Schelling's Identity Philosophy

The subject of this chapter is the most unfashionable era of F. W. J. Schelling’s philosophical trajectory: the various systems constructed out of a principle of absolute identity penned between May 1801 and (roughly) 1805. While its untimeliness has been exacerbated by post-1968 philosophies of difference, Schelling’s identity philosophy was long considered an aberration from the linear path of philosophical evolution from Immanuel Kant through G. W. F. Hegel. A litany of criticisms from throughout the past two centuries can be briefly rehearsed: Schelling’s identity philosophy is Eleatic, lacks a proper beginning, proceeds too quickly, is dogmatic, constructs monochromatically, fails to account for how the world appears to us, is grounded on mystical and unverifiable intellectual intuition, is elitist and reactionary, and excludes historical change, finitude, opposition, individuality, freedom, evil, or even time. Most damningly, these are not criticisms leveled by Hegelians, Marxists, poststructuralists, and analytic historians of philosophy, but also by many Schelling enthusiasts, even (occasionally) by the late Schelling himself. In what follows, I want to keep hold of some of the oddness of Schelling’s identity philosophy—its alterity, as it were, to more easily-digestible philosophies—without thereby necessarily damning it to irrelevance. The identity philosophy serves as a stumbling block to how philosophers have been trained to think ever since Hegel—and this precisely is its virtue. In particular, I read the identity philosophy as a series of experiments in thinking reality without negation; indeed, I suggest that the most striking thing about Schelling’s position is that he simply does not think that the philosopher should be particularly interested in describing a world of qualitatively-differentiated, finite individuals. The philosopher is restricted to another job: the description of the structure of rationality. What emerges is an alternative vision of the role of the philosopher and its limits.