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SCHELLING'S OF HEGELSSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE
STEPHENHOULGATE
ing lecture in the years after Hegel's death in 1831 and were receptive
to his critique of the HegeUan system.2 Furthermore, many leading
twentieth-century continental philosophers, including especially
Heidegger and Habermas, studied Schelling closely and have taken up
positions vis-?-vis Hegel which are recognizably ScheUingian in origin
and which have influenced other philosophers in turn.3 Schelling's cri
The Review ofMetaphysics 53 (September 1999): 99-128. Copyright ? 1999 by The Review of
Metaphysics
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100 STEPHENHOULGATE
begs the main question against Hegel and in so doing distorts the lat
ter's ideas.
The aim of this essay is to draw attention to the assumptions un
sively that Hegel's account of the world is correct and should be pre
ferred over others in the phUosophical tradition (such as those of
fered by Leibniz or Spinoza). It simply sets out to show that there is
no good reason to assume from the outset, with Schelling and many of
his adherents, that Hegelian dialectical thought is fundamentaUy mis
In particular, as wiU become clear below, Iwish to show that
guided.
ScheUing and his foUowers are wrong to claim that Hegel's dialectical
thought is by its very nature incapable of doing justice to existence.
Of course, to challenge this assumption is to challenge one of the cen
tral tenets of continental phUosophy as a whole: for it is to challenge
the belief shared by many continental ph?osophers that, whatever
4The most
thorough English-language study of Schelling's Hegelkritik,
besides Bowie's book, is Alan White's Absolute Knowledge (cited above, note
2). An important recent German study of Schelling's relation to Hegel is to
be found in Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Die Grenzen der Vernunft. Eine Unter
suchung zu Zielen und Motiven des Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am
Main: Anton Hain, 1991), 245-68.
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 101
else is to be said about it, existence has to be construed as expUcitly
II
"only contains the pure What of that thing, but nothing of the That, of
existence."7 Human reason, for SchelUng, is by no means cut off from
5See F. W. J.
ScheUing, S?mmtliche Werke (hereafter USW'), ed. K. F. A.
SchelUng, Part I, 10 vols.; Part II, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61), 10:126
64. For the English translation of these lectures, see F. W. J. Schelling, On
theHistory ofModern Philosophy (hereafter "OHMP"), trans. Andrew Bowie
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134-63.
6See
SW, 11/3:1-174. All translations from the lectures on the introduc
tion to the phUosophy of revelation are my own. Itmight, ?f course, be possi
ble to formulate alternative ScheUingian criticisms of Hegel based on earlier
texts of Schelling which do not address Hegel's philosophy expUcitly. In this
essay, however, I restrict myself to SchelUng's own direct critique of Hegel
and its background in the distinction he draws between negative and positive
phUosophy.
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102 STEPHENHOULGATE
the truth altogether; it is quite capable of establishing from within it
self the true nature (or at least aspects of the true nature) of the ob
jects it considers. Yet it cannot determine by itself whether those ob
jects actually exist in the world.8 Reason can thus prove that a
triangle has three sides and angles adding up to 180 degrees, but by it
self it cannot determine whether there are actually any
triangular
shapes in the world. Similarly, "reason can under given circum
stances certainly know the nature of the plant from out of itself, but
never its actual, present existence (Dasein)."9 To understand what
7 aber von
SW, 11/3:83: unur das reine Was desselben enth?lt, nichts
dem Da?, von der Existenz." See also SW, 11/3:59.
8SW, 11/3:60 and 101-2.
QSW, 11/3:172.
10On
Schelling's view that the existence of particular things in nature
can only be confirmed a posteriori by sensuous experience or Vorstellung,
see SW, 11/3:61-2,171, and 173. On his view that the existence of God (and of
other minds) can only be confirmed a posteriori by pure, nonsensuous expe
rience or Vorstellung, see SW, 11/3:113,169,171, and 173, and Beach, The Po
tencies ofGod(s), 148 and 172. Note that alongside the more famUiar sensu
ous empiricism, ScheUing thus propounds a theory of metaphysical
empiricism, according to which we can directly intuit that which is not given
to the senses; see SW, 11/3:114.
11The translation of Vorstellung would thus be "presenta
appropriate
tion" rather than "representation." I have elected to leave the term untrans
lated in this essay, however, as the etymology of the German word itself pro
vides the clearest indication of its meaning for Schelling.
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OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE
SCHELLING'S 103
ply proves that things have to be conceived in a certain way and that,
insofar as they can indeed be conceived coherently, their existence is
ist, but it can never show us by itself that anything it understands does
exist. Nor can a priori
it prove that anything must exist by virtue of
what it is understood to be, whether that thing be a triangle, a plant or
indeed God. The actual existence of what is conceived by negative
phUosophy can only ever be demonstrated by something other than
l3SW, 11/3:165,148.
14For a lucid account of see Beach, The
Schelling's negative phUosophy,
Potencies of God(s), 95-146. See also John Burbidge, "Contraries and Con
tradictories: Reasoning in Schelling's Late PhUosophy," The Owl of Minerva
16, no. 1 (faU 1984): 55-68.
15
SW, 11/3:104,149, and 155.
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104 STEPHENHOULGATE
when it considers the possibUity of sheer, irreducible being, actuality,
or existence as such.16
As Schelling goes on to explain, however, negative phUosophy
cannot in fact culminate in the thought of the mere possibUity of pure
actuality, because such pure actuality itself cannot be thought to be a
mere possibUity; it can only be thought to be actua?ty. Negative phi
losophy culminates, therefore, in the thought ofthat which must actu
ally exist. Let us look more closely at why this should be.
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OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE
SCHELLING'S 105
than actual be-ing and exist-ing. By virtue of the fact that it only ever
sary being is thus one whose very possibUity makes it actual. For
possibUity.21 This means that the necessity of being itself is not one
that is grounded in possibility, but one that is without any prior
ground. It is the groundless necessity of being's simply being and hav
19
SW, 11/3:167.
20 Immanuel
Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (hereafter UCPR," with
references to pagination in the first [A] and second [B] German editions) ed.
Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg:Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990),A122/B111; English
translations taken from Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(London: MacmUlan, 1929), 116.
21 . . .m?ssen wir von dem ausgehen, was
SW, 11/3:160: ueben darum
ich das blo? Existierende genannt habe, von dem unmittelbar, einfach not
wendig Seienden,"
das notwendig ist, weil es aller Potenz, aller M?glichkeit
zuvorkommt, 166: "Eben darum ist es das notwendig Existierende, weil es
alle vorg?ngige M?glichkeit ausschlie?t, weil es allem K?nnen zuvorko
mmt"
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106 STEPHENHOULGATE
to suggest that logicaUy there could just as easily be (or could just as
easily have been) nothing rather than being. Yet that is by no means
the principal point of the question. For as we have seen, Schelling
thinks that existence as such is actually necessary; the logical possi
bility of nothing is thus not really a possibUity after all. The main
point of Schelling's question, therefore, is not to raise the purely logi
cal possibUity of nothing, but to make us aware that no reason can be
given for the existence that actually and necessarily is. In asking his
cept of being, and then, following from this, the fact of being. As
Spinoza saw, there is first
existence, being, and actuality itself which
exists out of sheer necessity.25
Pure actuality or indubitable existence thus constitutes the one
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 107
thing itself exists. Thus when Schelling claims that we can never
know that something exists simply by understanding what it is, he is
asserting above aU that the actual existence of something can never be
shown to follow from its mere possibUity.
In the case of pure actua?ty or existence as such, however,
ScheUing does not claim that its necessity foUows from itsmere possi
bility. This is because pure actua?ty is precisely that which can never
be merely possible in the first place, but is always and only actua?ty.
There can thus never be the mere possibUity of sheer actuality from
which its actua?ty as such
can follow. The necessity of sheer actua?ty
stems not from any prior possibUity, but from the fact that it can only
ever be pure and simple actuality and so excludes from itself the very
nothing other than the actuality of existing: "the existing is here itself
the concept and the essence."27 To know what existence is, is thus au
tomaticaUy to know that it exists?not because any prior essence or
26
SW, 11/3:167.
27
SW, 11/3:167.
^SeeSW, 1/10:17; OHMP, 51-2; SW, 11/3:156.
29 11/3:70: "Die Veraur?/?, wenn gleich ihr letztes Ziel und Absehen
SW,
nur das Seiende ist, das Ist, kann es doch nicht anders bestimmen, sie hat
keinen Begriff f?r dasselbe, als den des nicht nicht Seienden."
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108 STEPHENHOULGATE
in the mere idea of necessary existence, indeed in the merely negative
concept of such existence.30 Insofar as it stops at the mere idea or
concept of existence, however, negative does not come
philosophy
into full possession of that which it conceives. It does not bring di
rectly before the mind the rea?ty which it thinks. For it only thinks
that which can be found within thought itself?the concept of abso
lutely necessary existence?but does not touch existence itself. Phi
losophy only touches existence itself when it becomes positive philos
ophy.31
Positive philosophy retains the same a priori conception of exist
ence as such or pure actuality as negative It under
philosophy.32
stands such existence to be that which is expUcable through no prior
reason, but which simply and necessarily is?that which is prior to aU
possibUity and so cannot but be actual. Yet positive phUosophy not
only understands the concept of such existence, it brings before the
mind such existence itself. It does so, Schelling explains, by ceasing
to be the work of pure thought alone and becoming the expUcitly co
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 109
capacity to intuit, or bring before the mind, existence as such, but sim
ply that it becomes the expUcit thought of that which Ues outside
thought, of that which is directly ava?able to pure Vorstellung alone.
There are, therefore, in Schelling's scheme of things three differ
ent levels of thought, two of which faUwithin negative phUosophy and
one of which characterizes positive phUosophy. At the first level,
thought conceives of what a thing must be if it is to exist, that is, of the
possibUity of that thing. At the second level, thought conceives of the
necessity of existence as such. At both these levels, the object of
thought remains whoUy within the realm of thought itself, within the
realm of that which can or must be conceived: the object is either the
conceived possibility of a thing or the conceived necessity of exist
ence as such. At the third level, however, the object of thought falls
outside the realm of thought itself, even though it stiU remains the ob
ject of thought. This is because thought now thinks of existence as
such as that which is expUcitly exterior to and other than thought it
self. Note that at none of these
levels does thought itself bring exist
ence as such
directly thebefore
mind; only Vorstellung can do that.
Yet at the third level?found in positive philosophy alone?thought
expUcitly recognizes that existence as such is what cannot be intuited
36
SW, 11/3:163.
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110 STEPHENHOULGATE
gins not with God as fully God, but with God as simple, necessary ex
acknowledge. Hegel also fails to bring before the mind the existence
or thatness of particular, contingent, created things in nature. This is
because for Hegel the object of thought is to be found nowhere but
within thought itself. In other words, Hegel fails to recognize (in
thought) or bring before the mind (through Vorstellung) the very that
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OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE
SCHELLING'S 111
Ill
"Cognition is the Positive," Schelling says, "and only has being (das
Seiende), rea?ty (das Wirkliche), as its object, whereas thinking just
has the possible ... as its
object."38
Hegel's philosophy, for Schelling, is at bottom an example of
edges that Hegel would not have been the target of such strong criti
cism if he had stuck to the idea that the concept merely contains the
structure of what is possible. He would have failed to bring to mind
37
SW, 11/3:164.
38
SW, 1/10:127;OHMP, 134.
39
SW, 1/10:126,141; OHMP, 134,145.
40 147.
SW, 1/10:143^1; 0#MP,
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112 STEPHENHOULGATE
concept is thus not just the structure of possible being for Hegel; it is
what is ultimately actual and real: "das einzig Reale"41 Furthermore,
the concept, for Hegel, is the real ground of nature and the human
world, because it is that which externalizes itself as nature and re
turns to itself as conscious spirit. Hegel thus does not keep his Sci
ence of Logic within the limits of negative phUosophy, but sees it as
the self-sufficient source of positive understanding of existence it
self.42
Why Schelling should object to this understanding of the concept
should be obvious. What Hegel has done, from Schelling's point of
view, is equate pure actua?ty with reason or the concept. Hegel thus
misses what is aU-important for Schelling: the fact that being itself or
pure actua?ty is not just reason, but
existingsheeras such, the sheer
ical," because this overlooks the fact that ultimately existence as such
occurs groundlessly of itself.43
ing but a mode of being of the concept itself, because this conflicts
with Schelling's view that nature is created by the free activity of God,
that is, by the free activity of groundless, necessary existence which
raises itself to expUcit Godhood through its activity of creation.44 In
addition, Schelling objects to (what he takes to be) Hegel's assertion
that every aspect of being as such and nature can be deduced and
known whoUy from within thought, because this goes against the
41
SW, 1/10:126-7,141; OHMP, 134,146.
42
SW, 11/3:80.
43
SW, 11/3:163.
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 113
lung of such existence. It is simply the thought of the least that can be
conceived. It is the thought ofthat which, within thought, "behaves in
relation to what foUows it as a mere minus, as a lack, an emptiness."46
From Schelling's point of view, indeed, the HegeUan thought of pure
being is one in which nothing is actuaUy thought; it is an "un
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114 STEPHENHOULGATE
Yet for Schelling there is no way that a dead tautology which simply
repeats nothing can yield theidea of becoming or any other determi
nation. For Schelling, therefore, whatever necessity leads from pure
being to further concepts in the Logic cannot be a necessity that Ues
in the opening thought of pure being itself, because that thought is
empty and completely immobUe.48
Yet if Hegel cannot move from the concept of being to further
concepts through some dialectic immanent in the thought of pure be
ing itself, how does he progress in his Logic? The only explanation
Schelling can come up with is that the compulsion to move on from
the concept of being Ues within the phUosopher who is doing the
thinking. This compulsion, Schelling teUs us, lies in the fact that
"thought is already used to a more concrete being, a being more full of
content, and thus cannot be satisfied with that meager diet of pure be
(noch) nothing" or that "it is not yet (noch nicht) real being."50 By be
ing recast as not yet real being in this way, pure being is understood
not just as nothing but as harboring the possibUity for real being
which is yet to be fulfiUed, that is, as being in potentia. With the in
terpolation of the word yet (noch), Schelling maintains, pure being is
thus understood as lacking, but also as promising, something which
has yet to be. That is to say, pure being is thought as pointing beyond
48
SW, 1/10:132;OHMP, 138.
49
SW, 1/10:131-2; Oi?MP, 138.
50 141.
SW, 1/10:135; O?MP,
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 115
itself and as heralding real being which is to come. In this way, ScheU
ing claims, the transition is made by the HegeUan phUosopher from
the thought of pure being to the thought of coming to be or becoming.
One moves from pure being to becoming, therefore, not by under
standing pure being as pure being, but by understanding it as not yet
real being and so as pointing forward to the future coming of that real
being itself. In Schelling's view, it is only "with the help of this yet
(noch) [that] Hegel gets to becoming."51 Hegel's dialectic develops,
therefore, because pure being is understood already to be the concept
in its abstract form, though not yet the fuU concept to come.
From Schelling's point of view, Hegel thus perpetrates a double
deception at the beginning of his Logic. He pretends that the concept
of pure being is something that moves itself, when itwould in fact lie
completely immobile if itwere not for the thinking subject; and he pre
tends that the Logic is driven forward by a necessity immanent within
the concept of pure being alone, although it obviously has a goal that it
is striving toward, namely real being.52
thought underlies Levinas's critique of Hegel;54 and the idea that Hegel
abstracts from existence?existence which he must nevertheless pre
suppose?is to be found in Kierkegaard.55 It is clear then, as Andrew
51
SW, 1/10:135; OHMP, 141.
52
SW, 1/10:132; OHMP, 138-9.
53
Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: ?ditions Deno?l/Gonthier, 1981), 281:
ugr?ce au jeu du d?j? et du pas-encore." For an English translation see Glas,
trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Ne
braska Press, 1986), 201.
54
See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay
on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1969), 289: "The Hegelian dialectic is all powerful to reduce this indi
viduality of the tode ti to the concept." See also, Emmanuel Levinas, "Ethics
as First PhUosophy," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: BasU
Blackwell, 1989), 78: "The labor of thought wins out over the otherness of
things and men."
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116 STEPHENHOULGATE
Bowie says, that Schelling's critique of Hegel has set the agenda for
much subsequent phUosophy. But if Schelling has set the modern
agenda in this way, what would be the consequence if Schelling had
actuaUy misunderstood what Hegel had to say? Might not the modern
imperative to go beyond Hegel lose some of its urgency? So just how
accurate is Schelling's reading of Hegel?
IV
being itself; it thus has to direct its attention outward, to what is vorg
estellt and so other than itself, in order to learn what being or exist
ence actuaUy entails. Being itself is thus understood by Schelling to
be an absolute outside of thought, to be absolutely independent of
55 Post
See, for example, S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific
script, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 75: "The speculative result is in so far iUusory, as the
existing subject proposes qua thinker to abstract from "the fact that he is oc
cupied in existing, in order to be sub specie aeterni. Kierkegaard is con
cerned to highUght the existence of the subject, rather than existence as
such. Nevertheless, his interpretation of Hegel is simUar to?and, indeed, in
part indebted to?that of ScheUing.
56 11/3:164.
SW,
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 117
to Schelling, because he thinks that what is conceivable is aU that
there is. He simply understands being as the concept and so fails to
think of, or to bring before the mind through Vorstellung, the sheer
that of being and existing.
The problem with Schelling's criticism is that Hegel does not
share the assumption from which Schelling starts. SpecificaUy, Hegel
does not accept Schelling's view that thought can only arrive through
itself at what is conceivable and possible (or at what ismerely thought
to be necessary and actual). He thus does not accept that being as
such has to be thought of as exceeding the reach of thought. In He
gel's view, thought through itself is already the consciousness or intu
ition of being and existing. It is within itself not just the thought of
what being hypothetica?y would be (or of what itmust be), but the di
rect awareness of existence itself, the direct awareness that there is.
Hegel accepts Schelling's claim against Fichte that being is not merely
there for consciousness, but that it exists prior to consciousness. In
that sense, Hegel agrees with Schelling that being is independent of
thought. But he insists against Schelling that thought is directly aware
from within itself of the very thatness of being. Indeed, for Hegel,
thought is precisely this awareness of being from the very beginning.
It is the awareness that there is and must as such, and it
be existence
is the awareness of particular,
contingent things as existing.57
It is through thinking, therefore, that we are conscious of the par
ticular things we see before us as actuaUy being there. As Hegel notes
in the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit, what we see is, as such,
were, but there is no awareness in our simple seeing of the red that the
red we see is there. For Hegel, it is "the reflection of the soul into it
self, the I, [which] separates this material from itself and gives it ini
tiaUy the determination of being."58 We see red, therefore, but we un
derstand that red to be there, and without thought and understanding
we would have no consciousness of being at aU. Thought thus knows
that what is thought, is, because it knows that being can only be un
derstood to be there.59
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118 STEPHENHOULGATE
Note that Hegel does not claim that thought can prove by itself
that certain particular things?such as Herr pen?have to exist
Krug's
(though he does believe it can prove that there is and must be being as
such). He claims, rather, that thought is what enables us to under
stand the particular, contingent things which we do encounter, not
merely to be something seen or heard, but to be something actuaUy
existing. For Hegel, thought must be able to think existence from
within itself, because it is thought that conceives of there being any
thing in the first place. Now to the extent that thought is aware
through itself that there is being, being cannot be absolutely other
than thought and utterly exceed the reach of thought. Hegel's refusal
to regard being as ultimately exceeding thought is thus not the result
of any desire to reduce everything there is to the concept, but is the
result of his beUef that thought itself, through itself, is what is first
conscious that there is anything at aU.
It should be noted, by the way, that when Hegel turns to consider
nature, he does not conceive of it as that which Ues utterly outside
thought, either. Nature is conceived as being outside of itself, as
again, this does not mean that nature is a mere posit of thought for
Hegel. Nature is independent of and prior to thought. But it is not to
be thought of as utterly outside thought?as utterly exceeding
thought?because thought is directly aware through itself of the very
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 119
In contrast to Hegel, ScheUing beUeves that it is through Vorstel
lung, not thought, that we are conscious of particular things as exist
ing, and that thought merely teUs us what it is that is given to us. The
role of thought, therefore, is not to understand a sensuous content as
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120 STEPHENHOULGATE
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 121
which is why Hegel begins the Logic by talking interchangeably of
pure thought and intuition.68
Of course, to point out that Hegel thinks of thought as inteUectual
intuition does not prove that he is right to do so. It is not my aim in
this essay, however, to prove conclusively that Hegel is right and
anything at all."69 The Logic does not purport to think being, there
fore, but simply the determinations of thought through which any be
ing which might exist must be characterized: what White calls the
"categories fundamental to all possible worlds."70 Robert Pippin takes
a similar line when he claims that the Logic sets out the structure of
intelligibility, but not the structure of being itself. For Pippin, there
fore, Hegel's claim in the section on determinate being in the Logic is
68
WL, 1:82-3; SL, 82.
69Alan
White, "Hegel or ScheUing?" Bulletin of the Hegel Society of
Great Britain 30 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 16.
70
White, Absolute Knowledge, 86.
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122 STEPHENHOULGATE
71Robert
Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Conscious
ness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 188.
72SW, 1/10:134; OHMP, 140.
73
SW, 11/3:149.
74 . . . , in dem noch nichts von
SW, 11/3:167: udas blo? Eocistierende "
einem Wesen, einem Was, zu begreifen ist. See also SW, 11/3:162^3.
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 123
the mind through itself. Dialectical movement is generated, according
to Hegel, by the fact that this pure being without a what is itself expe
rienced by thought first as nothing whatsoever and then as becoming.
nothing but the passing over into, or becoming of, being. As Alan
White correctly notes, the Logic thus "makes its own way" and deter
mines its own path, without anticipating a goal which it is trying to
reach.76 Pace Schelling, the Logic does not obviously have a goal that
it is striving towards, and is not obviously trying to get anywhere.77 It
slips forward in trying to stand still, in trying to stick with sheer being.
Interpreted in this way, Hegel's analysis of being is clearly not
mately unsustainable. This is not to say that for Hegel there is no such
thing as being after all, but rather that being or existence proves to be
not just being, but also becoming, determinacy, quantity, substance,
and eventually reason and nature. From Schelling's perspective, He
75
WL, 1:83,113; Si, 83,106.
76
White, Absolute Knowledge, 57.
77
SW, 1/10:132;OHMP, 139.
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124 STEPHENHOULGATE
indeed contingent, particular) existence that exceeds thought and
which his own thought must always presuppose. From per
Hegel's
spective, however, Schelling's criticism that Hegel is logocentric re
Ues itself on the questionable assumption that thought in itself is re
stricted to what is conceivable and possible, as weU as on the
insufficiently determinate?and so abstract?concept (or Vorstel
lung) of sheer existence as such (das Seiende selbst) outside thought.
For Hegel, being itself does not merely reside outside thought,
but is brought before the mind or intuited by thought itself. Further
more, thought recognizes by itself that such being is not just pure and
simple being, but becoming, determinacy, quantity, substance, reason,
and nature. Schelling, of course, also acknowledges that being itself
or existence as such is more than sheer being or existence. In his
view, such existence turns out
to be the free, creative activity of God.
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 125
ply that the concept of becoming is introduced because with the con
cept of being "something to come which has yet to be is already prom
ised." He consistently maintains that, as he understands it, "being ...
sublates itself and is... the transition into nothing."78 It is clear, how
ever, that ScheUing has to misrepresent the development of the Logic
in the way he does, because he cannot accept that Hegel does actuaUy
begin with the direct thought or inteUectual intuition of being. This is
because thought can never be intuitive in that way, in Schelling's view.
For Schelling, therefore, there can be no real transition from being to
ticular, Schelling has to deny that the development in the Logic is gen
erated immanently by the initial concept, and he has to claim instead
that that development only gets going once the goal has been antici
pated and the initial concept has been judged to faU short of?and so
not yet to be?but also to contain the promise of?and so in a sense al
78
SW, 1/10:135; OHMP, 141, and WL, 1:112; SL, 106.
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126 STEPHENHOULGATE
another possibUity: that the Logic does proceed immanently from the
thought of being as such and that Schelling is incapable of grasping
this because he has simply assumed from the outset that thought by it
self cannot bring being as such before the mind.
I have to acknowledge that the immanent interpretation of He
79
Apart from Alan White and myself, other English-speaking commenta
tors on Hegel who accept that Hegel's dialectic develops immanently out of
itself, without being, as itwere, pulled forward by any presupposed goal, in
clude Richard Dien Winfield and WiUiam Maker. See, for example, Richard
Dien Winfield, Reason and Justice (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988) and Wil
Uam Maker, Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany,
N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994). See also Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and
History: An Introduction toHegel's Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991),
41-76. It should be noted, however, that despite our broad agreement con
cerning Hegel's method, White, Winfield, Maker, and I do not agree about the
relation between thought and being in Hegel. As I understand it, I am the
only one of the four who maintains that Hegel's Logic provides an ontologi
cal account of the basic structure of being as such, rather than a mere cate
gory theory or theory of determinacy.
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SCHELLING'S OF HEGEL'SSCIENCEOF LOGIC
CRITIQUE 127
not to be found at the beginning of the Logic, but later in the text, as
well as in the ph?osophies of nature and spirit. There is nevertheless
an important reason for studying ScheUing's critique of Hegel, because
that critique has introduced a twofold suspicion of Hegel that lingers
to the present day and often overshadows the whole of his system.
First, it is often assumed that Hegelian thought is thought which
progresses by already knowing where it is headed and by drawing
whatever it encounters into a systematic development which it can al
ready foresee. Second, Hegel is often accused of failing to think a cer
tain outside which is the very condition of his own speculative
thought because he absorbs all exteriority into the interiority of what
can be thought. I have tried to show that both of these worries about
Hegel are unfounded, or at least open to serious question. As Alan
White argues, Hegelian thought does not already know where it is
headed, nor does it, as Heidegger maintains, proceed "in accordance
with a predetermined idea of being."80 Rather, HegeUan thought, and
in particular the Logic, makes its own way, and the speculative
thinker in the process of determining the categories does not know
where, if anywhere, he is headed. HegeUan thought thus does not pur
externa?ty. Thought, for Hegel, does think and intuit genuine exter
na?ty, therefore; but just because thought does think such externa?ty,
that externa?ty cannot Ue simply outside of thought.
It is important to counter Schelling's suspicions regarding Hegel's
system, not simply because they distort the argument of the Logic and
so get in the way of an appreciation of the subtlety of that text, but
80See
White, Absolute Knowledge, 57; and Martin Heidegger, Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Blooming
ton: Indiana University Press, 1988), 82.
81For a
critique of Derrida's reading of Hegel, see Stephen Houlgate,
"Hegel, Derrida, and Restricted Economy: The Case of Mechanical Memory,"
Journal of theHistory of Philosophy 34, no. 1 (January 1996): 79-93.
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128 STEPHENHOULGATE
urge readers of Hegel not to assume from the start that they know al
University of Warwick
82This con
paper was originaUy given at a conference entitled Schelling
tra Hegel which was held at the University of Warwick on May 9, 1997. I
should Uke to thank aU those who commented on the paper at the confer
ence, and to acknowledge a particular debt of gratitude to Edward Beach for
the very helpful remarks he made both during the day's proceedings and in
writing after the conference.
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