German Romanticism and Idealism Beyond Nostalgia And Reaction

Romanticism gets treated like a synonym for nostalgia, and German Idealism gets shrunk to a few brand-name thinkers. We push back on both habits by talking with Christopher Satoor, a York University doctoral candidate and founder of the Young Idealist series, about what really happens when philosophy, poetry, art, and science collide in Jena.

Schelling sits at the center of that collision. We dig into why his Naturphilosophie is neither “woo” nor a quaint premodern science lesson, but a serious attempt to rebuild our concept of nature after Cartesian mechanism. That means thinking in terms of living processes, hidden forces, and organic organization, and then asking what it does to our view of mind, creativity, and embodiment when “nature is visible spirit and spirit is invisible nature.” Along the way, we unpack the rift with Fichte, the shadow cast by Hegel, and how later caricatures and missing translations shaped Schelling’s reputation in English-language philosophy.

We also take the political and ethical questions seriously: what the Freedom Essay contributes to debates about evil, freedom, and the limits of purely dialectical stories of progress, and why Schelling’s later “positive philosophy” focuses on existence, facticity, and the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Finally, we connect the stakes to the present, where climate change and environmental catastrophe demand a less mechanized picture of the world and a more holistic way of thinking across disciplines.

If you enjoy deep dives into German Romanticism, German Idealism, Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, philosophy of nature, and freedom, subscribe, share this with a friend who argues about materialism, and leave a review with the biggest idea you’re still wrestling with.

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Transcript

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog. And today I'm here with Christopher Satur, who's a doctoral candidate, good old ABD at the Department of Humanities at York University. His specializations are classical German philosophy, German romanticism, and German idealism, particularly Kant Fichte, and with a special concentration on Schelling, good old Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Joseph. Christopher is also the president, one of the founding members of the Idealist Society of North America, the ISNA. And he is the creator of the Young Idea series on classical German philosophy and post-Kantian thought on YouTube, which you will be able to find linked in the show notes. I am fascinated by this period of philosophy. I was personally trained by a bunch of analytics, one weird continental Nietzschean, and who tried to make Nietzsche into a systematic thinker, which was an interesting attempt on his part. And a Christian Hegelian. So I have read a lot of Kant and Hegel and Fichte and not so much Schelling, actually, but I wanted to have you on because this is your specialty. I've watched some of your videos, and I find it very refreshing to hear these things talked about.

Why Romanticism Gets Labeled Reactionary

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Very interesting question. I interestingly, when I went to college, not university, I was working under, I didn't realize it, under a retired Kantian scholar who already got me interested in people like Coleridge, Wordsworth. And I was reading Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which he he wrote after coming to Germany and studying people like Schiller. He loved Schiller, studied the Schelling's system of transcendental idealism. So I was already, it was already in the background, but really my undergraduate was really was I did all my courses in Kant and Fichte and Hegel. I did, of course, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but I was among a group of group of peers that were kind of obsessed with Kant and Hegel. And something happened in my last year. I kind of I like to say I walked the dark side and got seduced by Deleuze and became a Deleuzian for my master's and wrote a whole master's thesis on it. But really something this tradition kind of opened me up to thinking about thinkers that that Deleuze was you know related to in an interesting way, but not so much. So French spiritualism. So I started reading people like Mandelbiron and Felix Ravesson, and a lot of these thinkers were thinking about spiritualism, but not spiritualism the way that we in the West think. Spiritualism has to do with activity and vitality and vitalism and volunteerism. And I became really interested in vitalism and volunteerism, and this led me to really, really want to understand what it means, what it means to talk about organic philosophy. And so I began reading, in this case, the Romantics, or maybe let's call them the natural, natural philosophers. So people like Goethe and Schiller and Kilmeyer, and not Shelling yet. I hadn't read Shelling yet, not until my first year of my PhD. And I really, really wanted to work on the concept of nature and rethinking our concept of nature, because I also read a book by a philosopher named Lovejoy, who talks about the kind of great chain of being. And I really thought that concepts like Cartesianism itself really has you know mechanized the world. We see the world as just information, or we see the world as just materiality, stoff in German, just just pure matter. I mean, I thought there was more to that, and I wanted to investigate that more. And I didn't find that more until I found Schelling and Schelling's Nature Philosophie. And then I began reading people like Novalis and Schlegel and the other romantics, even early Fichte, who was a part of this whole kind of romantic movement as well. Uh, and and that was it. And of course, Holderlin. So that's what really got to me. So it was a kind of weird, awkward full circle. Started German idealism, leave, come back. That's really what happened.

C. Derick Varn 6:37

Yeah, I remember like looking at your specializations and thinking like you would give Isaiah Berlin a heart attack. But for those of you who don't know, he he basically to vulgarize Isaiah Berlin's argument, which is not nearly this vulgar, you know, he basically argued that uh counterevolutionary and reactionary thought is rooted in romanticism and particularly German romanticism, and he traces that all the way up through Fichte. And I don't think that's a fair interpretation of German romanticism, actually. I was gonna ask you about that. Why do you think German romanticism often gets treated in Anglo academia as like almost inherently reactionary, particularly in philosophy departments?

Jena And The Interdisciplinary Revolution

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(Cont.) Jena And The Interdisciplinary Revolution

SPEAKER_00 7:25

I think I think really it's because a lot of people aren't doing the research, aren't doing the work. When we think of romanticism, we think of Hollywood romanticism, nostalgia. But, you know, everyone thinks romanticism, therefore nostalgia, and that has nothing to do with it. The first romantics, really and truly, this will probably make Hegelians, you know, like stay up at night, was, you know, in a sense, the young Schelling, Holderlin, and Fichte dancing around what they called the freedom tree, enveloped in the fervor of the French Revolution, this idea of making a new mythology, of making a new religion outside of state and church, about talking about what a stateless community would be, right? They even say this idea that the state is too mechanical, therefore it must cease. We're talking about really radical ideas in something like 1796 and the oldest systematic program of German idealism, which they write in Hegel's pen. Hegel writes it. But essentially, a large majority of thinkers and philosophers were not okay with what was going on in in Prussia or Germany at the time with the Enlightenment. Now, Kant was revolutionary, but it took a long time for Kant to get famous. Most people think, oh, wait a minute, Kant was just he was famous overnight. That's not true. It took someone named Carl Leonhard Reinhold to write in a newspaper articles on interesting facets of the critique of pure reason and to popularize it to a popular crowd for people to really take up Kant. And then, you know, we had he had really interesting interlocutors like Marcus Hertz, Salomon Maimon, who wrote an unbelievably beautiful work on transcendental philosophy. And so you have this whole period where people are thinking in enlightenment terms, rationality, reason, the world is governed by reason. And at the same time, what happens is the human being becomes number one, and everything else is subsumed under the human being. And when the romantics gather together in Jena, people like Schiller, even Schleiermacher, Dorothy Weight, Caroline Michaelis Schlegel, who becomes Schelling's wife later, Novalis, of course, Fichte, Schelling, Ludwig Tiek, all of them were, you know, drinking Schnapps, listening to Beethoven, and kind of finding themselves, Holderlin at this point was lost in the Black Forest, maybe somewhere, you know, writing poetry, interested in this element. But really, it was not being at home in the world of this enlightened world, of this world governed by reason. There must be more. There must be more to life than just the human faculties of the understanding. And really, this is what pushes Schelling first. He he thinks, you know, he's under the wing, just like Novalis and Schlegel, and even Schleiermacher, who are attending lectures in Jena. Now we have to think about this university for a second, Derek. Like just for one second. Jena, the chair of Jena before Fichte took the chair, was Reinhold, who was the person that popularized Kant. Then after Reinhold, Fichte, and then after Fichte, Schelling, and then finally Hegel would come later. So we're talking about a period, we're talking about like the revolutionary place to be, and I mean revolutionary as in thought for thinking. But what also stifled this young generation was that because Kant's philosophy had had begun to be taken up by everybody, the faculty, the faculty started taking over Kantian philosophy and making it a kind of religiosity, like a very religious Kantianism, something that Kant would not be happy with. And a lot of the students, so like Schelling and Hegel and Holderlin especially, found this stifling. And so they wanted to kind of radicalize Kant's third critique, the critique of judgment, and they wanted to think of what can what could be next. How could we go further from Kant? How could we take Kant's project, light the torch, and do our own thought? And for Schilling, that was realizing that there was something more to nature, that nature is not just something out there, space. It has to have its own essence, its own freedom, its own, its own organic totality, its real reality. And this is where it starts. It starts with people reading The Critique of Judgment, reading Schiller, reading Goethe's pieces on color, and debating about the Urfrons, you know, this one germ that's in nature or in plants. So I mean, it's a mixture of art and mythology and literature and science coming together in a kind of proto-encyclopedic form for everyone. Even Novalis talks about a romantic encyclopedia. He never finishes it, but he's still working on things like this. Sorry, I'm talking too much.

Why Art Matters To Philosophy

C. Derick Varn 14:06

Oh no, that's fine. I was actually thinking about the a kind of you know interesting national comparison because you have an enlightenment movement in in Britain that kind of levels out into a romantic movement, but it doesn't seem to have the kind of merger of disciplines that you see that emerges from German romanticism's transition to German idealism. And it also doesn't seem like British romanticism, despite some of the polemics by Coleridge and Wordsworth, are some of the weirder stuff you see out of you know William Blake, ever produces anything like a systematic philosophy of any kind. What you know, and this is speculative, but what do you think is the difference between the two cases if we look at this development in Europe?

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Well, interestingly about Blake, I mean, Blake was reading the Neoplatonists, of course, reading Jakob Burma, who by the way, the romantics and the German idealists read. And so he he's still, you know, really reading all this rich material. What is it? I really think what what's missing between the British romantics and the German romantics is that kind of core philosophical ground. So I'll give you an example. Not that Keats, who I love and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Blake are not philosophical, but there's this one point in the system of transcendental idealism where Schelling says that art, art itself, is the organ for philosophy. What he means about that is that the way to think about how mind and nature are connected is art. Art is a perfect piece to reconcile our disharmony with nature, to be reconnected with it. And he thinks, you know, in some sense, that it's kind of nature's unconscious powers working on us. Now, this sounds like mysticism, but I'm going to tell you how how it's not mysticism. It's like you're walking down the street and something comes to you. It comes to you in words, or comes to you in song, or comes to you in images. And that's what he means. Something, where does this what caused this in you? What caused this, let's say, genius or influence? And for Schelling, this is our nature acting on us unconsciously, and so consciousness takes that unconscious idea, turns it into a product, and it connects us together, it connects nature and mind. And for him, this is a bridge for the two of us that art, in a sense, is this major organ for philosophy. I see that my screen has frozen. I'm I'm sorry.

The Lost Network Beyond Kant

C. Derick Varn 17:55

I find German idealism to be fascinating in its relationship to German romanticism. And and and Schelling and you know, everyone knows about Kant. Schelling's also a bridge figure, as is Fichte. And one of the problems that you have in my mind in getting to understand either German romanticism or German idealism is unfortunately some of its biggest names shadow the movement. Uh, you know, I think about reading Frederick Besser's German idealism, the struggle against subjectivism, and realizing how many of the transition periods figures between Kant and Hegel that I knew Jack about, like nothing. And the the shadow of readings of Hegel later on, and you know, through Marxist, and we might talk about that at the towards the end of our interview, are through neo-Kantians in the late 19th century, changed the interpretation. So it's hard to get to what these figures often meant in their own context. Do you find that to be true? Like, maybe is it just me?

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Well, not to speak ill will of Frederick Beiser, but what I find about by I I think Beiser as a historian is is it Beiser, Besser?

C. Derick Varn 19:25

I I'm not I'm never quite sure, but I'm gonna trust your maybe for those of you who don't know, it's B-E-I-S-E-R. And he is, I think him and and Terry Pinkard are probably the most commonly read historian, his historians of this period, but anyway.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

I think I think um Beiser's a great historian, but he tends to have really bad character caricatures, especially of Schelling. And it's not just me that thinks that there's people like Dalia Nasser, who's one of my favorite scholars. Daniel Whistler also thinks the same thing. But he does get a lot of really interesting things correct. What we have to what we have to really get is what's called sim philosophy. This is a this is where a group of individuals, they didn't really care about whose name went on what manuscript. It was about the ideas and about, especially with the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, Frederick Schlegel and Novalis worked together quite closely. They were working, and even the Schlegel brothers were working on something called the Athenium, which is a journal on literature and poetry and philosophy, and they would talk about things like poetry, philosophy, art, science interchangeably. There was no borders, interdisciplinarity was fluid for all of these thinkers, and this is why this is what makes the material so rich and so interesting, and each figure is important. So when you're thinking about art and literature, August Schlegel is unbelievable. I mean, all of Schelling's 1802 lectures to 1803 in Jena, his lectures on art, a majority of them are him being inspired by Schlegel and inspired by the Athenian journal. Novalis, we're like we're talking about a man, a young man that comes from a quite poor family. He he goes to the mines, he's he's mining salt all day and then coming back home and writing poetry, attending lectures with Vikta, and still meeting together with all these people. And so he wanted to mix science and art and literature and philosophy all together for everyone. This, you know, not just the high aristocratic elite. So we have a group of people that are willing to work with each other, willing to discuss ideas, willing to discuss everything, and reading everything, reading the sciences, the mathematics, philosophy, engaging in all of these things, bringing them all together, bridging, bridging disciplines, something that I haven't seen for quite a long time. And it's interesting what they come up with. But what Beiser does nicely, and even Pinkert, Beiser does this nicely in what he in, I think a book called The Fate The Fate of Reason. He does this very nicely. In the fate of reason, Beiser brings up people like Reinhold, who I brought up earlier, a guy named Schulze, who was a kind of Pyrrhine skeptic, that wrote this Anisidemas dialogue that attacks Kant. There's people like Salomon Maimon, one of the first Jewish thinkers of German idealism, which is really important, who challenges Kant to the point where Kant answers him in letters. And they have this great discussion back and forth. And Kant says, you know, my greatest interlocutor is this man named Salomon Maimon, who was at the time homeless and getting in beer, beer brawls and and doing all this really fun, cool stuff. And, you know, a lot of people don't know who Maimon is. Right. So also some of these figures. Also wanted to attack, attack the revolutionary fervor of Romanticism, people like Jacoby, who, as you well know, and is one of Lukotch's main figures for irrationalism. Yacoby saw metaphysics, he saw the new philosophy as spinozaism, as atheism, and thought this was just terrible. It was pantheism, it's all it's it's corrupting the youth, therefore, we need to get back to faith. We need to get back to this base. And actually, it's funny, Frederick Schlegel, much later, joins Jacobi on this front as well, converts to Catholicism and goes from this kind of romantic rich thinker to this conservative overnight, which is maybe why some of these tropes follow with a lot of these thinkers. But what they were doing, what makes them so interesting and what makes them so important, and what makes every figure of this area, of this era important, is this idea of sim philosophy working together, working through disciplines. I think that's a really important. Like, look at someone like Schleiermacher, he revolutionizes religion. How does he do that? Well, he's hanging around Dorothy Weit and Fichte and Goethe in Berlin, and at that time, most of them had such derogatory comments on religion. But what Schleiermacher did was take that romantic spirit and romanticize a kind of secular religion, religiosity, a secular religion that wasn't just you know preached in church, etc. etc. A kind of freeing. So this was super important for all of them. All of them have their part to play.

Schelling’s Nature Philosophy In Plain Terms

C. Derick Varn 25:38

I think it's it's very vital for us not to just read this as basically Kant, Hegel, and maybe Fichte. Because when I when I was taught this in my like general surveys of philosophy, that's what I got. And I got it largely through, I mean, honestly, uh first through analytic eyes, and then later on through Marxist and Continental Eyes. And I wanted to talk about Schelling in particular because I I also think he's like mischaracterized by I think almost everybody. And I'm not a big yeah, I'm not a big Shelling, like, you know, I'm not a Schelling scholar at all, but I feel like he's used as a whipping boy, but you know, by everyone from Besser to like, as I mentioned earlier, Isaiah Berlin. Like it's so I wanted to ask you for people unfamiliar with Shelling, because I do think of like the big idealist, he's probably one of the least understood in common parlance. Like, I could ask the average philosophy YouTuber or Marxist a couple questions about Hegel, and they might not get it right, but they're gonna have an idea. When I ask him about Shelling, they're gonna probably stare at me. So, what are some of the big concepts from Shelling that you know come from this his interacting with this kind of sim philosophy and these and these romantics? And also, what are some of the mis you know, conceptions about him, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_00 27:14

My favorite misconception is actually from Marx. He called him a bloated a bloated a bloated bourgeois fish that was a traveling salesman of ideas. I love that. That's that's that's I didn't laugh. I I'm sorry, that's a good insult. It's a pretty good insult. I just kind of laugh. I I have a lot of Marxist friends, so I just I kind of laugh at some of these things. We have Heinrich Heine to thank for all of the misconceptions. I'll give you an example of how crazy Heine, his ability to gossip. This lie about Kant setting his watch at five o'clock in the morning or a.m. and walking all around Karnigsberg, and everyone going, oh, that's Mr. Kant. That's not true. That was a good old-fashioned gossip lie by Heinrich Heine, and that is still popularized today. I've heard lectures online from big universities where I hear someone open up with a Kant talk and oh, everyone knew Mr. Kant could set his clock to 5 a.m. and there he was. And no, this was Heinrich Heine. Heine once stated that Schelling's philosophy was so confusing, he he should just become a whirling dervish because when he when he stops spinning around, he doesn't know the difference between left and right. I mean, these are some of the burns that you can get from from some of these people. So that's Heine. He also said that Schelling walked around Munich and Berlin with his face all down and dejected because Hegel had surpassed him. So, I mean, these are some of the, these are the interesting. I'll get back to I'll get back to that, but let me just start off who Schelling was and what makes him important about important with all of these SIM philosophical ideas. Schelling becomes obsessed with science in 1796 when he's a tutor, kind of like most academics now. If you couldn't find an academic position, you become a tutor or you go to a private school, and he's tutoring for two young barons. And he goes to visit his brother. Schelling has an older brother named Carl. And there, and Carl is studying medicine. Schelling sits in on medicine lectures and becomes obsessed with medicine and chemistry and electricity. And at the time there was new science going around. Huge, hugely vast amounts of science coming in from England, from all over Germany. And so he becomes obsessed with learning as much as he can. And of course, there are texts by Kilmeyer, there's Herder, there's Kant's third critique, there's so much philosophy and science. And at this time, Wissenschaft doesn't just mean, you know, it doesn't just mean science. It also means philosophy and science. It's talking about the human sciences or the human Geistes Wissenschaft Lehrer. So it's like the the human humanitarian, the humanities, let's say, the human sciences. So he's intrigued by all of this, especially medicine, chemistry, electricity, magnetism, and he's starting to see that there is something to all of this science that is in a way our way of you know trying to rationalize the world through science. It's not accurate. But if we can take that science and philosophize about it, we can add a we can add spirit to it. And by spirit, I don't mean, you know, ghost. I mean the historical element of it and why it's important. And so he becomes really fascinated with a guy named John Brown, a really radical, I want to say, English philosopher that saw the world in two ways: contractive forces and expansive forces. And so Schelling starts realizing that in nature, especially in the human being, like even in the heart, the way that the heart contracts and expands with blood, takes in blood, right, takes in unhealthy blood and then sends out cleaned blood or healthy, let's let's say that. Sorry that sounded terrible. But he sees this process going on, and then he wants to investigate. He wants to investigate into these kind of hidden forces in nature. Now, the reason why he calls them hidden is because we don't see them. But just because we don't see them doesn't mean they're not there, aka air, wind, right? Like air is there, we know it, but we don't see it. We can see it when it interacts with another actant. He calls it actant, or we can say object, like a tree. So he starts saying, well, what is the interiority of nature? And this is this is the start of his kind of romantic element. He starts seeing nature as this kind of absolute mode of productivity, it has this kind of energy, this kind of dynamism, and that all finite products have this kind of infinite spark written in them. And his example is an acorn. An acorn has the same genetic make makeup of the tree that it fell from, but yet it's now individuated and divided from the main tree. But it's it still has that it still has that identity from the tree that it came from, so the seed that's falling. And so he sees this as something that he wants to study. It's interesting that I bring up, you know, a plant or tree, because Hegel, at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, brings up this beautiful example that he gets from Goethe about a flower, about a seed, and the seed turning into a stem, and a stem turning into a flower, and then a flower turning into a fruit. So, I mean, he gets this from Goethe. So there's all of this talk about this kind of archetype, this principle, this foundation that's lying in nature. And what Schelling and a lot of these romantics wanted to do at first was to find to find a foundation to philosophy in in nature, to talk about nature, but in a way that's not dissected from humans, that were part of humans. Now, I'll give you an example. In his first work, Ideas for a philosophy of nature, he talks about what he identifies as spiritual sickness. He literally calls it that. He says, spiritual sickness is, in a sense, that first Cartesian mode of thinking where one contracts inward into themselves. They see themselves as this reflective eye, sorry, this self-conscious eye, but everything outside them is not is nothing. It's it's there for them. And he thinks that this bridge between the two of them is what he'll later call freedom. However, how do you talk about this? How do you talk about nature and mind being an embodied human? And his idea is actually kind of brilliant. He says that nature is visible spirit and spirit is invisible nature. This is a very famous quote from this introductory piece, The Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. Essentially, nature and mind are identical, identical in in makeup or identity, but they are located or they are they're space, they're located in different spaces. So, like my left and my right hand, I use this example all the time. This example's from Sean McGrath. He uses an example of stereoisomers where in science, where these two particles mirror one another, and that's what nature and mind do, in a sense. Human and nature mirror one another, like our left and our right hand. They are made of the same content, they're made of the same identity, they have the same elements, however, they're in different spatial locations, and yet they form this whole. And this is the way he wants to think about the conceptions of nature. Nature in, you know, insuled, spirited. Now, what does that mean? Well, it means that beneath the leaf, beneath the leaf that we see, there is this organic totality that is using photosynthesis from light to turn it into simple sugars. We know that trees, for example, use an entire network of fung of fungi to send nutrients and messages to other trees. This is what he's talking about, about these inner inner, what he talks about, what he means about by spirit. Spirit is this kind of interiority of nature. It's these powers in nature that we don't see. We do see, you know, I mean, we don't see them necessarily, but he talks about them in this sense. And he sees this constant productivity, this production as this unconditioned creativity, unconditioned principle that's in all of nature. And he considers it, he he calls it something like a stream. He says that all nature, all life, comes from this one unconditioned principle, like a stream. However, when the stream hits rocks and there's inhibition, he gets this from Fichte, this is an stos, or this is a check, resistance, what happens is whirlpools form. And there's a separation. But that doesn't mean that this new separated whirlpool is not missing from that infinite link. It means now that it's individuated and differentiated from this original flow of the river. So he sees things in that sense. So we have absolute productivity, and then we have these products, which then form as actants. They're actors in a sense. They're actors within a network of other living beings. And he thinks just by talking about that, by even rethinking the concept of nature itself, is important. He gets even more radical in his next piece, Vandravatzela, so on the world soul, where he uses Plato in this sense to kind of think about how the demiergos, how the world, how the cosmos is insolved, but not with spirit, not with the soul, like what, you know, but with these powers, these in these interior forces inside us. And this is his kind of quest about kind of mapping out this unfolding of this, what he calls, you know, the unconditioned, the unv the unvordenklisch, literally the unthinged, that which is you know producing all of this production, and how at the end of our lives, at the end of our cycles, products go back to that productivity. And for those that are watching, if this sounds like Platinus, you're absolutely right, because it is very much Platinian that the these finite products then go back to that infinite whatever stream of water after we lose our cycle. So lose this cycle of life. So he he's seeing these forces and magnetism in electricity, in chemistry. He's seeing how liquids, gases, and solids, how there's always these three kinds of these three elements or these three processes, or not just three, but he's seeing how all of these changes happen and how just because change and movement are occurring doesn't mean doesn't mean that they're not alive. And so he thinks that you know when rest occurs in productivity, we get human beings, animals, plants, etc. We're out of that that unfolding productivity. Sorry, I went on a little too long there.

Schelling Versus Fichte On Nature

C. Derick Varn 40:16

No, no, I mean it the it's fascinating because it does indicate that you have a holistic philosophy that isn't really mystical, but I guess maybe I mean, like when we get to concepts like the unconditioned, which is kind of partially pulled from ficta and might have some relationship to Kant's thing in itself. This sounds super mystical, it sounds super Buddhist, but it isn't entirely so I like the the explanation, and I was gonna ask you specifically, like, how does this tie into other you know German romantic and German and early German idealist thinkers? Like, like, how does this where what is Schilling's like relationship to these other ideas? And specifically, you know, I mentioned Kant and Fichte, but go where you want.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

Like it's funny when Schelling was a nobody in like 1797, Schiller handed him the 1797 book that I was talking about, and Goethe kind of you know just said, uh, this sound this smells foully Kantian. He thought the first work by Schelling was too Kantian, maybe it was, but then something happened, Schiller Hans Goethe, you know, von der Weltzela on the world soul, where Schelling starts talking about these contractive and expansive forces, and starts talking about sorry, no problem. So Schiller appreciated what Schelling was doing. Goethe didn't until he read this work where Schelling begins talking about an archetype, a principle in the cosmos, talks about this kind of organic network of beings and flourishing and dynamism, and he brings Schelling in into the mix, into this connection with other romantics, but it's not how do I say this? So many people love it, many people are engaging in Schelling's philosophy. Goethe is extremely blown away by Schelling's what he called his first, what's called the first outline for a system of the philosophy of nature, which to me is his mature work on the mature romantic Schelling, where he he creates a a really, really well-thought-out, let's even call it proto process philosophy in some sense. He talks about processes, he talks about how they interact. Fichte hates this. Fichte thinks it's impossible for us to speak about nature in this way. Since the only the most fundamental principle is the I. The I is that which posits itself, the self-conscious subject fundamentally asserts its own existence in self-positing, right? This is why he uses the term tot, fact-act. All thought is action, and we can talk about fact and action. So it's not just a thing, but an act. So, and this act is summarized as I equals I or the I am. But the not I, nature, for the conscious I, right, when it encounters nature or objects, right, the external world, the external world sets, defines the limits of self-consciousness. So nature for Fichte is not this plural, plural verse of actants that have this interiority, this freedom, and it causes a rift between Fichte and Schelling. And Fichte has a very, very, very serious issue with Schelling even talking about transcendental philosophy or even a project of Kant in the same light of Kant, critical philosophy, where there's a philosopher talking about nature. He thinks it's problematic. And he is probably next to Eschmeier, who is a really good friend of Schelling, but another big critic who wants to make this unconditioned principle God. And Schelling's not there yet. Schelling's not ready to embrace this unconditioned, the unbedingt as God at this point. So at first, a lot of philosophers in the circle enjoy it. Goethe's writing about colors, he's writing about plants, he's writing, he has his own natural philosophy. He's a part of this movement as well. People like Faraday, scientists, people working in the science world are interested in Chelling's concepts, but he's also getting some resistance. Then we have people like Novalis, who's already creating what he calls a pluralism, a pluralist philosophy in reaction to Fichta's philosophy, too. So we have another reaction to Fichta. And this whole reaction to Fikta starts with Holderlin. Holderling also, like Schelling, thinks that nature cannot be, you know, nature cannot be this limitation for self-consciousness. It can't be this, you know, this apparent, this boundary for our world. So he is the one man out here. Although Fichte starts off as in the romantic circle, he is the one pushing back against all of this uh nature philosophy. Schelling is dealing with mathematicians and scientists, so he deals with someone named Henrik Stefens. I think he's a he may be a Danish or Dutch physician or physicist, or that's friends with Schelling, that's you know, an interlocutor. But yes, so many of them in the sim philosophy circle are okay with a lot of what Schelling is talking about with nature, but it's Fichte. Fichte is the main force. Now, the reason why is because in the third critique, when Kant starts talking about nature, he says that the mind can't talk about nature like we talk about things like concepts, because we don't have concepts and intuitions about nature. We can't grasp nature in a concept or an intuition. We have to self-reflectively grasp nature, and then in this moment of self-reflection, Kant thinks, well, there must be some kind of autopoesis or some kind of something that's organizing nature, and he leaves this open. And this is what really this idea of nature organizing itself, this this idea of even having nature having its own identity that's hinted at, right? Kant is still, in terms of understanding nature and humanity, quite conservative when it comes to understanding nature as this kind of dynamic process, having its own freedom, having its own spirit, its essence, right? He's even arguing against people like Blumenbach, who has this who has this whole theory of drives. So it's it's Schelling is kind of at the forefront here talking about nature. We also have people like Novalis who are also trying to talk about pluralist ideas, but Ficht is really pushing back on all of them. And he's already been dismissed from Jena. So he's in Berlin sending letters after letters, and Schelling is still supposed to make a journal with him, but that doesn't end up that ends up fruitless. So I don't know if I answered your question there. I kind of went on a tangent there. I'm sorry. Oh, it's okay. What can we make of oh, you wanted me to talk about the the things that the caricatures of Schelling, right?

unknown 49:39

First?

C. Derick Varn 49:39

Yeah, we have yeah, go ahead.

Misconceptions And The Berlin Backlash

SPEAKER_00 49:42

Okay. So Schelling was one of the youngest professors to teach in Germany. I think the second youngest next to Nietzsche, believe it or not. He was like 24 or 23 when he started lecturing at Jena. And it's true, he was a part of this sim philosophical attitude, right? He was a part of this sim philosophical network where he played chess with Schiller and talk about uh education and aesthetics, Goethe with sciences, you know, talk about art and mythology and poetry with the Schlegel brothers. And he was just taking in all this information from physicians, and so he really was experimenting in his lectures. So he has a series of lectures in 1799 entitled The First Outline for a System of the Philosophy of Nature, which is one of his books. And he gets criticized by this by Hegel, I believe. Hegel says that Schelling, we all know that Schelling, you know, kind of did his philosophy in the public, which in some cases is true. He would experiment in his lectures about key concepts that he was working out. So this is very much true. Schelling also is known for having many, have never putting together a system and just, you know, dropping something and moving forward. In some cases, this is correct. I would say he has multiple systems. He's got a a nature philosophy, he's got an identity philosophy, he's got a middle philosophy where he's very interested in ontology. I think Schelling stops doing idealism in 1808, the Shelling of the Freedom essay. I don't even think it's idealism, it's ontology. He's he even states something similar to this in the freedom essay. And of course, because of the backlash of the freedom essay, and because of the backlash of many other things, especially with with pantheism, the pantheism dispute, Schelling doesn't print, doesn't publish anymore after 1809. He presents one more time in the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences in 1815. But he lives a pretty much a life of just he's working at the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences. He goes on archaeological digs with Johann Wagner, no relation to Rickard Wagner. He's interested in art. He's still, I mean, he's is he aristocratic? I don't think he's aristocratic, but he he's a tutor for Maximilian II. He's you know, he does lectures in 1810, private lectures for the top nobility, but he is kind of dormant for almost 20 years, and then all of a sudden, when a little bit of tension happens in Berlin, the Prussian king asks him to come to Berlin to take to quote him to stamp out the the dragon seed of pantheism and Hegelianism, and he jumps on this. That's the rumor, but that's not true actually. Schelling waits a whole year, a whole year before he answers the king's letter, number one. Number two, Schelling is Schelling's positive philosophy is 100% a reaction to Hegel's science of logic. The beginning of the science of logic, this idea of the what's it called, the doctrine of being. This really makes Schelling completely change his mind about philosophy. He realizes that idealism is negative philosophy. It's negative philosophy because it's talking about concepts, ideas. It's like dealing with the world, it's dealing with what he calls whatness, not thatness, not facticity. And so he he realizes that yes, Hegel wins. Hegel wins the idealism case. Hegel has completed the system of German idealism with the science of logic and encyclopedia. But for him, negative philosophy can only take us so far: a philosophy of action, of existence, of thatness, of why there is something rather than nothing. This is a Schellingian question, not a Heidegger question. This really irritates me when I hear Heideggerans go, oh, Heidegger said, you know, why is there something rather than nothing? And no, the first person to bring this up is Leibniz in the Theodicy. And after Leibniz, Schelling brings it back up again to talk about, you know what? Leibniz was sort of right, but wrong in a sense. He was doing negative philosophy and idealism. You can't talk about the world in concepts. You have to talk about the world with being, with with that, thatness, why there is a being, why there is the world in the first place. So he gets called, you know, the proteus of philosophy. I like thinking him of it as the Odysseus of philosophy, you know, lost at sea, lost at sea for several years, working out, you know, star notations and then finally arriving at the end. But yes, so he gets a bad name for that. Another bad rap that happened with him, caricature. This is the true story, though, is that Schelling was supposed to be married to Caroline Schlegel, Caroline Michaelis Schlegel's daughter, youngest daughter. She was 16, he was 23 at the time, which is a little bit shady now, but maybe it was okay back then, not saying it was all right. But really, Schelling's love of his life was Caroline, and they were having an affair. Now, because Schelling was taking medicine lectures, and his brother was a physician, what happened was Augusta got diphtheria. And at the time, the only way to the only way to really heal someone was opium. And Schelling realized that opium was both addictive and it also was terrible for the immune system. And so he took her off that and she died. And so pamphlet, pamphlets after pamphlets went around about this quack Schelling who killed this 16-year-old girl, which is not the which is not the case. So he got her off opium and she ended up passing away. And there were rumors that he was using his quack natural philosophy to save her, and a lot of negativity came about this. So now, if you if you're in scientific circles and you hear the name nature philosophy in Schelling, you get this story come up all the time. And it's not real, it's spiritual, it's it's all of this. And and really, it's not a he's not a mystic, he's not mystical at all in this period. He is influenced by someone named Frederick Christoph Oertinger, who is a spiritual pietist, but Uertinger saw the same contract of expansive principles, this kind of dynamic force, you know, as the foundation or identity of being. So he he gets that from Uertinger, but there is no mystical spiritual element to mature philosophy.

Where Schelling Lands Globally

C. Derick Varn 57:56

So I I suppose when we look at nature philosophy as kind of a synthesis of these of these various things coming out of Sim philosophy, which is something that's gonna characterize both later German romanticism and earlier German idealism. Why is, you know, what why is Schelling not as focused on not just in the English academy, but like when say, you know, I think of uh another Baser Besser book on after Hegel, where we talk about like the Neo-Kantians and the post-hegelians in the Bismarckian academy that's you know developing in Prussia. Why is Shelling not as or seemingly not as important to that project? Is do you have a theory on that? Or is is absolutely okay, go.

Marxism Freedom And The Dark Ground

SPEAKER_00 59:03

Interestingly enough, Schelling is popular in other circles. He's popular in anarchist circles, like Bakunin, the French socialists are extremely influenced by Schelling's so-called anarchic later philosophy in the positive philosophy. So in French socialist circles, he's really, really huge in Russian circles and the kind of orthodox Christian circles. But where you think he's not, where you think he's the most popular, which is crazy, is Japan. So Nishitani, Nishitani Keiji, a young a young Japanese student, begins translating the freedom essay into Japanese. Tanabe Hajime is extremely inspired by by Schelling, and his entire Manoetics is kind of grappling with Schelling's ontology in the Freedom Essay. So there's this huge other outlet of Schellingianism happening in the French socialist circles, the Russian circles, as well as the Japanese circle. And he's huge. Kuki Shuso, many of these other people are reading Schelling and the Kyoto school, along with Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche and others. But in Germany, many other intellectuals are reading Schelling. Habermas writes his dissertation on Schelling. Paul Tillich is a Schellingian his whole life. Carl Jaspers, before Heidegger wrote on Schelling, writes two books on Schelling. Italian philosopher who I can't even think of right now, who's really, really big in Italian circles, writes on Schelling. I'll think of it. If I can think of it, I'll let you know. But he's still big in this area in the 50s and 60s, I'd say, in in Europe. And North America, not at all. He's vanished off the face of the earth. Now, the interesting thing is Peirce and James read Shelling. Peirce even calls himself an objective idealist after Schelling. And he says the only true scientist in philosophy is Schelling, since he would easily throw away his systems multiple times because you know he truly was a man of science. That's what this is me kind of riffing on what Peirce said. William James took the positive lecture, the positive philosophy lectures in the United States, and he really read it, and his kind of radical empiricism was quite influenced by what Schelling later calls metaphysical empiricism, which is in the grounding for positive philosophy. And people like Josiah Royce, who's, you know, a pragmatist, but maybe one of the first American idealists, is greatly inspired by Schelling. But there isn't a translation of Schelling in English until 1936 by James Goodman, and that's the Freedom Essay. But up until then, there were no translations. Now there was a Canadian idealist who translates, not translates, but writes a piece on Schelling and gives us the same tropes. You know, he had multiple systems, dropped them. He was egotistical and petty and blah blah blah. Like many of these things that we were talking about, and that he, you know, the real philosopher is Hegel, but I'm doing Schelling because not many people study Schelling, and that's just not true. What really happens, I think, is that when Hegel dies, there's a huge rift. Because Hegel is massive. Hegel is like the philosopher. And, you know, it took Hegel so long to become an actual academic. He didn't get a position teaching at a real university until he was 48. He was, you know, writing letters to get money from his friends. He was really struggling, and he was a progressive at this time. Like he was reading the newspaper, I mean in English, seeing what was going on in the Americas. And so this was devastating for a lot of the youth, the young, who were young Hegelians, like Ruga, like Engels, like Burkhart, like many of these people that attended Schelling's lectures. Kierkegaard came in 41. But what they got was not revolution. They didn't get this, they didn't get what they wanted to hear. They got, you know, a philosophy of existence. They got Christianity again. If they'd stayed long enough, they would have got to what's called the Johanin Church. Schelling talks about the Church of St. John, which is this kind of church, this kind of quasi-anarchistic church that is no church on earth, but a community of equals, in a sense, which inspires a lot of anarchists, inspires a lot of French, the French socialists that I was talking about before. But for many of the proto-let's call them the proto-Marxists, the of the young Hegelians, so especially Angels, he saw Schelling's lectures as poisonous. Now I'm going to be unbiased here because I think his lecture, I think Engels' work on Shelling is deeply erroneous. But let me just be un let me be charitable here. Engels was part of this young Hegelian movement. He was part of this whole, he was, you know, writing, he was seeing what was going on in factories in England. He was seeing what's happening with the Irish. And here is Schelling, this great idealist who helps found German idealism, talking about Christianity again. And that's not what they wanted to hear. So there was a huge rift. And I think this really, and at the time, many people were writing down verbatim what Shelling was lecturing about, and his lecture notes got passed everywhere. So the positive philosophy was being distilled everywhere. And Schelling was getting really deeply frustrated that people were passing around his theory. And of course, he was still working out kinks in the system, but it wasn't what the people wanted at the time. It wasn't materialistic enough. It didn't deal with overcoming. It didn't deal with this kind of overcoming of the bourgeoisie. It didn't deal with certain things that they were they wanted, these central issues that they wanted. And really, Schelling gave a kind of philosophy of existence. He was showing the faultiness of his own system, idealism. Even Hegel, there was a huge critique of Hegel. And he even states at the end of the lectures that, you know, this will never be finished. This whole philosophy will never be finished because somebody else will take up the torch and take up the questions. So it's open-ended. He quits in 46 at Berlin, and he just kind of works on what he calls the pure rational philosophy, where he he's working out what negative philosophy is and his philosophy of and his positive philosophy, and he becomes deeply inspired by mythology. And here again, when you think of mythology, like romantic. Romanticism, mythology gets a really bad name. It gets a super bad name because people think mythology, people think you know, romanticism, you know, they think of what happens with the national the National Socialists and them taking Norse mythology and tweaking it for their own their own their own propaganda. And it's kind of dismissed. And you know, he was ahead of his time, but it wasn't the right time to let to lecture on the positive philosophy. So the crowds were great, massive. You couldn't even, you know, people were elbow to elbow in these lecture halls. But that's it. So after 1850, you know, Shelling dies in 54, there really isn't any kind of Schelling revival until I mean we could say some of the French socialists bring him up. He's brought back up. Well, one good thing, this is one good thing. Let me just say this the Schelling House, that's in Munich. Uh what's his name? Drexler. The lead, the head of the Nazi party, took Schelling House off where the Nazis met because Schelling was not going to be their philosopher. Schopenhauer was going to be their philosopher. Schelling was too deeply entwined in Jewish mysticism and the East. And so he was he was not radical enough for the National Socialists. I was talking to Dan about this, Daniel about this, and I told him that I'd bring this up again at some point. But yeah, so he I think he fades, but he's he's kind of thought about through the Japan Japanese thinkers. He's thought about through von Hartmann, who's also a kind of Schopenhauer, I guess. Interestingly enough, there is an ongoing debate that Schelling invented the unconscious, unbewusst, unbewusst, or the the concept in German for the unconscious. And so a lot of people there have been lots of really good research that Freud read Schelling. But I think what happens is that Hegel becomes this kind of pioneer philosopher. The Frankfurt school becomes very, very big. Habermas moves away from Marx. And I think what happened is somehow a lot less people start reading Schelling. But interesting, in Italy, Luigi Parison, who's a brilliant philosopher, is reading, is reading Schelling. I told you Paul Tillich, you know, Eric Vogelin, many of these people are reading Schelling. But he fades. He fades because of lack of translation. Maybe the the kind of rebuttal that happened in Berlin. Yeah, so that gets really that really helps conceal his philosophy. But then he gets picked up again by Walter Kasper, who's a Catholic bishop. He writes on the positive philosophy. It's a very good text. He's picked up by a lot of theologians because he still is in that Christian, he's still working out a kind of philosophical religion. But I think that's really what does it. I think people start moving so secular to one point. People start realizing that the world needs to be, the world doesn't need to be philosophized, it needs to be changed. And this is something that they don't see in Schelling. And I think there is, I think it is there. I think this idea of action, desire, change is in the late Shelling. Sorry, that was very long-winded. No, that's okay.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:58

One thing I was gonna ask you then, if we we see Schelling as kind of uh both uh emblematic figure and a you know constellation or bridge between later German idealism and this earlier German romantic movement. Um what are some of the the takeaways for people studying this today? And you know, how would a Marxist respond to a lot of this now? I mean, I think about Lukash's response to Schelling.

The Johannine Church And Stateless Community

SPEAKER_00 1:12:28

All right, this is a really important question. I think Lukash doesn't understand Schelling's when I say this, I get like rolled eyes all the time, but it's really, really important. Schelling is not a dialectical thinker, he has what I call a non, well, I didn't name this, Sean McGrath names this, non-dialectical personalism. And there's a reason why he's not dialectical. In the Freedom essay, Schelling states that idealism is the soul of philosophy, realism is its body, only the two together can form a whole. He is creating in this text an ontology, an idealist realism. He realizes that one-sided idealism can never give us anything, and one-sided realism, materialism, can't also give us a system. So I think what's important to note is that what Lukath sees in Schelling as a kind of rebuttal of reason, he's rebuttling to reason because Schelling's question is well, what came before reason? What is the unreasoned? What happens to us? And rather than do this whole dialectical, this dialectical standoff, getting in the the square circle with Lord and bondage, bondsman, Schelling realizes that there is something deep-rooted, there's something dark, there's something within all of nature, within the ground, that is irrational, and it's meant to be irrational. It's in all human beings. It's this the minute that we get our own independence, something in the ego, something dark in the ego, dark in personality, is what makes us want to consume the other. Now, Schelling's not saying this is a good thing, he's saying this is what is prior to reason. When reason is formed, with when reason is formed and grounded in consciousness, we are able to understand what he calls the universal will, which we could say is the kingdom of ends in Kant and heteronomy. We understand the differences now, but evil or the irrational is something that is in all human life. It's there as soon as you're born. It's the it is that seed of independence in everybody. Now he uses theology to talk about this, the fall, he'll say, you know, being born in the ground of God. We're separated from God, but yet in this ground, this dark ground, there's no reason, there's no rationality. It's like it's like the receptacle of Plato's Timaeus. It's this kind of surging, un surging sea, this ball of matter. And what really what we need, in a sense, is both reason and the will to form this kind of essence of spirit, which is you know, consciousness, etc., etc. But he but I think Lukac sees this as dangerous, as as it's not a system that's grounded in freedom. But Schelling is really the philosopher of freedom. He is the philosopher of freedom. He's the thinker that's thinking of the most kind of radical concept of freedom. And when we think of why people murder, why people do such horrible, I mean, look at all of the Epstein files now that are all everywhere, when we think about how do these people do these things to these young kids, this is a question that is ingrained in human behavior, human nature. And this is something that Schelling thinks that has to be answered when we're talking about humanity, consciousness. It's already there. It's something primal in this ground, he says. And it's not that it's not that it's always there. This is why he he's called a mystic, because he uses people like Yaakubema and to talk about this in theological terms: darkness and light, these two principles that are in all of us, but in sense that they are there. Darkness is the ego, light is this, let's say, ipseity, it's this individual, it's this individual that sees the freedom of everybody as opposed to their own ego consuming the world, in a sense. So he has to philosophize about this. What I think Marxist can get from this is that well, particular, particularly, I think that there has to be some for me, there has to be some theory of the subject before we can talk about the collective. Number one. I think there has to be some understanding of being. And I think there has to be some element of why things have gone so wrong, philosophically speaking. So I think he's important in that sense, especially from the freedom essay. And to the late Schelling, the philosophy existence, uh, when he's talking about the philosophy of existence, when he's talking about facticity, I think a lot of these themes are extremely important. And there are a lot of a lot of thinkers that see connections between Schelling and Marx, people like Enrique Ducell, uh Manfred Franck, Stephen Holgate wrote a really good article on this. Habermoss did. Now that's Habermoss, so he's a neocantian, he's like a public sphere philosopher, so you know I'll just I'll bracket that. But I think there is there is certain there are certain issues that need to be discussed. Like just one-centered, one-sided materialism isn't acceptable. Like for me as a philosopher as well, too. I'm not a materialist, I consider myself an idealist realist in Schlingian terms, but politically speaking, I'm a socialist. I'm not a communist, I appreciate Marx, I appreciate the young Marx. However, you know, there are certain things, certain elements in communism, like Lenin and Stalin, etc. etc., that you know, I think distorted Marx, but I think altogether, as I'm kind of doing these circles here, I think essentially being and this the individual is something I'm more extremely concerned about. And I think Schelling has a really good philosophy about the individual, but not just the individual. I think the later Schelling deals with the so-called collective. I am now going around in circles here, so I'll stop, I'll stop here.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:09

Well, I mean, in Schelling, what is the tension between the individual and the collective? Like what you know, bracketing that with the I think fair assertion that Schelling is not a dialectical thinker, so we shouldn't think about this tension as a dialectic, you know, the way we might in Hegel, or even in a simpler form of Kant, like, but what is this tension between the individual collectivity you hit on here in in Schelling that's often missed by, you know, in your opinion, by so many Marxists?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:46

There's a concept. So Shelling's okay, Schelling's so-called philosophical religion towards the end of the positive philosophy. He says something that I think is really beautiful, actually. He talks about what he calls the Johannine Church, the Church of St. John. Now, this is not a building, it's not an institution, it literally is a community of free individuals that are equal and recognize each other, and there is no state. What makes the state are the community? I think this is a noble concept. This is something that he brings up in 44, in 45. Now, should Marxist be skeptical of something called the Church of St. John? Quite possibly, but his idea is a stateless idea, which he gets, you know, he gets this, he forged this idea as well in 1796 in the in the oldest systematic program of German idealism. And I think a majority of that was written by Schelling and Holderlin. I'm not sure how much Hegel contributed to that. I think he was writing. I think maybe he talked a little bit about art, but I think mythology and poetry were definitely Holderlin. So I I think that element of it should inspire Marxists, I think. When we think about this idea of a community, a collective that are not that are not infused by any state, any state whatsoever. I think that's very intru. I think that's very interesting. For me at least. So that is a concept that I was bringing up to Daniel when Daniel and I were talking about Schelling and Marx and Lukatsch. I went on his emancipation podcast, and he was, we had read Engel's critique of Schelling and Lukac's reason, Lukas's work on Schelling. And I think both of them are, I don't think they get the crux of Schelling's philosophical project, which is asking those questions. And it doesn't mean, you know, asking the question, why is there something rather than nothing? But it's why is this here in the first place? He gives us this kind of system that allows us to ask those fundamental questions. He gives us something, a philosophy of action, I think, in the positive philosophy. And I think this is missing in in Hegel. And I think what he sees in Hegel, he thinks that Hegel collapses the ideal into, or sorry, the real into the ideal for this grandiose concept, according to Schelling. So I'm not I'm not so I'm not fully I'm not fully on board with what a lot of later Marxists think that their solution is for the so-called state afterwards, maybe closer to something like democratic socialism, which is why I'm maybe more swayed by Schelling's arguments on this, than let's say full full-blown communism. Which you're probably not very happy about, but I'm sorry.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:36

I mean, I I would say I don't know that I know it that communism as its view of the state as a finished project or even particularly coherent, which probably makes a lot of my audience angry.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:48

Did I say something that was inaccurate? Sorry.

Why Holistic Thinking Still Matters

C. Derick Varn 1:24:50

No, no, no, no, no. I would I I would I would say that part of the problem with dealing with like communism in the state is that we kind of have a have or cake and eat it to relationship to state abolition. I mean, unless you're like Dominico Lacerdo, who just like throws it out and says even Stalin was wrong of ever wanting it in the first place. But there is the whole dialectical view that you build the state up so that it can so that you can use the state to abolish all the functions of the state. And I would say to that, and I mean I am admittedly making a somewhat vulgar simplification of it, is good luck, because it's never even begun to happen, much less happened. And it it's it's very similar to like the second international position on building up capitalism, particularly finance capitalism, as a way to create an integrated monopoly that would thus be seizable by socialists and blah blah blah blah blah. But it also seems to empower capital in ways that make socialists a lot harder, socialism and socialist actors a lot harder to actually operate. So I don't have an answer for that easily. And so I'm always interested in what other pathways are because I I don't think philosophically or practically Marxists have consistently worked this out. Like, you know, and whether or not we want to defend actually existing socialist states or not is sort of beyond the problem of how do you get from a from a very, very, very strong state to a stateless society in anything like an imaginable timescale. And you know, it it's it's also an argument with Marxists and anarchists. You know, I've always said that Marxists are ultimately slow anarchists, but even many Marxists get mad at me for saying that. So I don't know. As far as like what I think we should be doing, I do think, as opposed to like borderist or certain kinds of Leninist, that democratic integration of uh you know the laboring classes is about the only way we're gonna ever achieve that. And that also has to be a larger project than just a political one. And I think that latter element is often dropped or posited in these ways where, like, oh, we have a cultural revolution and then a political revolution and then an economic revolution. But you know, one of the things you get from reading these kind of holistic German philosophers is the realization that these things are not really discrete categories. And they like the idea that they are discrete categories is like almost an enlightenment fetish that is not particularly helpful for thinking your way out of current status quo situations. Like, like, yes, there's an appearance between the separation between the economy and the state until you start thinking about money very hard, or there's an appearance of between the separation between politics and culture, until you start thinking around like social reproduction very, very, you know, very hard. And I do think that this was a question that certain of the more organicist German philosophers, the later ones I'm not as comfortable with, but particularly with the romantics, were actually asking in a real way. And that's why I wanted to get, you know, to talk to you about Schelling in this, because the idea of a unified project of thought, not, you know, not just you know, you know, revolutions in a field or whatever, but like a really way to have these ideas relate to one another beyond disciplines that are basically constructs, the way we reproduce knowledge in a university or in a marketing context, depending, that there is a reason to go back to thinking about this in holistic terms. And, you know, on that note, I'm I'm I'm actually pretty sympathetic to you. So I wouldn't say no, you didn't upset me, because while I consider myself a communist, I'm not sure I understand exactly like what that. fully means in practical politics beyond right now a commitment to a democratic form of socialism that would be a a transitional or first step towards something much bigger. And I also think that's why it's you know as much as I would love to say we could dispense with philosophy like every Marxist wants to say I don't think we can.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:54

No I mean I agree. Yeah.

unknown 1:29:56

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:57

Yeah and I I mean you know the whole like you know the philosophy saw to understand the world and the purpose is to change it to paraphrase Marxist thesis on on Forbach presumes we understand the world. Right.

Where To Find The Work

SPEAKER_00 1:30:10

Yeah you know but I'm not sure we do we need that Zizikian reversal. I think Zizek says this and I maybe laugh but I I posted it on on social media because I thought I would piss off all my Marxist friends. Because there's one point where he says you know instead of in changing the world we need to go back and reinterpret it in order to change it again. Zizek said this I think it's funny. The thing is is that when it comes when it comes to someone like I was once asked I was speaking about Shenling's nature philosophy and someone asked me a really harsh question like why are you reading a 19th century thinker? Like I mean he's talking about galvanization and electricity you know how we've gone so much beyond with AI and stuff. And true. And I said to him reading a 19th century thinker 18th 19th century thinker even Goethe I'm not taking what they say about science as par excellence it this has got to be it. I said but he's giving me the tools to rethink our concepts of nature you ask the average person right what nature is then they'll point you to a forest they won't talk about the processes or what's going on they won't think about so-called issues that we have with climate change or the environmental catastrophe that we're in because of the mechanization that we've had because of the enlightenment of because of Cartesianism because we see things in Cartesian coordinates because we can dissect everything down to talk about minute particles or whatever not because we don't have this kind of holistic or organic understanding so it's not about being it's not about you know I'm a I'm a nature philosopher no it's about having the tools to rethink the concepts of nature having the tools to rethink things I think philosophy is important. Does Shelling give us an answer to the problem of democratic socialism? Probably not but does he give us other uh tools to think about the human being what we're do what we're faced with right now I think so so if you're thinking about political philosophy maybe Schelling's not the person to read but at the same time there's much more in there than just that there's an interesting interesting thought that who was it was it William Desnet I can't remember it's interesting to think that Schelling's father was a pastor he was a pastor and a scholar and Shelling spent a lot of his time writing about religion Hegel's father was a politician and Hegel spent a majority a lot of time talking about politics so it's interesting to think about the differences between the two of them after going back and rethinking the and rereading the phenomenology of spirit for this in interview I actually went back and reread it and I was reading some Marx as well which I probably didn't do so well with discussing I realized that Hegel's very important and I think what a lot of people don't realize is that Hegel's dialectic the unfolding of this dialectic is Schelling's stufenfolge this this step pyramid of the unfolding of reality the unfolding of the unconditioned but just Hegel has a better language of Hegel has a better way of talking about self-consciousness unfolding through history. And it was Hegel that came up with the term objective idealism for Schelling and this idea of the idea the identity of identity and non-identity so he comes up with these terms in the different schrift so Hegel's a really really important thinker and I think at the time an important Schelling at the time before he broke off and became his own thinker but I think a lot of these ideas can help us you know rethink our own age that's that's the one thing why I returned to German idealism you know from people like Deleuze and Foucault who who they're brilliant and they're brilliant in their own way but I don't think I don't think there's enough there that's that's you know in Fichte and Schelling and Hegel and Marx and and in Kant. So I think there's much more in this period of thinking than we have right now. And I think a lot of the thinkers whether you're a Marxist Kantian or whatever I think we're thinking through these problems and I think that's the that's the central issue the central thing that we can do with philosophy.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:53

Yeah I I think that's a great point on where can people find your work Chris you can they can find my work on academia I unfortunately I use that site I upload all my publications on there.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:07

I also have of course the young idealist series which is me kind of giving to I really wanted to I really believe that education should be free. I really do I don't think any student should pay for anything and so I I wanted to give them a kind of digital archive on German idealism and this period. But then I realized that post-Kantian philosophy is huge.

C. Derick Varn 1:35:37

You know it goes into African philosophy it goes into Japanese philosophy it goes into the women philosophers and scientists so it's now a huge branch so they can also check out my interviews on the young idealist and they're free and people can post comments and suggest who they want on next maybe I'll have you on next maybe we can talk about something yeah that's the best way to yeah I I would I actually I I find some you cover a lot of stuff I'm really interested in including poetry like you had a guest on Raina Maria Raca that I was uh excited about I will also link in the show notes the the the uh conversations you mentioned with Daniel for those of you who don't or who are not insiders that is Daniel Tutt of Emancipation podcast and I will link that in the show notes as well I've i i also agree with you about education for free i do have a patreon attached to this but i i actually try to make all the education materials including like advanced reading lists with programs of study now available completely free for whoever wants it and that's also why this channel is free it's also why I interview people like you because I I think you know I I don't want to besmirch the good name of research universities I realize you need capital to do research I I get that but a lot of particularly what we do in the humanities there's no reason for it be behind a paywall it's just not uh you know in an ideal society we'd we'd have uh enough to at least do this part-time as part of our regular day and whatever other work we needed to do fish in the morning criticize at night what does he say fish in the morning criticize at night spin whatever during the afternoon I don't know sorry yeah it's it's very similar it's like uh so you know ideally that would be the case but yeah people should check out your work I really enjoy your show it is quite diverse actually for what seems like a relatively narrow topic and I find your work on Schilling fascinating it actually got me interested in him again uh in preparations for the show I was reading some of it and so thank you for that have a great day you as well too thank you so much for having me on here all right