Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved.

May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ON PHILOSOPHY

It would seem neither improper nor undesirable if before the exposition

of the particular subject of the lecture that I now have the occasion to give,
that I put forward a general word about philosophy as such. There is perhaps
not one among you who has not come here with some type of idea, or at least
a presentiment, of what philosophy is. Here—even the beginner will say—here
those questions will be answered for me for which in all other sciences there
is no answer and that sooner or later, but always inevitably, disturb every
upright spirit. Here that veil will be removed that until now has hidden from
me—not particular objects, but this entirety itself, of which I feel a part, and
of which the more I sought to learn of its particulars became all the more
unfathomable. Here no doubt will be won those eminent convictions that
maintain human consciousness aright, without which life would have no pur-
pose and would thus be deprived of all dignity and independence.
All the sciences with which I have previously concerned myself are
based on presuppositions that in themselves are not justified. The mathemat-
ical disciplines progress within themselves without significant scandal, but
mathematics does not comprehend itself since it provides no account of itself
or of its own possibility, and as soon as it wanted to ground itself, it would [4]
with that very attempt go beyond itself and abandon the basis on which it
alone can achieve its results. Besides mathematics, I have until now primarily
concerned myself with the study of classical languages. I am indebted to this
study for that formal exercise of the spirit that, more than any abstract logic
or rhetoric, puts me in the proper state of mind to notice and to express the
most subtle gradations or distinctions of any thought; I am indebted to this
study for the priceless advantage of always being able to inhale directly from
the great works of antiquity that spirit from which they are inspired, to ele-
vate and to refresh my soul. Yet the more deeply I grasped and examined the
applicable copyright law.

construction of these original languages, the more I felt the need to penetrate
to the very nature of this wonderful instrument itself which, when appropri-
ately used, expresses thoughts with infallible certainty and, regarding sentiment,
is delicate enough to reproduce its quietest breath yet strong enough to repro-
duce the raging storm of the most vehement passions. Where does language

91

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 92 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
come from, how was it that it came into being for humanity? Where does this
power come from, which this instrument creates not before its employment,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

but immediately in the employment itself? A power that I brandish not with
hands or external organs, but directly with the spirit itself, within which I truly
dwell, which animates me, and within which I move freely and with no resist-
ance?— Next I directed my attention to the external objects of nature around
me. I acquainted myself with the fundamental propositions of physics,
acquired the elementary ideas and concepts of the most general natural phe-
nomena. I became familiar with the laws of gravity, of pressure, of kinetics, and
I observed the effects of light, of heat, of magnetism, and of electricity. I lis-
tened to explanations of these phenomena as well. Some of these phenomena,
like gravity, were attributed to immaterial causes; others were attributed to, as
one says, certain subtle or imponderable substances. Still, if I go so far as to
grant that these substances and forces actually explain these phenomena—a
position about which I hardly feel convinced in every regard—[5] there is
always a question that remains: From where do these substances and forces
themselves derive and for what purpose? What type of necessity do they have
to exist and why are there such things? I will grant that light consists of—or
is produced by—the vibration of the ether, but what of the ether itself that fills
outer space, what cause do I know to ascribe for its existence? It seems to me
something so contingent that I cannot even comprehend it and thus cannot
accept as actually explained any phenomenon that depends on it.
I have also looked into natural history, and if this inexhaustible manifold
of colors, forms, and shapes in which organic nature appears to play already
aroused my youthful sensibilities, and if I then later believed that I had detected
a subtle law that for once would guide my spirit through this labyrinth—show-
ing me the path of generative nature itself—there nevertheless remained for me
always an unanswered question: Why are there such beings at all? Why are
there plants, why animals? One answers me: they are but steps over which
nature ascends in order to arrive at humanity—thus in humanity I shall find
the answer to all questions, the solution to all riddles, and for this very reason
I am inclined to agree with those who for ages have claimed the sole object of
the final science that answers all questions, the sole object of philosophy, is
man. But if man is undoubtedly the culmination, and to this extent the goal of
all creation and becoming, am I therefore entitled then and there to proclaim
him to be its ultimate purpose as well? Would I be justified in doing this if I
knew how to specify what that being [Wesen], which permeates every level of
becoming as its efficient cause, had intended for him? Am I, however, capable
of specifying this? I could conceive of that being perhaps as something that,
applicable copyright law.

initially blind, struggles through every level of becoming toward consciousness,

and humanity would then arise precisely at that moment, at that point in which
this previously blind nature would reach self-consciousness. But [6] this can-
not be, since our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature
that permeates everything: it is just our consciousness and hardly encompasses

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On Philosophy 93
within itself a science of becoming applicable to all things. This universal
becoming remains just as foreign and opaque to us as if it had never had a bear-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ing on us at all. Therefore, if this becoming has achieved any kind of purpose
it is achieved only through humanity, but not for humanity; for the conscious-
ness of man does not = equal the consciousness of nature. But, one answers, of
course the ultimate and highest purpose does not lie in the human faculty of
cognition, since if nature is impenetrable to man, conversely, man is foreign to
a nature that indeed continues beyond him and his works, and thus for which
he has no significance. The reason for this lies precisely in the fact that man has
separated himself from nature and in the fact that—as experience shows—man
was by no means merely destined to be the goal or culmination of a process
independent of him, but was rather destined to be himself the originator and
creator of a new process, of a second world that would lift itself above the first.
The true purpose of man lies in what he, through the freedom of his will,
should be in this different world. Man was the goal of nature only to the extent
that he was destined to sublate [aufzuheben] nature within himself, to continue
beyond nature, and to begin for himself a new chain of events. But far from
hoping to be able to arrive at the true reason for the world through this defer-
ment of the ultimate purpose, this freedom of the will—which I have conceded
to man and from which I now should expect the solution of this great riddle—
itself leads to a new one that indeed is the greatest of all riddles, and plunges
man into an even deeper (if possible) ignorance than that in which he previ-
ously found himself with respect to only nature. For when I consider the
actions and consequences of this freedom in general—and I had also taken at
least a general look at history before I turned to the study of philosophy—this
world of history presents such a dreary spectacle that I completely despair of
there being no [7] purpose and therefore no true reason for the world. For if
every other creature of nature, in its place or at its stage, is that which it should
be and therefore fulfills its purpose, then so much the more is man—since he
can become what he should be only with consciousness and freedom—as long
as he remains unconscious of his purpose and is swept along by this tremen-
dous and never-ceasing movement we call history toward a goal of which he is
not aware, he is himself purposeless, and since he should be the purpose of
everything else, then through him everything else again becomes purposeless.
All of nature toils and is engaged in unceasing labor. Man for his part also does
not rest, and it is as an old book says: although everything under the sun is so
full of toil and labor, one nonetheless does not see that anything is improved or
that something is truly accomplished in which one might truly believe. A gen-
eration passes away, and another arises to itself again pass away. In vain we
applicable copyright law.

expect that something new will happen in which this turmoil will finally find
its goal; everything that happens happens only so that something else again can
happen, which itself in turn becomes the past to something else. Ultimately,
everything happens in vain, and there is in every deed, in all the toil and labor
of man himself nothing but vanity: everything is vain, for vanity is everything

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 94 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
that lacks a true purpose. Thus far from man and his endeavors making the
world comprehensible, it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible and
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

who inexorably drives me to the belief in the wretchedness of all being, a belief
that makes itself known in so many bitter pronouncements from both ancient
and recent times. It is precisely man that drives me to the final desperate ques-
tion: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?—
That there should be a science that responds to these questions, which
would snatch us from this despair, is unquestionably a compelling, indeed a
necessary, longing—a longing not of this or that individual person but of
human nature itself. What other science should it be that is capable of this if
not [8] philosophy? For all other sciences known by man—invented or devel-
oped by him—each has its specific task and none responds to this final and
most universal question. So there will be no doubt about this: philosophy is in
itself and at all times the most longed for of sciences, since through it all other
knowledge receives both its first highest reference and its final support. If I
cannot answer this final question, then for me everything else sinks into the
abyss of a bottomless void.
These questions, however, are not now advanced for the first time and
the need for philosophy has not arisen only in our age. What Horace says
regarding heroes, “Fuere fortes ante Agamemnon,” applies to those who search
for wisdom as well.1 Philosophical spirits have wandered not only under the
plane trees of the Lissus, but also under the palms along the Ganges and the
Nile, even if no perceptible or definitive word, but at most a vague sound, has
reached us, and even the earlier as well as the later philosophers of Greece—
Pythagoras as well as Plato—were familiar with questions on account of
which they deemed it worth the trouble to travel to the ends of the known
world to secure their answers, as, for example, the dying Socrates challenged
his students to ask even the barbarians about wisdom. And how many and
what momentous centuries have in the meantime passed over the human
spirit! How [this wisdom] was first transplanted through Christendom to
Europe, and then in more recent times through the virtually unrestricted
expansion of world relations, how the Orient and the Occident are not merely
coming into contact with one another, but are being compelled as it were, to
fuse into one and the same consciousness, into one consciousness that should
for this reason alone be expanded into a world-consciousness! How much has
the German spirit alone achieved and accomplished for philosophy from the
Middle Ages until now! Yet we must nonetheless confess that there was per-
haps never before now a time in which a philosophy that would actually take
hold of the great issues—not merely treat them with formulas—was more
applicable copyright law.

urgently and universally needed and perhaps no other time when we have
been driven farther away from philosophy’s proper goal. [9]
If for many years human affairs have maintained a certain uniform
course then they become convictions necessary for life that, quite independent
of philosophy, acquire their validity precisely through their necessity—a type

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On Philosophy 95
of sweet habit. In such times, one does not easily think of an investigation of
these principles, and even if these long-held standards and doctrines have long
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

since inevitably grown lax—and indeed have fundamentally lost their original
force—precisely such a fact is handled as a mystery. For fear of destroying the
cozy situation, one avoids looking this fact in the face or declaring that the
moral and spiritual powers that still hold the world together, albeit in a merely
habitual sense, have long since been undermined by the advance of science.
Such a situation can often last so unbelievably long because precisely that
which was untenable in the earlier beliefs (according to the previous concepts)
is so obvious that the more powerful minds do not find it worth the trouble to
expose this, and instead leave the business to those mostly powerless minds,
incapable of doing anything on their own, to publicly declare what for every
profound observer has long since ceased to be a mystery, namely, that there is
no place for these truths—considered as unassailable—in the consciousness of
the present age.There then arises most often a great clamor, not so much about
the matter at hand—which one has long since been unable to hide and now
cannot deny as well—as about the unseemly audacity with which the matter is
proclaimed. The more farsighted, however, will recognize in all this only an
actual need—the need to become aware in a new way of the principles that
hold human life together. Not the truths but the consciousness in which, as one
says, they can no longer find a place, is that which is obsolete and should there-
fore make room for a different, expanded consciousness. But the transition to
this new consciousness cannot happen without a disruption, indeed without a
momentary nullification [Aufhebung] of the earlier condition. In this general
breakdown, there will be for quite some time nothing [10] that is secure, to
which one could subscribe, and on which one could build: the beautiful and
enchanted illusions of an age gone by vanish before the merciless truth.
Truth—pure truth—is what one demands and still seeks in all relations, in all
the institutions of life, and one can only rejoice when a time comes in which
war is openly declared on every lie, every deception, where as a principle it is
proclaimed that what is desired is truth at any price, even the most painful.
For more than the half century since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the
German spirit in particular has embarked upon a methodical examination of
the foundation of all knowledge, indeed of all the basic elements of human
existence and life itself. Since then it has fought a fight the likes of which has
never been fought with the same persistence, in constantly changing venues,
or with such unrelenting ardor. And far from regretting this, one would like
to call out to the Germans to hold out in this fight, and not let up until the
great prize is won. For the more lurid one may portray the threatening phe-
applicable copyright law.

nomenon of our age, the discord, the disagreement, and dissolution, the more
certain it becomes that the truly learned will see in all this the portents of a
new creation, of a magnificent and enduring restoration, which of course
would not be possible without the excruciating pains of labor and the ruthless
destruction of all that has become corrupt, fragile, and worn out that must

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 96 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
precede it. Nevertheless, there must be an end to this battle since there cannot
be, as some imagine, an endless—that is, purposeless and meaningless—
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

progress. Humanity does not advance on into infinity; humanity has a goal.
There is, therefore, a point to be expected where the struggle for knowledge
achieves its long-sought aim, where the millennia-long unrest of the human
spirit comes to its rest, where man finally takes hold of the proper organism
of his knowledge and learning, where the spirit of universal mediation pours
forth like a balm over all the previously disparate and mutually exclusive ele-
ments of human learning, healing all the wounds [11] that the human spirit
in its zealous struggle for light and truth inflects on itself and from which our
age still partially bleeds.
“But this would be too much”—one could for instance object to our last
remarks—“to expect of philosophy, if through it one considers a restoration of
this age as possible, since on the contrary philosophy itself has fallen into con-
tempt, and that widespread interest, that enthusiasm for philosophy which
one knew in earlier times is no longer apparent.” It may well be that over a
long period of time, and benefited by accidental circumstances, a way of doing
philosophy has made itself credible that conveyed to some honorable men a
certain aversion to philosophy. And perhaps an entire class of esteemed schol-
ars who come from such an age believe, and have made no secret of this, that
they can do away with all philosophy. In this case, of course, when pure his-
torical knowledge is not combined with a sense for the ancient classics, and
instead steps in as its replacement, the lack of a more profound education will
soon become perceptible. However, if I see in philosophy the means for heal-
ing the fragmentation of our time, then I do not thereby mean a feeble phi-
losophy that is a mere artifact. I mean a robust philosophy of the type that can
measure up to life and that—far from feeling powerless in the face of life and
its awesome reality or being confined to the miserable business of only nega-
tion and destruction—takes its vitality from reality itself, and for this very rea-
son brings forth something that is again efficacious and enduring.
Still, perhaps one says, “It is not at all the task of science, and thus not
that of philosophy, to bring the shrill discord of this age back into harmony.
Would not the healing and reconciliation of our age be expected more truly
from poetry?” Yet history shows us well that an exuberant age, contented and
satisfied with itself, pours itself into poetry and proclaims that poetry is as it
were the natural product of an era that has appeased all its essential interests.
On the other hand, however, history shows us [12] no example of an age that
deeply divided, confused, and doubtful of itself has reconciled and healed itself
through poetry. “Secrets,” says Friedrich Schiller, “are for the happy.”2 Indeed,
applicable copyright law.

one could say that poetry is for the happy. Yet where are those who are happy
in an age that is at odds with its past and present, that cannot find the break-
through to a different age, into the true future? If an actual poet is found in
such an age, he will be of the type that knows how to gather all the dissonance
of the times into his spirit and combine them into an elaborate but supremely

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On Philosophy 97
subjective totality, like Lord Byron; lesser spirits will have to reach for fright-
ful and even abominable subjects so that, in contrast to reality, poetry will still
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

appear to be something. I do not, however, really need to speak about this.

From what one hears as far as poetry is concerned, the judgment of our age—
or as far as Germany is concerned—has already been pronounced by another
person, and, indeed, by the type who does not think much of philosophy but
who expects a fresh and healthy poetry only as the result of political upheaval.
Now this may well remain his opinion, into which I have no cause to go. I
would, however, like to throw out the general question: how can one who pays
no attention to such an essential element of German literature as philosophy
credit himself with the ability to presage the future of German literature? For
philosophy has penetrated so deeply into all the affairs of this age and into lit-
erature in particular, it has acquired such a deep and internal bearing on
poetry, that from now on—or at least for the moment—the destiny of both
can only be a common one. Just as in earlier times, poetry preceded philoso-
phy—Goethe in particular had a truly prophetic relation to this—so now a
revitalized philosophy is destined to bring about a new age of poetry, if only
because it returns to poetry its necessary foundation, namely those momen-
tous themes in which our age has lost faith because it has long since lost all
understanding for such matters. [13]
To be sure, a decent teacher of philosophy does not first anticipate
objections to the intended effects of philosophy from others. It is his duty,
once he has shown the edifying side of philosophy, to reveal the dismal and
offensive side of it as well so that no one deceives himself. And but a glimpse
into its recent history provides adequate material for melancholy reflections
on philosophy; this is because until now there has been no way to philoso-
phize, or, as one otherwise says, none of the different philosophical systems
has been able to survive over the course of time. I contend that it is also the
duty of the teacher to reveal this side of philosophy, which repulses more than
it attracts. For whoever considers how many people have shipwrecked on this
rocky sea, how some with no vocation for philosophy have consumed the best
years of their life, emptying their very soul in the fruitless and foolish pursuit
of philosophy, who, without mentioning the desolate halls of prehistoric
schools of wisdom, wander among the weather-beaten tombstones of former
doctrinal systems-whoever notices, closer to our own age, how scholasticism,
which remained throughout the entire Middle Ages in possession of an
almost exclusive domination, and was still favored by the leaders and teachers
of both churches in the time of the Reformation, and how in the seventeenth
century, with no great resistance, it was suddenly and so completely defeated,
applicable copyright law.

if not in the schools then nonetheless in popular opinion by Descartes, who

because his work, however, was still too immature to be called philosophy,
caused one to become ungrateful to all philosophy, and it required nothing less
than the entire stature of a Leibniz to partially restore philosophy’s honor; —
whoever considers how no less than the brilliant Leibnizian system, in the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 98 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
form provided it by Christian Wolff, dominated the German schools for quite
some time, yet had nonetheless all but disappeared, and counted only a hand-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ful of scattered followers when Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason systematically

put an end to it, or even how it was earlier forced to capitulate to a shallow
popular philosophy lacking foundational principles and a guiding star; [14] —
whoever considers how again the last philosophy mentioned, the so-called
Critical Philosophy, which for a long time enjoyed a nearly unlimited, one
could even say tyrannical stature, and how these days it is scarcely known and
still less understood by many who glorify philosophical studies and knowledge,
and how it has, in particular, lost any influence on all the great questions of life;
—whoever considers how the dynamic Fichte, the founder of Transcendental
Idealism, whose appearance worked like a bolt of lightening, who for a
moment more or less inverted the polarities of thought, but sadly, like a bolt of
lightning, again disappeared, and how in the contemporary consciousness of the
German people the site could still scarcely be found on which he then con-
structed his system, so that one would find it difficult to make clear to his suc-
cessors the fundamental ideas of his doctrine;—whoever then notices how
after a period of exhilarating activity, where the successful sublation
[Aufhebung] of the antithesis between the real and ideal world appeared to
abolish all the limitations of previous knowledge so that one law led through
the world of nature and mind, and how in those days nature itself also appeared
to adapt to this new knowledge, through a series of brilliant and illuminating
discoveries that followed the first observation of Galvanism—as when, to use
an expression of Goethe, a true heavenly knowledge appeared to descend—
whoever then notices how after such an era a new darkness nonetheless fol-
lows, and what began great ended small;—whoever observes and considers all
of this, truly, may well be filled with melancholy at the vanity of all human
struggle for that highest knowledge that is demanded by philosophy. He may
well find only a profound if bitter truth in those words that Goethe puts in the
mouth of the negative spirit in his Faust:

O believe me, who for many thousand years

Have chewed upon this hard repast,
That from the cradle to the grave
No human could the old sourdough digest. [15]
applicable copyright law.

Believe me also, this whole universe

Has only for a God been fabricated.
He finds Himself in an eternal glory,
But us He’s brought to darkness unabated,
And you but one brief day has allocated.3

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On Philosophy 99
This diversity, this alternation of systems not merely different from each
other, but also opposed to each other, is a phenomenon that in any case indi-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

cates a quite distinctive nature of philosophy. And if we do not avoid recog-

nizing this nature completely, precisely this phenomenon must be brought
into our considerations, and, where possible, it must be comprehended from
the nature of philosophy itself.
One cannot avoid this diversity of philosophical systems by somehow
saying that every philosophy is nonetheless still philosophy, just as every type
of fruit is fruit; and how amazing would it be if someone would reject grapes
or some other type of fruit because, although he craved only fruit, he did not
crave this fruit. I do not believe that the objection, which takes the diversity
of systems in philosophy as proof against philosophy itself, allows itself to be
repulsed with merely this simile. To begin with it, is not compelling that he
who craves fruit must for that very reason accept any type. For if along these
lines one offered him for example a wild pear, or so-called Heerlinge, he would
be justified in saying that that is not fruit, since he had asked for fruit, namely,
something edible. Just as one with a thirst who craves water would not be
obliged to drink nitric acid, since he craves something drinkable, not some-
thing that is just physically or mechanically drinkable—a potile-but rather
something that to his taste is drinkable, that is, a potabile. Second, it is just not
compelling that we have a craving for philosophy in general. This would be like
those fathers or guardians who direct their wards at the university to study
philosophy—regardless of which kind, since after all it belongs to a proper
education to also know something about philosophy, or, at the very least, to
receive [16] some practice in logical and dialectical argumentation, so that, as
one says, the mind will in general be put in order. Everyone, however, wants
to know something about philosophy. For example, one who acts like he has
contempt for philosophy would probably take no offense if one said to him
that he does not know how to compose a march or Latin verse, but would
nonetheless find it highly offensive if one were to tell him that he does not
have a philosophical mind.
But if it be allowed for one to say such a thing, if someone did not want
or intend to speak simply about philosophy in general, but to present the phi-
losophy that is, and thus also endures, such a person would be the most
inclined to let all previous developments have a just hearing, since they all must
find their goal in the true philosophy. Such a person would feel the greatest
reluctance to arouse the opinion that those attending his lectures should be
prepared exclusively for some one system and should be intentionally left in
ignorance about all the other standpoints that lie outside that position or
applicable copyright law.

should only be told of them in a partisan manner. Nothing could more enrage
a youthful and fiery sensibility, burning for the truth, than the intention of a
teacher to prepare his audience for some one special or particular system, wish-
ing in this way to emasculate them by underhandedly removing the freedom
of inquiry. Consequently, I have prefaced all my other lectures on philosophy

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 100 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
with a genetic exposition of the systems of philosophy that have arisen since
Descartes until recent times. Recently there has been a profusion of such expo-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

sitions written and presented in which partisan intentions unfortunately stand

out all too shrilly; for unfortunately, in some circles philosophy has gradually
become a partisan issue, whereby it has nothing to do with truth, but only with
the preservation of an opinion. In this lecture series I will restrict myself by
beginning with Kant, or more accurately speaking, with the old metaphysics
that serves as the foundation of the Kantian philosophy. This old metaphysics
was not a system in the sense that one speaks of systems since Descartes. [17]
But just as in Germany, for example, one speaks of a common German law, so
too was the former metaphysics to a certain degree the common German phi-
losophy predominant in the schools. This was a metaphysics that continued to
hold its ground even after the appearance of these systems, since the entire sys-
tem—for example, the Cartesian—was never incorporated into the common
philosophy, but rather, at most, into their individual components. For this rea-
son I will begin with the old metaphysics in order to show how, as the result
of a necessary development, philosophy had to reach the point that it—just as
its negative and positive facets distinguished themselves—would also realize
that in the joining of these two facets it would finally discover its complete and
altogether satisfying conclusion. You see this point already touched on in an
earlier lecture, where it dealt with the presentation of the positive philosophy
itself, which I again pick up here in order to ground it and expound on it still
further. Yet, since this time the negative or rational philosophy will only be
spoken of according to its general propositions, ideas, and methods without
itself being explicated, I will attempt for this purpose a different derivation of
this science that for some of you will be perhaps more comprehensible. [18]
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ON THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF PHILOSOPHY

Before the presentation itself, I would like to put forth a few general
remarks about listening to philosophy lectures. There is nothing more com-
mon regarding philosophy lectures than to hear complaints about their unin-
telligibility. When this occurs, a certain injustice is done to some teachers to
the extent that the blame is placed on his individual inability to express him-
self distinctly, or that he lacks the gift of clear analysis, whereas the blame
properly lies in the subject itself. For where the subject is in itself unintelligi-
ble and muddled, the highest art of oratory would still be incapable of mak-
ing it intelligible. Thus, if one would first strive for intelligibility in the subject
itself, then that of the lecture would emerge of itself. What Goethe says is thus
valid here as well:

Understanding and good sense

Express themselves with little art.4

What is true is hardly of the type that it allows itself to be found only with
unnatural efforts or articulated in unnatural words and formulas. Most people
spoil their first foray into philosophy through the unnatural excitement that
they regard as the correct disposition with which to approach it. Some have
dealt with philosophy in the same way as people who have long grown used to
living only with their equals and when they [19] associate with someone above
them, or should appear before one of the so-called great ones of this earth,
behave clumsily, awkwardly, and unnaturally. Indeed, in philosophy one
believes such behavior belongs to the subject so much so that one ultimately
judges the degree of scholarly expertise according to the degree of the perverse
distortions and contortions into which a philosophy deteriorates. On the con-
trary, however, one should remain convinced that anything that allows itself to
applicable copyright law.

be articulated only in a garbled and eccentric manner cannot, for that very rea-
son, be what is true and right. What is true is easy, says an ancient; but it does
not come to us without effort, for indeed to find what is simple and easy is
most difficult, and for this very reason it is difficult to understand many

101

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 102 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
thinkers precisely because they have not found this simplicity. Most imagine
that what is true must be difficult in order to be true, but when what is true is
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

found it always has something of the luck of Columbus about it. A consum-
mate work of art, a painting by Raphael, looks as if it had effortlessly created
itself, and everyone thinks that it could not possibly be any other way, but only
the artist knows how much he was forced to discard in order to reach this point
of lucid clarity and intelligibility. The difference between the mere dilettante
and the genuine artist consists precisely in the fact that the former remains
stuck in the mere preliminaries of art and science without ever getting to the
heart of the matter, whereas the latter goes beyond this to freedom and creates
a free art. You must summon courage to do philosophy. In philosophy it is not
about an opinion that would be imposed on the human spirit like a burden or
a heavy yoke; its burden must be easy, its yoke light.5 Plato does not crucify
himself as some philosophers of late have done. Rather, one can say of Plato
what has been said of Orpheus: through the mere tones of his music he moved
mountains and tamed the wildest monstrosities in philosophy.
Thus, one must first strive for objective intelligibility, for clarity in the
subject; for, to be sure, subjective intelligibility permits of very different degrees,
and if what is true can only be [20] what is in itself intelligible, conversely, it
does not follow that what is intelligible—just because it is intelligible—is the
truth. For what is common and everyday is of course intelligible to all, whereas
in philosophy there is a clarity that brings the novice and especially the better
minds to despair. For example, I know of a student to whom a well-meaning
teacher, when he thought it time that the student should also engage in phi-
losophy, put in his hands a leading book of then-popular philosophy, Feder’s
Logic and Metaphysics.6 This book filled the student with the deepest distress
because he believed that he did not understand it, for what he did understand
of it seemed too trivial to him to be considered as the actual content of the
book and because of the work’s all-too-great clarity the student gave up ever
trying to comprehend anything about philosophy. Yet when that same teacher
later put in his hands Leibniz’s aphorisms, known under the title Theses in gra-
tiam principis Eugenii (which was written for the famous duke Eugen von
Savoyen and contains the foundational principles of the Monadology), the stu-
dent regained his courage and thought that perhaps he was capable of under-
standing something of philosophy after all.7 Specifying a general standard of
intelligibility that would be acceptable to everyone is just not possible, and
those students who come here having learned how to deal with philosophy in
a perverse and forced manner find what is simple and not perverse difficult,
much in the same way as one who, if he had spent the entire day on a tread
applicable copyright law.

wheel, would find in the evening that he could no longer move in his usual and
natural way. One ought to deal with such spoiled individuals as Socrates did
with the students who came to him from the Sophist and Eleatic schools, who
with simple questions, so to speak, he put on a limited diet, thereby attempting
to reacquaint them to what is simple and wholesome. But of course, nothing

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On the Academic Study of Philosophy 103
has yet been provided for such a treatment in the organization of our univer-
sity’s curriculum.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

If philosophy in general has the reputation of a certain unintelligibility,

then it is perhaps even more important to consider as well the usual means of
support and facilitation [21] one employs to make a lecture more intelligible.
I would like to say something about this as well.
Counted among the means of support for an oral lecture are, above all,
textbooks written by the lecturer or someone else, which serve as the basis for
what will be presented and which he comments upon and explains. Now I
cannot provide for my lectures, least of all the present one, a textbook written
by another or even myself that would serve as their basis. Indeed, the content
of these lectures is just not suited to the format of a typical textbook: it does
not consist of a series of finished propositions that can be put forth individu-
ally. Rather its results are generated in a continuous but thoroughly free and
animated progression and movement, whose moments do not allow them-
selves to be captured in the memory, but rather only in the spirit. Therefore,
the entire series of lectures, to the extent that they are purely scientific, would
have to be printed, and this will now also presumably happen.
I must leave it to you, my listeners, to determine whether after this expla-
nation you would still like to make use of another conventional device, or per-
haps now find it superfluous. I mean that widespread custom of note taking,
which one primarily justifies, in that it puts one in the position to dwell by every
point according to need and to recall the entire series of moments over and over
again. For this reason, and since there is after all no textbook available, I have
nothing against the taking of notes in this sense, but rather excuse it, particu-
larly when it is actually a matter of summation and the entire work does not
consist in simple dictation. For I cannot deny that only with restrictions and
only in a very qualified sense can I approve of note taking in philosophy lectures,
not on account of their improper use, of which I have here first learned, of how
very, very far science is behind art regarding the protection that art and science
have a right to expect. For if a piece of sculpture were exhibited in a public space
in this metropolis of German culture, as I have confidently called Berlin, there
would not be one individual, even in the class of the lowest rabble, [22] who
would entertain the thought of defacing, sullying, or bombarding that work of
art with filth, immediately after its installation. The general level of culture has
to such depths long since penetrated, and it does not require a law, nor the antic-
ipated general indignation, to prevent such an outrage. When, however, a scien-
tific work of art is unfolded in public lectures, there, it seems, that a dirty and
pandering publishing house, which mutilates and smears it, need fear neither a
manifestation of indignation nor even the use of existing laws.8 Nevertheless, as
applicable copyright law.

I said, it is not because of improper use of this kind, but for reasons quite inde-
pendent of it that note taking in philosophy lectures, at least in itself alone, has
always seemed to me to be an ambiguous means of insuring an understanding
of a scientific exposition. With the mere taking of notes it is always to be feared

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 104 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
that while one thinks only of grasping the word of the teacher, the context of
the thought itself becomes lost, and afterward one attempts in vain to recon-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

struct it from a defective collection of notes. The renowned Greek philosopher

Antisthenes, a leader of the Cynic school, was once asked by a pupil what he
needed in order to attend his classes.9 The philosopher responded that he would
require a biblarion kainou=, a grafeiou kainou=, and a pinaxoj kainou=, —
words that could be understood to mean a new notebook (probably for compo-
sitions), a new stylus, and a new slate (perhaps for taking notes). The pupil, if
one thinks of him as the one in Faust, must have been quite satisfied for the
moment to hear from the mouth of the philosopher his own opinion confirmed,
that to understand a philosophy lecture one requires above all a new stylus and
slate.10 But the earnest cynic was a rogue like Mephistopheles and knew how to
make a pun—for if one took the word kainou= as two words, then one may
understand that he told his pupil he needs a notebook and understanding, a sty-
lus and understanding, and a slate and understanding; that is, [23] understand-
ing doesn’t depend on anything else, the decisive element one must use is one’s
own self-engaged thought, one’s own understanding.11 These words resemble
those of the famous General Montecucculi, who in response to the Kaiser’s
question of what is necessary to wage war replied that three things are neces-
sary: first, money; second, money; and third, money.12 The same Antisthenes
replied to one of his pupils who had complained to him of having lost his lec-
ture notes: you should have written them in your soul, not on pieces of paper.
The most fruitful method of taking notes would be if one, with care and dis-
crimination, were to record only the essential points—and particularly the tran-
sitions, which form the connective elements of the inquiry—and then according
to this summary—this skiagraphy—would then attempt to work out and pro-
duce the entire lecture itself again, a possibility that is provided for in this lec-
ture series, in that between each lecture a day will remain open. (I have found
that with this arrangement more is gained for the understanding of philosophy
lectures than with an uninterrupted series, which most listeners are unable to
deal with.) If one attempts to reconstruct the entire lecture in this manner, then
this will be a self-won content, and this effort is doubly beneficial since it will
feed back into a more decisive and lucid understanding of the lecture. In this
way, one learns to attach importance to that which through the progressive
development of the inquiry conveys its inner connection, the inquiry’s connec-
tive tissue. Still better is when more do this collectively, one helping and sup-
plementing the other, so that through such collaboration the entirety is once
again produced. Only thereby does the lesson come alive for each student, and
the more deeply inspired content won through this shared effort and discussion
applicable copyright law.

will become at the same time the bond of a true, spiritual friendship. For this is
the greatest appeal of the academic life, or at least it should be—this being
together with others, so united in one common purpose, as in the course of life
that follows people cannot be so easily united again.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On the Academic Study of Philosophy 105
Things are in order in an institution of higher learning only when many
students,[24] or at least the better and more gifted ones, understand what is
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

most worthy of being sought and desired in the sciences. It thereby cultivates
a type of shared spirit of scientific inquiry and a youth imbued with character,
who does not falter with ambivalence, but who decisively turns away from
what is base, in whichever form it may present itself. There are among adults
enough of the type that Dr. Luther calls “weathervanes,” who put their finger
to the air to learn which way the wind blows, wishing, in the words of Luther,
to find out first whether Christ or Baal is right. It is worthy of youth to stand
by that which they recognize as right and to deny the better sentiment in noth-
ing. Even the greatest talent is first ennobled through character. But character
can be cultivated only in the thrust and counter-thrust of a shared struggle for
one goal. The true spice of academic life is the ever-changing excitement and
enthusiasm for science, without which all the other joys of this way of life
would soon become stale. If the German academic life maintains a lasting
worth in the memory of many, if the faces of the oldest men still brighten with
the recollection of the university and the life there, then this is certainly not
due to the memory of sensual pleasures, but is chiefly due to a recollection tied
to that consciousness of a shared, courageous struggle for intellectual develop-
ment and higher knowledge. The student who has not passed time in intimate
allegiance with like-minded youth in a shared striving for conviction and clar-
ity in important matters has not enjoyed academic life.
It is becoming of noble-minded youths to concern themselves with sun-
shine and even mindless merriment, to which they are to a certain degree still
entitled, but they are to search the darker shadows of more serious matters as
well, and it is essential that such gravity does not assault the manner or the
subject matter they pursue. That teacher is no friend of youth who attempts to
fill them with the grief and sorrow for the ways of the world or the course of
[25] politics when they must first acquire the strength of guiding convictions
and beliefs. Likewise, it is most often only an abuse for ulterior motives and
one’s own shallowness to use youths, as one says, to demonstrate freedom of
thought and teaching. I say an abuse for ulterior motives so long as one can
doubt to what extent these individuals who mouth the words “freedom of
thought” are themselves actually willing to admit freedom of thought, which
they most often lay claim to primarily for their own incidental opinions, while
considering themselves justified in assailing other opposing views by any
means that stands in their power. Regarding the appeal to academic freedom,
it can hardly be accepted as long as those who speak of such things somehow
find it totally acceptable that someone who allows himself to be employed and
applicable copyright law.

supported by a church, whose foundation he covertly seeks to undermine in his

lectures, nonetheless would himself concede no unlimited freedom of instruc-
tion to a teacher of theology at a Protestant seminary, for example, who with
fire and spirit (as it may very well be) seeks to uphold and assert something like
the necessity of a visible head of the church, of a most high and infallible judge

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 106 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
in issues of faith, and other fundamental principles of the Roman Church—
faced with such a scandal these people would hardly tolerate an appeal to aca-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

demic freedom. That thought and inquiry must never be restricted, that
science, that even instruction must be free (at least within the confines of what
is proper and fitting), all this is so obvious that he who professes such plati-
tudes can really only have the intention of conveying in a harmless way the idea
that here or there freedom of thought or teaching is in danger, and thus in a
cheap purchase acquire the reputation for exceptional candor. To be sure, our
youth should also be enthusiastic about this priceless good, purchased at so
high a price by Germany—may heaven and the good sense of our rulers always
provide that this treasure is never lost through unskillful use!—but only so that
they strive all the more zealously to obtain the intellectual and scientific pro-
ficiency that is necessary to put this freedom to an [26] honorable use and
bring forth that which on whose account it was worth the effort to win this
freedom. For what is routine and trivial requires no such freedom of thought.
A total inversion of mankind’s worldview, such as that provided by the
Copernican astronomy, was able to impel the spiritual leaders of an earlier time
to incarcerate a Galileo and force him to renounce his theory. By means of
tremendous magnification, Ehrenberg’s discovery first unlocked for the human
eye a world of perfectly disciplined and organized animals, a world that could
have appeared to an earlier and more constricted age as something sinister and
dangerous, as if there was something not quite right about magnification.13
These are discoveries through which the human mind is liberated, expanded,
and actually raised to a higher level. Nevertheless, the world does not care
whether one reads in a work by a Latin writer declarabat or declamabat, or
whether one should begin the deduction of categories with the category of
quantity (as was the custom from Aristotle until recent times, and for which
there were good reasons), or with that of quality (as more recent logic prefers,
perhaps only because it did not know how to deal with quantity), this is per-
haps important for the schools, but not the slightest thing in the world will be
changed as a result of it. One must, however, be reasonable and concede that
the common masses are at the very least not completely indifferent to the out-
put of the mind, and especially of philosophy. For if it were ever possible that
a doctrine was to gain the upper hand, according to which the best and wisest
things for humans should be leftover food, drink, and other goods of this type,
a doctrine according to which everything metaphysical should be completely
removed from human conviction: if it were ever possible that such a doctrine
were to come about—something I still consider less likely than primates
becoming the rulers of humankind, or that humanity would forever disappear
applicable copyright law.

from the face of the earth, and thereupon the primates would then become
rulers of the world—but suppose that such a teaching did appear, then of
course the government could do nothing other than [27] more or less look on
with folded arms, in impassive resignation at its downfall.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On the Academic Study of Philosophy 107
The entire edifice of human affairs is comparable to that image the king
of Babylon saw in his dream: his head was of fine gold, his breast and arms
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

were of silver, his belly and loin of bronze, his thigh of iron, but his feet were
part iron and part clay, which were then crushed and mixed together with iron,
clay, bronze, silver, and gold, and became like chaff on the summer threshing
floors, which the wind scattered so that one could no longer find them any-
where.i If one could ever extract all that is metaphysical from the state and
public life, then they too would fall apart in the same way. True metaphysics is
honor, it is virtue; true metaphysics is not only religion, but also respect for the
law and love of one’s land. What would be the outcome and result of a phi-
losophy such as the one described above (if one can call something of this type
philosophy)? Answer: the moral of Falstaff in the well-known monologue
before the start of battle:

Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?
How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or to an arm? No. Or take away
the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? What is
honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air; a
trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it?
No. Doth he hear it? T’is insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not
live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll
none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.14

With such a moral as Falstaff ’s would a catechism of this doctrine also have
to end, if everything metaphysical were ever to be removed from the world
and the faith of humanity? Human affairs do not allow themselves to be gov-
erned by mathematics, physics, natural history (I revere these sciences highly),
or even poetry and art. The true understanding of the world is provided by
precisely the right [28] metaphysics, which for this very reason has from time
immemorial been called the royal science. For the very reason that some have
reproached our universities for holding the young man in too great an isola-
tion from the world—as if he did not require precisely such a setting, so that
the composed, undisturbed development and cultivation of his mental powers
may be sustained—for this very reason are our universities properly esteemed,
worthwhile, and praiseworthy institutions. In the blessed hours of these aus-
picious years, great decisions are made and ideas received that later will step
forth into reality: here every person must find and acknowledge the calling of
his life. No one should believe that something can emerge later in life for
applicable copyright law.

which he did not already here lay the groundwork, or that he could attain
some kind of achievement, which he may well call his life’s work, that at the

i. Daniel 2:31–35.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 108 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
very least had not already stood here before his soul as a presentiment. The
dreams of youth themselves—even if they remain dreams—are not without
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

meaning if they make what is base inaccessible for future life, if one can apply
to them what Schiller allows to be said to the unhappy Don Carlos:

Tell Him
That he should have respect for
The dreams of youth when he becomes a man;
That the heart of divinity’s tender flower should not
Open to the deadly insect of vaunted better reason—
That he should not lose his way
When the wisdom of dust blasphemes
Heaven’s daughter, enthusiasm.15

May this also apply to your future. Do not be astonished if I speak to you this
semester in a more personal manner than I have in the past; this stems from
the fact that my tenure here is decided. Consequently, I have taken on the duty
to be for you not merely a teacher, but to the extent I am capable, of being your
friend and adviser as well. My calling for this is due just as much to the sci-
ence that I teach, the only one that seizes the entire person at his very core, as
to the fact that, although the years have drawn me far from you, [29] I did
nonetheless once feel as you do now, and have still not yet forgotten how to
feel how one in your years feels.
If the state of social relations under which science exists with us does not
permit the teacher to teach in the manner of the philosophers of old; if the rela-
tionship of the pupil to the teacher can no longer, at least not usually, be a liv-
ing relationship as in Socrates’ or Plato’s time, one would nevertheless like to
try at the very least to work toward such a relationship, in that one would see
to it that the rapport between teacher and student is not one-sided, but is rather
reciprocal. No one doubts that it is beneficial for the student to speak out
against the teacher, present his doubts, request clarification of what remains
obscure, and through questions, make sure whether and to what extent he has
grasped the teacher’s thoughts. Yet the well-meaning and conscientious teacher
should also not be indifferent to know whether he has been understood, for
indeed he can only then continue with assurance to the next topic if he is con-
vinced that the preceding material, on which the next topic depends, has been
correctly and completely comprehended. The teacher is often first made aware
through his listeners of a misunderstanding that he has not considered (for
applicable copyright law.

who could consider every possibility?), and can perhaps with one word do away
with an error that would have otherwise made all that was to follow obscure
and confusing. I have therefore in the past sought to make possible such an
exchange of views through a discussion group connected with my lectures,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On the Academic Study of Philosophy 109
where everyone throws out questions, presents their doubts, where the listener
can also repeat what he has heard according to his interpretation, so it may be
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

confirmed or, according to circumstances, be corrected and supplemented. For

the time being it may well have to be as it was last winter: anyone for whom
something has remained obscure or who nurtures a doubt that he cannot
resolve for himself, should put it in writing on a signed piece of paper and
either [30] place it on my lectern or send it to my apartment. I will reply to
what comes to me in this way either when the context will not suffer too much
from it, or at an appropriate point in the lecture. I assume that there is no one
among my audience who after this could believe he is only here to make objec-
tions, but not, however, in order above all else to learn. Naively and as is only
proper, I assume that there is no one here who does not have the honest and
actual intention—be it a great deal or very little—but in any case to learn from
me. If someone believes he understands the matters to be discussed here better
than I, then he should please let me know so that I may try as quickly as pos-
sible to learn from him. Due to the nature of the subject at hand, questions,
misgivings, and objections can only be considered after a topic has been thor-
oughly discussed and the teacher has explained himself completely on the mat-
ter. There are people lacking in upbringing who, as soon as they learn of
something unheard of, feel an itch to make objections. I of course do not wish
to promote a reaction of this type, and I am quite convinced that I will not have
to deal with it here. Until the point at which the matter at hand is completely
exhausted, a Pythagorean silence must be law for this type of pupil.
I have made my way through the different means of support for an oral
lecture: textbooks, note taking, and the exchange between teacher and pupil. I
would now like to mention another thing that, according to circumstances,
can be one of the most powerful means of support for the study of any science,
and thus also for the understanding of a philosophical presentation. I mean
the reading material, the study of the primary works that are written in every
science and denote a significant moment in its advancement or improvement.
When I spoke earlier of primary works, I indicated fully that I do not
consider daily lectures to be beneficial to scientific studies—as little as the idle
talk of the day that is heard today and forgotten tomorrow, without leaving
behind a trace in our [31] souls. There is, however, yet another distinction
between scientific works and those that are only incidentally serious: not all
have flown forth from their source in the same way and not all are equally orig-
inal. If the secondary works are not absolutely necessary for one to understand
the primary works, one would do very well indeed to stick exclusively with the
originals, so that one may thereby dedicate to them even more time and effort.
applicable copyright law.

To exhaust the depths and very soul of a single dialogue of Plato, such as the
Sophist or the Philebus, will certainly yield each of you much more significant
results than an entire army of commentaries. From the truly original works,
there always comes to us a uniquely invigorating spirit that incites our own
productive powers, whereas with other works it falls asleep.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 110 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
Also from a moral perspective, what one reads is far less insignificant
than one would think. In life, it is not always in our control to determine to
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

whom we will allow access to our soul. All the more diligently then should one
study these original works, so that one accustoms oneself early on to that
which is eternal, unchanging, and enduring, and thereby learns contempt for
what is here today and gone tomorrow.
If I am to designate now that which above all else is to be recommended
in relation to the lecture that follows, or to the study of philosophy in general,
it will be unavoidable to express the following in more specific terms than I
have previously.
Ever since that great movement ushered in by Kant, it has been a ques-
tion not of this or that philosophy, but rather—just as Kant’s critique itself
addressed this issue—it has been a question of philosophy itself. De capite dimi-
catur, it is a question of the essential point, that is to say, it is a matter of phi-
losophy itself. For those emboldened by fortuitous circumstances into
deluding themselves that the time has come in which their vacuous theories
[asserting] the absolute negation of everything metaphysical in science and
humanity may now assume the throne, it must be very upsetting to hear [32]
that one must return once again to the fundamental investigations.
Historically speaking then, one must once again return to Kant. Consequently,
since they cannot hinder this, they will summon everything in their command
to at least cast suspicion on this undertaking and will, for example, put forth
the pretense that our undertaking is simply a matter of religion, that the dis-
agreement is a religious one, that one simply wishes to establish religion in the
old sense—particularly positive religion—and so on, for with this they believe
to have already sufficiently discredited this aspiration. But this is not so. It is a
question, and indeed a very serious question; once again—may it be the last
time!—it is a question of the meaning of philosophy itself.
We admit for the time being no specific philosophy, neither a religious
one nor one that claims to be irreligious. We leave both of these open, for one
cannot speak of what is derivative before one is certain about the primary mat-
ter at hand, which is here that of philosophy itself. Since Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, philosophy has been engaged in a progressive development, and is per-
haps now engaged in its final crisis. Even if it is already possible to analyze the
necessary result of this crisis, one cannot—for the time being at least, while this
result does not have widespread acceptance—do it independently of the histor-
ical process whose end it is; that is, we are compelled to traverse the entire route
of philosophy from Kant until the present time. For I most definitely have to
dispute the opinion that any position can be advanced that is completely
applicable copyright law.

removed from a connection to Kant. This could be shown alone by the fact that
every attempt to nullify this connection and establish something beyond it, no
matter how much effort and refinement has been applied to it, has barely won
recognition even in limited circles, and certainly no widespread consideration. I
would cite as an example what one calls the Herbartian philosophy.16

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 On the Academic Study of Philosophy 111
Philosophy, still in development even if engaged in the final stages of its
becoming and the explication of its final result, [33] does not, at least for the
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

time being, allow itself to be presented in an instructive, informative, and uni-

versally convincing manner without going back to Kant. If I were therefore to
recommend some type of research at the beginning of this presentation, I
would know of nothing more enlightening and useful than the study of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason, a work with which one should begin even more since
it is also the proper source for the vast majority of the contemporary philo-
sophical vocabulary. Whoever wishes to make philosophy their major field of
study must always begin with Kant. Not all students however, are in this posi-
tion; but even those who devote only part of their time to philosophy should
not neglect to study at the very least the short but succinct excerpts taken from
the Critique of Pure Reason, approved by Kant himself, and to which the pub-
lisher, Johannes Schultze, has even contributed a commentary.17
I have once again returned to the point, which from the outset I have
designated as the beginning of our own exposition—to Kant. [34]
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 This page intentionally left blank.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

METAPHYSICS BEFORE KANT

Kant himself presupposes the old metaphysics, and his critique relates
directly to it. Thus, we too will have to begin with it. It derives from scholas-
ticism, which throughout the entire Middle Ages was, in general, the domi-
nant philosophy. The differences that occurred within scholasticism itself were
not essential differences through which its standpoint could have been altered.
Since the fall of scholasticism, such a long-lasting peace in philosophy has yet
to be achieved again. The true philosophy, the highest philosophical science of
scholasticism, was metaphysics, a word whose origin is as doubtful and uncer-
tain as whether the title Metaphysics now carried by Aristotle’s book comes
from the author himself. In its literal meaning, metaphysics would be the sci-
ence that concerns itself with those objects that extend beyond what is phys-
ical and natural. To this extent, it could be regarded as the science that chiefly
deals with what is supernatural and supersensible. In fact, these were the prin-
cipal objects of the former metaphysics. The nature of God and his relation-
ship to the world—the world itself, conceived in its totality, as a cosmos, no
longer the object of just a physical representation or knowledge—the begin-
ning and ultimate purpose of the world—man as the band between the phys-
ical and a higher world—the freedom of the human will— [35] the difference
between good and evil and the origin of this difference; the emergence of evil
itself; the immateriality of the human soul and its perpetuity after death—
these of course constituted the primary content of metaphysics. Nonetheless,
one could not consider these as its only objects. It was also not a hyperphysic,
but rather a metaphysic, since even in the world of visible nature not every-
thing is the object of just a physical inquiry because even material nature has
its metaphysical side. In addition, even if the absolute supersensible, God, was
the goal of all metaphysical endeavors, there was still the matter of finding the
intellectual means for a knowledge of this supersensible. Metaphysics found
these means in three different types of knowledge, which therefore also allow
applicable copyright law.

themselves to be seen as three sources of our knowledge, and with which one
must become thoroughly acquainted in order to penetrate the spirit of the old
metaphysics, for indeed, knowledge of God was possible only through the
combination or integration of these three sources of human knowledge.

113

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 114 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
The first of these sources was the understanding [Verstand], intellectus,
under which was understood the faculty of general concepts that, when
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

applied to experience, become general principles.

Just as one can observe that in the everyday and scientific use of one’s
understanding, certain forms of judgment and inference are applied, as it were,
by instinct, and constantly repeat themselves—forms that, when freed of the
stuff of their application and presented in their purity or abstraction then
become the content of the so-called everyday or formal logic—so it was easy to
see how certain final and general concepts serve as the basis of all our judg-
ments and inferences, and without which every thought, not just the philo-
sophical, would be impossible. Whoever had no concept of substance and
accident, cause and effect, could think of nothing. When the chemist proves
the empirical proposition that the process of combustion consists of a combi-
nation of oxygen in the atmosphere’s air and a burning body—specifically of
the increase in weight of the burning body, for example, of a [36] burning
metal and the corresponding decrease in weight of the air that remains left
over—what does he tacitly presuppose in this, perhaps without even being
aware of it himself? Nothing other than the proposition that the body’s con-
tingent manner of appearance can change without subjecting the substance
itself to an increase or decrease in weight, that is, he distinguishes at least
between substance of the body and its accidents—thus he distinguishes
between substance and accident in general. Similarly, if some new phenome-
non arouses the attention of the natural scientist, and he feels himself called on
to find the cause of this phenomenon, he thereby, without justifying himself
further, presupposes as something understood the concept as well as the law of
cause and effect, namely, that in nature it is impossible for there to be an effect
without a determining cause. Since, as a result of these general concepts and
principles, all thought that extends beyond mere material representation itself
is first made possible, and since without these concepts and principles thought
itself would be annulled [aufgehoben], one thus presupposes that they have
already been posited with the nature of thought itself and that they are natu-
ral to it. Or, as one later claimed, they are innate or inherent to thought, so that
one need not first obtain them from experience, since experience only provides
the material for their application, whereas they are already given along with the
human understanding before experience, and in which respect they should
then most certainly be called a priori concepts and laws.
The old metaphysics thus posited the first source of knowledge in the
pure understanding, which it defined as the source or faculty of all those con-
cepts and laws that are clothed for us in the character of generality and neces-
applicable copyright law.

sity. Nonetheless, these concepts and laws would be lacking all use if experience
were not to be added.
Consequently, experience was viewed as the second source of the knowl-
edge to be produced in metaphysics and was then divided again into inner and
outer experience, according to how it instructs us of phenomena or conditions

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 115
outside us or within our own being. Experience does not reveal to us what is
universal, necessary, [37] and unchanging, but rather only what is particular,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

contingent, and transitory in things. Yet it is precisely what is particular and

contingent in things that is the real basis of science upon which it supports
itself in the production of knowledge and science. For this too was always pre-
supposed as well, namely, that metaphysics is not a ready-made science that
exists without our assistance, but is instead a science that must first be pro-
duced. A productive activity in no way inheres in these general concepts and
laws of the understanding: on their own they would produce nothing and on
their own no real knowledge inheres in them. Aristotle already says the deci-
sive words: scire est agere, intelligere est pati [knowledge is active, understanding
is passive]. It seems to us that we relate more passively to the necessity that
these concepts and principles impose on our thought; in the same way, what we
obtain directly from experience is something that we take but do not generate.
The productive activity, which can first be called philosophical and
through which metaphysics first arises, has its presuppositions in each of the
first two sources of knowledge: in understanding and in experience. That fac-
ulty, however, for which these presuppositions serve as its basis and by means
of which they arrive at that which is neither directly provided through the
pure understanding—which is in no way something concrete or real, and thus
provides still less of anything that is personal—nor through experience—that
which is provided neither through the pure understanding nor through expe-
rience is precisely the absolute supersensible [das absolut Uebersinnliche]. The
faculty that puts us in the position to arrive at a knowledge of the supersensi-
ble from both of those presuppositions is a third source of knowledge in gen-
eral, and is the immediate source of a freely produced knowledge (a
knowledge that, as will become clear from what follows, can in any case only
be a mediated knowledge). It is ratio, reason, understood as the capacity to
deduce [Vermögen zu Schließen]. This capacity to deduce consists solely in the
application of general principles, provided with the understanding itself, to the
contingent elements present in experience. [38] Through deduction we are led
to a third source, which, elevated above both, must simultaneously have some-
thing in common with both, or unite both, in that which is the universal per
se, which as such is simultaneously something concrete. Both must be united
in that which is absolutely concrete, which, precisely because it is this, is
simultaneously that which is the universal per se: this power must unite both
in God as the truly universal cause, who as universal cause is simultaneously
personal, and thus an individual. Metaphysics believed that it could accom-
plish this solely through reason as the capacity to deduce. When I incorporate
applicable copyright law.

the phenomena given in experience into the world of concepts and determine
these phenomena as contingent (which could also not be), yet existing, and
when I then apply the general laws of the understanding to what exists con-
tingently—namely, everything that comports itself as just an effect, that is, as
something that could also not be (for this is the proper concept of an effect),

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 116 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
that cannot be determined to exist without a cause, but only through a deter-
minate cause—I elevate myself, on the one hand, to the concept of an absolute
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

cause through which the world, that is, the complex of all special and merely
relative causes and effects, is determined to be [zum Daseyn bestimmt], and on
the other hand, to the insight into the existence [Existence] of this absolute
cause, which to know was considered to be the ultimate and highest goal of all
metaphysics. In general, then, the former metaphysics was based on the
assumption that it is capable, through the application of general concepts and
fundamental principles to what was provided in experience, of inferring that
which is beyond all experience. One has disparagingly called this metaphysics
in recent times a metaphysics of the understanding [Verstandsmetaphysik]. It
would be nice indeed to wish that one could say the same of every philosophy,
namely, that it incorporates understanding at all.ii
After the foundations of this metaphysics have now been explained,
there will be no difficulty in making comprehensible in which way that
moment had to arrive when it was impossible to continue with [39] this meta-
physics and why it was necessary for philosophy to distance itself farther and
farther from it. It is quite obvious, namely, that such metaphysics, without any
further justification, simply assumes and presupposes the sources, the three
capacities of experience, understanding, and reason, from which it derives its
knowledge. But as time progressed it could not be avoided that these sources
themselves would become objects of doubt or, at the very least, of criticism; as
soon as this occurred, the shape of philosophy had to change. Descartes was
the first to announce significant doubts against external, sensible experience,
and in doing so he negated [aufhob] it as a principle of knowledge, since it now
became itself an object. Doubt could not apply to whether we necessarily rep-
resent external things. Instead, the question was whether we are not deceived
in this, for example, by a god who merely brings forth for us these representa-
tions of external things, while they do not exist beyond us, an opinion main-
tained by Malebranche, that all objects were to be seen by us only in God,
which was later even endorsed by the famous Berkeley. Already in this doubt
lay the demand to demonstrate the necessity of the thing itself.
At first, therefore, it was experience that as the certain source of knowl-
edge was challenged and itself cast into doubt.
But even before Descartes, the famed Francis Bacon had, on the con-
trary, advanced sensible experience as the only genuine, original source of all
knowledge. Worn out by the syllogisms of scholastic metaphysics, he aroused
the most widespread distrust toward this entire manner and method of oper-
ation and the entire genus of general concepts and the conclusions that built
applicable copyright law.

upon them. Induction, combination, and analogy should be the means to

ii. Compare the parallel exposition about the method of the former metaphysics in the
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, I/5, pages 261-62.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 117
arrive at that which in all phenomena is in agreement, equivalent, and identi-
cal, and in this way finally to reach out beyond individual phenomena to arrive
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

at their general characteristics. The expansion of material human knowledge

was due to this assignment of immediate experience as the exclusive source of
science, in contrast to which metaphysic’s tedious and artificial propositions—
won with syllogistic methods—seem trivial and wanting. [40] Everything
turned toward this immediate source of knowledge and away from the source
that in metaphysics had been regarded as special and independent, the pure
understanding. Until through John Locke, and later David Hume, that second
source, the intellectus purus, which, although it had never been dependent on
experience, completely lost significance and authority when Locke, by means
of a reflection on experience, derived those general concepts and fundamental
propositions from experience alone. Consequently, these general concepts and
fundamental propositions are really only subjective principles that are just
dressed in the character of generality and necessity. As the power and the
(independent of all experience) reputation of these a priori concepts and fun-
damental principles was shattered, the nerve of metaphysics proper was sev-
ered as well. Leibniz sensed this acutely, and for this very reason, from then on
the question of whether there are within us innate concepts independent of
experience became one of the central questions for philosophy. Leibniz’s major
work against Locke was his Essai sur l’entendement humain, which, save for
Germany, had as little effect in arresting the ubiquitous and incessant spread
of empiricism as did any of his other efforts.18 —From this point on then
there were no longer two different foundations for metaphysics, but just a sin-
gle homogenous one—experience; for even those concepts and laws that had
been earlier regarded as necessary and inherent in the understanding a priori
had become simply the result of either a relentless, habitual routine, or of an
experience intensified through reflection. But nothing more can be inferred
from a simple homogeneity: a and a yield no possibility of a syllogism. What
had earlier been regarded as generally valid in itself—namely independent of
all experience—lost this character and became that which is singular, particu-
lar, or enjoys a doubtful generality. But even the principle of logic ex puris par-
ticularibus nihil sequitur [nothing follows as a consequence from pure
particulars] shows that a syllogistic philosophy in this manner was no longer
possible. The former metaphysics then, which for quite some time had enjoyed
virtually nothing but a conventional acceptance (it still survived in the schools
[41] really only by virtue of an unspoken agreement), had in fact already col-
lapsed before Kant, and the real business of Kant was merely to give it a thor-
oughly formal hearing, artfully executed in every respect. If one were only to
applicable copyright law.

consider the succession of systems that have followed since the downfall of the
old metaphysics, and the troubles thereby brought about in all the sciences—
particularly in academic studies—one might very well regret how that state of
completeness in which philosophy earlier found itself had been abolished
[aufgehoben]. There was, however, no way to maintain that state if one did not

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 118 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
wish to bring the human spirit itself to an absolute standstill. Over time, this
spirit could not content itself with that philosophical method of knowing for
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

the very reason that the knowledge so produced was simply artificial, since the
coherency it achieved was merely a coherency in our thoughts, but not in the
matter itself. The path of this merely syllogistic knowing only arrived at a
proposition that asserted a specific content, but not that this content itself was
realized [eingesehen] as a necessary content. Of course the conclusion can be
drawn from the principle of substantiality that the phenomena and emotions
of our inner life have as their base a substance that one calls the soul. (In gen-
eral the old metaphysics took its objects from experience or everyday beliefs,
for example, the concept of the human soul; the objects were given, and it was
merely a question of finding the right predicates for them.) Knowledge
regarding the human soul consisted simply in that one considered it as a sub-
stance, which should then be further defined through new syllogisms as an
incorporeal and immaterial—and therefore as an immutable or indestructi-
ble—being. To this extent, one could believe himself to be in possession of a
general truth: there are immaterial, incorporeal beings—that is, souls—which
are indestructible. To the question why there are such entities, however, there
was no answer; the necessity of the existence of such beings [Wesen] was not
realized. The great turnaround of more recent times [42] consisted precisely
because of the fact that one no longer aims for the predicates, but that one
demands to become certain of the thing [Gegenstände] itself. Even today, some
come to philosophy with the notion that it deals with certain propositions or
assertions, which one could carry away from it like some kind of treasure. Yet
this is no longer the case. Contemporary philosophy involves the derivation of
the things themselves, which in the earlier metaphysics were quite simply
assumed from mere experience or the general consciousness. That is why this
content always remained external to reason. Accepting as given even being, the
nature or essence of the thing was incomprehensible to reason, with the result
that one understood nothing about being. One could perhaps believe the
proposition is proved: because of the manifest, purposive arrangement of the
world, it is necessary to presuppose an intelligent and freely acting creator of
it. But with this the nature, the essence of this intelligent creator of the world
was not realized [eingesehen]; he too remained something merely external to
philosophy, the connection between him and the world was merely a nominal
one (in which basically nothing could be thought), not a real one with which
a real insight [Einsicht] could have been combined. For if I do not realize in
what way a being [Wesen], thought of as external to, and exalted over the
world, could bring forth a world distinct from and posited outside itself, then
applicable copyright law.

perhaps I can divine a faith in this assumption and it can have an influence on
my life, but my insight has won nothing other than mere words lacking under-
standing. For there would not even be a real concept of man and the insight
that he is a being capable of free will and action, if there were not, coupled
with this thought in our idea, simultaneously an awareness [Kenntniß] of the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 119
means and the instrument of his free actions, an awareness of the physical pos-
sibility of his actions. This manner of knowing must sooner or later appear to
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

the human mind as insufficient: either he must abandon metaphysics alto-

gether, that is, all knowledge of that which lies outside and beyond experience,
or he must search for another way to arrive at it. [43]
The bridge over which metaphysics thought it possible to cross from the
sensible world to the supersensible was that of the general rational principles,
particularly the principle of causality. Once these were removed as generally
and absolutely valid principles, that bridge vanished, and with it the highest
and ultimate orientation of metaphysics was eliminated: if it is unable to go
out beyond just the sensible world, then that which alone gives metaphysics
its value and significance vanishes. Thus particularly David Hume’s attack (his
writings have been translated into German more than once) must have once
again summoned the spirit of the old metaphysics in Kant, just as Locke had
awakened it in Leibniz. No less, therefore, did it also lie in the interest of expe-
rience and the empirical sciences that the character of the universal laws of the
understanding—of their validity that, independent of experience, first condi-
tions experience itself—be preserved, especially the law of cause and effect.
For if the universal laws of the understanding, on which every connection in
experience and every possibility of an empirical science are based, are merely
the consequence of chance habit, then the demise of every empirical science is
at hand. This in fact was the central, motivating thought in Kant: he wanted
to save at least empirical science. Since he could not hide the fact that, even
though these principles can be applied with the greatest of certainty to the
objects of experience, and thus within the world of experience, the syllogistic
application of these same principles yields only a very uncertain and fragile
connection to the objects that lie beyond all experience. In fact, the uncer-
tainty of such inferences was felt even regarding objects not because of their
nature, but only incidentally, since previously they have been outside our direct
experience. Thus before the discovery of Uranus one believed to have cause to
infer the existence of a planet beyond Saturn, and later still to infer the exis-
tence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter on account of there being an open
space between them that was too great. But as much as one believed—partic-
ularly in the latter case—to support this position through a mathematical pro-
gression one wished to have found in the reciprocal [44] withdrawal of the
planets from each other, one was just as glad when experience showed not just
one planet but, surpassing the claims of science, four planets in that space
(four planets that of course had to be considered the equivalent of one).19
Even less could one conceal this regarding objects that lie outside experience.
applicable copyright law.

In this respect it is understandable that Kant defended the authority, inde-

pendent of all sensory impression, of the universal laws of the understanding
for the realm of experience, but only for this one realm. A realm over which
metaphysics in its former expanse, in so far as it made a claim on objects that
lay beyond all experience as well, enjoyed no advantage, whereas Kant believed

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 120 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
to have shown a priori the possibility of a real experience, of an objective
knowledge of sensible things.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

To pursue the matter further, we must now consider Kant from two per-
spectives: first, his position toward the earlier metaphysics, and second, his posi-
tion toward philosophy in general, that is, to what extent did his critique relate
not to the material of the earlier philosophy but primarily to the foundation of
the former metaphysics? This could not occur, however, unless he himself simul-
taneously advanced his own theory of human knowledge, through which he
then became the founder of an entirely new turn in philosophy.
Regarding Kant’s critical position, he advanced it above all against the
immediately preceding Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy. He himself came
from this philosophy, and in this respect, his critique could not have a wide-
spread effect, insofar as that type of philosophy had never found widespread
credibility and was valid least of all for the type of philosophy with which the
existence of metaphysics either stands or falls. On the other hand, insofar as it
related to the final result of all metaphysics, to that being on whose account
there was truly a metaphysics at all, to this extent Kant’s critique was decisive
for the entire future [45] of metaphysics.
As is well known, the former metaphysics was composed of four differ-
ent sciences. The first was ontology, which drew its name from the fact that it
should encompass the first and most general determinations of being: all those
concepts that allow themselves to be derived from the most supreme concept
of being as such (of the Ens). In the vocabulary introduced by Kant it was the
science of the general concepts of the understanding or categories. Ontology
was followed by rational cosmology and psychology; but the crown of these
different sciences was the so-called natural or rational theology, which—
although it simply incorporated the concept of God from experience or
tradition—did, on the other hand, set as its principal undertaking the task of
proving the existence of God. One cannot maintain that Kant really hit the
mark in his critique of the so-called proof of the existence of God. In particu-
lar, he did not even uncover what in my judgment is the real error of inference
in the so-called ontological argument (which will be extensively discussed in
what follows). Nonetheless, the positive results of Kant’s critique of rational
theology overall are more important than the negative. The positive result was
that God is not the contingent but the necessary content of the final, highest
idea of reason. This was not a claim of the immediately preceding metaphysics,
at least, or of metaphysics in general, that is, if we do not go back to Plato and
Aristotle, for whom God likewise was the necessary end [Ende]. The concept
of God in more recent metaphysics was at bottom just as contingent as any
applicable copyright law.

other concept. The positive result, though, agreed with the negative, namely,
that reason cannot know the real being [Seyn] of God: God is merely the high-
est idea and precisely because of this must always remain the end that can
never become the beginning and, thus, can never become the principle of a sci-
ence. Or, as Kant expressed the matter, this idea always has only a regulative—

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 121
never a constitutive—function, that is, reason has the function of necessarily
striving toward God and seeking to lead everything on into this highest idea—
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

which lies precisely in the concept of a regulative principle—but can begin

nothing with this [46] idea, and can never make this idea into the beginning
of any knowing. Theoretically, with this negative result all real religion was
basically negated [aufgehoben] since all real religion can only relate to a real
God, and indeed to him only as the lord of reality [Herrn der Wirklichkeit] and
because a being that is not this can never become the object of a religion, much
less the object of a superstition. This, however, could never be the case accord-
ing to the negative result of the Kantian critique: for if God as lord of reality
was knowable then there would be a science for which he was the principle, and
from which reality could be derived. But Kant denied this. Still less did there
remain a possible relation of natural theology to revealed religion. Revealed
religion presupposes a God who reveals himself, thus an active and real God.
From the God whose existence is proved, which the old metaphysics believed
it had, a transition was possible to one who reveals himself. Of the God who
is just the highest idea of reason, it could only be said that he reveals himself
to consciousness in a very improper sense, completely different from that in
which those who believe in revelation speak of revelation.
Yet as Kant destroyed the old metaphysics, he simultaneously became
the founder of a completely new science, since under the modest name of a
critique of pure reason he claimed to have put forward a complete and exhaus-
tive theory of the human faculty of knowing.
Kant begins his theory of knowledge (in which the different faculties are
taken only from experience, as contingent) with sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] that, as
he says, supplies the initial material of all our representations, which refer either
to things outside ourselves or to processes within us and within our own con-
sciousness. The former we perceive through the outer sense, the latter through
the inner. The sensible representations, however, disclose two forms, which as
conditions of all sensible intuition cannot first be obtained from just this intu-
ition. Thus, as a result of an [47] initial arrangement of our faculty of knowing,
these forms must be as it were preformed in us a priori, before the real intuition,
although they first come into use with the real intuition. These two forms are,
for the external senses, space and, for the internal, time. Everything outside our-
selves we perceive in space, everything that occurs within us, for example, the
representation of external objects themselves, occurs in time.
Kant continues from sensibility to the second source of knowledge, the
understanding [Verstand], which relates to sensibility as spontaneity relates to
receptivity. Through the first source (as he expresses it), an object is given to
applicable copyright law.

us, through the second it is thought—indeed, according to concepts that refer

a priori to the objects and that we have not simply derived from the objects
themselves. However, the remark cannot be repressed that it is quite impossi-
ble for the object to be given to us through only receptivity. For no matter how
general and undetermined we may think the concept ‘object,’ there are already

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 122 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
determinations of the understanding to be encountered in it; indeed, there is
at least the determination that it is something that is a being [ein Seyendes],
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

something that is real. Yet Kant himself first classifies this concept among the
categories; what should appear as an object therefore cannot be a given pro-
vided solely through receptivity. The object as such, according to Kant’s own
theory, presupposes that the categories have already been applied, at least that
of the most general, namely, that of being. What is provided through sensibil-
ity can therefore not yet be the object, but can only be just the sensible impres-
sion. Admittedly, the transition from the sensation, from the sensible
impression, to the representation of an object in our consciousness is so quick
and immediate that one could believe that the latter is already provided with
the former, the sensible impression. That this is not the case, however, shows
itself when I determine an object not specifically, but rather only as an object
in general. When I bump into something in the dark, I say, “Here is some-
thing, that is, a being, an object in general.” A being in general, however, can-
not now, nor ever, be provided through sensation: this is obviously a [48]
concept and can only be thought in the understanding. Thus, that Kant allows
the object to be provided through sensation or receptivity is at the very least
an imprecise expression. For Kant does recognize, in the most definite man-
ner, that the sensible impression is first elevated to a representation and to
objective knowledge through those concepts that he assumes, a priori, inde-
pendent of the sensible impression, to be a result of just the nature of our fac-
ulty of knowledge present within us. I will say nothing of the manner in which
Kant obtains these concepts and nothing about how he believed to have
secured their complete enumeration. For ten to twenty years, the Kantian table
of twelve categories has maintained a reputation in German philosophy
scarcely less than that of the tables of the Ten Commandments, and everyone
has believed that they must deal with everything according to this table; how-
ever, upon closer examination they may very well be subject to a significant
reduction. This alone would be the topic of a special evaluation of the Kantian
theory, in which not its particular content, but rather its general significance
would come up for discussion.
To the extent that Kant assigns the general concepts of the understand-
ing a basis in the faculty of knowledge that is independent of and precedes real
knowledge, he admittedly eliminates the simple a posteriori origin of these
concepts ascribed to them by Locke, Hume, and the entire empirical school
that had developed from the two. Kant eliminates it, though not without
simultaneously reducing them to mere subjective forms of the faculty of knowl-
edge, which, to be sure, correspond to something in the objects, insofar as they
applicable copyright law.

are objects of our experience but do not, however, correspond to the objects in
themselves, independent of experience. If, however, we assume that there are
necessary, innate concepts already present in the faculty of knowledge, through
whose application the simple sensible impression is elevated for us to real expe-
rience and to objective knowledge, then in this theory the things that occur in

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 123
real experience are composed of two elements. We must distinguish in every-
thing the determinations of the faculty of knowledge: [49] the general deter-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

mination is indeed that this is precisely a thing, an object, that is, a being at all,
and thus something real (this it must be even independent of the categories).
A more precise determination is that it is in time and space (according to Kant,
this determination is also derived, not from the understanding, but rather from
the faculty of knowledge), and then further, that the object is a substance or
accident, a cause or effect. Thus, in every thing known by us there is both that
which the faculty of knowledge contributes to the object and that which
remains in the object independent of the faculty of knowledge. This, however, is
what is unknown, equivalent to the mathematical x, as Kant himself calls it,
which is present in the impression, from which we in fact must, willingly or
not, derive this impression, and which we are not capable of eliminating. Still,
just how could this x, which we indeed necessarily think of in a causal connec-
tion with the impression, be something that precedes all categories and is inca-
pable of being determined by them? For we must think of it, willingly or not,
as a being, as what is real, and, consequently, we must think of it subsumed
under a category, for we in fact have no other concept for this other than pre-
cisely that of something which exists [des Existirenden]. Even when we strip
away all other determinations, this at least remains: it must at the very least be
something that exists. How could this unknown, to which we willingly or not
apply the concept of cause, be void of all determinations? Here is an obvious
contradiction. For on the one hand, this unknown x should precede the appli-
cation of the categories (it must come beforehand, since it first conveys or
induces their application to the sensible impression). On the other hand, how-
ever, we cannot avoid giving this unknown something a connection to the fac-
ulty of knowledge, in order to determine, for example, the something as the
cause of the sensible impression. We must apply the categories of being
[Seyenden], of causality, and so on to that which according to the presupposi-
tion is external to all categories, to what Kant himself calls the thing in itself,
which designates it as the thing that precedes and is external to the faculty of
knowledge.
You now see: this theory just quite simply does not work. One does not
even need to raise the question of how that [50] thing, which in itself is not
in space and time and can be determined through none of the categories, slips
in through the back door into our faculty of representation and submits to its
forms, taking on the determinations of our faculty of knowledge, which have
their foundation solely in our subjectivity. The central question always
remains: what is this thing in itself in its own right? Only when I have known
applicable copyright law.

this, will I presume to know that which is really worth knowing. This thing in
itself was therefore the point of departure beyond which Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason could never move, and because of which it had to fail as an inde-
pendent science. Right from the outset one urged it to either altogether dis-
card this thing in itself, that is, to declare itself an outright idealism that

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 124 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
transforms the entire world into one of just the necessary idea or to confess
that thought proceeds from this point and that these different elements just
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

do not allow themselves to be thought together. Even Kant appeared ambiva-

lent, since there are various statements that can only be united with a perfect
idealism (I refer you to a synopsis which you can find in Jacobi’s David Hume,
or A Discussion about Idealism and Realism).20 Yet of course these statements
are contradicted by others in which the thing in itself was gotten hold of;
indeed, Kant even included in the second edition to his Critique an explicit
refutation of idealism. Kant, therefore, remained bogged down in what was for
him an insurmountable contradiction. It is clear, however, that scientific
progress could not remain bogged down in this theory as well. Kant main-
tained that there is an a priori knowledge of things, but he removed from this
a priori knowledge that which is precisely the most important thing, namely,
that which exists [Existirende], the ‘in itself ’ [An sich], the being [Wesen] of the
thing, that which really is in it. For that which appears in things by virtue of
the supposed determinations of our faculty of knowledge is not really in them.
But then ultimately what is it that is within them independent of the deter-
minations of our faculty of knowledge? Kant has no answer to this. The
unavoidable next step was therefore the [51] insight that if there is a knowl-
edge at all of things a priori, and even if that which exists itself can be known
a priori, then the matter and form of things must be derived together and
from the same source. This thought came to fruition in the work of Fichte,
whose greatest, most unforgettable service will always remain to have first
grasped within his spirit the idea of a completely a priori science. Even though
he did not carry out this idea in reality, he nonetheless bequeathed a great
legacy for philosophy, namely, the concept of an absolute philosophy that pre-
supposes nothing, in which nothing is assumed from any other source as a
given, but rather everything is to be derived, in intelligible succession, from
one general prius, from that which alone is to be immediately posited. Because
Kant made the critique of the faculty of knowledge the sole content of phi-
losophy, he thereby set philosophy in general on a trajectory toward the sub-
ject. Fichte located this one general prius, which was entirely natural
considering this trajectory, in the ‘I,’ and indeed in the ‘I’ of human conscious-
ness. His system was complete idealism, a system for which the entire so-called
objective world has no real objective subsistence, but is rather there only in the
necessary ideas of the I. With the transcendental, that is, super-empirical,
actus, whose expression is the ‘I am,’ with this self-consciousness an entire sys-
tem of existence is posited for every human being. The source and first foun-
dation of all existence is in the I or, more properly speaking, the I am. In this
applicable copyright law.

timeless act, through which every single rational being comes to conscious-
ness, the entire system of external existences is posited as in one fell swoop for
this individual. Thus, as Fichte expresses it in one of his later popular writings,
only the human species exists, everything else is only there in the necessary
ideas of the I.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysics before Kant 125
It would have, of course, been valid to derive from the nature of the I
such a system of necessary ideas that corresponded to the objective [52] world
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

existing in experience. Fichte considered himself liberated by the subjective or

individual energy with which he maintained that everything is only through
the I and for the I, and the contradictions in which Kant entangled himself
with the thing in itself seemed to him a sufficient justification. For him, nature
in particular is not something that is self-subsisting but is rather something
that exists only as the limit of the I. If the I were to vanish, then nature would
have absolutely no meaning. It is there only to limit the I, not something in its
own right similar to the I and just as substantial, but rather precisely as some-
thing that is pure ‘Not-I,’ which really is in its own right a nonbeing. The I, in
the primal act of posting itself, sets this nonbeing in an incomprehensible
manner in opposition to itself, but only so that it has something that it can pro-
gressively negate [aufhebe], against which it can advance, against which it or its
consciousness can progressively expand. Consequently, Fichte first comes
around to speaking about nature in his practical philosophy, specifically in his
consideration of natural law, where he is required to think of several I’s in inter-
action with each other. He deduces that every rational being must posit or
intuit itself and other rational beings with a body, of which he furthermore
knows must consist of a tough and modifiable material. In this context two
means or media through which the rational beings may associate among them-
selves are, among other things, also deduced as the conditions of the coexis-
tence of rational beings and so indirectly of the individual self-consciousness.
One medium is the air, by virtue of which they can hear and have rational dis-
course with each other, while the other is light, so that while speaking they can
simultaneously see each other: he knows of no other meaning to assign to these
remarkable elements of nature. It is easy to see that a philosophical science of
nature, if he even had such a thing in mind, could have been for him at most
a teleological deduction of nature, in which he deduced all of nature and its
determinations as being only the conditions of the self-consciousness of the
rational individual. Only in this manner did he succeed in linking nature to
self-consciousness, and indeed as its presupposition, [53] but not so that any
kind of real connection, a bond other than that which occurs through the nec-
essary idea, occurs between nature as presupposition and self-consciousness as
a goal or purpose. He had basically only proved that the I must conceive such
a world with such conditions and gradations.
Whoever wishes to become acquainted with Fichte, with the energy of
his mind in its entirety, must refer to his principal work, the Wissenschaftslehre
(philosophy was for him a science of knowing, and thus philosophy was prop-
applicable copyright law.

erly speaking the science of all sciences, a determination whose importance

will become apparent in what follows).21 Of course, even one who exclusively
busies himself with the study of the most recent developments of philosophy
cannot find his way through the course of this work these days without con-
scious effort. In its time, however, this science of knowing did not lack for

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 126 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
enthusiasts, who wished to see in it a ne plus ultra of the dialectical art, an
unsurpassable masterpiece, in the same way as later occurred with a different
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

and, not to mention, far less ingenious and much more mechanical philoso-
phy. For a considerable portion of Germany had worked itself into such a
pedantic fuss that it, to use a simile of J. Möser’s, no longer asked for flour, but
rather contented itself with, and took pleasure in, the mere clatter of the mill
house. In later writings such as, for example, the lectures held here in Berlin
under the title The Way toward the Blessed Life22—a work that perhaps some
of you should reach for because it is more comprehensible—and even in the
subsequent expositions that followed the 1794/95 publication of the
Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte worked his ideas more and more into a popular form,
as he then published a monograph under the title, A Crystal Clear Report to the
General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An
Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand.23 Here, of course, the matter became
intelligible enough, but only to the same degree in which what earlier had
been recognized in the Wissenschaftslehre as something sublime here became
unfit for consumption. In still later writings, he attempted to connect certain
ideas, foreign to him at first, with some of his original ideas. [54] Yet how was
it possible to bring the absolute divine being [göttlichen Seyn], of which he now
taught as the only real substance, into a connection with that idealism whose
foundation, on the contrary, had been that every individual I is the only sub-
stance? Fichte would in fact have done much better to have remained true to
himself, for with that syncretism his philosophy, from being full of the char-
acter through which it was at first distinguished, just lost itself in obscurities
and a total absence of character.
Fichte’s true significance is to have been the antithesis of Spinoza, inso-
far as the absolute substance was, for Spinoza, a merely dead and motionless
object. This step, to have determined the infinite substance as the I, and con-
sequently as the subject-object (for the I is only that which is subject and
object of itself ), is so significant in its own right that one forgets what became
of it in Fichte’s own hands. Within the I is provided the principle of a neces-
sary (substantial) movement; the I is not inactive, but rather progressively
defines itself of necessity. Fichte, however, made no use of this. The I does not
propel Fichte through all levels of the necessary process through which it
reaches self-consciousness, passes through nature, or by which nature first
becomes truly posited in the I. The I itself does not propel Fichte. On the con-
trary, everything is just externally linked to the I through subjective reflec-
tion—through the reflection of the philosopher and not through the inner
evolution of the I, and, thus, not through the movement of the object itself.
applicable copyright law.

Moreover, this subjective linkage to the principle occurs through a simple rea-
soning of such arbitrariness and contingency that one, as was said, is hard
pressed to recognize the thread that runs through the entirety. [55]

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

KANT, FICHTE, AND A SCIENCE OF REASON

Fichte was determinative for all subsequent schools of philosophy in two

respects. First, he was determinative in the limited form that he gave to the
principle—limited insofar as it was expressed only as the I, and indeed as the I
of human consciousness. In this limited form, nonetheless, was found the true
starting point, according to its matter or essence, for that a priori science that
through Kant had become an unavoidable demand. As I will demonstrate in
more detail in what follows, it required only the sublation [Aufhebung] of that
limited form according to which the I was but the I of human consciousness
to arrive at the true universal prius. Secondly, it was precisely through Fichte’s
demand for an absolute prius that the way to continue beyond Kant was shown.
Kant posited a tripartite a priori, which included that of sensible intuition, or
time and space; that of the pure concepts of the understanding; and that of
concepts that he termed the special concepts of reason, or ideas in a stricter
sense. To the ideas of reason he ascribed only an a priori regulative meaning
and not, as with the categories of the understanding, a constitutive meaning.
Yet above all these various a priori forms lay a higher one that was itself again
the common prius of sensibility, of the understanding, and of reason. That
which stood above all these particular forms of knowledge could only be the
faculty of knowledge or reason itself in the most general and highest sense in
[56] which Kant himself called his critique of the faculty of knowledge a cri-
tique of reason (although he then determined reason again as the particular fac-
ulty of knowledge, namely as the special faculty which relates to the
supersensible). The basis for Kant’s belief that reason must specialize as the
faculty of the supersensible ideas lay in the fact that reason, as soon as it goes
on into the supersensible, no longer has experience on its side, and thus stands
there in its simplicity, or on its own, lacking experience. Here reason appears as
reason, whereas in sensible nature it appears mediated by sensibility.
Yet, because of this, should that which is a priori—which in the tran-
applicable copyright law.

scendental forms determines every sensible intuition of space and time—

should that which is a priori in these forms—in which absolutely nothing
empirical or sensible is mixed—be anything other than precisely the a priori of
reason, only in a particular employment? Or from where should what is nec-
essary and universal, which via mathematics is made to stand out in these

127

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 128 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
forms, originate, if not from reason? Certainly not from sensibility as such,
which Kant explains as mere receptivity. What Kant terms transcendental sen-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

sibility is thus nothing other than reason itself in the particular relationship
with what is sensible. Likewise, from where should the invariable universality
and continuous necessity of the concepts of reason derive, if not from reason?
For it appears in the formation and employment of these concepts, but again
in a particular function, in that it seeks to integrate the phenomenon provided
through the forms of space and time into the unity of consciousness, into a real
experience. Thirdly, it can no longer be mistaken that what is truly the a priori
of reason lies in what Kant expressly terms reason, since here reason is, as it
were, alone with itself, abandoned by experience, and thus beyond every rela-
tionship to anything beyond itself. Thus arose the necessity, as articulated by
Fichte, of a common derivation of all a priori knowledge from one principle.
This necessity had to lead to absolute reason, to reason in that absolute sense
that I have just now attempted to explain. [57] It had to lead to the concept of
an unconditioned science of reason [Vernunftswissenschaft] in which no longer
the philosopher, but rather reason itself, knows reason—where reason stands
opposed only to itself and is the knower as well as the known and precisely
because of this, according to its matter and form, earns the title of a science of
reason. Only then is it elevated to a wholly independent and autonomous sci-
ence that is a Critique of Pure Reason. For reason did not reach its autonomy in
this critique precisely because it related to what was simply given. And even if,
as Kant claimed, the entire faculty of knowledge was correctly appraised and
its entire apparatus (as Kant used to express it, as if he were dealing with a
machine) examined, even with all this insight the faculty of knowledge or rea-
son nonetheless remained opaque and incomprehensible to itself, since this so-
called apparatus was again not grasped from within reason itself, but was
instead something given to it from without.
If in this manner the concept of a pure science of reason is advanced,
which from within itself reaches out to all being and no longer assimilates
anything just from experience, then it is natural to raise the question whether
experience—the other source of knowledge of equal birth with reason—
should be completely set aside and fully excluded. I answer, “Nothing less.”
However, it is excluded only as a source of knowledge. —You will understand
what type of relationship a science of reason has to experience when I proceed
to the following.
Reason, as soon as it directs itself to itself, becomes an object to itself, finds
within itself the prius or the subject of all being [Seyns]—which is the same
thing—and in this it also possesses the means, or rather the principle, of an a
applicable copyright law.

priori knowledge of everything that is [alles Seyenden]. But now the question
becomes what is it that in this way—namely, a priori—is to be known in every-
thing that is. Is it the essence [Wesen], the matter of what is, or that it is? Here
we should note that in everything that is real there are two things to be known:
it is two entirely different things to know what a being [58] is, quid sit, and that

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 129
it is, quod sit. The former—the answer to the question what it is—accords me
insight into the essence of the thing, or it provides that I understand the thing,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

that I have an understanding or a concept of it, or have it itself within the con-
cept. The other insight however, that it is, does not accord me just the concept,
but rather something that goes beyond just the concept, which is existence
[Existenz].This is a cognition [ein Erkennen] whereby it is readily clear that while
there can be a concept without a real cognition, it is not possible for there to be
a cognition without a concept. For in cognition what I take cognizance of as
existing is precisely the whatness [das Was], the quid, that is, the concept of the
thing. Most cognition is, properly speaking, a recognition—for example, if I take
cognizance of a plant and know what type it is, then I again take cognizance of
the concept that I previously had of it, that is, in what exists. In cognition there
must always be, as the Latin cognitio says, two elements that come together.
Even here (immediately after this distinction) it will probably become
muddled for us that, insofar as the question is of the whatness of a thing, this
question directs itself to reason, whereas—that something is, even if it is some-
thing realized by reason from itself, that this is—that is, that it exists—can only
be taught by experience. To prove that something exists cannot be an issue for
reason, due to the simple fact that, by far, the most of what reason takes cog-
nizance of from itself [von sich aus] occurs in experience and what is a matter of
experience requires no proof that it exists precisely because it is already deter-
mined as something that actually exists.Thus, at least regarding everything that
occurs in experience, it cannot be an issue for a science of reason to prove that
it exists; to do so would be superfluous. What exists, or more precisely, what will
exist (for the being derived from the prius relates to the prius as a being yet to
come; from the standpoint of this prius, therefore, I can ask what will be, what
will exist, if anything at all exists) is the task of the science of reason, which
allows itself to be realized a priori. But that it exists does not follow from this,
[59] for there could very well be nothing at all that exists. That something
exists at all, and, particularly, that this determinate thing exists in the world, can
never be realized a priori and claimed by reason without experience.
As I first presented this distinction, I fully anticipated what would hap-
pen. There have been some who have shown themselves to be quite astonished
by this simple, absolutely unmistakable, and—for precisely that reason—
extremely important distinction, since in a preceding philosophy they had
heard of a wrongly understood identity of thought and being. I will certainly
not contest this identity, correctly understood, for it derives from my own
writings, but the misunderstanding, and the philosophy that derives from that
misunderstanding, I must indeed contest.
applicable copyright law.

One need not read very far into Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences to find repeatedly in the first pages the dictum that reason concerns
itself with the ‘in itself ’ [An sich] of things. Now you may well ask what the in
itself of these things is. Is it, perhaps, the fact that they exist; is it their being
[Seyn]? Not at all, for the in itself, the essence [Wesen], the concept—for

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 130 Grounding of Positi
example, the nature of man—remains the same even if there were no people
at all on the earth, just as the in itself of a geometrical figure remains the same
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

whether or not it exists.

That a plant in general exists is nothing contingent if anything in general
exists: it is not contingent that there are plants in general, but there are no plants
that exist in general, since there exists only this determinate plant at this point
in space and in this moment of time. If I then also realize—and perhaps it is to
be realized a priori—that in the cycle of existence in general plants must occur,
with this insight I have still not moved beyond the concept of the plant. This
plant is still not the real plant, but rather just the concept of the plant. Further—
and I certainly do not want to assume that somebody thinks he can prove a pri-
ori or through reason that this determinate plant exists here or now—someone
will, however much he may accomplish, still have only [60] proved that there
are, in general, plants.
If one wants to honor a philosopher, then one must grasp him here, in
his fundamental thought, where he has not yet gone on to the consequences.
For against his own intentions he can go astray in the subsequent development
and nothing is easier than to go astray in philosophy, where every false step has
infinite consequences and where one on the whole finds himself on a path sur-
rounded by an abyss on all sides. The true thought of a philosopher is precisely
his fundamental thought from which he proceeds. The fundamental thought
of Hegel is that reason relates to the in itself, the essence of things, from which
immediately follows that philosophy, to the extent that it is a science of reason,
occupies itself only with the whatness [Was], or the essence, of things.
One has construed this distinction as if philosophy or reason did not deal
at all with being [Seyende], and it would admittedly be a pathetic reason, which
had nothing to do with being, thus only concerning itself with a chimera. But
the distinction has not been thus expressed. Reason is, properly speaking, con-
cerned with nothing other than just being and with being according to its mat-
ter and content (exactly this is being in its in itself ). Nevertheless, reason does
not have to show that it is since this is no longer a matter of reason, but rather
of experience. Admittedly, if I have grasped the essence, the whatness of some-
thing, for example, of a plant, then I have grasped something that is real, for
the plant is not something that does not exist, a chimera, but is rather some-
thing that does exist [etwas Existirendes]. In this sense, it is true that what is
real does not stand in opposition to our thinking as something foreign, inac-
cessible, and unreachable, but that the concept and the being are one: that the
being does not have the concept outside itself, but rather has it within itself.
Nonetheless, in all this the discussion was only about the content of what is real,
applicable copyright law.

but regarding this content, the fact that it exists is something purely contin-
gent: the circumstance of whether it exists or not does not change my concept
of the content in the least. Likewise, if one maintains the opposite: [61] things
exist as a consequence of a necessary and immanent conceptual movement, of
a logical necessity, by virtue of which the things themselves are rational and

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 131
thus present a rational nexus. If one, however, wanted to conclude further from
this that their existence, or that they exist, is therefore also a necessity, one
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

would have to respond in the following way: of course there is a logical neces-
sity in things and of course this is nothing contingent. To this insight, science
has so far advanced, for example, that, first, the cosmic principle enters the
world and organizes it, then particular nature appears—initially as inorganic
nature—then the organic kingdom of vegetation elevates itself above the for-
mer, and then the animal kingdom rises above the latter—all this allows itself
to be realized a priori. Yet in all this one sees that the discussion is only about
the content of what exists: if there are things that exist, then they will be of this
kind, and will come to be in this sequence and no other—this is the meaning.
But that they exist I do not know in this way and must convince myself of this
from somewhere else, namely, from experience. Conversely, reality does noth-
ing to the whatness [dem Was] and the necessity that is independent of all real-
ity. Thus, for example, the indivisibility of space is not a matter of real space,
and what is in real space—order, symmetry, and definition—is all of a logical
origin.iii In this way one may comprehend the importance of that distinction.
Reason provides the content for everything that occurs in experience; it com-
prehends what is real [Wirkliche], but not, therefore, reality [Wirklichkeit]. This
is an important difference. The science of reason does not provide what really
exists in nature and its particular forms. To this extent, experience, through
which we know what really exists, is a source of knowing independent of rea-
son and, thus, travels right alongside it. And here is precisely the point where
the relationship of the science of reason to experience allows itself to be posi-
tively determined: the science of reason, contrary to excluding experience,
requires it. For precisely because what [62] the science of reason comprehends
a priori—or construes is being—it is vital for it to have a control through
which it can demonstrate that what it has found a priori is not a chimera. This
control is experience. For only experience, and not reason, can say that that
which has been construed really exists.
The science of reason, therefore, does not have experience as its source, as
the former metaphysics had it in part, but it does indeed have experience as its
escort. In this way, German philosophy has incorporated Empiricism—which
for the past century has been exclusively embraced by every other European
nation—within itself, without thereby becoming Empiricism. Nonetheless,
there of course comes a point where that relationship ceases, since experience
as such ceases. According to Kant God is the final, all-conclusive concept of
reason—thus, of its own accord, reason will always find this concept not as its
contingent, but rather as its necessary terminus. That God exists, though—
applicable copyright law.

iii. Perhaps there is something analogous to this thought in the alleged Platonic distinction
between a}riqmiw~n ei/dhtixw~n and maqhmatixw~n. [Schelling refers to what Aristotle writes in
his Metaphysics regarding Xenocrates’ distinction between ideal numbers and mathematical
numbers (cf. Metaphysics 1086a5f ).]

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 132 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
about this, reason cannot refer to experience as it does with all the other con-
cepts it realizes a priori. What philosophy will conclude as soon as it arrives at
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

this point, however, cannot yet be explained. First, I must clarify how the sci-
ence of reason arrives at this point.
If the philosophy that proceeded indirectly from Kant, and directly from
Fichte, was no longer a mere critique in the Kantian sense, but was rather the
science of reason—the science in which reason should discover of itself, that is,
from within its own original content, the content of all being—then the ques-
tion now arises, what is the original and, thus, the sole immediate content of
reason, that at the same time is constituted in such a manner that it can reach
out of itself—hence indirectly—and arrive at all of being. According to Kant,
reason is nothing other than the faculty of knowledge as such, so that what is
posited within us becomes, from the standpoint of philosophy, an object for
us—so that reason itself considered entirely objective is the infinite potential of
cognition (for reason remains this even apart from its subjective position, apart
from its being in [63] any one subject). Potency is the Latin potentia—power—
and is opposed to the actus. In the conventional use of language, one says, “The
plant in its seed is the plant in its mere potency, in pure potentia, whereas the
real mature or developed plant is the plant in actu.” Here, potency is considered
merely as a potentia passiva, as a passive possibility; the seed is not necessarily
the potential of the plant; there must be other external factors—fertile soil,
rain, sunshine, and so on, added to it so that this potency becomes actus. As the
faculty of knowledge, reason also appears as a potentia passiva, insofar as it is a
faculty that is capable of development and, in this respect, is admittedly also
dependent on external factors. Here, however, reason is not the faculty of
knowledge subjectively considered, rather that standpoint has already been
assumed from which reason itself is its object. Considered as an object, where
the limitations of the subject are removed through abstraction, it can be noth-
ing other than the infinite potency of cognition. Reason in its own and origi-
nal content, without being dependent on anything else, has the compulsion to
go forth into all being because only the all of being (the entire fullness of
being) can correspond to its infinite potency. The question, therefore, becomes
what this original content is. It appears to be an actual cognition, but one that
is incapable of having the pure, infinite potency of cognition. Reason, though,
must have such an original content, only that—and this can be pointed out in
advance—it must be a content that is not yet a cognition, which it has through
no cause of its own, with no actus from the side of reason. Were it otherwise,
reason would cease to be the pure potency of cognition. It must be reason’s
innate and inborn content, one that is posited with reason itself (as one says of
applicable copyright law.

gifts and talents that we do not ourselves acquire), a content that all real cog-
nition presupposes and that reason thus also possesses before all real cognition.
A content that we could, therefore, call its a priori content, which from this
point on—after this explanation—should not be difficult [64] to determine
more precisely. Since every cognition corresponds to a being—a real cognition

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 133
to a real being—then nothing other than the infinite potential of being can cor-
respond to the infinite potential for cognition, and this is then the innate and
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

inborn content of reason. Philosophy, or reason, would be directed, above all,

to this immediate content of reason insofar as reason acts as the subject in phi-
losophy. In the activity of turning toward its content, reason is thinking—
thinking kat0 e)coxh/n—namely, philosophical thinking. But this thinking, as
soon as it turns toward the content, immediately discovers therein its own
thoroughly mobile nature and, with this, a principle of movement is provided,
which requires that a real science should arise.
Through the mobility of its highest concept, contemporary philosophy
distinguishes itself from scholasticism, which could appear to have had a sim-
ilar starting point. The scholastics held that the infinite potency of being cor-
responds to the Ens omnimodo indeterminatum from which it proceeds: they
understood this not as something that somehow already exists, but rather, as
they said, as that which exists as such. This Ens of the scholastics was some-
thing quite dead—from which, for this very reason, only a nominal progres-
sion was possible from the highest conceptual genus, Ens in genere, to the
genus and species of being, to the Ente composito, simplici, and on to the par-
ticular classes of essence that would be further determined. In the Wolffian
philosophy, the Ens defined by the scholastics as the aptitudo ad existendum
was even defined as a mere non repugnantia ad existendum, through which the
immediate potency is completely reduced and diminished to a mere passive
possibility, with which again nothing can be started. But the infinite potency of
being—or that immediate content of reason that has the infinite capacity to be
[das unendliche Seynkönnen] is not just the ability to exist, it is also the imme-
diate prius, the immediate concept of being itself. In this way it subsists in
accordance with its nature—hence always—and in an eternal manner (modo
aeterno in the logical sense). It must, as soon as it is thought in the [65] con-
cept pass over into being, since it is nothing other than the concept of being.
It is, therefore, that which is not to be held back from being, and, therefore,
that which immediately passes over from thinking into being. Because of this
necessary transition, thinking cannot remain as that which has the capacity to
be (therein lies the justification for all progress in philosophy).
Here, however, it cannot be avoided that some people will primarily
think of a real transition, and imagine that the real becoming of things should
now be explained. But this would completely miss the point. What a science
of reason derives is of course, among other things, precisely that which occurs
in experience and under its conditions in space and time as individual entities,
and so on. However, the science of reason itself moves forward in mere
applicable copyright law.

thought, although the contents of the thought or concept are not, as in the
Hegelian logic, once again mere concepts. In the fact that a science of reason
derives the content of real being, thereby ignoring experience, lies what is for
many the illusion that they have not just grasped what is real, but have also
grasped reality, or that they have grasped how what is real arises in this way, so

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 134 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
that this merely logical process is also the process of real becoming. In this
alone nothing else occurs save thinking; it is not a real process that develops
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

here, but rather just a logical one; the being into which the potency passes over
is a being that itself belongs to the concept and, thus, is only a being in the con-
cept, not outside it. The transition is simpliciter, a becoming other: in the place
of the pure potency, which as such is nonbeing, there appears a being. But the
determination ‘a being’ is itself here a mere quidditative, not a quodditative
(scholastic expressions, but expedient designations). I am here only concerned
with the quid, not with the quod. A being or something is just as good a con-
cept as being or potency is a concept. A being [ein Seyendes] is no longer being
[das Seyendes]—it is something other than this, but only essentially, that is,
according to its concept, but not actu, something different. The plant is not
being, but is rather already a being. But it is a being even [66] if it never really
existed. It is, therefore, only a logical world in which we move in a science of
reason; to imagine that a real chain of events is intended here, or to claim that
this chain of events took place during the original generation of things would
not only be contrary to our meaning, but also would be an absurdity in itself.
Since the infinite potency comports itself as the prius of what it generates in
thinking through its transition into being, and since it corresponds to nothing
less than all being, so then is reason, due to the fact that it possesses this
potency from which everything real for it can emerge—and, indeed, possesses
it as what has grown together with it and is thus its inseparable content—set
into an a priori position vis-à-vis all being. One grasps, to this extent, how
there is an a priori science, a science that determines a priori all of what is (not
that it is). In this way, reason of itself, without somehow calling on experience
for assistance, is put in the position to arrive at the content of everything that
exists, and consequently to the content of all real being; not that it takes cog-
nizance a priori of whether this or that thing really exists (for this is an entirely
different matter), but rather that it only knows a priori what is or what can be,
if something is, and determines a priori the concepts of every being. Reason
arrives at what can be or will be when the potency is thought of as self-mov-
ing only in concepts, and, thus, again, only as a possibility in contrast to real
being. These things are only the particular possibilities established in the infi-
nite, that is, in the universal potency.
But what cause does thinking have to pursue the potency in its becom-
ing other? Well, consider the following. Reason wants nothing other than its
original content. This original content, however, possesses in its immediacy
something contingent, which is and is not the immediate capacity to be; like-
wise, being—the essence—as it immediately presents itself in reason, is and is
applicable copyright law.

not being. It is not being as soon as it moves, since it then transforms itself
into a contingent being. Therefore, to speak the truth, [67] even if I had being
in the first concept, but not in such a way that it could not withdraw [entwer-
den] and become something other for me, then I also did not have it. Yet I
want it, and in fact it is only this, which I really want. Yet I want true being

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 135
that can no longer become something different. But the capacity to become
something different cannot be excluded from the first and immediate concept.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

I must, therefore, allow it to emerge out of being [Wesen], and eliminate it

from itself [sich selbst ausschließen]. It eliminates itself in that it passes over into
contingent being [Seyn]. I must first allow what is contingent in the original
content of reason to remove itself so that I may arrive at what is essential and
so, finally, to what is true. The immediate content of reason is not yet what is
true or unchanging, for otherwise there would be no movement at all and,
thus, no necessity for going forward, that is, no science. In this science, how-
ever, everything that is contingent, that is, everything that is not true, is
removed, or, rather, it removes itself. For the infinite potency, as it is the imme-
diate content of reason, passes over according to its nature into what is differ-
ent, and comports itself in this way as the prius of everything that is external
to reason (what exists).
The immediate content of reason is, thus, nothing absolutely certain and
unchanging. What is really unchanging in this content must first be drawn
out. This happens when what is contingent is eliminated. This original
entwinement of being (itself ) and of nonbeing (contingencies) will not be
clear to everyone. There is, however, a very obvious comparison. Fortunately,
the highest speculative concepts are always simultaneously the most profound
ethical concepts that are much closer to everyone; consequently, I cannot resist
this comparison in order to make clear a distinction that is important for all
of what follows. The human will is also relatively (i.e., within the sphere
accorded humanity in general) an infinite potency: there is nothing at all in
which the concepts actus and potency express themselves more definitely than
in the sphere of the will. The will is in fact not only a potentia passiva, but is
also that which introduces into the realm of experience the most decisive
potentia activa that is intimately related to the pure capacity to be. [68] In
some people, of course, the will is also a potentia passiva—it requires stimula-
tion to become active—but in people who are capable of freely deciding and
are able to start something on their own accord, to become the originator of a
course of action, the will shows itself quite decisively as a potentia activa. Will
[Wille] alone, the will in its repose—in not willing—is an infinite potency.
Wanting [Wollen] itself is nothing other than the transition a potentia ad
actum, and, indeed, the purest example of this transition. The individual who
is aware of this infinite potency of the will in himself can assume that this
potency is given to him so that he may want unconditionally and in every
manner possible. He then fixes his will on a multitude of things that, in fact,
are not worthy of the will, and not only on these but also on things that only
applicable copyright law.

make his will confused, troubled, and enslaved. In a manner of speaking, he

only wants in order to want, to show his wanting. Or the individual can also
be so disposed that not the wanting, but rather the will itself (thus the
potency) is for him the true good, that he esteems this will too high and holy
to waste it on what is second best, and thus finds his heaven more in the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 136 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
reposed will than in wanting. This is similar to that infinite potency of being,
which reason finds as its immediate content. If the potency itself is being (as
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

in the aforementioned case of the will itself instead of the wanting—precisely

the will itself is already being), then it is that which Is [Ist], but if it is not itself
being, then it comports itself necessarily as nonbeing. This amphibole cannot
be excluded from the concept of infinite potency, and, thus, from the imme-
diate content of reason: it is this amphibole that rouses and sets reason into
action, that is, that calls upon reason to become a science. Indeed, as you see
right here, reason is above all called upon to become a science that removes
and eliminates the mere contingencies of that immediate content, that is, to
become a critical science (every elimination is a critique), or, because it
removes, to become a negative science. Such a science shows itself from the
very start as a descendant of the so-called critical philosophy, as the conse-
quence of the [69] standpoint philosophy obtains through Kant’s critique of
reason. Without this amphibole of its immediate content, thought would not
be compelled to depart from it and advance to that in which this amphibole
is totally sublated [aufgehoben], and of which one can first say that it Is.
Reason finds itself called upon to follow that which has the capacity to
go beyond itself to being in two respects. First, reason knows that it will
thereby come into an a priori relationship to everything that is externally pres-
ent to it, and in this way (namely, when it follows the potency into being) it
will comprehend a priori everything that is externally present to it. I say every-
thing different that is present to it externally because, in doing this, that which
has the capacity to go beyond itself to being also continues beyond reason and
produces precisely that being which in fact occurs a priori as possibility—not
as reality in reason, but rather as reality only in experience.
But the call for reason to follow that which has the capacity to be in its
procession beyond itself does not lie in this alone; rather, it has yet a different
and higher interest. Reason wants really nothing other than its original content,
but this content, as has been shown, has in its immediacy something that is
intrinsically contingent.The potency that moves within being, to the extent that
it has not moved, is still the subject of being; it is still equal to that which Is, but
it has only the appearance of being, for it presents itself as that which is not as
soon as it becomes something different. Indeed, for becoming in general, for the
very reason that it becomes, is not that which Is. It—the immediate potency—is
thus only materially, only essentially, that is, only contingently, being so that it
can also not be that which Is. As long as it does not move it is, so to speak, only
provisionally being, but as soon as it steps out of its capacity [Können] it also
steps out of the sphere of that which Is into the sphere of becoming and, there-
applicable copyright law.

fore, is and is not being. Provisionally, or a priori, it is being, but after the fact it
is not being. But precisely because it is and is not being [70] it is not being itself,
au)to\ to/ 1On, for this is only that which is not what is and not is, but rather what
Is, the o1ntwj 1On, as the Greeks very significantly named it, and who indeed
had a reason to distinguish mere 1On from o1ntwj 1On. Put in this situation,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 137
reason indeed wants being itself since, because it is unchanging, it considers only
this as its true content. But it can attain to being itself—that which being itself
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

is, not that which merely has the semblance thereof and can become something
different, which can pass over into that which is alien to reason, into nature,
experience, and so on; it can attain to being itself only through the exclusion of
what is other, which is not being itself. Yet, in the first immediate thought, this
otherness is not to be separated from that which is being itself: the former is
unavoidably assimilated simultaneously with the latter in the first thought. How
else then can it exclude that otherness, which is what reason does not really
want, which is not really posited, but is rather only what is not not to be posited,
which it is incapable of excluding only in the first thought? How else can rea-
son exclude it other than by allowing it to emerge and really pass over into its
alterity in order to liberate in this manner true being, the o1ntwj 1On, and pres-
ent it in its purity? Any other way than this will not bring forth what it wants.
For reason—and this is of great importance and our next result—reason has
none other than a negative concept of that which being itself is. Even if the final
goal and objective of reason is solely the being that Is, it can nonetheless deter-
mine nothing else: it has no concept for the being that Is other than that of what
is not nonbeing, of that which does not pass over into otherness, that is, a neg-
ative concept. With this is then also provided the concept of a negative science,
whose duty is precisely this: to produce in this manner the concept of what being
itself is through the successive elimination of everything that is not being and
that lies implicit or potentia in the general and indeterminate concept of being.
This science can lead no further than [71] to the aforementioned negative con-
cept; thus, in general, only to the concept of being itself. Only at its end does the
question then arise whether the concept—which is the result achieved through
that negative science and its simple via exclusionis—again becomes or can
become the object of a different, positive science.
In that I determine my standpoint in such a way that for me only that
which is being itself is true being and everything else is just apparent being, it
becomes self-evident—and at last perfectly clear—that this otherness can only
have meaning as what is merely possible, and therefore—as already shown—it
is not deduced as something real (according to its reality). Moreover, this dis-
tinction between merely apparent being, which is only a capacity to be, and true
being, which I, as was said, know [erkenne] only in being itself, is of the utmost
importance. As I follow the capacity to be in thought, that which is being itself
naturally remains for me outside this movement. It is itself not drawn into this
movement—in which I occupy myself exclusively with the capacity to be, with
what may possibly be (not merely nature, but also with the world of the spirit—
applicable copyright law.

that raises itself above nature belongs to what is possible; for this reason the a
priori science is necessarily a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of the
spirit). In that I distinguish being itself and the capacity to be, and go on from
there, it is quite natural when I follow the capacity to be that I do not draw
being itself into this movement as well: being itself remains for me outside this

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 138 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
movement and first appears at its end as the result of this elimination. In this
entire movement, I have only to deal with the capacity to be, with what is pos-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

sible. Whether what I find in this way is from a different standpoint, namely
that of experience, something real, is for me of no concern in this context; from
the height that I look out at it a priori, it is merely what is possible.
The confusion into which philosophy has fallen in recent times springs
chiefly from the fact that this distinction [72] is not made, that that which
being itself is, is drawn into the process instead of it being only the result
achieved through this process of eliminating that which is not being itself. I
say “only the result,” and thus only the end which—as one has assumed in an
inversely absurd manner—cannot simultaneously also be the beginning.
However, as little as being itself enters into this process (through which, on
the contrary, everything that is not being itself should be eliminated), it is still
necessary from the other side to allow it into this process, because only by
doing so can we logically—in thought—realize the idea of being itself, which
subsists through its remaining-into-itself, through its not-becoming-an-other.
Thus, in order to obtain in its own right that which remains into itself and is
absolutely equal to itself, we must first eliminate from within indeterminate
being everything that is possibly of the (transitive) capacity to be. We cannot
do this, however, if, to begin with, we consider being as that which proceeds
out of itself, that is, as that which also has the capacity to be external to itself.
Only in this way can we discover and make evident all of the transitive capac-
ity to be (which can thus pass over into being) that is within being in order to
arrive at that which does not exist as something that passes over into being,
but rather what is, pure ipseity [was Ist, rein Ist].
Kant had determined God as the final concept necessary for the con-
summation of human knowledge. However, he had taken even this highest
idea really only from experience, from tradition, from the widespread belief of
humanity, in short, only as a given idea: he did not progress to this thought in
a methodical manner. But when the other philosophy, by virtue of an objec-
tive method, really arrived at this as the highest concept, this provided it with
the semblance of a cognition, yet this cognition limited itself to discerning that
this was the highest and final concept, and not as with Kant when it was
merely assumed or presupposed. This brought about the illusion of a result
opposed to that of the Kantian critique, whereas when correctly understood
the result was entirely the same. In this philosophy, every consequence was jus-
tified by what had preceded it, [73] but it was justified only as a mere concept.
It was from beginning to end an immanent philosophy, that is, it progressed in
mere thought and was by no means a transcendent philosophy. In the end
applicable copyright law.

therefore, whereas it had only demonstrated God as a necessary idea of rea-

son, which of course was already secured by Kant, the necessary consequence
of it laying claim to a knowledge of God was to rob God of all transcendence
and draw him into this logical thinking, into a merely logical concept, into an
idea itself. And because the concept of God was once inseparably connected

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Kant, Fichte, and a Science of Reason 139
with the notion of existence and indeed that of the most dynamic, there thus
arose those wrongful and improper expressions of a self-movement of the idea,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

words through which the idea was personified and ascribed an existence that
it did not and could not have. This in turn was connected with the other mis-
understanding. This philosophy advanced incrementally from that which was
determined as nonbeing since it was something capable of being cognized
[erkennbar Bestimmten]—to that which only subsisted as something capable of
being thought [seyend Denkbaren]. In the same course of advancement, that is
in the same science, it was determined as something no longer capable of
being cognized [nicht mehr als erkennbar zu Bestimmenden], which means
something transcendent, since it stood out beyond this science. Yet precisely
this advance from relative nonbeing to being, to that which according to its
nature or concept is being, was viewed as a successive realization of the concept
of being, as the successive self-actualization of the idea. This advance, how-
ever, was in fact merely a successive elevation or intensification of the concept,
which in its highest potency remained just a concept, without there ever being
provided a transition to real being [wirklichen Daseyn], to existence. [74]
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 This page intentionally left blank.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEGATIVE AND

POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

I have been asked in writing how we arrive at the infinite potency of cog-
nition when there is, however, no such infinite object of which we are aware.
Object would hardly be the proper expression to employ in this context—
nonetheless we are aware of an immediate content in reason, which of course
is not an object, that is, already a being, but is rather only the infinite potency
of being. One cannot invert this relationship and say, “Produce for me an infi-
nite object of cognition, and then I will grant you an infinite potency of cog-
nition.” To do this would be nothing other than to expect us immediately to
step beyond reason, when, on the contrary, it was our intention to immerse
ourselves within it completely and recognize nothing other than that which
discloses itself therein. The questioner seems to believe there could be no infi-
nite potency of cognition before there is an infinite object of cognition. The
question, however, is not at all whether there is an infinite potency of cogni-
tion—since this would be the same as to ask whether there is reason [eine
Vernunft], something that has yet to occur to anyone to ask, since everyone pre-
supposes that there is reason. And that this infinite, that is, free toward all or
prepossessed of nothing, potency of cognition exists, one must concede as well:
prepossessed of nothing, I said, namely, of nothing that is real [Wirklichen].
(There are well-known theologians and philosophers who make God out to be
the immediate [75] content of reason; this is contradicted here, since, by God,
we must think of something that is real.) On the other hand, reason is of
course prepossessed by the sheer potency of being, which, however—precisely
because it is sheer potency—is in a certain sense equal to = nothing; it is that
which is open toward everything, equal to everything (omnibus aequa), and
excludes nothing—and only that which excludes nothing is the pure potency.
Even what is feminine in this word, or that we say ‘reason’ [die Vernunft], points
to its quality as potency, while what is masculine in the understanding [der
applicable copyright law.

Verstand] shows that understanding is the actus; as Lessing said, the German
language is born for philosophy.
It is natural for those who believe to possess the exposition of the real
chain of events in the pure science of reason, of the real generation of things,

141

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 142 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
to be disinclined toward this word ‘potency.’ For this word ‘potency’ reminds
us that in the science of reason, or, what is the same thing, the pure a priori
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

science, only the possibility of things, not the reality, is comprehended.

Reason, however, is the infinite potency of cognition and, as such, has noth-
ing but the infinite potency of being as its content. Precisely because of this it
can, from this content, arrive at nothing but what is possible a priori. This, of
course, is also what is real and occurs in experience, but reason arrives at it not
as something real, but as what is merely possible a priori. At some point and
time in its development the human spirit will feel the need, to express myself
in such a manner, to get to the bottom of being—this is a vulgar expression,
which I nonetheless help myself to gladly and intentionally, for such expres-
sions are illustrative—one would very much like, as one says, to get to the bot-
tom of an issue. But what is here, at ‘the bottom of the issue’? Not being, for
this, on the contrary, is what lies on the surface of the issue, that which imme-
diately comes to mind, and, thus, what is already presupposed in all this: if I
want to get to the bottom of an issue, for example, an event, then the issue—
in this instance, the event—must already be given. At the bottom of this issue
is, therefore, not being, [76] but the essence, the potency, the cause (properly
speaking these are all just synonymous concepts). Thus, at the highest point of
its development, the propensity to understand that is so deeply embedded and
insurmountable in humanity will also demand to get to the bottom of not
merely this or that issue but to the bottom of being in general [das Seyn über-
haupt]. Not to see what is above being, for this is an entirely different concept,
but to see what lies on the other side of being [jenseits des Seyns]. In this way, it
comes to the point where man must liberate himself not merely from revela-
tion but from everything that has reality in order to flee into a complete waste-
land devoid of all being, where nothing is to be encountered but only the
infinite potency of all being, the sole immediate content of thought in which
it moves only within itself as within its own ether. Yet in precisely this con-
tent, reason also possesses what provides it with the fully a priori position
toward all being, such that from this content it can take cognizance not only
of a being in general but of the entirety of being in all of its gradations. For in
the infinite, that is, still undetermined potency, reason immediately discloses,
not as contingent but, rather, as necessary, that inner organism of successive
potencies through which it possesses the key to all being, and which is the
inner organism of reason itself. To disclose this organism is the task of the
rational philosophy.
The oldest and, when properly understood, most appropriate explana-
tion of philosophy is this: it is the science of being, e0pisth/mh tou= o!ntoj. But
applicable copyright law.

to find what being is [Seyende], that is, what true being is—hoc opus, hic labor
est [this is really work, this is really labor]24—this must first be established by
the science itself, and, indeed, for the following reason: as it manifests itself in
the immediate content of reason (or the infinite capacity to be), being is just as
much Itself as well as the matter of a different being [Seyn]. The potency (the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 143
immediate content of reason) is indeterminateness per se (to\ a)o9riston),25
insofar as it can be potency, subject, matter (since these are synonymous
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

expressions), or even being [das Seyende]. Consequently, one does not have
being itself as long [77] as one has not excluded from it what is material or
simply potential (that which can be), which is the matter of a different being
[Seyn]. To be capable of doing this, however, thought first of all must delve into
this immediate content of reason, to unlock it and ask: what is that being
[Seyende] that is the immediate content of reason; what belongs to it such that
it is being? For this is not self-evident. The concept of being must, therefore,
be produced.
Clearly, to this being [Seyenden] belongs first and foremost that it is the
subject of being [Seyn]. With this, however, that it is just the subject of being,
that is, just that of which being can be predicated, it would not yet be being (in
the pregnant sense which we are using here, where it means the cause of all
being [Ursache alles Seyns]. Initially, being [Seyende] must be the subject of
being [Seyn]—that which can be—and to this extent it is the potency of being
[Seyn]. But it is not the potency of something that it not yet is because then it
would not even be being [nicht das Seyende], but it is rather the potency of that
which it already Is, of that which it is immediately and without transition. Once
again, the being [Seyende] we seek is immediately and in the first thought the
potency of being [Seyn]. It is subject, but subject that immediately contains
within itself its fulfillment (the subject is in itself a void that must be first filled
by the predicate). Being, therefore, is immediately just as much being as it is
the capacity to be. Indeed, it is pure being, entirely and completely objective
being, in which there is just as little of a capacity as there is something of a
being [Seyn] in the subject. And since in the subject = or potency = being there
is immediately also an object, a complete concept of being [Seyende] must also
incorporate this (the third element), which is a subject and object thought as
one inseparable subject = object, so that this must still be distinguished as a
third determination.
You see that what we have comprehended here under the name of being
[Seyende] is nothing other than the subject = object of the philosophy that
Fichte advanced. Thus, if this subject = object was determined in the first
thought as indifference of subject and object, [78] this expression would be com-
pletely synonymous with the other one: the immediate content of reason is the
infinite potency of being. (Fichte, however, posited the subject = object only in
human consciousness; the philosophy that proceeded from his sublated
[aufgehoben] this limitation, and posited in the place of the subject = object in
human consciousness, the universal and unconditional subject = object.) The
applicable copyright law.

subject = object, however, cannot really be thought without distinguishing

three moments: (1) subject, (2) object, or (3) subject = object. Immediately,
that is, presupposing nothing, nothing other than the subject can be thought.
Indeed, the word subject means nothing other than supposition. The only

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 144 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
thing that presupposes itself, that is, allows nothing to presuppose it, is pre-
cisely the subject (in the former philosophical language subjectum and supposi-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

tum are synonymous): nothing can immediately be an object, for nothing is an

object save in relationship to a subject, and for precisely this reason nothing
can also be an immediate subject = object. This last element presupposes the
other two: (1) that which lacking all supposition has the capacity to be—the
subject—and (2) the object. Only with the third, however, can precisely that
which was the subject and the object become subject = object.
Now we must promptly add that not the subject, object, and also not the
third or the subject = object, none of these (if we indicate them with numbers,
not 1, not 2, not 3, is, in its own right, being; being itself is only when 1+2+3
are combined.iv Thus, in order to reach being itself (and this is the matter cur-
rently at hand), in order to arrive in our thought at being itself, we must first
remove the 1, 2, and 3—which in their original unity are equal to being
itself—that is, we must make them unequal, so that together they are no longer
being, but each one in its own right a being. This occurs when we allow what
in being [Seyende] is the subject, thus, the potency of being [Seyn], [79] to be
a potency for itself, that is, to be the potency of its own being. We then think
of it as passing over into being [Seyn], whereby, however, it ceases to be a sub-
ject and becomes an object. In contrast, that which was an object in being
must then cease to be an object and must itself become a subject in exactly the
same manner as that which was subject = object is similarly excluded and
posited as a being in its own right. The possibility of this procedure is pro-
vided for by the fact that that which is the subject (which of course is also the
potency of a being = for = itself —and also the capacity to be in the transitive
sense), becomes a subject for itself, and thus becomes the potency of its own
being, instead of turning to the object posited within being [Seyende] and
becoming the subject of the object. Considered in this manner, 1, 2, and 3 are,
in their unity, indeed, being; they make, though, a unity that also has the
capacity not to be, that is, they are that which is contingent in being, which
must be removed to arrive at being itself in its purity, at being that is exalted
beyond all doubt. These elements are identical, but they are not what is
absolutely identical with itself.
The science that accomplishes this elimination of what is contingent in
the first concepts of being—and with this frees being itself—is critical, is of
the negative type, and possesses in its result what we have called being itself
[das Seyende selbst], yet still only in thought. But to know in its own purity,
through the exclusion of contingent being [Seyn], that this being itself exists
applicable copyright law.

above that being: this can no longer be a task of that negative science, but of a

iv. Compare this and the following argument with the twelfth and thirteenth lectures of the
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, especially I/5, pages 291, 313, 319, and 320. See also
pages 365 and 387.—ED.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 145
different one, which in contrast is to be called a positive science, and for which
that negative science first sought the proper and highest object.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

I have again led you to the point where philosophy—as far as it now
seeks its final and highest object, yet brings itself only so far as the logically
mediated concept in thought—is incapable of demonstrating it in its own
existence, and to where philosophy, as far as it now consorts directly with this
object, stands face to face with being exalted beyond all doubt. [80]
Here in the indistinction between the negative and positive philosophy,
and with a philosophy that, correctly understood, could only have a negative
meaning, one sought to achieve what is possible only for the positive philoso-
phy—herein lies, as was said, the cause of the confusion and of the wild,
deserted essence [Wesen] into which one fell when one attempted to present
God as engaged in a necessary process, after which however, because this strat-
egy could go no further, one took refuge in a brazen atheism. This confusion
has in fact prevented this distinction from being so much as even understood.
Only the correctly understood negative philosophy leads to the positive
philosophy; conversely, the positive philosophy is first possible only in contrast to
the correctly understood negative. Only the latter’s withdrawal back into its lim-
its makes the former discernable and then, not only possible, but also necessary.
When through my public lectures something of the positive philosophy
was first disclosed there were many who believed they must take up the nega-
tive against me, believing that I thought the negative should be entirely abol-
ished, since I had certainly spoken of the Hegelian philosophy in such a way.
This occurred, however, not because I considered the Hegelian philosophy to
be the negative. I am not able to inflict this honor upon it, nor can I even con-
cede that it is the negative, since, on the contrary, its fundamental error consists
precisely in that it wants to be positive. The difference between Hegel and
myself is no smaller in regards to the negative than to the positive philosophy.
The philosophy that Hegel presented is the negative driven beyond its limits:
it does not exclude the positive, but thinks it has subdued it within itself. The
great slogan repeatedly used by his pupils was, “The full and real knowledge of
divine existence that Kant had denied human reason is upheld by Hegel’s phi-
losophy” (even the Christian dogmas were but a trifle for this philosophy). I
have contested this philosophy (which puffs itself up to be the positive, whereas
according to its final rationale it can only be negative) in my public lectures not
just here, but long before, and will continue to contest it as long as [81] it
appears necessary to do so. Meanwhile, I will expound the true negative phi-
losophy, which, aware of itself, in noble abstinence completes itself within its
limits as the greatest benefit—at least for the moment—that can be accorded
applicable copyright law.

the human spirit. For through such a philosophy, reason enters into and
employs that which is its most fitting and unrestricted right: to comprehend
and to exhibit the essence, the In-itself of things. In this way, reason is stilled
and completely satisfied in all its legitimate claims; no longer feeling the temp-
tation to break into the territory of the positive, just as conversely, from its own

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 146 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
perspective, reason is once and for all free from the constant disruption and
interruption from the side of the positive. Not one philosophy since Kant has
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

appeared in Germany against which the followers of the positive did not
immediately arise with the accusation of atheism (primarily against Kant him-
self ). But a philosophy that sincerely and genuinely contents itself to propose
the concept of God as the final, highest, and necessary idea of reason, without
claiming to prove the existence of God, is no longer subject to the danger of
such disruption and interruption from the positive, but can and will calmly per-
fect itself within itself.
It often occurs even now that the partially schooled suggest I declared
the former philosophy negative in order to put the positive in its place. It might,
then, be worthwhile to speak of even a change of mind. But if a matter requires
two elements, A and B, and I find myself at first only in possession of one, A,
then the fact that B is added to A, or that I now no longer have merely A, but
possess rather A + B, does not in fact change A. What is only prevented is that
I believe through the mere possession of A to already possess or to be able to
attain what is only first possible through the addition of B. Such is the rela-
tionship of the negative and positive philosophies. No alteration occurs to the
first when the second is added to it. On the contrary, through the addition of
the latter, the former engages its true essence so that it can no longer be
tempted to surge over its borders, that is, to become positive itself. [82] Not
long after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason became dominant, one started to
speak of a critical philosophy. Soon, however, one asked whether this critical
philosophy is all there is, whether beyond this there is nothing more of philos-
ophy. Regarding my position, I allow myself to point out that soon after a
thorough study of the Kantian philosophy it became clear to me that it was
impossible for this so-called critical philosophy to be all there is. I even
doubted whether it could be the true philosophy. Convinced of this, I main-
tained already in 1795, in the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, that—not
without turning to Fichte’s momentary and obvious contradiction—in oppo-
sition to this criticism (and thus was the critical philosophy labeled as a sys-
tem), there will someday appear an entirely different, far more adroit
dogmatism than that of the mistaken and halfhearted former metaphysics.26
Since Kant of course, the word ‘dogmatism’ has acquired such a nasty ring to
it, and even more so as a consequence of that logical dogmatism that Hegel
later wanted to ground solely in the abstract concept (which is the most repug-
nant form of any dogmatism, since it is the most miserly, whereas the dogma-
tism of the old metaphysics always had something magnificent about it). Yet
even regarding the old metaphysics we must distinguish between a dogmatic
applicable copyright law.

and a dogmatizing philosophy. The old metaphysics was a dogmatizing phi-

losophy and, through Kant, this form is irreparably destroyed. Kant’s critique,
however, did not extend to the true dogmatic philosophy, that is, to what meta-
physics actually should be, and not merely what it wanted to be, as in the old
metaphysics, which, accordingly, I simply call the dogmatizing philosophy. The

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 147
old metaphysics believed it could rationally prove, and had proved, the exis-
tence of God. It was to this extent a rational dogmatism as Kant expressed it
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

or, conversely, as I would like to express it, a positive rationalism. This positive
rationalism was so thoroughly undermined by Kant that it henceforth
appeared as impossible so that, nowadays, even those theologians who gladly
grab at anything to go on no longer look for help in the old metaphysics. But
when that positive rationalism was undermined a purer rationalism came into
view—a purer rationalism that, however, we will not [83] call a negative
rationalism, since this would presuppose the positive as a possible rationalism;
also, since Kant there has not been a positive rationalism. Rationalism can only
be negative philosophy, and both concepts are completely synonymous.
According to its subject matter, that pure rationalism was already contained
within Kant’s critique. As was said, Kant leaves to reason only the concept of
God, and because he rejects the so-called ontological argument, which wanted
to infer God’s existence from his concept, he makes for the concept of God no
exception to the rule that the concept of a thing contains only the pure what-
ness [Was] of the concept, but nothing of its thatness [Daß], of its existence.
Kant shows in general how futile it is for reason to attempt through inferences
to reach beyond itself to existence (in this effort, however, reason is not dog-
matic, since it does not reach its goal, but, rather, is simply dogmatizing). Kant
thus leaves nothing other to reason than the science that encompasses within
itself the pure whatness of the thing and his clearly stated position is that this
pure rationalism is all that remains standing of the edifice of the old meta-
physics. Kant, of course, extended what he had proved only of reason to philos-
ophy, and tacitly assumed that there is no other philosophy than pure rational
philosophy. But he had hardly proved this last point. The question, therefore,
had to arise whether after the breakdown of the old metaphysics the other pos-
itive element is completely destroyed or whether—on the contrary—after the
negative philosophy had been beaten down into a pure rationalism the positive
philosophy, now free and independent from the negative, must configure itself
into its own science.
A science that is in a crisis, however, does not advance in such a hasty
manner. For sheer caprice does not rule in scientific movements. Rather, the
deeper and more extensive such movements are, the more they are ruled by a
necessity that allows for no such leaps of thought, the more they oppressively
demand that first the next step be completed and the immediate task at hand
be solved before one goes on to more remote matters. This pure rationalism,
[84] which had to be the necessary result of the Kantian critique, was only
indirectly contained within that critique and was combined with too many
applicable copyright law.

contingent elements. It was therefore first necessary to separate these from it,
to work Kant’s critique itself into a formal science, into a real philosophy. The
first of those called to present this pure rationalism must have imagined this as
their goal. They must have been so occupied with it that they could think of
nothing else: they must have thought they had incorporated everything into it,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 148 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
and as long as they were occupied with it they could not think of anything that
went beyond it. To this extent, of course, there was then not yet any discussion
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

of a positive philosophy and because of this the negative philosophy had also
yet to be recognized and declared as such. In order for this philosophy to pull
itself entirely back within the limits of the negative, of just the logical, and to
confess itself as a negative philosophy, it would have to exclude the positive phi-
losophy emphatically. This could happen in two ways: it could posit the positive
outside itself or it could deny it outright and completely abandon or abolish it.
The latter option was too extreme a demand. Even Kant himself, after he had
completely eliminated the positive from the theoretical philosophy, introduced
it again through the back door of the practical. Kant’s philosophy, which
admittedly stood on a higher level of scientific proficiency, could not grab hold
of this positive message. But to exclude the positive from the negative in the
other way, so that it posits the positive outside itself as the object of a different
science—for this the positive philosophy would by all means have to be created.
Yet this philosophy was not created and through Kant there was simply no
possibility provided for this. Kant had put philosophy on a course where it
would culminate and conclude as a negative or a purely rational philosophy
and had provided absolutely no means for a positive philosophy.
Now we see in organic nature, however, that an earlier organism decides
to become negative, or to declare itself as negative, at precisely that moment in
which the positive arises outside of it. It was thus impossible that that philos-
ophy could resolve itself to the pure negativity [85] demanded of it before the
positive philosophy was discovered and actually present. Contributing to this
was the fact that this philosophy developed in a very positive era that
demanded knowledge loud and clear; to renounce all positive knowledge in
the face of this was perhaps a prohibition that was too difficult for vigorous
and aspiring minds. Among others, this philosophy stood in opposition to
those who had their standpoint only in the positive and those who, although
they renounced all scientific philosophy in order to, as it were, recover from
this humiliation, only wanted all the more to ground the greater claims of all
higher convictions entirely in a blind feeling, in faith, or even in revelation.
One of these was Jacobi, who proclaimed as his fundamental principle that
every scientific philosophy leads to atheism. This person did not shrink from
treating the Kantian proposition that reason is not capable of proving the exis-
tence of God as being thoroughly identical with his own even though,
between the two, there is indeed a sizable and significant difference. Yet
because Kant wanted to know neither of a blind faith nor of mere feeling in
philosophy, his negative outcome found itself in the position of appearing to
applicable copyright law.

Jacobi as atheism, and Jacobi scarcely restrained himself from pronouncing

this. Aside from these men, for whom it was all just a matter of finding con-
firmation of their proposition that all scientific philosophy leads to atheism,
and who consequently saw atheism everywhere—where it was and where it
was not—aside from these, Spinoza continued to have a powerful influence,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 149
for he first brought this confusion of the positive and the negative into phi-
losophy in that he made that which necessarily exists into his principle (begin-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ning), but from which he then just logically derived real things.
It was to be expected that precisely at that moment when the negative
and the positive should have become forever divorced—thus at the moment
of the formation of the purely negative philosophy—that the positive had to
appear even more forcefully and establish its own legitimacy. And if earlier I
had had the clear presentiment that on the other side of this Critique, which
had destroyed [86] the dogmatizing philosophy, a different one must arise,
and, indeed, a dogmatic philosophy that would not be touched by it, then it is
easy to imagine how when that rational system, prepared by Kant and now
brought to its full manifestation and liberated from all contingencies, stood
before my eyes as a real system, that this same sight must have weighed on my
heart all the more heavily. The more purely the negative philosophy was put
forth, the more forcefully the positive had to rise up in contrast to it, and it
seemed as if nothing had been done as long as this had not been discovered as
well. Perhaps this will explain how, almost immediately after the first presen-
tation of that system that had developed out of the Critique, this philosophy
was more or less abandoned by its founder and left for the time being to those
who stood ready to appropriate it, who, as Plato would say, were drawn by the
brilliance of the vacated position to pounce on it with zeal.27 For myself, this
philosophy had really only been a transition. In truth, I had attempted in this
philosophy nothing other than the next possible thing after Kant, and was
inwardly quite removed from accepting it—no one will be able to cite an
assertion contrary to this—as the whole of philosophy in the sense in which
this later occurred. And if I allowed the positive philosophy, even after it was
discovered, to be known, at most, through intimations, through the well-
known paradoxes of a polemical essay against Jacobi, then I believe that even
this restraint was to be praised more than rebuked.28 For with this I left plenty
of time for a school of thought, with which I wanted to have nothing in com-
mon, to develop and express itself, so that now no one can any longer be
doubtful about that school of thought and my relationship to it, whereas I
would otherwise probably have never freed myself of it. The only action that
I took against this school of thought was to leave it to its own devices, whereby
I was completely convinced that it would, with rapid strides, head straight for
corruption and decay.
The true improvement to my philosophy could partly have been to have
restricted it precisely to only a logical meaning. Hegel, however, made much
more specific [87] claims than his predecessor did to have comprehended the
applicable copyright law.

positive as well. In general, one has made altogether false concepts about the
relationship between these two thinkers. One believes that the former was
angry with the latter for having gone beyond him. But exactly the opposite is
the case. The first, who still had much to overcome (about which one nowa-
days no longer knows anything) and had to master all the material that the

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 150 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
latter found already subdued in the concept, could certainly put up with being
corrected by the latter. Even if those elements of Hegel’s overall approach that
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

were particularly hostile to all that is meaningful and inspired could not be
hidden from me, I nonetheless also saw how that same approach opposed with
vigor, and for the true benefit of rigorous thinking and science, much of what
he found before him in that time that was spuriously brilliant, really weak—
yes, even childish—and that misled through an ostensible conviviality. While
others just floundered about, he at least held tight to the method as such, and
the energy with which he carried out a false system—although mistaken, it
was nonetheless a system—had it been turned to what is correct could have
contributed a priceless largess to science. As I saw then, it is precisely this
aspect that mostly accounts for his influence, in that those who praised him
most fervently always removed a few platitudes and slogans, rarely spoke of
specifics, but always emphasized that his philosophy is a system, and indeed a
complete system. On the one hand, this unconditional demand for a system
expresses the heights to which the philosophical science has been elevated in
our time; one is convinced that nothing more can be known in its singularity,
but rather only in its context and as part of a great, all-encompassing totality.
On the other hand, there are many who want to be finished at any cost and
feel childishly delighted to subscribe to a system, thereby elevating their own
importance; primarily because of this, it is always such a deplorable affair
when the labels of party or sect come into use or are again accepted as valid.
For I have had the opportunity to see some whom on their own meant noth-
ing, but when they called themselves a liberal or a monarchist sympathizer
[88] fancied both themselves and others to actually be something.
Not everyone, by the way, is called upon to be the creator of a system. It
requires an artistic sensibility to remain within the borders of what is natural
and to keep oneself from being carried away by the pursuit of closure to
absurd or bizarre conclusions. Hegel, who in the details is so sharp, was aban-
doned by this artistic sensibility by nothing so badly as when he moved on
into the whole [das Ganze], for otherwise he would have detected the inter-
ruption of movement that takes place for him between the Logic and the
Philosophy of Nature; from the manner alone, in which the latter was pieced
onto the former, he should have seen that he was not on the correct path. I do
not belong to those who look for the source of philosophy exclusively in feel-
ing [Gefühl], but for philosophical thinking and invention, as for the poetic or
artistic, feeling must be the voice that warns of the unnatural and indistinct,
and many a path that leads to error will be spared those who listen to it for
the very reason that this sensibility shuns that which is artificial and can only
applicable copyright law.

be achieved through laborious and unclear compositions. The philosopher

who really wants a completed system must see far out into the distance, not
just stare myopically at details and what lies nearby.
The earlier philosophy could not present itself as an unconditional system
in the sense of Hegel’s, but one could not, for this reason, reproach it for not

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 151
being a system at all. It did not first need to be systematized, since it was born
a system; its peculiarity consisted precisely in the fact that it is to be a system.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

Whether the external presentation was held to be more or less academic could
appear as inconsequential: the system resided in the subject matter [Sache], and
whoever had the subject matter had for precisely this reason the system as well.
Yet it could not achieve closure [sich abschließen] as an absolute system that
leaves nothing outside itself, and as long as the positive philosophy had not
been created, it could do just as little to prevent another thinker from advanc-
ing this system as philosophy per se. At first, Hegel seemed to realize the purely
logical nature of this science. Yet if he were serious about its purely logical
meaning, then logic for him could not be just a component. This entire philos-
ophy, [89] even those philosophies of spirit and nature undertaken by his pred-
ecessor, had to be logical for him, that is, they had to be logic, and yet what he
specifically proposed as logic must not be something so misguided as it is in
his hands. Instead of using the true and real logic as a foundation from which
one could have advanced, he hypostatized the concept with the intent of pro-
viding the logical movement—which, however independent one takes it to be
of everything subjective, can nonetheless always exist only in thought—with the
significance of an objective movement, nay, what is more, of a process. So little
had he freed himself from what is real, and which had impeded his predeces-
sor, that he in fact affected what is real with expressions taken from that pred-
ecessor, which were in no way made for his standpoint. In the transition to the
philosophy of nature, which can occur only hypothetically in a philosophy that
remains purely negative (whereby even nature is preserved in its sheer possi-
bility, with no attempt to explain it as a reality, a task which must be reserved
for an entirely different facet of philosophy), he helps himself to such expres-
sions—for example, the idea resolves itself [entschließt sich]; nature is a fall
[Abfall] from the idea—that either say nothing, or, according to his intent,
should be explanatory and thus include something real, an actual process, a
happening. Thus, if the error of the first presentation was not to have placed
what is positive outside itself, so this was surpassed by the ensuing (Hegelian)
presentation, but only through the perfection of that error.
I return to the opinion that some have formed as they heard from afar
of the positive philosophy, namely that it should take the place of the negative
entirely, and should thereby supplant and nullify [aufheben] the latter. Thus was
it never intended, and so easily will a creation like that of this philosophy never
surrender, a philosophy that since then has determined itself for me as the neg-
ative. It was a beautiful time in which this philosophy arose, when through
Kant and Fichte the human spirit released itself to a real freedom toward all
applicable copyright law.

being and justifiably saw to ask not what is but what can be, and when Goethe
also shone forth as the sublime paradigm of artistic perfection. The positive
philosophy, however, could not have been discovered and [90] developed with-
out a corresponding advance in the negative, which is now capable of an
entirely different presentation than forty years ago. Although I know that this

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 152 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
simple, easy, and nonetheless magnificent architectonic, insofar as with the
very first thought it crossed over into nature, and, thus, proceeding from the
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

broadest basis, culminated in a peak that soared up into the heavens—I know
that this architectonic, in its perfect execution, particularly in the countless
details of which it is capable and, indeed, even demands, all of this is only
comparable to the works of the old German architecture, which cannot be the
work of one person, of one individual, and, for that matter, not even of one
epoch. Yet even the Gothic cathedrals, left uncompleted in an earlier age, were
taken up again by a later progeny and constructed according to their princi-
ple. Although aware of this, I nonetheless hope not to withdraw from this
world, without having also consolidated the system of the negative philosophy
in its true foundation, and as far as it is now possible for me, to have further
developed it.
From what has been said, it becomes immediately clear how superfluous
it was to want to defend the rational or negative philosophy against me or
bring it to bear upon me, as if I no longer wanted to know anything about a
philosophy of pure reason. Those people, incidentally, who believed them-
selves called to do this and, in particular, those who believed they must under-
take a defense of the Hegelian philosophy against me in this regard, did this,
at least in part, not to somehow oppose the positive philosophy, but, on the
contrary, they themselves also wanted something of the sort. Only they were of
the opinion that this positive philosophy must be constructed on the basis of
the Hegelian system and can be constructed on no other. Moreover, they
thought that the Hegelian system lacked nothing more than for them to carry
it on into the positive, and this, they thought, can happen in a continuous
advance, without interruption and devoid of any setbacks. They proved
through this that, firstly, they had never had a correct concept of the preced-
ing philosophy, otherwise they would have known that this philosophy was in
itself a closed and fully consummated system. A totality that had a true [91]
end [Ende], that is, an end beyond which one could not, according to circum-
stances or conditions, again move, but rather one that must remain the end.
Secondly, they proved that they did not even know about the philosophy that
they wanted to improve and expand, the Hegelian, since this philosophy had
no need to be extended by them to the positive because it had, on the contrary,
already done that on its own. Its error consisted precisely in this; it wanted to
be something that, according to its nature and heritage, it could by no means
be, namely, to be a dogmatic philosophy. In particular, it was their opinion
(probably derived from dubious hearsay) that the positive philosophy begins
with the personal God, and the personal God was that which they thought to
applicable copyright law.

acquire through the advancement of the Hegelian philosophy as the necessary

content of reason. They did not know, therefore, that Kant along with the phi-
losophy that followed from him already had God as the necessary content of
reason: about this there was no quarrel and no doubt, for it was no longer a
question of content. As far as Hegel is concerned, yes, he indeed boasted that

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 The Difference between Negative and Positive Philosophy 153
he had God at the end of philosophy as absolute spirit. But can one think of
an absolute spirit that would not simultaneously be an absolute personality, a
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

consciousness absolutely aware of himself? Perhaps they meant this absolute

spirit is just not a freely acting personality, the freely acting creator of the
world, or any such thing. This of course could not be the spirit who first comes
at the end, post festum, after everything has been done, and who has nothing
other to do than take up into himself all those extant moments of the process
that are before and independent of him. And yet it was precisely this that even
Hegel had finally sensed, and in later addendums he allowed this absolute
spirit to freely decide to create a world, to externalize itself with freedom into
a world. Yet these addendums came too late even in this respect. They could
not say that at the creation of the world the Hegelian philosophy is an impos-
sible thought, since after all they wanted to achieve the same thing with pre-
cisely this philosophy. Their imagined improvement of the Hegelian
philosophy was thus quite actually, as one says, moutarde apres diner, and one
would now truly have reason to assume that Hegel would be against his stu-
dents. [92] One must have been no less inclined to defend him against the
insult that was done to him, when others with melodramatic phrases—those
sentimental, pietistic phrases capable of arousing only disgust in that power-
ful thinker—sought to make his philosophy accessible to a portion of the pub-
lic by forcing ideas taken from elsewhere into a narrow vessel, which always
failed to hold them.
The main argument of those defenders of Hegel, who at the same time
want to be his reformers, is this: a rational philosophy is something intrinsi-
cally necessary and particularly indispensable to the foundation of a positive
philosophy. Against this, one might now say that the negative as well as the
positive is necessary for the consummation of philosophy. The positive is nec-
essary not in that sense that they imagine it, however, in which the negative
founds it; also, it would not be just a continuation of the negative, since in the
positive there occurs an entirely different modus progrediendi as that in the neg-
ative, in that, here, even the form of the development is completely reversed.
That the negative should found the positive philosophy would only be neces-
sary if the negative philosophy handed over to the positive its object as some-
thing that is already cognized, with which it could only then begin its
operations. But such is not the case. That which will be the proper object of
the positive remains stuck in the preceding philosophy as that which is no
longer capable of being known [das nicht mehr Erkennbare]. For in the nega-
tive philosophy everything is knowable only to the extent that it has a prius,
yet this final object does not have a prius in the sense of everything else, since
applicable copyright law.

here the matter is turned on its head: that which in the purely rational phi-
losophy was the prius here becomes the posterius. In its culmination, the neg-
ative philosophy itself contains the demand for the positive, and the
philosophy that is aware of itself, and understands itself completely, certainly
has the need to posit the positive outside itself. In this sense, one could say

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 154 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
that, from its perspective, the negative grounds the positive but could not say
that the converse is true, however, that the positive likewise has the need to be
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

grounded by the negative. The foundation that we of course recognize from

the perspective of the negative (but not of the positive) [93] philosophy is not
to be understood as though the end of the negative philosophy would be the
beginning of the positive. This is not so. The former hands over its final con-
cept to the positive only as a demand [Aufgabe], not as a principle. Yet, one will
say, then it is nonetheless grounded by the negative to the extent it receives
this demand from it. Quite right, but the positive philosophy must, entirely on
its own, supply the means to satisfy this demand. If the negative arrives at the
demand for the positive, this occurs only in its own interest that it completes
itself—but not as if the positive had the need to receive this demand from it
or to be grounded by it. For the positive can begin purely of itself with even
the simple words: I want that which is above being [über dem Seyn], that which
is not merely being [das bloße Seyende], but rather what is more than this, the
Lord of Being [Herr des Seyns]. Since it begins with a wanting [Wollen], it is
already justified as philosophy, that is, as a science that itself freely determines
its object, a philosophy that in itself, and even according to its name, is a want-
ing. It can therefore also receive this demand solely from itself, and, likewise, it
can provide itself with its own actual beginning. For this beginning is of the
type that requires no foundation: it is that which through itself is the certain
and absolute beginning. [94]
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

HISTORY OF NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

The main objection to distinguishing between a negative and a positive

philosophy is, no doubt, that philosophy must be of one piece, that there can-
not be two different kinds of philosophy. Before one can make this objection,
however, one must first know whether the negative and positive are in fact two
different philosophies, or whether perhaps they are only two sides of the same
philosophy in two different, yet necessarily interrelated, sciences. This will
now be decided through the following considerations. Let us note for the
moment, however, that the antithesis that lies at the bottom of this distinction
has been present for some time, and indeed even within the rational systems
that have attempted to unite what cannot be united. We have not, therefore,
just created this antithesis and, on the contrary, by means of strict separation
we intend to sublate it forever.
From where else, indeed, if not from these two sides of what is never-
theless perhaps one philosophy, has one from time immemorial found it so
difficult, or even impossible, to provide a sufficient definition of philosophy, a
definition that also expresses the process of philosophy, its modus procedendi?
If one, for example, explains it as a science that withdraws itself into pure, that
is, necessary, thought, then this is a perfectly admissible [95] definition of the
negative philosophy; if one, however, takes this definition as absolute, what is
the necessary result? Since philosophy in general cannot refuse to also provide
an exposition and explanation of the real existence of nature and the world, not
merely concerning itself with the essence of things, the result will be—if one
is consistent—that one also must assert that in reality everything is merely a
logical nexus and that freedom and action mean nothing. But the extralogical
nature of existence rebels so decisively against this that even those who, con-
sistent with their concepts, explain the world and even their own existence as
the mere logical consequence of some kind of original necessity do not have
the words they want and must rather, forsaking the standpoint of pure
applicable copyright law.

thought, reach for expressions that are entirely unsuitable, and indeed impos-
sible, from their standpoint.
The question here is thus properly seen in this way: both philosophies
are demanded—a science that grasps the essence of things and the content of
all being and a science that explains the actual existence of things. Once this

155

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 156 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
antithesis is present, one cannot get around it by somehow suppressing one of
the two demands any more than by mixing both demands, whereby only more
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

contradictions and confusion will arise. There remains, therefore, nothing else
to do than to assume that each of these demands must be put forth and con-
sidered in its own right, that is, in a particular science. This of course does not
prevent one from maintaining the association and perhaps even the unity of
the two. For should it really surprise us if such a double-sided nature of phi-
losophy presents itself, since (and this is an essential point, on which I intend
to dwell at length) it can be shown that both directions have been present in
philosophy—the one right alongside the other—since time immemorial, and
that when they have come into conflict, the one has nonetheless always held
its own against the other.
To begin with antiquity, Aristotle, who is the principal source for
ancient philosophy, spoke more than once of a class of philosophers whom he
calls the theologians. If we now [96] also assume that by this term he under-
stood those philosophers of antiquity who still stood under the inspiration of
mythology or those who, in addition to the facts of nature and the use of the
human understanding, also considered religious facts, namely, the mythologi-
cal traditions such as that of the so-called Orphics, or the founder of that
palaiw~n lo&gwn who is occasionally mentioned in Plato, then Aristotle
speaks in a passage from the Metaphysics of philosophers in his time as well
whom he designates with the same name (the discussion is about qeolo/gwn
tw~n nu=n tisi), and by which he can mean none other than those who trace
the world back to God.v These are dogmatic philosophers, from whom the
other philosophers can then only be distinguished by the fact that they sought
to explain everything naturally or through reason.
The Ionic physicists certainly belonged to this latter group, particularly
Heraclitus—whose doctrine that nothing ever is, that nothing ever endures,
but rather that everything only flows or moves like a river–ta_ o!nta ie/nai te
xai\ me/nein ou)de/n, as Plato expressed the doctrine, or o3ti pa&nta xwrei=, that
everything yields or makes room for something else—basically describes
nothing other than the science of reason that also abides by nothing.29 What
is first determined as subject is transformed in the next moment into an
object; thus, the subject surrenders to and provides room for something differ-
ent, which again is determined not to endure but to surrender to yet another
and higher subject until that point is reached where the subject relates to
nothing more than nonbeing [das Nichtseyende], and, thus, to what can no
longer surrender.
applicable copyright law.

v. Lib. XIII, p. 300 (ed. Brandis). [The reference is to the Berlin Academy’s edition of Aristotles
works, edited by Bekker and Brandis (Berlin: 1827). Schelling first refers to Plato’s “old saying”
mentioned in his Gorgias (499c), and then to Aristotle’s account of the “mythologists” in his
Metaphysics (cf. 1091a30).]

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 157
The Eleatic philosophers in particular belonged to this group of rational
philosophers, whom Aristotle primarily criticized because, although their sci-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ence was only logic, they nevertheless sought with it to explain logic itself.30
In this context, he announces that the Eleatic philosophy can arouse only
bewilderment and is of no help, since movement only in thought excludes all
real events. When this merely logical movement nonetheless wishes to
advance itself as explanatory, [97] in doing so it never seems to leave its start-
ing point (since logical movement cannot be a real progression of events—
rather, everything happens only in thought—it seems that when a logical
account is accepted as a real explanation that it never leaves its starting point).
Precisely because of this it induces this bewilderment just as any circular
movement that revolves around one point.vi Socrates himself used a highly
developed dialectic that, far from being something positive or something that
possessed a significance in its own right, for him had only the significance of
a tool of destruction. He directed this dialectic not only against the Sophists,
that is, against a subjective = logical pseudoknowledge, but also against the
rational pseudoknowledge of the Eleatic school and its claim to objectivity.
Moreover, one has correctly understood Plato only when one realizes how
closely and inwardly related for him the Sophists and the Eleatics are; his
dialectic was equally applicable to the lightness and banality of the Sophists as
it was to the bombast of the Eleatic philosophers. In this context, Plutarch
said that, in philosophy, Socrates employed bombast and pomposity (tu~fon)
as a type of smoke (w3jper tina_ xapno_n filosofia0j) to be blown in the
face of his opponents.31 For Plato, the means to this were his questions that,
while they appear to us as the simple questions of a child, which on occasion
are even boring, nonetheless had the purpose of making those students who
had become ‘puffed up’ by the pseudo-knowledge of the Sophists or the bom-
bast of the Eleatics once again receptive to true knowledge through this diet
of simple questioning. This is like a clever doctor who, when he intends to
work on a sick body with strong medicine, first employs purifying agents so
that he does not affect the preserving and revivifying principle of the organ-
ism, but rather the cause of the sickness itself, and intensifies this cause in its
efficacy so that it strengthens the organism instead of weakening it.
Socrates primarily speaks out against this pseudo-knowledge and the
difference between him and the others is that, while these truly knew nothing
as well, they nonetheless [98] believed that they knew something; he, however,
was the better for it since he knew that he knew nothing. Above all, it should
be noted that in this famous discussion Socrates does not deny all knowledge
[Wissen], but rather only that knowledge of which the others boasted; he him-
applicable copyright law.

self ascribed to this knowledge as well, only he added that he is aware that this
knowledge is no real knowledge. Thus, right from the outset this discussion

vi. We cannot count the Pythagoreans among the theologians or particularly the rationalists, but
must rather assume that they attempted to unite both, even if it is not easy to say how they did so.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 158 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
looks quite different from that of some recent philosophers, who, also wishing
to present the look of Socratic unknowing, begin with the confession of
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

unknowing [Unwissenheit], seeking right from the start to calm themselves

with ignorance [Nichtwissen].
The Socratic ignorance must be preceded by a profound and even
exceptional knowledge: a knowledge of which it is worth the trouble of saying
that it is not knowledge, or that nothing is known with it. Ignorance must be
a docta ignorantie, an ignorance savante, as Pascal has expressed it.32 Without a
profound knowledge that precedes it, the pronouncement that one knows
nothing is merely ridiculous; for if one who is actually ignorant asserts that he
knows nothing, then what is so strange about that? On the contrary, what
would be strange would be if he knew anything at all; that he knows nothing,
one believes in any case, he does not need to worry about. Among jurists it is
said: “Quilibet praesumitur bonus, donec probetur contrarium” [All things are pre-
sumed to be done legitimately, until the contrary is proved]. Among scholars,
the opposite is true: “Nemo praesumitur doctus…” [No one is presumed wise…].
If, however, the knowledgeable individual says that he knows nothing, it fol-
lows that such an assertion here has an entirely different rhyme and reason.
Socrates presupposes a knowledge in this explanation of ignorance. The
question must now be what type of knowledge it is that he, just as the other
philosophers, ascribes to. For him, though, it is a not-knowing of the type with
which he knows not to know. We will attempt first to transform this negative
determination of an ignorant knowledge into a positive one. Thought is still by
no means knowledge. To this extent, we can call this ignorant knowledge a
thinking knowledge, and the non-knowing science a mere science of thought
[Denkwissenschaft]. Such a science includes geometry, which, no doubt for this
reason, Plato, in the famous genealogy of the sciences (Republ.VI), counts not
as an [99] e0pisth/mh, but only as a dia&noia.33 Thus, the knowledge that,
according to Socrates’ claim, has something in common with the other forms
of knowing, but which he regarded as ignorance, may very well be the pure sci-
ence of reason; a science he knew as well as or even better than the Eleatics,
and from which he distinguished himself precisely through the fact that,
whereas they wanted to make their logical knowledge into a knowing knowl-
edge, in Socrates’ opinion it could only be maintained as an ignorant knowing.
We now proceed a step farther. Since he explains the science that occurs
solely in thought as an ignorant science, he thereby posits external to this one—
at least as an idea—a science that must be a knowing, that is, a positive sci-
ence. In this context, the confession of his ignorance now assumes a positive
meaning, in that one can confess ignorance either in reference to a science that
applicable copyright law.

actually exists, of which one simply says that it in fact offers no real knowl-
edge, or in reference to a science that one does not yet possess and which, as
it were, still stands before us. For Socrates, evidently, both are the case. In ref-
erence to the purely logical knowledge, he explains himself in the first sense.
But by doing this he presupposes a different knowledge and if he confesses his

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 159
ignorance in the face of this different knowledge, it follows that this ignorance
once again has an entirely different meaning than one customarily expects. For
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

the one is unknowing or ignorant due to a lack of science, whereas the other
is an ignorance caused by the exuberant nature [Ueberschwenglichkeit] of what
is to be known. Indeed, the ignorance of a Socrates in this sense should be
praised; however, it is clear that not everyone is suited to emulate Socrates in
this manner.
Evidently, Socrates presupposes a knowledge to which the mere science
of reason relates as ignorant [Nichtwissen]. Here, of course, is not the place to
demonstrate fully the real desire of this most unique and individual man, who
has, for good reason, incurred the hate and aversion of Sophists in all times up
to the most recent. A veil still lays over his inner glory that has not yet been
fully lifted. Various details, however, do survive from which it can be con-
cluded that his spirit lingered precisely on the boundary of the merely logical
and the positive. An undeniable [100] sign of this is not just the mythical, that
is, historical, expression that he used to give to everything in his work that is
a doctrine [Lehre], or which deserved the name of a doctrine (for example, life
after death); averse to vulgar mythology, he sought instead of this a higher his-
torical context, as if only in this context there was real knowledge.vii The most
convincing evidence of this is that the most brilliant of his pupils, Plato
(whose entire series of extant works are thoroughly dialectical, nevertheless, at
the climax and transfiguring points of them all. Schleiermacher takes at least
the Timaeus as an example of this—or was it perhaps a work in which youth-
ful impetuousness carried away the poetic philosopher? However that may be,
in the Timaeus Plato becomes historical and breaks through, albeit violently,
into the positive, with the result that the trace of a scientific transition is barely
or hardly to be detected since it is more a cessation of what has preceded
(namely of the dialectic) than a transition to the positive. Socrates and Plato
both relate to this positive as something of the future: they relate to it
prophetically. In Aristotle, philosophy for the first time cleansed itself of all
that is prophetic and mythical, and yet in doing this, Aristotle appears as the
pupil of both, in that he turned away completely from the merely logical
toward the positive that was accessible to him—to the empirical in the widest
sense of the word, in which the thatness (that it exists) is first, and the what-
ness (what something is) then becomes second and, thus, subsidiary.
Aristotle turns away from the logical insofar as it seeks to be explana-
tory and therefore positive: logikw~j, dialektikw~j and kenw~j (‘empty’) are,
for him, synonymous expressions in this context; he admonishes all those who,
while they remain merely in the logical (e)n toi\j lo)goij), nonetheless seek to
applicable copyright law.

comprehend reality.34 He even extends this to include Plato’s Timaeus, as well

as, in particular, the doctrine of me&qecij (‘the participation of things in the

vii. Compare Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, I/5, p. 284.—ED.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 160 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
ideas’). This doctrine yields a correct meaning if it is logically understood so
that what is beautiful, what is good (what only occurs in experience), is not the
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

good or [101] the beautiful itself, but is rather only beautiful and good
through participation in the good and the beautiful itself. If, however, me&qecij
is made into an explanation of becoming, of the actual coming into being of
things, or is regarded or used as if it were sufficient for this, then of course the
error arises that a real explanation is attempted with something that only has
a logical meaning. In this sense, Aristotle was correct when he reproached
Plato, saying that he could bring forth no intelligible words about how the
ideas mediated concrete things. Only in the context of an explanation that
attempted and yet was incapable of showing how the ideas mediated concrete
things did Aristotle call this entire Platonic doctrine of me&qecij empty, even
using the word kenologei=n to describe it.35 In general, however, he opposed
the logical philosophers, arguing that there is an unbridgeable chasm between
logical necessity and reality. He reproached the same philosophers for the con-
fusion that arises when the logical order is confused with the order of being,
after which the actual causes of being will be inevitably confused with the
merely formal principles of the science. For precisely this reason, however, we
must now say that as differently as the path of Aristotle’s is from that of neg-
ative philosophy, in the essence of its results nothing so agrees with the prop-
erly understood negative philosophy as precisely the meaning of Aristotle.
How this is possible will become evident through a discussion of both meth-
ods, which cannot fail to cast our previous deliberations in yet a new light.
I would like to point out, therefore, that that rationalism or negative
philosophy, as much as it is in practice purely a priori, is not a logical philos-
ophy in the sense that Aristotle would attach to the word. For the a priori is
not, as Hegel understood it, something empty, logical, a thinking that again
has as its content only thinking, and in which real thought ceases, just as
poetry about poetry ceases to be poetry. The truly logical, the logical in real
thought, has in itself a necessary relationship to being: it becomes the content
of being and necessarily passes over [102] into the empirical. The negative
philosophy as an a priori philosophy is therefore not in this sense a merely
logical philosophy that would exclude being. Being is indeed the content of
pure thought, but only as potency. But what potency is, according to its
nature, is, so to speak, a leaping toward being. Thus, through the nature of its
very content thought is drawn outside itself. For what has passed over into
being is no longer the content of just thought—it has become the object of a
knowledge—empirical knowledge—that exceeds thought. At every point,
thought proceeds to its correspondence with what is present in experience.
applicable copyright law.

Consequently, at every point, thought takes leave of what has passed over into
being, since it has only served thought as a step to a higher level. The same
process occurs again at this higher level: being emerges from thought (which
secures and comprehends its content), but what is comprehended is again
abandoned by thought and handed over to a different knowledge, to that of

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 161
the empirical. In this entire movement, therefore, thought of itself truly pos-
sesses nothing in its own right, but allocates everything to a foreign knowl-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

edge, namely, that of experience, until it arrives at that which no longer has
the capacity to be external to thought, to that which remains abiding within
thought. With this, thought arrives at that which is simultaneously itself,
namely, at a thought that has escaped from its necessary movement and now
freely sees itself, and with which precisely for this reason, a science of free
thinking begins, no longer beginning as in the negative philosophy with a
thought that has surrendered to a necessary movement. According to the sub-
ject matter at hand, rational philosophy is so little opposed to experience that
instead, just as Kant had taught of reason, it does not even extend beyond
experience, and where experience has its end, reason recognizes its own
boundary as well, leaving this final concept standing there as something
unknowable. According to its subject matter, even rational philosophy is an
empiricism, but only an a priori empiricism.
As we have seen, as little as the a priori excludes the empirical, to which
it rather has a necessary relationship, just as little is the empirical free from the
a priori, [103] having rather a significant amount of the same in itself. This is
so much so that I say it stands with one foot entirely in the a priori, not only
to the extent that there are general and necessary forms, which means a priori
forms, in everything empirical, but also in that nothing less than the essence, the
proper whatness of everything, is something a priori, and only as something
that really exists does it belong to the empirical. Its essence is, in the consum-
mation of this science, something to be comprehended a priori, but that it
exists, that it is empirical, is only to be realized a posteriori.
Yet for this very reason, just as there is a path from the logical to the
empirical, there is also a path from the empirical to the logical that arrives at
the innate and indwelling logic of nature. Aristotle entered upon this path—
indeed, in the most expansive breadth possible for his time—in that he dealt
not merely with the whole of nature, to the extent it was accessible to him, nor
merely with the ethical and political relations of the human race and of his
time, but in that he also treated the general categories and concepts, not just in
their abstract conception, but in their application—in the actual employment
of the understanding—treating nothing less than the entire history of philos-
ophy until his time as the subject matter of his analytic investigations. In this
way he ascended, step by step, to the final goal of the first science, the prw&th
e0pisth/mh, or the first philosophy. While on this path, however, and particu-
larly at its terminus, Aristotle also had to encounter the negative philosophy. If
one follows him to the deepest depths from which he starts out, he begins his
applicable copyright law.

ascending progression with the potency (corresponding to the beginning) in

which every antithesis is still enfolded. This progression ends in the actus,
which subsists above every antithesis, even above every potency—and which is
therefore pure entelechy; for entelechy is for Aristotle what actus is for us: the
antithesis of du&namij. Out of the womb of the indeterminacy and infinitude

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 162 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
of potency, of what is possible, nature elevates itself step by step toward its end
from which, as Aristotle says, it is attracted [angezogen]. As he says, within
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

every increment its antecedent subsists only [104] as potency, as nonbeing, just
as in the philosophy of nature, for example, matter relates to light only as
object, but both relate to the organic principle again as nonbeing. Aristotle
maintains that the antecedent always subsists in the corollary according to its
potency, or as potency—aei\ gar e)n tw|~ e)fech~j u(pa&rxei duna&mei to_
pro&teron.36 Any point, any arbitrary limit of the series is the goal of the pre-
ceding series; every member of the series is, in its own position, just as much a
final cause as the last member is the final cause of everything. Since the series
cannot lose itself in infinity, and since the ascending movement of nature does
not drift off into emptiness, there must be an ultimate goal of this path, which
continues a potentia ad actum, that is, in the sense that just as the beginning is
pure potency, so too is the end pure actus. In relationship to the approach to
the end, being rules over nonbeing, the actus over the potency; all u(&lh (syn-
onymous with potency) will be incrementally removed. The final telos is thus
no longer potency, but is rather to_ e)nergei/a? o!n, potency fixed entirely as actus.
This final telos itself does not again become a member of the series like every-
thing else, but is rather that being which exists in its own right above and inde-
pendent of the entire series. Of course Aristotle employs this as that which
actually exists [das wirklich Existirende] (not merely as an idea as in the nega-
tive philosophy)—and here lies the distinction—but he employs that which
actually exists as the final telos only because it grounds his entire science in
experience. He thereby incorporates this entire world, which the rational phi-
losophy has in thought, as the existing world. Nonetheless, it is not a question
of existence, for existence is, as it were, the contingent element in all this, and
has worth for him only as far as it is that from which he can extract the what-
ness of things. Existence is the mere presupposition; it is only the point of
departure. His real goal is the essence, the whatness of things and so, for him,
the final telos—which is the same as that which actually exists according to its
nature (and this is the real issue at hand)—is pure actus, and precisely this
being, which according to its nature is actus, is the final telos of rational or neg-
ative philosophy.
Because of this, Aristotle also makes no use of the final telos—of God—
or [105] of the actually existent, but expressly rejects these, in that he always
determines it only as the final cause (as ai1tion teliko&n not poihtiko&n).
Consequently, since he now has this final telos as that which actually exists, he
does not then attempt to make it somehow into an efficacious beginning as
well. It remains for him the end, he does not think of making it again into the
applicable copyright law.

beginning, into the principle of an explanation. The entire movement of

becoming is only a movement toward this end, not proceeding from it as from
a beginning. If he uses this final telos as the basis of explaining reality, for
example, of the movement of the heavens, he explains this movement not
through an impetus or an effect of that e)nergei/a? o!n, but through a tug, a

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 163
desire, o!recij, which the subordinate nature of the stars feel toward what is
most supreme.37 If for him God is to this extent only the cause of movement,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

then God is nevertheless only a w(j te~loj, au)to_j a)ki/nhtoj to this move-
ment, so that in being the cause of this God himself remains unmoved.38
Until recently, this “au)to_j a)ki/nhtoj” has been understood to mean only that
God is not moved by something other than himself. This is not, however, how it
was intended. Rather, what was meant was that even as God himself does not
move and does not act, that even as efficacious he nonetheless remains
unmoved; he acts but without being moved because he acts only as the final
cause, as that toward which everything on its own accord strives. In so doing
God comports himself as the object of a longing, w(j (as Aristotle says explic-
itly) e)rw&menon,39 as something that is craved by us, toward which we move or
grasp, which moves us without itself being moved. Separated as this immobile
God is for him, and capable of no externally directed effect (a!praktos ta_j
e!cw pra&ceij), he can only perpetually think and only think himself: he is
e(auto_n now~n.40 So thorough is Aristotle’s identification of the final telos
with the actus that he really no longer separates the nou~j from the no&hsij
(from actual thought) in God and no longer holds that he is the sheer potency
of thought. For Aristotle, God is the pure incessant actus of thought (but of
no thought without content). As it is difficult for him to say what he thinks
(since it is inadmissible even for us humans to think of some things, [106] just
as it is better for us not to see than to see some things (be&ltion e!nia mh_
o(ra~n), so then is it even more so with God. Consequently, he decides that
God perpetually thinks only himself. This should only show that this actus is
an infinite actus, that is, that onward into infinity there resides within him
nothing that is foreign to him (no limiting object). For this reason he speaks
of a noh&sewj no&hsij, which is solely the content of God himself.viii [107]
The philosophy of Aristotle is a logical philosophy, but one that starts
out from a presupposed existing being; to this extent, it begins with experience.
Its beginning is experience and its end is pure thought: that which is logical in

viii. On the other hand, it is difficult to assume that according to Aristotle the blessedness of God
consists in his perpetually philosophizing in Hegelian fashion. In the middle of the preceding cen-
tury, after Lessing and Klopstock had revolted, the Germans rejoiced that they too now had their
own literature. Soon more critics and poets joined together in assorted genres, and then historiog-
raphy and philosophy also stepped forward in generally recognized works (for in the strict sense,
the literature of a people encompasses above all poetry and the criticism of literature, historiogra-
phy, and, finally, philosophy). Accordingly, under these circumstances the comparisons began and
soon the Germans were no longer lacking a Homer, a Tyrtaeus, a Theocritus, a German
Thucydides, or, finally, some number of Platos (for the public, the German Plato was first Herder,
and then Jacobi). Where then was the German Pythagoras, the German Heraclitus—should the
applicable copyright law.

former be perhaps Leibniz, the later J. Böhme?. Where is the German Aristotle? No one had a
greater right to be so named than Kant. All this notwithstanding, a later philosophy reserved the
right to be regarded as Aristotelian. This philosophy spoke of a cycle of the divine life in which God
unceasingly descends to the deepest and unconscious being; there he is indeed still the absolute,
but yet only an imprisoned God, that is, a blind and deaf absolute. But God climbs forever
(Continued on next page)

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 164 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
the highest sense of the word. Its totality, however, is one prepared in the fires
of the purest analysis, of a spirit extracted from all the elements of nature and
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

the human mind.

It was the Neoplatonists who, belonging to the transition into a newer
age and aroused either by the approaching or already present Christianity,
sought to revive those sentiments of a positive philosophy found especially in
Plato, but which had been suppressed by Aristotle. Aristotle could not toler-
ate a positive philosophy, which in Plato had been a mere anticipation and to
which not even he had found a scientific transition. In the absence of a posi-
tive philosophy to reach a God that really exists, Aristotle’s path would still be,
even today, the only way to proceed from the empirical, from what iof teeth
or clawss given in experience and insofar exists, to the logical, to the content
of being. If we merely wished to content ourselves with the God concocted by
Aristotle then we would also have to be capable of that Aristotelian renunci-
ation, to remain with God as terminus, and not to want him again as a gener-
ative cause. Such a God, however, would not correspond to the demands of our
consciousness, before which a world lies uncovered with which Aristotle had
no acquaintance. I do not mean by this Christianity alone. For Aristotle also
considered the mythological religions to have the mere significance of an
incomplete phenomenon; he could see nothing original in mythology and
nothing that would have been acceptable to his considerations or that could
have qualified as a source of knowledge.ix
The question was long ago raised as to why King Charlemagne con-
ceded or wished that the books of Aristotle—who one can only regard as an
atheist [108]—be introduced and analyzed at length in the academies he
founded. The answer becomes clear in what was just noted: Aristotle certainly
knew no other God than one that could be used as a principle from which to
explain the world. At most, his God could be the ideal creator to which—but
not through which—everything has come to be. Moreover, providence in the
Aristotelian system as well extends only to the extent that everything aims
toward this end and nothing can happen that had not been determined by this
final goal of the movement, and thus only to this extent determined by God
as the final cause. In contrast, however, one says that the Platonic philosophy,
which is by far more closely related to Christianity, is to be excluded from

(Note viii continued) downwards only in order to, in the same way, climb unceasingly upwards
through ever higher levels until human consciousness is finally reached where he works off and
sheds his subjectivity and becomes absolute spirit, that is, where he first properly becomes God. I
confess that among all philosophers who have distinguished themselves, those who have main-
tained such a cycle of the divine life seem to me the most anti-Aristotelian. Similarly, I doubt that
applicable copyright law.

any rational person could see in such a teaching—which ended with this entirely peculiar combi-
nation of the logical with the actual—the last word of German philosophy, in the same sense as
in Aristotle the climax of classical philosophy was achieved. (Compare to this the discussion of
Aristotle’s theology in Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, I/5, p. 559n1.—ED.
ix. Cf. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, I/5, p. 256.—ED.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 165
consideration. An author of the seventeenth century offers to this question a
naive answer: the theologians are quite right when they have had something
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

to object to or to rebuke in philosophy, since if the philosophers were to suc-

ceed in cobbling together complete agreement between the teachings of
Christianity and philosophy, some could, through the temptation of the devil,
hit upon the idea that Christianity itself is nothing other than a human inven-
tion, a work either of the thinking or slyly ingenious faculty of reason. In fact,
however, it was nothing less than a pure Aristotelian philosophy that was
taught in the Christian schools. The Christian theology, and thus also the
Christian schools, required a God with which they could begin something,
that allows God to be conceived as the founder of the world, and particularly
of revelation. Just as the negative philosophy was incapable of incorporating
Christianity—at least incapable without altering itself completely—the pure
Aristotelian philosophy itself was also incapable of surviving in the Christian
schools. Its place, therefore, was taken over by scholastic metaphysics, which
has already been characterized insofar as it has been called a rational dogma-
tism or positive rationalism.
One already sees in the manner how this philosophy began in a rational
way to arrive at a positive result, that is, to an existing God. (The essential
vehicle for this was, as we saw earlier, the syllogism, the inference, that ana-
lyzed on the one hand what is given in experience, and on the other, the
koinai\ e!nnoiai, [109] the universals, with both presenting themselves as nec-
essary concepts and principles.) Moreover, one sees that rationalism enjoyed
only a formal function in this philosophy in the manner in which it sought to
infer the existence of God from the thorough analysis of experience and the
innate concepts of the understanding. The material that these inferences
would analyze was taken, on the one hand, from experience, for example,
from the purposive arrangement of nature in detail and in general, and so on,
and, on the other, from the rational component of these inferences of meta-
physics, which constituted the general principles—for example, cause and
effect, and, particularly, that cause and effect must be proportional or that a
purposive whole presupposes an intelligent cause—whose application to
experience should then make possible an inference to that which is beyond
experience. As a consequence of combining these elements, neither the ratio-
nalist nor the empiricist component in this metaphysics could come to the
fore, pure and free. This artificial composition qua artificial could not endure;
fundamentally, only the power of the church held it together for so long. After
the Reformation and its consequences, this brand of metaphysics could no
longer sustain itself and so there arose that movement in philosophy, which
applicable copyright law.

inevitably brought about the earlier described breakdown of dogmatic ration-

alism. Out of this breakdown there could only emerge on the one hand a pure
rationalism and on the other a pure empiricism.
For the moment, let us still consider in general terms empiricism’s rela-
tionship to pure rationalism. Pure rationalism, correctly understood, can crave

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 166 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
nothing other than at its end to correspond with reality as it is given in expe-
rience. Conversely, even the most limited empiricism can admit no other goal
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

for its endeavors than this: to find reason in every individual phenomenon as
well as in the interrelatedness of all phenomena—to disclose and bring forth
into the light of day the reason presupposed in individual as well as in the
entirety of phenomena. An empiricism [110] that would renounce this goal
would have to confess itself as irrational. Empiricism is, therefore, not to be
directly opposed to a correctly understood rationalism (that is, how it has been
cultivated since Kant), as it is, more properly speaking, a phenomenon paral-
lel to rationalism. This empiricism has an entirely different relationship to the
dogmatizing rationalism of the earlier metaphysics, an entirely different rela-
tionship to the pure rationalism that emerged out of the breakdown of that
dogmatizing rationalism that, until now, has been our German philosophy. If
one follows this empiricism—to which for quite some time all of Europe, with
the exception of Germany, had surrendered to as the only true method in phi-
losophy—if one goes back to its beginning and its source (in Francis Bacon)x
and, following this other side, traces its path and sees to what extent, for what
purpose, and how it developed, then one must become convinced that some-
thing else lies at the heart of this work, other than what appears at first glance
as nothing less than a mere aggregate of facts. Whoever considers the zeal with
which the announcement of brute facts is made in the natural sciences has to
recognize in it something higher, if even only active on an instinctual level, a
thought that stands in the background, a drive that goes beyond the immedi-
ate goal. For how else should one account for the importance placed on facts,
even those that in themselves are the most trivial, particularly in natural his-
tory, for example, the number and form of teeth or claws—or how else should
one account for the religious conscientiousness with which empiricism under-
takes these investigations, the perseverance with which it pursues under hard-
ships, privations of all types and often even in life threatening situations—how
else should one account for this than through an indistinct awareness that in
all these facts it is a question of something still more than the data itself? How
should one account for this enthusiasm of the true natural scientist without
recourse to an indistinct feeling that says to him that this empiricism,
extended to its final boundaries [111] and gradually purged through its own
actions of banal hypotheses, must finally converge with a higher system that,
united with it, will form an unshakable totality, that will present itself as the
fully equal result of both experience and of pure thought? How should one
account for this without the still so distant presentiment that this empiricism
will ultimately reveal in nature that which dwells within it, as that reason, as
applicable copyright law.

that system of an innate logic, to take possession of which in thought is the

x. It is in any case notable that this general zeal for empirical research or experience had at first
been effected through a change in philosophy, and thus originated in philosophy itself.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 167
highest task of rational philosophy? That there is a point at which all the
potencies of human knowledge, where thought and experience, which at first
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

sight and even now still appear to lie or be so far removed from each other,
will completely permeate each other and together form one insurmountable
totality? This was unquestionably the final thought of Bacon, whom the
thoughtless, workman-like empiricists freely invoke as their commander.
Until now of course, the true philosophers of France and England have been
their great natural scientists.xi Nevertheless, if the French and English natural
scientists or philosophers learned to understand this position of German phi-
losophy toward empiricism, they would learn that it is indeed empiricism, but
an a priori empiricism. Once they have comprehended the meaning and
understanding of German rationalism they will no longer demand that we
allow empirical—approximately psychological—facts to precede this one true
ontology, the science of necessary thought, which begins with itself, advances
into itself, and yet simultaneously realizes itself immediately in experience.
And would that they [112] ponder, in contrast, how through restricting their
philosophical empiricism to the observation and analysis of psychological
facts, they exclude themselves from that great circle of true empiricism that
rules out nothing that is in nature or present in the great history of the human
race and its development—how they cut themselves off from this magnificent
empiricism that excludes nothing, which encompasses all of nature, as well as
the great facts of history, and with which to coalesce and, in the end, actually
become one with, is the true aspiration of a pure rationalism.
If this is the position of philosophical empiricism toward pure rational-
ism then we must now speak of a previously intimated second relationship,
namely of the question how the positive philosophy, posited by us in opposi-
tion to rationalism, relates to philosophical empiricism. For in fact, if pure
rationalism is an a priori philosophy, there seems nothing else left for positive
philosophy to be but empiricism. Yet as I have already shown, since pure ration-
alism does not exclude empiricism, the positive philosophy can hardly be just
empiricism in the sense as it is most often conceived and, consequently, the
discussion would not at all be about something a priori. Yet some type of rela-
tionship must nonetheless occur between positive philosophy and empiricism.
It is not my intention to deny this. On the contrary, I would like to point out
that the concept connected to the word empiricism in the standard explana-
tion is much too limited. When the talk is of philosophy, one customarily
understands by ‘experience’ only the certainty that we obtain through our

xi. That in England philosophy (though usually not without the composite Natural-Philosophy)
applicable copyright law.

for a well-known reason means physics (because in English physician means a doctor, as in
German forensic specialists are called physci) does not need to be proved by the titles of the most
recent journals of chemistry or newspaper advertisement for hair tonic. More to the point would
be to refer to the most famous periodical of England, the two-hundred-year-old Philosophical
Transactions, in whose numerous volumes one would search in vain for something similar to what
we in Germany call philosophy.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 168 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
external senses of external objects, of the existence of an external world alto-
gether, or the certainty that we obtain through the so-called inner sense of the
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

emotions and the changes that take place within ourselves (a sense that still
very much needs a critique). Here it is assumed that everything commensurate
with experience can only be detected in the outer or inner realms of sense.
[113] If empiricism becomes thoroughly exclusive, then it denies the reality of
the universal and necessary concepts; it can go as far as to view even legal and
ethical concepts as things that have become a part of our nature through sheer
habit and upbringing—a view that is indeed the lowest level of narrow mind-
edness to which it can sink. But it is incorrect to view all this as necessarily
connected with the concept of empiricism as Hegel does in his Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences,xii when he declares as a necessary consequence of
empiricism that legal and ethical determinations as well as laws must appear
as something contingent whose objectivity is given up on.
It is incorrect to reduce empiricism in general to mere sensation as if it
had only this as its object, since an intelligence of free will and action, of which
each and every one of us is, does not as such fall under the purview of the senses
and yet this is something empirical and indeed something that can only be
known empirically. For no one knows what exists within a person until that
person expresses himself. His intellectual and moral character exists only a pos-
teriori, which is to say that it is discernible only through his statements and
actions. Now suppose that the discussion was about an intelligence in the
world, assumed to have a free will for action—this intelligence would likewise
not be knowable a priori, but only through its deeds that occur in experience.
Although a supersensible being, it will nonetheless be something that can only
be known commensurate with experience. Empiricism as such, therefore,
hardly excludes all knowledge of the supersensible, as one customarily assumes,
and even Hegel presupposes.
One must distinguish between that which is the object of actual experi-
ence and that which according to its nature is commensurate with experience.
Within nature itself there is much that has never been the object of an actual
experience and yet for this reason does not at all lie outside the sphere of possi-
ble sensible experience. For beyond this sphere does everything commensurate
with experience, as one imagines, cease all at once? Suppose [114] it does cease;
one would nevertheless not assume that everything ceases, that on the other side
of this boundary all movement ceases. For with movement science itself would
also cease, since science is essentially movement. But, one says, the movement
presupposed to occur on that other side can still be merely a movement dis-
cernible in pure thought, which means (if one is consequent) a movement from
applicable copyright law.

which every free action is excluded. For a free action is something more than
what allows itself to be discerned in mere thought.

xii. Second edition, p. 213. [Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, 2nd ed.
(Heidelberg, 1827).]

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 History of Negative and Positive Philosophy 169
Opposed to this view however, stands everything that is an actual hap-
pening [Geschehen], that is resolve [Entschluß] and action, and that extends
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

beyond the sensible world. This is easy to realize: only resolve and action can
ground an actual experience. If in geometry experience has no place this is pre-
cisely because in this case everything can be accomplished through pure
thought, because in this case there is no happening to be presupposed. Con-
versely, everything that is not to be secured through pure thought, that is, where
I admit experience, must be something that is grounded in free action. The
opinion that what is the cause of everything commensurate to experience could
itself no longer be of the same type but could only be something abstract, sim-
ply to be posited in pure thought, was the principle motive [behind the con-
cept of ] God, as far as he is thought of as the last cause of all empirical being
and as far as it is possible to think of everything empirical, for example, of
everything human.
Thus, there is also a metaphysical empiricism as we would like to name
it for the time being; for this reason there are still other systems to be sub-
sumed under the general concept of philosophical empiricism, systems other
than the sensualist that limits all knowledge to sensory perception or even
denies the existence of everything supersensible. The different doctrines of this
type must now be subjected to an even more extensive exposition than the
types that, regarding their goal, agree with the positive philosophy that seeks
to take cognizance of precisely that which in (actual) experience cannot occur,
and thus must be that which is beyond experience. [115]
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 This page intentionally left blank.
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or
applicable copyright law.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

METAPHYSICAL EMPIRICISM

The lowest level of empiricism is one in which all knowledge is limited

to experience through the senses, in which everything supersensible is either
denied as such or as a possible object of knowledge. If one accepts philosoph-
ical empiricism in this sense, then it does not even share positive philosophy’s
opposition to rationalism. For positive philosophy merely denies that the
supersensible is knowable only in a rational manner, whereas empiricism
maintains that it is not knowable in this or any other way, and that ultimately
it does not even exist.
A higher level of philosophical empiricism, however, is one that main-
tains that the supersensible can become an actual object of experience,
whereby it goes without saying that this experience cannot be of the merely
sensuous type but must have something about it that is inherently mysterious,
mystical, and for which reason we can call the doctrines of this type doctrines
of a mystical empiricism. To be found among these doctrines, again at the low-
est level, is that doctrine that allows us to become certain of the existence of
the supersensible only through a divine revelation, which is conceived thereby
as an external datum. The next higher level is a philosophy that goes beyond
all external facts but nevertheless relies on the inner fact of an irresistible feel-
ing to convince us of the existence of God while holding that reason inevitably
[116] leads to atheism, fatalism, and, thus, to a blind system of necessity. As is
well known, this was the earlier teaching of Jacobi, which was widely attacked
because of this type of mysticism. He later sought to make peace with ration-
alism, and in a very unique way indeed, in that he installed reason in the place
of the earlier feeling (itself provided merely for the individual) and then pro-
posed something quite peculiar: that reason in itself—in a substantive man-
ner, devoid of all actus and, thus, even before all science—is that which posits
and knows God. This was a position he believed to be able to prove through
a very popular argument—in a formal syllogism—which reads: “Only man
applicable copyright law.

knows of God, the animal does not know of God. The only characteristic that
distinguishes man from animal is reason. Thus, it is reason that immediately
reveals God, or it is that faculty with whose mere presence a knowledge of
God is posited within us.” —The proposition that reason possesses an imme-
diate knowledge of God, and thus a knowledge of God that is not mediated

171

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 172 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
through science, or that reason by its very nature posits God—this proposition
found such approval from those who would gladly dismiss all science that it is
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

more than worth the trouble to submit to a closer critique the manner in
which Jacobi sought to prove, through the aforementioned syllogism, this
immediate positing of God by reason.
We would like to clarify first only the major premise of this argument:
“Only man knows of God, the animal does not know of God.” Germans have
an old proverb: “What I do not know does not affect me, that is, it moves me
neither for nor against it, neither to affirm nor to deny it.” Now, if in the first
clause of the major premise (“Only the human knows of God”) there is such
an indifferent knowledge, a knowledge that is still neither affirmative nor neg-
ative, but permits both responses—if this is the type of knowledge implied by
the major premise, then according to the rule that there should be no more in
the conclusion than there is in the premise, in the conclusion, reason cannot be
that which reveals God, that is, reason cannot, as the intent of the inference
suggests, be that which affirms God. To [117] avoid this, the major premise
(“Only the human…”) would have to imply an affirmative knowledge. Yet if
one assumes this, then the word knowledge in the major premise is used in two
different senses; for “the human knows of God” means the human affirms
God, and “the animal does not know of God” means the animal neither affirms
nor denies God. This equivocation is again a formal error. Moreover, the first
clause of the major premise would then be false. For the knowledge or the
affirmation of God should be a generic character of humans, just as reason is.
But this generality contradicts Jacobi’s own assertion that all philosophy leads
to atheism, according to which there are only those who accidentally affirm
God, whereas necessarily—as a result of science—there are only deniers of
God. To be materially true, the major premise would then have to read: “Only
man either affirms or denies God, the animal neither affirms nor denies God.”
Consequently, the conclusion could then only read: “That which distinguishes
man from animal (reason) is that which puts him in the position, gives him the
possibility, to either affirm or deny God.” Reason, however, gives man this pos-
sibility regarding every other object as well; formally considered reason is noth-
ing other than the facultas, quidlibet de qualibet re siva affirmandi sive negandi
[faculty of affirming or denying anything about anything]. Thus, nothing can
follow from this that would prove a special God-positing power of reason.
The minor premise of the syllogism, to examine this as well, reads: “The
only characteristic that distinguishes man from animal is reason.”This propo-
sition is obviously taken from the common use of language or way of speak-
ing, where, under reason, one understands the complex of all the intellectual
applicable copyright law.

attributes of man. The discussion in this context is not about reason in specie,
as it is in the conclusion, where Jacobi clearly means reason, but is rather about
reason in contrast to the understanding. Jacobi seeks to support this proposi-
tion as well through the simple appeal to the common use of language when
he says: “One has never spoken of an [118] animal’s reason, yet we know and

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 173
name an animal’s understanding.” Even in an age that truly suffered from no
less an evil than an abundance of understanding, one had no cause to bestow
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

it so generously upon animals as well. What is more, since Jacobi only appeals
to what is said, and not—and this concerns a fact—to what everyone can judge
according to his own experience, I would only like to point out, for example,
that I have often heard of a rational horse in contrast to an irrational one that
puzzles over every trifle and gallops always to the side; furthermore, one also
speaks of a madness or of an insanity that is ascribed to animals, for example,
to the horse that comes down with the staggers, from which it follows that
one calls animals in healthy condition rational. One must respond to such
insipid assertions not with profound discourse but with the simple facts as
taught by the common use of language. Now, regarding the philosophical
meaning, I have heard that one has termed the instinct of animals an analogue
of reason but not that instinct is an analogue of the understanding. In addi-
tion, I have heard that one has explained an animal’s instinct for learning as a
type of reason active within them—a reason, however, that they do not pos-
sess, but from which they are possessed as by a foreign spirit. Furthermore, I
understand very well how one can see reason in instinctive behavior, since rea-
son is something essential and potential, something universal and impersonal,
just as instinct in animals is also something that is not individual, but some-
thing universal and identical in all members of a species. How one can thus
see reason in the actions of instinct, I can comprehend, at the very least, ana-
logically. Yet in no way can I comprehend how one can see understanding in
such actions, since understanding is always something actual, personal, some-
thing that belongs to that individual just as, in order not to be insulting, I must
grant every person reason but not understanding as well. Besides, it is odd to
hear someone appealing to the use of language—and indeed specifically regard-
ing expressions such as reason and understanding—who in reference to these
words has shown either such [119] superficial knowledge or such meager
respect for linguistic usage that what he termed understanding in the 1780s he
began to call reason after 1800, and vice versa, so that within twenty years both
terms had completely exchanged roles. What he had earlier blamed on reason
he later burdened the understanding with, and for what he had earlier praised
the understanding he later attributed exclusively to reason.
In a third type of empiricism, the supersensible is made into an object
of actual experience through which a possible ecstasy of the human essence in
God is assumed, the consequence of which is a necessary, infallible vision not
merely into the divine essence, but into the essence of creation and every phase
of that process as well. This type of empiricism is theosophy, which is pre-
applicable copyright law.

dominately a speculative or theoretical mysticism. I reserve the right to speak

extensively about this type of empiricism. For the time being, it should be
noted that doctrines and systems that were all in opposition to the dogmatiz-
ing rationalism of the earlier metaphysics will now become apparent, so that
the latter never exclusively prevailed but always had these systems alongside

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 174 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
it, systems that I have already designated with the common name as doctrines
of a mystical empiricism. For the origin of revelation, as well as of an individ-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ual and inexplicable feeling, has something mystical about it. This system
formed, at the very least, a powerful opposition to rationalism—a system that
at no time, and even now, has ever really been overcome. This could only have
happened if a true philosophy had been put in opposition to it. For the
demand [Forderung] that announces itself in these systems cannot be dis-
missed by simply treating them as unscientific. They are of course unscientific,
but with this [concession], the demand that lies at the core of such systems is
not fulfilled. In any case, the continued existence of such mystical teachings
(that throughout the entire Middle Ages ran parallel to the scholastic philos-
ophy, approved in the schools and ordained by the church, that held its ground
until the era of [120] the Reformation, after which it again arose and found
its zenith in Jacob Böhme) testifies to the fact that until now philosophy has
not been able to achieve in a scientific and universally enlightening manner,
convincing of reason itself, what these teachings in an openly unscientific
manner sought to achieve or feigned to achieve (in the case of theosophy, most
often in an incomprehensible manner and not without falling to some degree
back into mythology). For precisely this reason that they themselves have not
satisfied, these teachings themselves contain the demand for a positive philos-
ophy. These teachings are those which in recent times have represented the
position of this second philosophy (deute/ra filosofi/?a), and they testify to
the fact, to return to my initial assertion, that until now these two strains of
philosophy have at least, according to their demand or their potentia, always
been present alongside each other.
It is, thus, all the more necessary to provide at least a provisional idea of
how this positive philosophy we advance relates to these mystical teachings.
For surely it cannot be identical with any of them since it claims to be a phi-
losophy, and, thus, a science, whereas the others, if they have not dispensed
with all speculative content, have nevertheless done so with all scientific form
and method. A detailed discussion about the relation of positive philosophy to
revelation will emerge of itself as a result of this development, but we will no
longer return to theosophy. Accordingly, I would like to provide now my
explanation of the relationship of positive philosophy to theosophy, although,
in what follows, the development of the method of the positive philosophy
will itself show that it can have just as little in common with theosophy as it
can with the rational systems. The positive philosophy is a new creation that
can be particularly troublesome to claims of having consummated philosophy.
Under such conditions, it is the normal custom to look around in the history
applicable copyright law.

of literature for some title or some notorious category, under which one can
subsume [121] the new phenomenon, thereby hoping to lift oneself above all
the trouble of a rebuttal.
However, have I myself not provided the impetus to bring positive phi-
losophy into contact with theosophy? It was indeed claimed that the former

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 175
seeks the same thing for which the later strives; the difference is only that the
former seeks to arrive at its goal in a scientific manner, the later in an unsci-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

entific and nonmethodical fashion. This is how the relationship has been
determined. Yet by the same right, any ignorant person could then belittle the
science of astronomy since it has replaced astrology or the science of chem-
istry since it has replaced alchemy. What lies at the heart of theosophy, wher-
ever it achieves, at the very least, a substantive scientific or speculative
significance—which in particular lies at the heart of Jacob Böhme’s theoso-
phy—is the inherently laudable aspiration to comprehend the emergence of
things from God as an actual chain of events. Jacob Böhme however, does not
know of any other way to bring this about than by involving the deity itself in
a type of natural process. The characteristic feature of the positive philosophy,
however, consists precisely in that it rejects all processes in this sense, namely in
which God would not only be the logical but also the actual result of a process.
To this extent, the positive philosophy is more properly speaking in direct
opposition with each and every theosophical aspiration. —Hegel looks down
at Böhme and in the preface to the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Science he speaks out against the renowned Franz Baader, who
had imputed or accused the Hegelian philosophy of allowing matter to
emerge immediately from God, so that this eternal issuing forth of God
becomes the condition of matter’s eternal retrieval, or return to itself, as spirit.
Against this accusation, Hegel speaks out quite nobly: the emergence of
things from God is not one of his categories—he makes no use of it since it is
not a category at all but only a figurative expression. On the other hand, how-
ever, Hegel has the astounding [122] category of the release [Entlassens]. Yet
is this release not a figurative expression? What this release itself is about is
not explained. From the side of God, however, this release must nonetheless
necessarily correspond to an issuing forth of that which is discharged (of that
which God discharges from himself ); thus, it must also correspond to an issu-
ing forth of nature and to an issuing forth of matter out of God, just as,
according to Hegel in his Logic, when God is still enclosed in his eternity,
exactly the same matter must have issued forth out of his eternity into actual,
extralogical nature.
In his Philosophy of Religion, Hegel speaks about the Trinity and specifi-
cally about the son as follows: “He is indeed the son, hence different from the
father, but he may not remain the son; since as the son the distinction obtains,
but as eternal it is again sublated; it is more or less only a game of love with itself
[to be sure uncommonly edifying], it does not in this way come to be a serious
matter of a different being [Andersseyns].”xiii So that it does become a serious
applicable copyright law.

matter it is necessary that the son contain the determination of a different being
as a different being, that he must appear as an actual being external to God (but

xiii. Hegel’s Works, vol. 12, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1840), 248.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 176 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
of course something that has proceeded out of God) and lacking God, that is, as
the world. According to all philosophical concepts, it is here that the son is
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

explicitly made into the matter of the world; for through this, that he is not
merely a different being, but that he is also posited as a different being, will he
become the world. Consequently, as long as he is still the son, as in the stated
distinction, the son comports himself as the possibility, as the matter of the
world to come. All this is just as theosophical as anything in J. Böhme could be,
but with one difference: such fantastic ideas in Böhme are something original
and are actually born of a magnificent intuition, whereas with Hegel it is tied
into a philosophy whose indubitable character consists of being of the purest
prose and a sobriety totally devoid of intuition. One forgives the individual who
staggers when he is actually drunk with intuition, but not one who by nature is
actually sober and only wishes to appear as if he too is staggering. [123]
One cannot help but say that J. Böhme is a miraculous appearance in the
history of humankind, and particularly in the history of the German spirit. If
one could ever forget what treasure lies in the natural depths of the heart and
spirit of the German nation, then one would only need to remember this man,
who in his own way is just as far above the explanations of popular psychology
that one attempts of him, as it is impossible to explain mythology with popular
psychology. Just as the mythologies and theogonies of the races preceded sci-
ence, so too does J. Böhme with the birth of God as described by him precede
all the scientific systems of recent philosophy. J. Böhme was born in 1575, Rene
Descartes in 1596. In Spinoza, who passed away nearly one hundred years after
J. Böhme’s birth, that which in Böhme was intuition and like an immediate
inspiration of nature appeared as a cultivated rationalism, but not without hav-
ing driven completely out of the philosophy the great intuitions of nature that
existed in J. Böhme’s writings. For there was nothing in the physics of Spinoza
that distinguished it from the utterly mechanical and soulless physics of
Descartes. J. Böhme is truly of a theogonic nature, but precisely this prevented
him from elevating himself to a free creation of the world, and thus to the free-
dom of a positive philosophy. As is well known, J. Böhme spoke often of a wheel
of nature or of birth, one of his most profound apperceptions through which he
expressed the dualism of forces in nature that, struggling with itself, wants to
give birth but cannot. Yet he himself, however, is precisely this wheel, he him-
self is this nature that wants to give birth to this science but cannot. The rotation
of his spirit arises from his futile attempt to escape from that substantial force
in whose power he is, and to escape to a free science. If that substantial princi-
ple, which has gone through the whole of nature and experienced its entire
process, again raises itself under the conditions of current human existence to
applicable copyright law.

know directly—that is, to replicate within itself that process from which it was
once cut off (precisely this was the case for Böhme)— [124] if again it raises
itself to know directly, without the help of a higher activity, namely, of the ana-
lytic understanding—to be, so to speak, directly begotten by that process—if
this happens, then that principle can appear, as it were, only as a staggering and

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 177
unconscious nature that is powerless over itself. The rotation of his spirit
becomes outwardly apparent as well through the fact that in every one of his
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

writings J. Böhme always starts at the beginning, repeatedly explicating the

amply explained beginnings without ever going on any farther or ever even leav-
ing that position. In these beginnings he is always astounding, a true drama of
one whose nature is to wrestle with oneself, yearning for freedom and serenity,
but who is incapable of ever changing over into real motion, instead circling
around the very same point. As soon as J. Böhme goes beyond the beginning
and into concrete reality one can no longer follow him; here every trace disap-
pears, and even if one successively employs the concepts of Kant, Fichte, natu-
ral philosophy, or even Hegel, it will always remain a futile effort to transcribe
the muddled concepts of his intuitions into any type of clarity.
We have advanced theosophy primarily as the antithesis of rational phi-
losophy, and, thus, of rationalism in philosophy. Yet at bottom, theosophy strives
to move beyond rationalism without, however, being capable of actually wrest-
ing away rationalism’s substantial knowledge. The knowledge in which ration-
alism has its essence is to be called substantial [substantiell] to the extent that it
excludes all actus. Rationalism can generate nothing through an action, that is,
through a free creation; it is familiar only with pure essential relations. Every-
thing merely follows from it modo aeterno, eternally, which means in a merely
logical manner, through immanent movement. For it is only a falsified ration-
alism that explains the genesis of the world through a free divestment
[Entäusserung] of the absolute spirit that as such wants to maintain a violent
creation. For precisely this reason the false rationalism approximates theosophy,
and is thus no less captive than theosophy to a merely substantial knowledge;
theosophy [125] wants of course to overcome such a knowledge, but it does not
succeed, as is seen most clearly with Böhme. No doubt, there has never been
another spirit that has withstood the heat of this sheer substantial knowledge
as well as J. Böhme; obviously for him God is the immediate substance of the
world and he wants a free creation and a God that relates freely to the world,
but cannot produce them. Although he calls it theosophy, thus making the
claim to be the science of the divine, the content to which theosophy attains
remains only a substantial movement, and he presents God only in a substan-
tial movement. In its essence, theosophy is no less unhistorical than rational-
ism. The God of a truly historical and positive philosophy however does not
move, he acts. The substantial movement in which rationalism is confused starts
out from a negative prius, for example, starts out from something nonexistent
[einem nichtseyenden] that must first move itself into being [Seyn]; but the his-
torical philosophy starts out from something positive, that is, from an existing
applicable copyright law.

prius that does not first have to move itself into being. This prius thus posits
only with complete freedom without being somehow required by its nature to
posit a being. He does not directly posit his own being, but instead posits a
being that is distinct from his, in which his being is more accurately negated or
suspended rather than posited, hence his being is only indirectly posited in this

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 178 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
being that is distinct from his. It is fitting for God to be indifferent toward his
own being, but it is not fitting for God to trouble himself with his own being,
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

to provide himself with a being, to beget himself within a being that—as J.

Böhme expresses it—as the content of the highest science, for example, of
theosophy, pronounces the birth of the divine essence, the divine birth, and,
hence, a real theogony. Consequently, it would be justified if we explained the
phenomenon of theosophy (for in any case it is a phenomenon, particularly
with J. Böhme) as a regression into the process that preceded science, as the
attempt to revert to a prescientific, theogonic process. That the positive philos-
ophy cannot be theosophy is due to the fact that it is determined as a philoso-
phy and as a science; [126] in that theosophy does not call itself philosophy and
renounces science, it wants to speak from immediate intuition.
The question now, however, is in which way the science we have
proposed—the positive philosophy—is a philosophy and in which way it will
become a science.
If among the categories that stand at our behest for the designation of
philosophical doctrines, empiricism can be opposed to nothing other than
rationalism, then positive philosophy, as the antithesis of rationalism, will nev-
ertheless be incapable of denying that it is also in some way and in some sense
empiricism as well. The question thus returns to what type of relation the pos-
itive philosophy will have to experience: the same as that of a mystical doc-
trine, or an entirely different relation? What is common to all of these mystical
doctrines is that they start out from experience—from something that occurs
in experience. What this experience is is entirely irrelevant, for example,
whether it starts out from the appearance or the miracles of Christ (as in an
earlier time, when there was such a mindless historical theology, which
avoided every contact with philosophy to the extent that it believed it could
eliminate all philosophical arguments for the existence of God and could best
prove the existence of God through the miracles of Christ), whether it pro-
ceeds from the presence of an exuberant feeling in us that is only to be satis-
fied through an existing God, or whether it proceeds from an immediate
intuition of the divine—each of these always starts out from something given
in immediate or mediated experience. I would now like only to briefly state—
for it extends as far as a preliminary distinction, and we are concerned only
with a preliminary distinction—that the positive philosophy starts out just as
little from something that occurs merely in thought (for then it would fall
back into the negative philosophy) as it starts out from some being that is
present in experience. If it does not start out from something that occurs in
thought [im Denken Seyende], and, thus, in no way from pure thought, then it
applicable copyright law.

will start out from that which is before and external to all thought, conse-
quently from being [Seyn], but not from an [127] empirical being. For we have
already excluded this, in that empirical being is external to thought only in the
very relative sense, to the extent that every being that occurs in experience
inherently carries with it the logical determinations of the understanding,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 179
without which it could never even be represented. If positive philosophy starts
out from that which is external to all thought, it cannot begin with a being
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

that is external to thought in a merely relative sense, but only with a being that
is absolutely external to thought. The being that is external to all thought, how-
ever, is just as much beyond all experience as it is before all thought: positive
philosophy begins with the completely transcendent being [Seyn] and it can no
longer be just a relative prius like the potency that serves as the basis of the
science of reason. For precisely as potency—as nonbeing—it has the necessity
to pass over into being, and, thus, I call it the merely relative prius. If that being
from which positive philosophy proceeds were also merely relative, then the
necessity of passing over into being would inhere within its principle. Thus,
through this principle, that being would be subordinated to the thought of a
necessary movement and, consequently, the positive philosophy would fall
back into the negative. If, therefore, the relative prius cannot be the beginning
of the positive philosophy, then it must be the absolute prius, which has no
necessity to move itself into being. If it passes over into being, then this can
only be the consequence of a free act, of an act that can only be something
purely empirical, that can be fully apprehended only a posteriori, just as every
act is incapable of being comprehended a priori and is only capable of being
known a posteriori.
The positive philosophy is not empiricism, at least insofar as it does not
start out from experience—neither in the sense that it presumes to posses its
object in an immediate experience (as in mysticism), nor in the sense that it
attempts to attain to its object through inferences drawn from something
given in experience, such as an empirical fact (for I must still exclude even this
to distinguish positive philosophy from [128] rational dogmatism that, in its
proof for the existence of God, makes partial use of empirical facts, such as the
purposive arrangement of nature). But if positive philosophy does not start out
from experience, then nothing prevents it from going toward experience, and
thereby proving a posteriori what it has to prove, that its prius is God, that is,
that which is above being [das überseyende]. For what it begins with is a
priori—but a priori it is not God, only a posteriori is it God. That it is God is
not a res naturae, something that is self-evident, but is a res facti, and can there-
fore only be proved factually. It is God. This proposition does not mean the
concept of this prius is equal to the concept of God. It means that this prius is
God, not according to its concept, but according to its reality. Of course, if pos-
itive philosophy does not start out from experience, then it must be an a priori
science. To this extent it is thus again no different from the negative philoso-
phy, for what we have ascribed to the positive philosophy also holds for the
applicable copyright law.

negative, namely, that it does not start out from experience but goes toward
experience. They do indeed relate in this way, but the difference is this: posi-
tive and negative philosophy each has a position toward experience, but each is
different. For the latter experience confirms but does not prove [erweisend].
Rational philosophy has its truth in the immanent necessity of its progress; as

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 180 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
we said earlier, it is so independent of existence that it would be true even if
nothing existed. If that which actually occurs in experience agrees with its con-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

structions then this is something gratifying, something to which the construc-

tion indeed refers, but with which it does not really prove anything.xiv The
position of positive philosophy is entirely different. It enters into experience
itself and grows, as it were, together with it. It too is an a priori science, but the
prius from which it proceeds is not simply before all experience, so that it must
necessarily move [129] forward into experience, but rather it is above all expe-
rience, and thus there is no necessary transition into experience for this prius.
From this prius, positive philosophy derives in a free thought and in an evi-
dentiary sequence that which is a posteriori or that which occurs in experience,
not as what is possible, as in the negative philosophy, but as what is real. It
derives it as what is real, for only as such does it have the meaning and the force
of proof. So that I make myself completely clear: not the absolute prius itself
will be proved (this is above all proof, since it is the absolute and through itself
indubitable beginning), thus, not it itself (the absolute prius) will be proved, but
rather what the consequences are that follow from this, these must be factually
proved, and only thereby do we prove the divinity of that prius—that it is God,
and that God therefore exists. Consequently, we will say that the prius, whose
concept is such and such (that of what is above being), will be capable of having
such a consequence (we will not say that it will necessarily have such a conse-
quence, for then we would fall back again into necessity, that is, fall back into a
movement determined solely by concepts. We should rather only say it can have
such a consequence if it wishes, since the consequence is contingent on its will).
This consequence, however, really exists (this proposition is one founded now
in experience: the existence of such a consequence is a datum, a fact of experi-
ence). This datum, thus, shows us—the existence of such a consequence shows
us—that the prius itself also exists in the way we have conceived it, that is, that
God exists. You see that in this manner of argumentation the prius is always
the point of departure, that is, it always remains the prius. The prius will be
known from its consequences, but not in a way such that the consequences had
preceded it. The preposition ‘a’ in ‘a posteriori’ does not in this instance signify
the terminus a quo; in this context ‘a posteriori’ means ‘per posterius’: through its
consequence the prius is known. To be known a priori means just this: to be
known from and out of the prius; what is known a priori is, thus, that which a
prius possesses and from which it is known. The absolute prius, however, is
what has no prius from which it can be known. To be the absolute prius means,
therefore, not to be known a priori. [130] Here, in the positive philosophy, lies
applicable copyright law.

the real empiricism insofar as that which occurs in experience itself becomes
an element of and an assistant to philosophy.

xiv. Compare this to Schelling’s remarks on page 60ff. above, and remarks made in the
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, I/5, 376.—ED.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 181
To express this distinction in the sharpest and most concise manner: the
negative philosophy is a priori empiricism, it is the Apriori [Apriorismus] of
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

what is empirical, but, for this very reason, it is not itself empirical. Conversely,
the positive philosophy is an empirical Apriori, or it is the empiricism of what
is a priori insofar as it proves that the prius per posterius exists as God.
From the perspective of the world, positive philosophy is an a priori sci-
ence, which is nonetheless derived from the absolute prius; from the perspec-
tive of God, it is a posteriori science and knowledge.xv
The experience towards which positive philosophy proceedsxvi is not just
of a particular kind, but is the entirety of all experience from beginning to end.
What contributes to the proof is not a part of experience, but all [131] of expe-
rience. For precisely this reason, though, this proof itself is not just the begin-
ning or a part of a science (least of all some type of syllogistic proof posited at
the apex of philosophy), it is the entire science, that is, the entire positive
philosophy—and this is nothing other than the progressive, strengthening
with every step, and continually growing proof of the actually existing God.
Because the realm of reality in which this proof moves is not finished and com-
plete—for even if nature is now at its end and stands still, there is, nonetheless,
still the unrelenting advance and movement of history—because insofar as the
realm of reality is not complete, but is a realm perpetually nearing its consum-
mation, the proof is therefore also never finished, and for this very reason this
science is only a Philo-sophie. For the science of reason is philosophy to the
extent it seeks and possesses only at its terminus that which is the object of the
most supreme knowing (that is, the sofi/a) and possesses this only at the end
of its path in a concept. The other side, which has the task of reaching this not
merely as an object found or remaining to be known or cognized, but as an
object actually known and cognized, the positive side is philosophy since it
achieves its goal only when the proof is provided not in its individual compo-
nents, but rather only in its continual development. Here, by the way, lies the

xv. One usually understands by a posteriori knowledge that type in which one, for example, infers
backwards from the effect to the cause. The order of the proof here is the reverse of the actual
matter, for the effect is as such only the conclusion, only the result; the cause, however, precedes
it, it is the antecedent. In such an inference, what is the consequence according to its nature
becomes something artificial in order to benefit the proof, and is, thus, accepted as what is logi-
cally antecedent (and for precisely this reason the proof means an a posteriori proof, that is, a
proof in which what is actually the posterior is made into the logical prius, into the point of depar-
ture). Conversely, that which is the antecedent according to its nature—the cause—here in the
proof becomes a logical conclusion, a consequence. In the positive philosophy, however, this is not
an a posteriori proof in the usual sense of the word, for we progress not from the effect to the
cause, but, conversely, from the cause to the effect; the cause, which according to its nature is that
applicable copyright law.

which precedes, is in this way here also the prius of the proof. It follows from this (natural)
arrangement of cause and effect that here, while the causa (God) a posteriori or per posterius is
proved or demonstrated, the conclusion (the world) is deduced or comprehended a priori.
xvi. In earlier lectures of the author, the positive philosophy was also designated as a progressive
Empiricism, since it was not regressive, that is, it did not proceed backwards from experience
toward that which is above experience.—ED.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 182 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
central difference between philosophy and mathematics, in particular, geome-
try, which is a pure science of reason as well. For even the negative philosophy
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

distinguishes itself from geometry, in that with every proposition it reaches or

posits, the postulate of a consequence is simultaneously provided, and, thus, the
reality of everything that has previously been posited can only be tentatively
pronounced, since it is based on a consequence: the first potency holds only
insofar as the second potency follows it; this, only insofar as the third follows
it—whereas the first book, even the first, second, and third propositions of
Euclid could stand on their own and would remain true even if the human
understanding had never come across them. In particular, however, the object
of the positive philosophy is the object of a proof that is, while of course suffi-
cient at earlier levels, [132] nonetheless still incomplete; there could always
arise in a resulting stage a contradiction of an earlier postulate. In this context,
even the present is no limit, but is here a view that still opens onto a future that
will also be nothing other than the progressive proof of the existence of the
power that rules over being, of that which is no longer just the being with
which negative philosophy busies itself, but is rather that which is above being.
This entire philosophy is, therefore, an always advancing knowledge, always
nothing other than a philo-sophia, never rigid or stagnant, and, thus, in this
sense, a dogmatic science. For this reason, however, even this proof is only a
proof for those who want to think and move forward, and, thus, only for the
wise. It is not like a proof of geometry, with which one can coerce those of even
the most limited abilities, and even the dumb, whereas I can coerce no one to
become wise through experience if he does not want to, and this is why the
psalm says: “the foolish speak in their hearts: there is no God.”41
The positive philosophy is the truly free philosophy; whoever does not
want it should just as well leave it alone. I propose it to everyone freely. I only
maintain that if one wants the actual chain of events, if he wants a freely cre-
ated world, and so on, he can have all of this only via the path of such a phi-
losophy. If the rational philosophy satisfies him, and he longs for nothing
beyond it, then he should just as well stay with it, only he must give up the
desire to possess within the rational philosophy that which it by no means can
possess, namely, the real God, the actual chain of events, and a free relation-
ship of God to the world. The confusion that now reigns over this matter must
cease. No one can appreciate the rational philosophy more than I; indeed, I
would consider university students lucky if there was again a purely rational
philosophy taught in the schools. For I do not concede that those who now
boast of being rationalists are indeed rationalists; they are instead nothing less
than this: those who produce a repulsive mixture of rational and suprarational
applicable copyright law.

philosophy, whereby neither of the two is done justice.[133]

There emerges at this point yet another difference between the negative
and positive philosophy. The former is an entirely self-enclosed science that
has arrived at an unchanging conclusion, and is, thus, in this sense a system; in
contrast, the positive philosophy cannot in the same sense be called a system

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 183
precisely because it is never absolutely closed. If, on the other hand, one under-
stands by ‘system’ a philosophy that determines and distinguishes itself through
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

positive assertions (in this sense, so many individuals long for a system and
consider themselves lucky to be the proclaimers of such a thing, for everyone,
even the most incompetent, loves to proclaim something, ignoring Lessing’s
words that in order to assert something there should be above all a something
to be asserted, a fact because of which the negative philosophy—which, strictly
speaking, is one that affirms nothing—must inevitably be driven beyond its
limitations)—in this second sense, under which one understands a totality of
knowledge that serves as the basis for a magnificent declaration, in this sense
the negative philosophy is not a system. Positive philosophy, in contrast, as pre-
eminently affirming, is in this sense, in an eminent way, a system. To note these
different meanings of system is certainly worth the trouble.
Let us now assume that even something like revelation is found among
the realities of experience to which positive philosophy advances. If this were
so, positive philosophy could approach revelation no differently than it
approaches real nature, real humanity, and real consciousness: namely, from
and out of its prius. Revelation is thus neither its source nor its point of depar-
ture, as it is in the so-called Christian philosophy from which it is in this
respect toto coele different. Revelation will be present within positive philoso-
phy in no other sense than nature or the entire history of the human race is
also present within it; revelation will exert on it no different authority than
what every other object exerts on the science that deals with it. For example,
the empirically observed movements of the planets are to such an extent an
authority for the theories of astronomy that these theories for quite some time
could not be considered to be perfectly exact and correct, since [134] the actu-
ally observed movements did not agree with those that had been predicted.
Thus, every object of the natural sciences certainly exerts an undeniable
authority on the science that is concerned with it.
Furthermore, and although so much is already apparent, namely, that
this philosophy has the content of religion as its own, it will nonetheless refuse
to call itself, or allow itself to be called, a religious philosophy. For it would then
have to be called the negative, for example, the irreligious philosophy, and with
this an injustice would be done to the negative, even though it can encompass
religion only as the religion of absolute subjectivity, not as objective or, indeed,
as revealed. If there is a truly irreligious doctrine, it should not be termed an
irreligious philosophy, for to do so would be to accord it too much. An irreli-
gious doctrine is just as little a philosophy as a fundamentally unethical doc-
trine can be a philosophy, since, on the contrary, and as often pointed out, only
applicable copyright law.

that philosophy has earned the right to call itself a philosophy that has ful-
filled the truly scientific demand that all of its essential concepts have just as
much a profound ethical significance as they do a speculative significance.
This is also why the positive philosophy must refuse the title of a religious phi-
losophy, since through it the true concept and content of religion will first be

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 184 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
discovered. These concepts, therefore, cannot already be presupposed, and as
soon as one does not presuppose them, this title becomes completely ambigu-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

ous. For while there are no different ethical systems, there are, no doubt, dif-
ferent religions: even the heathen has religion, and the modern Christian, who
edifies himself according to the hours of his worship or other classical and
insipid works, nonetheless believes that he too has religion. One could then go
still further and site Christian philosophy, but there are so many very differ-
ent viewpoints that call themselves Christian that one must, to speak quite
decisively, go yet a step further and site Catholic philosophy (as has already
occurred in a party in France and in some parts of Germany). One could then
place this philosophy in opposition to Protestant science and Protestant phi-
losophy, and somehow find it advantageous to use the first predicate mostly in
a Catholic land and the other in [135] a Protestant land. But a philosophy that
must call on Catholicism or Protestantism for help has either never been any-
thing or, more to the point, has nothing more to be. One would thus have to
leave the general title of a religious philosophy to those who somehow see an
advantage in it so that they can, right from the start, cast suspicion on every
other philosophy with which it finds itself in collision or is afraid of coming
into collision with, and, in this way, to create for itself a privileged position.
One could, if we rejected revelation as a formal principle, as a princip-
ium cognoscendi, for every philosophy, and thus also for the positive (since one
who wants to and can believe does not engage in philosophy, and one who
does philosophize announces therewith that mere faith does not satisfy
him)—one could, I contend, in order to show that a positive philosophy is
nonetheless necessarily a Christian philosophy, point to the material depend-
ency of all new philosophies on Christianity. For as one would say, philosophy
of its own accord would have never come across these subjects and, still less,
across this perspective toward these subjects without the preceding light of
revelation. Yet to say even this would again prove too much. For in quite the
same way one could thrust the title of empiricism on every philosophy, for nei-
ther would there have been a philosophy at all, nor a philosophy with this con-
tent, as in the ancients and moderns, if there were not such a world as is found
in experience. If, however, a particular philosophy is meant that seeks to com-
prehend within itself that which lies beyond nature and the entire unending
treasures of the human world, and thus especially encompasses the great his-
torical phenomena of Christianity in both its development and as a part of
that history—it goes without saying that such a philosophy, as soon as it lays
its foundation, must have also thought about Christianity. Yet even this obser-
vation contains nothing that is particularly and especially characteristic about
applicable copyright law.

Christianity. For whoever proposes a comprehensive philosophy and can hope

to really lead it to its conclusion must think far further, must have already sur-
veyed everything beforehand and have [136] taken everything into his calcu-
lations. Nevertheless, if one considers this line of thinking that seeks to
remind philosophy of its historical and material dependency on Christianity,

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 185
if one thinks of a philosophy that has left Christianity completely outside
itself, then the sense of this line of thinking is this: even this later philosophy
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

could not have come this far if it had not had Christianity as its historical
foundation. This is indeed something true, yet also something so general that
it again loses all reference to the particular; for not only philosophy, but also
the state or human affairs overall—where would they find themselves if
Christianity had not existed? Can one, if the discussion is about the most
insignificant phenomenon of the present, remove a piece of the immense past
without promptly making the present impossible? Would it be possible to
extract from a person, as through a chemical process, that which confers upon
him a past and present? What would remain other than the merely vacuous
title of ‘self ’ or ‘ego,’ with which he could achieve little, or, to put it more accu-
rately, absolutely nothing?
That person for whom true philosophy and Christian philosophy are
synonymous expressions must above all form a higher idea of Christianity
itself than the habitual notion that Christianity is a merely historical phenom-
enon that first appeared in the world approximately eighteen hundred years
ago. He must grasp Christianity as that which is truly universal, that which,
therefore, even serves as the very foundation of the world, and as a result of this
say: It is as old as the world (in a different sense of course than the English
deist Tindal who, as is well known, wrote a book with this title in which
Christianity is made into a mere natural religion, about which it is then easy
to say that it is as old as creation and human reason42). If Christianity is under-
stood merely as a historical phenomenon, our philosophy would then be
dependent on it, even if we see in Christ only a Socrates of a higher type; for
without a Socrates, and without a Plato and Aristotle, our philosophy would
be an entirely different one. Who [137] could it occur to in this sense to deny
the external historical dependency of our entire culture and, to this extent, of
philosophy, on Christianity? Through this dependency, even the content of our
thought, and thus even the content of philosophy, is determined; it would not,
however, be the content of philosophy if it remained perpetually in this
dependency, that is, if it were only to be accepted on authority. If Christianity
is really the content of philosophy, then with this it becomes the content of our
own thought, it becomes for us our own insight, independent of all authority. I
would like to explain myself further on this subject through a simile. As is well
known, the four moons of Jupiter are only visible for normal eyes through a tel-
escope; yet there are nonetheless people with such farsighted vision that they
can see the moons without a telescope. This fact first came to my attention
through Zimmermann’s book on experience. Thereafter I often had the oppor-
applicable copyright law.

tunity to observe this myself and have known a woman, among others, who is
still alive who actually saw the four satellites with her naked eye. Put to the test
in the presence of an astronomer and a physicist, she sketched a drawing of the
momentary positions of the satellites vis-à-vis each other and Jupiter; a sketch
that was then found to be in the most precise agreement with the positions as

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 186 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
they appeared in the telescope. Now it is further the case that a small fixed star,
which we could not perceive with the naked eye, can be immediately seen even
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

with the naked eye when one has caught sight of it beforehand through a tel-
escope. I do not doubt that there are more people than one thinks who in this
way could see the four moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. Such people, how-
ever, are no longer dependent on the telescope. They really see the four stars
with only their eyes. In precisely the same way, philosophy would not have
known some things without revelation, or at least it would not have discerned
them as it has. Yet philosophy can now see these objects with its own eyes,
since in regard to all truths, even the revealed, it is only philosophy to the extent
that it transforms them into independent truths known for oneself [selb-
sterkannte]. [138] Of course, if a philosophy proposes not to exclude the great
phenomenon of Christianity, but, rather, to comprehend it if possible just like
other things and in connection with everything else, then philosophy must
necessarily expand its concepts beyond their previous limits in order to be a
match for this phenomenon, just as, in exactly the same manner, other objects
impose upon the science that relates to them the necessity to correct their con-
cepts, and to augment them according to circumstances, until they find them-
selves at the same expanse as that of their objects. As one would now declare
any philosophy incomplete that had excluded nature from itself, so too would
a philosophy in no way be complete that could not comprehend Christianity.
For Christianity is one of the greatest and most significant phenomena of the
world. It is in its way just as good a reality as nature and has the right, just as
every other phenomenon, to be left in its singularity and not to be misrepre-
sented only in order to be capable of the next best thing, that is, of applying to
it an explanation accessible to everyone. In recent times, Christianity has actu-
ally been included among the objects of philosophical consideration. Yet the
sincere inquirer soon discovers that it is not to be gotten hold of with the
merely logical systems, no matter how unnaturally they extend themselves
beyond their borders. For it is then a matter of robbing not only its external
character, but its internal and historical character as well—a direction at which
all previous attempts to rationalize Christianity have ultimately aimed. Still it
is by no means just revelation that requires philosophy to advance beyond the
merely logical systems; as we have seen, it is a necessity that lies in philosophy
itself that propels it beyond the merely logical.xvii With this, the concept of the
philosophy of revelation as such is already justified. [139]

xvii. I have also, albeit only in preliminary expositions, posited positive and negative philosophy in
applicable copyright law.

opposition to each other as the historical and the ahistorical [ungeschichtliche], and then explained
what these expressions mean; only the expressions circulate, whereas the explanations most often
do not proceed beyond the immediate circle [of students]. Accordingly, historical philosophy was
understood as if, within it, knowledge was drawn directly out of historical matter as through an
alchemical process and all a priori procedures abandoned. Others thought that historical philoso-
phy was to be understood as what one would otherwise call the philosophy of history, and brought

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 187
One has sought to make the expression ‘philosophy of revelation’ accept-
able, and spoken of a ‘revealed philosophy’ [Offenbarungsphilosophie].This offered
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

an immediate advantage, namely, to create the belief that it is a question of a

philosophy drawn from revelation, subject to the authority of revelation that it
consequently ceases to be real philosophy, a freely created science. Whoever
followed the development of this philosophy immediately discovered that this
is not so, since ‘philosophy of revelation’ is meant in exactly the same sense as
in similar constructions—philosophy of nature, philosophy of history, philoso-
phy of art and so on—that is, that in this construction, revelation is proposed
as an object and not as a source or authority. Thus, according to what has just
been said, it is at best an authority in the same sense as every [140] object of
nature and history is an authority that, when intellectually considered, exercises
an authority over thought. The mistaken opinion, therefore—intentionally or
unintentionally aroused by the expression ‘revealed philosophy’—disappeared
for those who informed themselves further; for most of those who did not have
the opportunity or the will to inform themselves, this prejudice remains in
place. One knows how much is superficially won against a subject—whose
refutation one gladly avoids since one has not yet comprehended it—through
the arousal of such a prejudice. One now says without hesitation ‘natural phi-
losophy’ instead of ‘philosophy of nature,’ and this long-lived habit has made
the misunderstanding impossible, as if ‘natural philosophy’ were somehow the
antithesis of ‘art philosophy’ [Kunstphilosophie], and as if one could speak in the
same manner of ‘natural philosophers’ and ‘art philosophers,’ just as one has had
the opportunity in recent times to hear of ‘nature poets’ and ‘art poets.’ But to
say, instead of the ‘philosophy of government,’ the ‘government’s philosophy,’
one will guard against this, if only because under the latter one may well under-
stand a philosophy protected and supported by the government or one
arranged according to the momentary principles of the government’s adminis-
tration—a philosophy of which one has certainly also had examples.

(continued) in connection with this The Ages of the World, which they arbitrarily—without provid-
ing any reason for doing so—called ‘the four ages of the world.’ A different misunderstanding was
that in the future, instead of philosophy, there will be instituted and taught just a genetic develop-
ment of philosophy that would have as its basis the history of philosophy. I must allow my con-
temporaries to once again experience justice, so that at least in this matter you will have not,
through too great expectations, put me in an embarrassing position. When the geometrician
proves from the nature of the triangle that the sum of its angles equals two right angles, this fol-
lows from the nature of the triangle devoid of any other movement save that of my thinking:
between the object itself and its attributes there is nothing in the middle save my thought. The tri-
angle itself does not somehow precede these attributes, nor does something precede it through
which it would assume these attributes. The triangle exists only according to its concept, that is, it
applicable copyright law.

is more truly logical than its attributes. If Spinoza used this geometrical truth as an example to
illustrate how, in his opinion, the individual finite things follow from God’s nature, namely, in just
as timeless and eternal way, then his explanation of the world was indeed ahistorical, and, in con-
trast to it, the Christian doctrine that the world is the result of a free decision, of an action, is to
be called a historical explanation. The expression ‘historical,’ when used by philosophy, refers, thus,
not to the manner of knowing in it, but exclusively to the content of the knowing.

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 188 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
Accordingly, one could have just as well let the matter stand with the title phi-
losophy of revelation. But some have gone still further and have used revealed
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

philosophy as the title of an entire philosophical system, of which the philos-

ophy of revelation was only a component or an application, as one, in precisely
the same way, once termed ‘natural philosophy’ not merely a component of the
system that dealt primarily with nature, but an entire system, with the intent,
in part, to make the entire system suspect, as if it were a doctrine like that of
the French encyclopedists, for which material nature, and thus matter as such,
would be the only reality. Regarding revelation, one can distinguish two dif-
ferent kinds of philosophy: one for which the content of revelation is some-
thing absolutely incomprehensible, and so not appropriate for thought, and the
other that has the means [141] to comprehend its content. Yet on this account,
one will not specifically call the latter a revealed philosophy, for it will extend
to and comprehend still more and different objects than simple revelation will,
and it will comprehend these only because it has already grasped something
different, namely, the actual God. For a God who is merely an idea of reason
does not allow an actual religion or, much less, an actual revelation to be con-
ceived. Let us call the philosophy that comprehends the actual God—and,
thus, in general, not simply the possibility, but the actuality of things—the pos-
itive philosophy, and so the philosophy of revelation will be a consequence of,
or even a component of it, but the philosophy of revelation will not be the pos-
itive philosophy itself, which, in the former sense, one had gladly advanced as
a revealed philosophy, that is, a philosophy drawn solely from revelation.
Next, I would like to correct yet another possible misunderstanding.
Whoever hears the word ‘revelation’ can imagine simply the act through which
the divine becomes the cause or author of representations in any one individ-
ual human consciousness. Those theologians who do not find the content of
Christian revelation to be inherently true, but only because those individuals
through whom the content was proclaimed had been inspired from God him-
self, must lay particular importance on this act. Now I do not want to deny that
in the philosophy of revelation a point may well arise in which the possibility
or impossibility of revelation in this sense is also investigated. Yet in the phi-
losophy of revelation, this question will always only be a subordinate one, and
if it receives an answer at all then it will be answered as a consequence of the
investigation that extends beyond this particular question. The philosophy of
revelation refers not to the merely formal element of a divine act, which in any
case would only be a particular one. It refers to what is general in revelation,
and, above all, to its content and to the great, general context in which this
content alone is comprehensible. The [142] content of revelation is first of all
applicable copyright law.

a historical content, but not in the vulgar or temporal sense. It is a content that
indeed is revealed at a determinate time, that is, intervenes in worldly phe-
nomena. Yet according to its subject matter it is nonetheless veiled and hidden,
as it was present and prepared “before laying the foundation of the world,”
before the foundation of the world had been laid, whose origin and proper

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 Metaphysical Empiricism 189
understanding thereof leads back to that which is beyond this world.43 It is
this type of content that should become the content of philosophy within the
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

philosophy of revelation. If this is seriously meant, that is, should this content
in its entire truth and authenticity become the actual content of philosophy,
then you see that a philosophy capable of incorporating this content in this
way must be constituted totally differently from those that have previously
ruled in most circles. This is, however, seriously intended with the philosophy
of revelation. As its first principle, it must be proposed (and was proposed) that
this combination of philosophy and revelation does not occur at the cost either
of philosophy or of revelation, that neither component will relinquish anything
nor suffer any violence. Let us consider revelation only in a certain improper
sense, in which every unexpected expansion of human consciousness or
unforeseen enlightenment could become a part of a science so that it could be
called the revelation of the spirit of this science—to comprehend a revelation
in this sense would indeed be an easy task, but not one that is appropriate for
philosophy. Just as if one acknowledged as the content of revelation (and it is
above all a question of this content, for with the content the chain of events will
be comprehended as a matter of course) only general or so-called rational
knowledge, so that to be capable of resolving the highly particular truths of
revelation into such general truths one had to take refuge in the distinction of
content from form or garment—once again it would not be worth the trouble
to deal with revelation. If revelation contained nothing more than what is in
reason, then it [143] would have absolutely no interest; its sole interest can only
consist in the fact that it contains something that exceeds reason, something
that is more than what reason contains. How something that exceeds reason
can be conceived and how it can even be actually thought in many instances
will be shown later. Is not everything that one learns only through experience
something that exceeds reason? And what occurs in the general history of
humankind, often in the acts and deeds of exceptional individuals, is this not
something that cannot be comprehended through reason alone? A reasonable
man is, thus, still no hero of world history.
In practice, it would not be worth the trouble to concern oneself with
revelation if it were not something special, if it contained nothing more than
what one already had without it. I should probably not, right at the beginning,
state my rejection of this means of instruction by which others are used to
being helped. Some could feel from the outset already rebuffed, or at least dis-
inclined toward the investigation. I do not at all expect to be judged accord-
ing to prejudices and provisional remarks alone. Whoever seeks to listen to me
listens to the end. It could very well be that in this case he would find some-
applicable copyright law.

thing completely different from what, commensurate with his existing and
somewhat narrow opinions, he expected to find, something against which the
customary (and these days well-known) objections to everything that exceeds
reason would find no use. I would like, however, to point out the following. If

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188
 190 Grounding of Positive Philosophy
revelation is a reality and is actually something factual—and we must presup-
pose this, for if what is factual in it were merely its general wording, then nor-
Copyright © 2007. SUNY Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or

mal knowledge would be sufficient to comprehend it—to realize that it is

actually something factual no doubt requires still other historical mediations
and corroborations than what until now have been a part of revelation. If it is
to be substantiated at all, it will only be substantiated in a higher historical
context, in a higher context that extends beyond itself and Christianity as a
special phenomenon, thus, in a context different [144] from the one we usu-
ally have in mind. In this regard, I refer for the moment to the lectures on the-
ology in my talk On University Studies, the fundamental thought of which is
that the concept of Christianity as a revelation is possible only in the context
not merely of earlier (Old Testament) revelations, but only within the context
of religious development overall, and especially of Heathendom. For my part,
I blame no one who, without thinking of this mediation, without being famil-
iar with it, is prepared and, indeed, even determined to abandon revelation as
fact, and with this solve the problem in the quickest manner, through the
removal of its object. However, in what follows even this—the historical
mediation of the fact—will be addressed and taken care of. The great and cen-
tral question will always be how, given the presuppositions, exactly as they are
stated regarding the reality of revelation, a philosophy could be consistent with
this, and yet not be second-rate, but rather one worthy of this name. Although
it would seem natural to first secure the facts correctly, before one undertakes
an investigation into the means of comprehending revelation philosophically,
in this context the matter comports itself differently. For I have already con-
ceded, and others will concede it still more willingly, that such an undertaking
cannot be executed with a philosophy as it now exists. To be sure, no philoso-
phy has yet been able to neglect seeking a relationship revelation, and even
Kant allowed this to be his final principle that established the relationship of
his philosophy to Christianity (for presumably Kant’s Religion within the
Limits of Pure Reason—the primary foundation of vulgar rationalism—has not
yet been fully forgotten). Yet the relationship that real philosophy and revela-
tion found with each other was still, for both elements, such a forced and awk-
ward one that it dissolved itself again of its own accord. It could never last, and
on the contrary, every sincere thinker must prefer the manifestly antagonistic
relationship that philosophy has (earlier and otherwise often enough)
assumed toward Christianity to such a false [145] and untrue relationship.
From this follows what has already been stated: that a philosophy of revela-
tion is not conceivable without an expansion of philosophy beyond its current
limits. Yet an expansion of philosophy intended just for the sake of revelation
applicable copyright law.

would, no doubt, have quite an ambiguous reputation. We have nonetheless

already substantiated such an expansion in our previous lectures, an expansion
that appears to us as the consequence of a necessity present within philosophy
itself. But precisely the last point of this discussion has again placed us before
that seemingly insuperable duality, according to which philosophy cannot help

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 6/12/2025 6:37 PM via UNIVERSITY
OF ALBERTA LIBRARIES
AN: 205599 ; F. W. J. Schelling.; The Grounding of Positive Philosophy : The Berlin Lectures
Account: s5940188