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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. Introduction
The 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 Gram[1] 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 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 Intuits
In 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 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 Intuition
Before 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 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 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]
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: