition of an object of consciousness. Things-in-themselves are, consequently, unknowable; all we can speak intelligibly about are the objects of cognition which we ourselves condition.

In the wake of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, commentators noticed problems with this dualism between sensibility and understanding. Though Kant sought to account for cognition with his theory of the conjunction of these two faculties, the arguments of Solomon Maimon in particular pointed out that the prior segregation is so complete that they simply cannot be joined in a posterior unity. Into this Maimonian problematic then stepped Fichte. As more than one commentator has noted,6 the early Schelling, earning the epithet “town crier of the self,” convinced Fichte that Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception qualifies as just such a sort of intellectual intuition, and that therefore the entire Kantian architectonic rested on a first principle known through what Kant himself considered an impossible faculty. However, Fichte came to be at odds with Schelling on the issue of the precise nature of intellectual intuition. Fichte maintained, against Schelling’s evolving account, that intellectual intuition is, just as it was for Kant, a nonsensible intuition, because it illuminates not those objects of outer intuition, nor even those elements of the empirical self that are given in inner sense, but the transcendental self. For the mature Schelling of the Identitätphilosophie, however, intellectual intuition is, as we shall see, a great deal wider in scope. Schelling’s evolution on this point from his and Fichte’s earlier persuasion must be understood via what Beiser calls the former’s transcendental naturalism, or his view of the transcendental subject as arising from nature—and not the other way around—as its ultimate manifestation.7

III. Intellectual and Sensible IntuitionBefore moving on to the aerial-view argument sketched above, and the thesis that Schelling’s transcendental naturalism implies a divergence from Fichte on the possibility of intellectual intuition in sensible intuitions—and even more specifically, in empirical

6 See Snow, Dale. Schelling and the End of Idealism, p. 43; and Harris, H.S. Introduction to the Difference Essay, from The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, p. 11.7 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism, p. 483.

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intuitions—we should note the direct textual evidence regarding the role of sensibility in intellectual intuition in Schelling’s Identitätphilosophie.

In this regard, we should begin with Fichte’s criticism of Schelling, circa 1801, on just this point: “What is intellectual intuition for Schelling?—[…] it is a perception [Wahrnehmung]. The whole thing is a perceptual system. Nothing at all like the inherently immanent light, like genuine intellectual intuition.”8

Now, there are two primary possibilities for what Fichte means here by ‘Wahrnehmung,’ both going back to different uses of the term by Kant. The first use is found in the typology of representations in the first Critique’s Transcendental Dialectic, where ‘perceptio,’ or ‘Wahrnehmung,’ stands for the very broad class of any representation within consciousness.9 In this sense, ‘perception’ is an umbrella term containing under its heading ‘sensations’ (subjective representations within consciousness) and ‘cognitions’ (their objective counterparts), as well as, subsequently, ‘intuitions’ (singular objective representations within consciousness), and ‘concepts’ (their multiplicable counterparts). If this is what Fichte means by ‘Wahrnehmung’ in his critique of Schelling, then his point provides minimal evidence for our thesis; he is merely pointing out that for Schelling intellectual intuition is a representation within consciousness, rather than an immediate awareness of the self as in transcendental apperception.

However, Marco Giovanelli has already documented that Kant uses the term ‘Wahrnehmung’ in a different sense than the above elsewhere in the first Critique, in the Prolegomena, and in personal correspondence.10 In these cases, a perception is far closer to the common modern sense, essentially synonymous with Kant’s term ‘empirical intuition’: “Perception is empirical consciousness, i.e. one in which there is at the same time sensation.”11

Indeed, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues that space is an apriori form of intuition by appealing to the fact that if it were derived aposteriori, mathematical judgments would not be apodictic, but would have “all the contingency of perception [Wahrnehmung]”12—that is, all the contingency of empirical cognitions, produced via empirical, not pure, intuitions. With the exception of the typology of representations presented in the Transcendental Dialectic, ‘Wahrnehmung’ in the Kantian terminology near-uniformly refers to empirical intuition, and we contend it is this usage that Fichte, in his critique of Schelling, was likely following.

Beyond Fichte’s personal assessment, however, Schelling’s own words testify to the fact that in his Identitätphilosophie intellectual intuitions could be sensible intuitions—or, more precisely, some sensible (even empirical) intuitions could qualify as intellectual intuitions. In all likelihood referring surreptitiously to Kant and Fichte, Schelling says that his conception of intellectual intuition is not like “what people have called intellectual intuition,” further stating that this other notion “either has nothing in

8 Fichte, J.G. “Preparatory Work Contra Schelling,” from The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802), p. 121.9 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, A320/B376-7.10 Giovanelli, Marco. Reality and Negation – Kant’s Principle of Anticipations of Perception, p. 5.11 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, B207.12 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, A24/B39.

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common with [real intellectual intuition] or is but a particular species of it.”13 Schelling’s point here is that his own version of intellectual intuition is broader than Fichte supposed; intellectual intuition as transcendental apperception is just a one-sided account. Schelling reinforces his broader view with the contention that all knowledge—and therefore, a fortiori, empirical knowledge—depends on the penetrating seeing characteristic of it: “The condition of the scientific spirit in general and in all the divisions of knowledge is not just a transitory intellectual intuition, but one that endures as the unchangeable organ of knowledge.”14 He continues by identifying it as the “capacity to see the universal in the particular, the infinite in the finite, the two united in a living unity,”15 and specifically alludes to the possibility of an intellectual intuition within the sphere of perception:

The anatomist who dissects a plant or an animal body surely believes he immediately sees [sehen] the plant or the animal organism, but strictly speaking he sees only the individual thing he designates plant or body. To see the plant in the plant, the organism in the organism, in a word to see the concept or indifference within difference is possible only through [durch] intellectual intuition.16

The implication is that we can imagine a particularly philosophical anatomist, one who is able to grasp the principle of identity between the archetype and the particular organism before her. Indeed, according to Schelling no science progresses without this capability on the part of its researchers. Such an intellectual intuition would by all means be, at the very least, occurring in tandem with a sensible intuition—or even more specifically and to the point, an empirical intuition in the Kantian sense, Wahrnehmung.17

13 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 206.14 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 206.15 The parallels between Schelling's intellectual intuition and Spinoza's third kind of knowledge, “intuitive knowledge” (scientia intuitiva), wherein particular things are “grasped under a species of eternity,” is well-noted by scholarship. Indeed, while he does not refer to it by name as “intellectual intuition,” in the Presentation Schelling claims that the acknowledgment of absolute identity is the same as Spinoza's third kind of cognition (Presentation of My System of Philosophy, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 163, author’s note).16 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 206.17 Further, we believe that there is continuity here on the role of empirical exhibition in conceptual knowledge from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie of 1799, when he says that, “The Philosophy of Nature, so that it does not degrade into an empty play with concepts, must demonstrate a corresponding intuition for all of its concepts. Therefore, the question arises how an absolute activity (if there is such a thing in Nature) will present itself empirically, i.e., in the finite. […] The illusion that surrounds the entire investigation concerning the infinite in all sciences issues from an amphiboly in this concept itself.—The empirically infinite is only the external intuition of an absolute (intellectual) infinity whose intuition is originally in us, but which could never come to consciousness without external, empirical exhibition” (First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, p. 15). Here “empty play with concepts” would of course be dogmatic rationalism (more on this in Sec. V). In opposition to this, Schelling’s philosophy seeks to demonstrate the concepts (archetypes) in “empirical exhibitions” of objects in nature.

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There are, however, problems in seeing intellectual intuition as merely coming alongside or in tandem with a sensible intuition, as of an individual plant. Firstly, Schelling does not describe intellectual intuition this way, as though it constitutes an additional stratum of intuition that accompanies the bedrock sensible one. Rather, in the passage cited above, Schelling describes intellectual intuition as occurring through (‘durch’) the sensible object. The universal is seen in the particular, and grasped in unity with it, not prior to, above, or beyond the particular. In intellectual intuition, the intuited object is given, is therefore accessed via sensibility, and is such not alongside its archetype, but as the archetype in concreto. In short, Schellingian epistemology does not follow the strictures of a Platonic divided line.18 Understanding occurs via that which is accessible to sensibility.

Secondly, Schelling’s exemplar class of intellectual intuition in the Further Presentations, pure intuitions of geometry,19 is, in the Kantian parlance, composed of intuitions of sensibility—just pure sensibility. We have thus far discussed the possibility of intellectual intuition as empirical. To be sure, though, intellectual intuition is possible in pure intuitions as well. Schelling even begins §II of the Further Presentations with what is essentially a phenomenological account of pure intuition, describing the unity of being and thought in mathematical givenness:

Geometry, however, and mathematics as a whole are entirely beyond this opposition [between concept and object, ideal and real]. Here thought is always adequate to being, concept to object, and vice versa, and never can the question of what is correct and certain in thought is also real or in the object, or whether what is expressed in being attains to conceptual necessity, even arise. In a word, there is no difference here between

18 A particularly pointed demonstration of this can be found in the Further Presentations, where Schelling says the forms do not have substance in themselves, nor even are they “ideal sketches that first obtain substantiality by an in-forming of the whole, for on this view they would cease to be specific determinations” (Further Presentations §IV, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 216). There is no ideal realm from which to purely intellectually extract—as in reflective inference—the archetypes. For more on Schelling’s rejection of Platonism, see Whistler, Daniel, Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language, p. 85-88.19 That Schelling considers such geometric intuitions paradigmatic cases of intellectual intuition is inferred from the way he speaks of them in the Further Presentations, particularly §§II and IV. Their relationship is made explicit, however, in §I: “[…] nor has [the example of at least a formal mode of absolute cognition] permitted reflection to cognize the necessary difference between philosophy and mathematics in a conclusive manner, because of the complete equivalence in regard to their type of cognition in general […]” (Sämmtliche Werke I/4, p. 347-8). With “reflection” [Reflexion], Schelling is referencing in particular the Kantian system, which held mathematics and philosophy (or the so-called “metaphysics of nature”) to be sciences corresponding to separate modes of cognition. The only difference between the two, Schelling says, is that philosophy, in taking as its subject matter the absolute itself, holds a sort of logical or methodological primacy, whereas mathematics consists merely of its fruits.

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subjective and objective truth, subjectivity and objectivity are absolutely one and there is in this science no construction in which they are not one.20

Such intuitions attest to the identity Schelling is seeking to demonstrate, acting as the methodological key to his Identitätphilosophie. The sure sign of intellectual intuition is this unity of being and thought, which bypasses the dualism between sensibility and understanding.

We can formulate the question of whether intellectual intuition is sensible or not in the following way: are the archetypes supersensible? Does discernment of them go beyond sense? If so, then intellectual intuition is with good reason contrasted with its sensible counterparts. But we believe this conclusion is incorrect, terminologically, because it seems to conflate “sensible” (‘sinnlich’)—a term of art for Kant and his successors—with “tangible,” as if what it means to be a sensible object is just to be a material object. This usage has great pride of place in the Platonic-rationalist tradition. But “sensibility” is a very different term in the Critical philosophy; it is imperative to remember that in transcendental idealism pure intuitions, such as those of geometry, are not of tangible, material objects at all; ‘sensible’ for Kant is a purely epistemic category, not an ontological one, as in the Platonic-rationalist tradition.

Now it is the case that Schelling often uses ‘sensible’ in the traditional way, to describe the ontological character of the archetypes as nonsensible.21 But Schelling’s view regarding their sensible character, in accordance with the Kantian or epistemic meaning of the term, and not the ontological meaning, does occasionally shine through. In an annotation to the Further Presentations, for example, he says that even though “The eternal as such lies entirely outside the world of sense,” he also maintains that “Since space itself falls within the sensible world, and, accordingly, the intuition of space is in one respect still a sensible intuition, so geometry exhibits, e.g., its archetypes in what is in one respect still a sensible intuition […].”22 That is, while the archetypes are not ontologically sensible, because they are eternal and therefore not spatio-temporal, they are nevertheless exhibited in pure intuitions, in which an immediate rational grasping of the intuited forms takes place. Thus, they are epistemically sensible, or, in other words, accessible via sensibility.

It is on this point that Schelling begins to depart radically from Kant. That pure intuitions of geometry serve as the paradigm for intellectual intuition and that Schelling recognizes them as sensible are jointly sufficient to show that for him intellectual intuition is found not solely in the understanding or the intellect proper, but in sensibility.23 Thus, for Schelling, it would be misleading to claim that archetypes are truly “intellected” in intellectual intuition. They are understood, but only insofar as they are

20 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 207.21 See, in particular, the 1804 System p. 183.22 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 261 ft. 289.23 Notably, in the same annotation, Schelling also differentiates between pure intellectual intuitions and intellectual intuitions in general, saying that “[the unity of being and thought] is the object of pure intellectual intuition and also intellectual intuition itself, since here intuition and object are identical.” Thus, we can reasonably surmise from this that some intellectual intuitions go beyond pure sensibility and constitute a possibility for Wahrnehmung, empirical sensibility.

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submitted to the sensibility, which is itself an “intellectual” faculty of sorts, since it is already capable—as demonstrable in pure intuition—of a kind of rational comprehension. Sensibility has no need, therefore, of putting such intuitions in posterior synthesis with concepts of the understanding.

While it is the case that Schelling elsewhere refers to “sensible cognition,” in comparison to the absolute cognition of intellectual intuition, as a “profound darkness” (‘tiefes Dunkel’),24 we have to ask, given everything else he says, whether he does not simply mean a mundane, non-intellectual form of sensible intuition, or that sensible intuition which is not sufficiently penetrating. For instance, elsewhere in the Further Presentations, Schelling says that the only difference between intellectual intuition and what normally gets called empirical intuition lies in the simultaneous discernment, in the former, as oppose to a lack thereof in the latter, of the fundamental unity between the perceived object and the perceiving subject.25 If this is the only difference between intellectual and empirical intuitions, it seems fair that one can still describe this special subset of the latter as an incisive type of empirical intuition that simply goes beyond untrained apprehension.

Moreover, there are reasons for seeing the characterization of empirical intuition as a “profound darkness” as only part of a much subtler epistemological story. In the 1804 System, Schelling again uses this imagery, and though he says that sensible knowledge is “noncognition,” and “not knowledge but privation of knowledge,”26 this claim comes amidst a complex account of the relationship between positivity and negativity, where privation is ultimately that through which knowledge (of God) is achieved. To paraphrase Schelling’s metaphor, the darkening of things, which stands in contrast to their illumination, nevertheless illuminates for us, so that the light actually never fails to be the object of our knowledge: “Hence the immediate object of our knowledge remains forever positive, namely, God alone, and the knowledge of things originates in us […] through a privation of knowledge.”27 So to conclude that the absolute cannot be revealed in sensibility, or that empirical intuition cannot be intellectual intuition because it is “darkness,” is far too hasty. Schelling’s epistemology is much more nuanced. All knowledge for him is through a glass darkly—but it is no less genuine knowledge as a result.

There are historical reasons for this shift from the Kantian and Fichtean versions of intellectual intuition to the perceptive model in Schelling. As Eckart Förster has noted, there is in fact a distinction between intellectual intuition as presented in the B Deduction of the first Critique (in which the understanding is infinitely productive, since it lends being to those objects it cognizes), and the “intuitive intellect” first found in §§76 and 77 of the third Critique (where the productivity of the intellect is not at issue, but rather

24 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §IV, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 220.25 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 212: “[…] (in this case intellectual intuition would be distinguished from all sorts of empirical intuition only in this respect: in the latter something different from the subject is intuited, while in the former what intuits and what is intuited are identical).” Here Schelling is expressing, as we shall see in Sec. IV, his fundamental principle of identity between the transcendental apperception of the absolute and the perception of the finite self.26 1804 System, p. 183.27 Ibid., p. 183.

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where it grasps the part in relation to the whole).28 Förster makes the case that in fact Goëthe was the first in the post-Kantian tradition to utilize the notion of an “intuitive intellect” rather than an intellectual intuition per se, and thus to conceive of how we grasp archetypes in or via empirical objects (the paradigmatic case for Goëthe is, as it is for Schelling, the plant specimen). Though Förster still calls the intuitions of such a faculty nonsensible (and Kant certainly saw it that way), he also says they are “a higher form of experience,”29 citing Goëthe’s reference to “empirical evidence […] of a higher sort” that, just as Schelling says, grounds and connects all scientific enquiry.30

We believe such a reading of Goethe is just as applicable to Schelling—an observation which Förster also briefly makes, though he sees it as something of an unwitting move on Schelling’s part.31 In any case, intellectual intuition thought of along the lines of what Förster identifies as “intuitive understanding” can hardly be labeled nonsensible without serious qualification. The role of sensibility, of receptive perception, is, in fact, quite pronounced. Nevertheless, only a practiced perception can hold witness to the universal in the particular, and this is why Schelling brings up the example of the anatomist who fails to see the universal in the organism, as well as his elitist insistence that not everyone is capable of intellectual intuition (and, therefore, the conduct of philosophy).32

Ultimately, this is a terminological issue. If, in contending that intellectual intuitions are nonsensible for Schelling, one simply means that they are of a special class of perception which can still take empirical objects as its own and see them in a new light—as Beiser seems to in his account of intellectual intuition as “contemplation” of an ordinary object33—then the terminological quibble is minimal (though the motivation for adhering to the traditional, ontological use of the term rather than the Kantian, epistemic one, whether by commentators or by Schelling himself, remains unclear to us). If, however, one takes intellectual intuition as entirely divorced from perception and receptivity, and instead insists that it can be accounted for as a pure productivity of the subject—as Gram and others have—then this represents a regression from the mature Schellingian notion of intellectual intuition in the Identitätphilosophie to something far closer to the Fichtean conception (on which their falling out was, in part, based).

Our contention, then, is that intellectual intuition is possible not just in altogether nonsensible intuitions, nor even just in pure intuitions of, for example, geometry, but also in empirical perception, in perceptions of ordinary objects in the world (though the perception itself is decidedly extraordinary). If it were not possible in receptivity, then, as

28 Förster, Eckart. “The Significance of §§76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment and the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1).”29 Förster, Eckart. “The Significance of §§76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment and the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” p. 15.30 Goëthe, J.W. “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,” from Goëthe: The Collected Works, Vol. 12: Scientific Studies, p. 16.31 Förster, Eckart, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, p. 248-9.32 He says that it can be neither learned nor taught (Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 206) as well as that, “it cannot be demonstrated just as light cannot be demonstrated to those born blind […]” (Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 209).33 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism, p. 580.

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we shall see presently, the pride of place given by Schelling to nature in the Identitätphilosophie would be severely compromised.

IV. The Autonomy of NatureIt is this insistence on the priority of nature that informs what Beiser calls Schelling’s “transcendental naturalism,” which dramatically sets him apart in a host of ways from Kant and Fichte, but, more pointedly, is crucial to the development of Schelling’s own, mature view of intellectual intuition in opposition to that of his predecessors. In short, Schelling dramatically rethinks the nature of the self, and therefore of the self-knowledge that constitutes intellectual intuition in transcendental apperception.34 When Fichte speaks of the self, he is referring to the universal form of subjectivity35; Schelling, on the other hand, means neither the individual finite self, nor a “super-subject” that encompasses all being,36 nor even the universal form of subjectivity.

Instead, the absolute self of Schelling’s idealism is akin to Spinoza’s Substance, nature itself. Schelling does not see the autonomy of nature as a one-sided postulate of Naturphilosophie, nor does he abandon that autonomy in his Identitätphilosophie. In the Presentation, he makes clear that the universe or nature is not an effect of the absolute, some outgrowth from it in its process of self-understanding, but is the absolute.37 He continues to identify the absolute with nature in the Further Presentations. Moreover, in the 1801 essay “On the True Concept of the Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way to Solve its Problems,” nature, the “purely objective,” is designated the proper identity of subject and object,38 and philosophy of nature is in no uncertain terms accorded full priority over transcendental philosophy.39

As a result of this privileging of nature, for Schelling the rational subject is a product—indeed, the highest product—of nature, and not vice versa, as was the case for

34 Beiser has already made this point (see German Idealism, p. 584) but it is our intention to expand on it.35 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism, p. 284-8, 501, 503.36 Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism, p. 357.37 Schelling, F.W.J. Presentation, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 154.38 “For what I call nature, is to me just nothing other than the purely-objective of intellectual intuition, what [the transcendental philosopher] establishes [as] = I, because he does not make the abstraction from the intuiting, which is in fact necessary if a purely-objective, i.e. actually theoretical, philosophy is to come about” (F.W.J Schelling. “On the True Concept of the Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way to Solve its Problems,” p. 5-6. Trans. modified by the authors); “I demand intellectual intuition for the purpose of the philosophy of nature, as it has been demanded in the Doctrine of Science; moreover though I demand an abstraction from the intuiting in this intuition, an abstraction which for me leaves behind the purely objective of these acts, which in itself is merely the subject-object, but in no way = I” (“On the True Concept,” p. 4. Trans. modified by the authors).39 “Because philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy have been spoken of as opposed yet equally possible orientations of philosophy, many have asked which of the two is accorded priority.—Without doubt philosophy of nature, because it allows the standpoint of idealism itself to first come into being […]” (Ibid., p. 6. Trans. modified by the authors).

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both Kant and Fichte. Kant had famously declared in the first Critique that, “The order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of the mind, originally set them there.”40 But in a November, 1800 correspondence with Fichte, Schelling is adamant that “ […] this ideal-real I, which is merely objective but for this very reason simultaneously productive, is in this its productivity nothing other than Nature, of which the I of intellectual intuition or of self-consciousness is only the higher potency.”41

Thus, for Schelling, the finite self is not the original ground of all activity; rather, it is the infinite, the absolute that is such a ground, and which therefore posits both the matter and form of experience in a productive intuition. According to Schelling, then, the postulate of a productive intuition is correct, but it would be misleading if we take it as applying to the finite subject, as Fichte did. The result of such a misapplication is subjective idealism, while Schelling’s elaboration leads to a species of objective idealism. In his system, the Ego of transcendental idealism is recognized as the absolute self, of which, comparable to Spinoza’s Substance, finite subjects are as modes. This infinite understanding, then, is absolute activity; it is, strictly speaking, the source of the content of experience in addition to the form, and therefore, from the infinite perspective, there is reason for saying that sensibility is folded into understanding, and understanding accordingly becomes a faculty of intuitions in addition to concepts. It is here that Kant’s notion of the divine understanding, with its intellectual intuition that simultaneously intuits and creates ex nihilo the objects of its intuition, comes into play.

If, however, one maintained this from the finite perspective of subjectivity, then Schelling’s bold new outlook would simply relapse into something akin to the Fichtean position. Take, for example, the following passage from the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, a rather sharp articulation of that project:

Hence an improper idealism, a system, that is, which turns all knowledge into illusion, would have to be one which eliminated all immediacy in our cognition, e.g., by positing external originals independent of our presentations; whereas a system which seeks the origin of things in an activity of the mind that is ideal and real at once, would have, precisely because it is the most perfect idealism, to be at the same time the most perfect realism. For if the most perfect realism is that which recognizes things in themselves and immediately, it is possible only in an order which perceives in things its own reality merely, confined by its own activity. For such an order, as the indwelling soul of things, would permeate them as its own immediate organism and—just as the master has the most perfect knowledge of his work—would fathom their inner mechanism from the first.42

Here, Schelling is describing a system which constitutes a direct realism precisely because it is a “direct idealism”; we are directly familiar not with appearances but with things-in-themselves, because we create the content and form of experience. There is thus

40 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, A125.41 Schelling, F.W.J. Correspondence with Fichte, November 19th, 1800, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 44.42 Schelling, F.W.J. System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 73.

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nothing received, and consequently nothing to condition, at all; objects of experience are constituted purely by the mind’s activity.

One could point to this passage as evidence of the productive power of the subject in Schelling’s philosophy. But then one would ignore that in the 1800 System, Schelling launches into a subjective account of the subject-object identity43—essentially his own ultimate articulation of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge—over and against the objective side, provided by his Naturphilosophie. It is in the Identitätphilosophie that follows and subsumes both that Schelling provides the wider context for a passage such as this. In the same letter to Fichte mentioned previously, Schelling says that transcendental philosophy, in particular Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, “is not yet philosophy itself” and amounts only to a “formal proof of idealism.” What Schelling says he seeks is a substantive proof, whose “task is to deduce nature with all its determinations, indeed in its objectivity, its independence not from the I, which is itself objective, but from the I that is subjective and does the philosophizing.”44 In fact, in the Further Presentations, he explains that any intuition that recursively understands itself only from the subjective side of the subject-object identity (that is, that understands itself merely as an instrument of a world-constituting subjectivity, as an understanding that intuits) can never be a true intellectual intuition.45 The 1800 System presents just such a subjective—and therefore incomplete—understanding of the subject-object identity, and accordingly, of intellectual intuition.

Instead, this productivity, deduced in transcendental idealism, properly belongs to the absolute. The “order which perceives in things its own reality merely” is finally identified in the Identitätphilosophie not as mind—much less our own finite minds—but the absolute which is neither mind nor matter, and which only partially reveals itself in both. Schelling’s fully articulated system preserves both transcendental idealism and transcendental realism: the former on the grand scale of the absolute, the latter on the modest scale of the finite subject.

Thus, for Schelling, from the finite perspective—and this is where the realism of absolute idealism comes to the fore—it would be more correct to say that the understanding is folded into sensibility, and therefore that sensibility becomes a faculty of concepts as well as intuitions. At the level of the infinite, of the absolute, there is an understanding that intuits—it is pure activity, creating both the content and form of experience, as Fichte had claimed. At the level of the finite subject, however, there is more correctly a sensibility that understands—a receptivity that is the source of neither the content nor the form of experience. It is for this reason that dismissal of the perceptive quality of Schelling’s intellectual intuition is exegetically problematic: if one holds that a perception (i.e. an empirical intuition of sensibility) cannot qualify as an

43 Note, for example, the explanatory subordination of realism to idealism in the cited passage. That the 1800 System presents only a subjective account of the identity is made clear at the outset of the work, in the Forward and in §1 of the Introduction (titled Concept of Transcendental Philosophy) in which transcendental philosophy as such is identified as the topic of the work, and characterized as the subjective problematic of knowledge (in opposition to the objective problematic, philosophy of nature).44 Schelling, F.W.J. Correspondence with Fichte, November 19th, 1800, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 44.45 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §II, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 212.

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intellectual intuition, then one has moved back to a Fichtean notion of absolute self. Owing to this one difference, the distinct conceptions of the absolute self, the very notions of intellectual intuition in Fichte and Schelling diverge in the most radical of ways. The misreading of the above passage from the 1800 System as an ultimate statement of Schelling’s position threatens the naturalist commitments established in the Naturphilosophie and carried over into the system of Identity. In short, were Schelling to view the finite self as productive in the same way Fichte did, from the interpretation of intellectual intuition as an understanding that intuits, he would necessarily have to forego perhaps the most central concern of his Naturphilosophie: its Romantic insistence on the autonomy of nature.

V. Production and FreedomThis insistence, it is worth noting, is not a dispensable element of Schelling’s mature work. It is an essential element of absolute idealism, as a Romantic development of Kantian idealism, that it recognizes nature, not the finite subject, nor even universal subjectivity, as originally productive.

Nevertheless, some might point to certain passages where Schelling seems to prima facie and in no uncertain terms speak of intellectual intuition in the sense of a pure productive activity: he says, for example, that “To philosophize is to create [schaffen] Nature”46 and “the sole task of natural science is to construct [construiren] matter [Materie].”47 Since we have here been focusing on the Identitätphilosophie, one might be tempted to dismiss such statements as simply early claims of a (still very Fichtean) Naturphilosophie that had not yet set nature as the subject-object identity itself—that is, were it not for the fact that Schelling reiterates such claims even after his public break from Fichte, declaring in the Further Presentations that “intellectual intuition […] produces [producirt] the absolute.”48

The impetus thus lies with us to give a positive account of passages such as these and to make sense of such claims regarding productivity within the context of our own interpretation of intellectual intuition in the Identitätphilosophie. To put it in another way: in our reading of intellectual intuition as receptive, we must account for human freedom, the preservation of which was ever one of Schelling’s great philosophical concerns.

In general, we think the interpretation of these passages in accordance with Gram’s view—that intellectual intuition involves the creation of objects by the subject—does not take into account a crucial component of Schelling’s conception of nature, no less present in the Identitätphilosophie than in the Naturphilosophie. This conception is made clear when the first passage cited above, from the 1799 First Outline, is put into context. In the wider passage, Schelling, following Spinoza, is emphasizing that nature is to be understood not as natura naturata, or a mere aggregate of products, but as natura naturans, or a primordial activity from which these products spring. Accordingly, when intellectual intuition, as the organon of philosophy, “creates Nature,” or “produces the

46 Schelling, F.W.J. First Outline, p. 14.47 Schelling, F.W.J. “Universal Deduction of the Dynamic Process or the Categories of Physics,” p. 1.48 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §IV, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 262 ft. 295.

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absolute,” what is produced is not, say, the particular plant, nor of course this productivity writ large which is nature, rightly conceived, for in both cases nature would then lose its autonomy. Rather, what is produced is the intellectual intuition itself, as a moment of this primordial activity. Thus, each act of intellectual intuition creates nature in the sense that it contributes to the activity that is nature naturing.

With this context in mind, there is little problem in explaining such passages under our interpretation, because they simply point out that in philosophizing we ourselves become nature naturing. This is not because we lend actuality and in a simple sense create the objects we perceive, nor because this act constitutes the length and breadth of the activity that is nature, but because in philosophizing about nature, natura naturans comes back to recognize itself via itself, in its manifestation as a certain form of activity, namely philosophizing. This explains why for Schelling we are not merely products or manifestations of nature but the highest products, the highest manifestations, since in us the activity of the absolute is echoed in the very recognition we are capable of achieving of that activity itself, from which we spring.

That relation between the knowledge of the finite subject and the productivity of the absolute—the crux of the Romantic zeitgeist—is perhaps best summarized by Goëthe: “Through intuiting ever-creative Nature we might make ourselves worthy of participating intellectually in her productions.”49 Our contribution to the absolute involves not our construction of nature in the simple sense, but our understanding of nature’s own self-construction, as the conscious element of that productivity coming to recognize itself as such. Our intuitions are indeed spontaneous, not in their production of what is intuited, but in their being unprecedented occurrences, novel developments, in nature’s self-understanding.

VI. ConclusionAposteriori intellectual intuition is certainly not a sufficient organon of philosophy for Schelling, nor may it even be a necessary one within the system of identity. Indeed, the Presentation, the crowning document of the Identitätphilosophie, proceeds via an apriori deduction of nature in the vein of Spinoza’s Ethics. But if we turn to a late exposition of the Naturphilosophie, the 1799 essay “On the Concept of Speculative Physics,” the relation of apriori to aposteriori methodology is clarified. There, Schelling makes quite clear that an apriori deduction of nature does not mean experience is cast off or rendered irrelevant:

The assertion that natural science must be able to deduce all its principles a priori is in a sense understood to mean that natural science must dispense with all experience, and, without any intervention of experience, be able to spin all of its principles out of itself; an affirmation so absurd that the very objections to it deserve pity.—Not only do we know this or that through experience, but we originally know nothing at all except through experience, and by means of experience, and in this sense the whole of our knowledge consists of the judgments of experience. (1799, p. 198)

What Schelling means is that an apriori deduction of nature is possible from the primary

49 Goëthe, J.W. “Intuitive Judgment,” from Goëthe’s Botanical Writings, p. 232-3. Translation modified by Eckart Förster.

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principle (the principle of identity, by way of which such a deduction is then supposedly carried out in the 1801 Presentation). However, this says nothing about how the primary principle was arrived at; it is only through a careful working out of our empirical knowledge that any principle could even be posited in the first place as a candidate. So first and foremost, experience is called upon to construct the principle from which the apriori science can then, and only then, proceed—and even at such a point, Schelling is adamant that any such candidate must be “brought to an empirical test” that may falsify it by contradicting its derived implications (p. 197-8)

But how could any principle be arrived at by such empirical means? Apropos our thesis: by way of an aposteriori manifestation of intellectual intuition, which allows the “indifference within difference” to first come to light, and the principle of identity, from which an apriori science is only then made possible, to first be posited.

Why, though, does it matter whether intellectual intuition is possible aposteriori, or in perception, for Schelling? The answer is that if intellectual intuition, in constituting archetypal knowledge of things-in-themselves, is available through experience, then it presents the possibility of a formal realism, in opposition to Kant’s own formal idealism. Intellectual intuition would then be a matter of seeing the unconditioned, the things-in-themselves in their own formal structure, not under the auspices of one’s own schematisms. In intellectual intuition, one is not confined to the circle of consciousness, with its world of appearances. It is for this reason that absolute idealism signals a legitimate post-Critical metaphysics, and why Beiser claims it consists in a full-throated realism about the archetypes. While according to Gram, intellectual intuition is not an intuition of a thing-in-itself,50 Schelling does continuously refer to it in the Further Presentations as absolute cognition, where being and thought are one and the same, and thus where appearance is reality: “Identification of form with essence in absolute intellectual intuition snatches the ultimate doubling [of the real and ideal] away from the dualism it inhabits and establishes absolute idealism in place of the idealism that is confined to the world of appearances.”51

To break out of this confinement of the phenomenal world and to “explain how our presentations can absolutely coincide with objects existing wholly independent of them,” is precisely what Schelling had previously declared to be the first task of

50 Gram, Moltke. “Intellectual Intuition: The Continuity Thesis,” p. 301-2. A clarificatory remark is warranted here: insofar as ‘Ding-an-Sich,’ the Kantian term of art, belongs side-by-side with ‘phenomenon’ in a dualistic opposition, Schelling indeed dispenses with the notion as such, just as Fichte did in the wake of Schulze’s decisive criticism (for more on Schelling’s critique of the thing-in-itself, see Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, p. 25). But this is only because he rejects the dualism in the first place; if we ask whether our consciousness extends beyond itself to the unconditioned, and therefore whether we have access to what is in itself rather than what our minds merely condition and represent to us, Schelling’s answer would be definitively in the affirmative.51 Schelling, F.W.J. Further Presentations §IV, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 221. He says elsewhere that intellectual intuition “has as [its] object that in-itself free from all restrictions” (Further Presentations §I, from Sämmtliche Werke I/4, p. 355) and that “the standpoint of philosophy is the standpoint of reason, its kind of knowing is a knowing of things as they are in themselves, i.e. as they are in reason” (Presentation, from Philosophical Rupture, p. 146).

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philosophy in his 1800 System.52 Intellectual intuition in Schelling’s Identitätphilosophie purports to accomplish precisely this, and does so only because it overcomes the dualism between sensibility and understanding, object and concept, being and thought, in a non-Fichtean way. The Fichtean solution to the problem of the Kantian dualism consists in making intellectual intuition the purely “immanent light,” thereby sacrificing the role of experience and receptivity, not to mention the very constitutive status of the thing-in-itself, and with it, the autonomy of nature. For Fichte this insight yields absolute knowledge of that first principle from which all else is ultimately derived, the subjective Ego. As we hope has been made clear, Schelling cannot endorse this solution.

Appreciating Schelling’s distinct notion of the self—not as individual self but the absolute self of identity—is what allows us to see that the finite subject creates neither the form nor the content of knowledge, and at the same time that an intellectual intuition cannot be for that finite perceiver merely individual self-knowledge, the “immanent light” that remains in the sphere of self-consciousness only. Intellectual intuition for Schelling is not self-knowledge of the finite subject, but self-knowledge of the infinite, the absolute, through the finite subject as the capstone of its productive evolution53; it is thus possible in our perceptual knowledge of the world about us, and by the very same principle, this perceptual knowledge is absolute, immediate, unconditioned access to things-in-themselves. Therefore, we see that Schelling does not follow Kant and Fichte in the view of intellectual intuition as a necessarily nonsensible intuition. Indeed, as shown above, the entire point for Schelling’s Identitätphilosophie is to show how high-class sensible intuitions and postulates of pure reason are one and the same: how the givenness of sensible data to us is identical with the productivity of the absolute. Because the absolute comes to understand itself through us, our intellectual intuitions—including sufficiently penetrating sensible intuitions—just are the transcendental apperception of the absolute.54

Schelling’s idealism thus alleges it can talk about things-in-themselves rather than mere appearances, maintaining a formal realism about archetypical knowledge. The key to this escape from the confines of Kantian-Fichtean formal idealism and subjectivism,

52 Schelling, F.W.J. System of Transcendental Idealism, p. 10: “This first and most fundamental conviction suffices to determine the first task of philosophy: to explain how our presentations can absolutely coincide with objects existing wholly independent of them.—The assumption that things are just what we take them to be, so that we are acquainted with them as they are in themselves, underlies the possibility of all experience (for what would experience be, and to what aberrations would physics, for example, be subject, without this presupposition of absolute identity between appearance and reality?). Hence, the solution of this problem is identical with theoretical philosophy, whose task is to investigate the possibility of experience.”53 As Schelling says in the 1804 System, “I know nothing, or my knowledge to the extent that it is mine, is no true knowledge. Not I know, but only totality knows in me, if the knowledge that I consider my own is to be a real, true knowledge” (Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, p. 143).54 Notably, in E5P36, Spinoza says of our intellectual love for God, which arises through scientia intuitiva, that it “[...] is a part of the infinite intellectual love with which God loves himself.” (Ethics, p. 310) In other words, our love for God just is God loving itself through us, its modes.

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stemming from the dualism between sensibility and understanding, is intellectual intuition, which therefore presents the transcendental possibility of metaphysics, circumventing the Kantian injunction. Schelling spells out the motivation behind his rejection of reflection, of dualism and posterior synthesis of intuition and concept, in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: “[Mere reflection] is an evil which accompanies man into life itself, and distorts all his intuitions even for the more familiar objects of consideration. […] It makes that separation between man and world permanent, because it treats the latter as a thing in itself, which neither intuition nor imagination, neither understanding nor reason, can reach.”55 The express purpose of Schelling’s union of sensibility and understanding in intellectual intuition is to turn away from Kantian-Fichtean subjectivism, to provide an account of our epistemic contact with the world (in its ideal as well as real character), and, moreover, to do so in accordance with the original autonomy of that world, not its derivation from us.

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