Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism: Kantian Transcendental Ideal from the Historical Perspective of the “Odyssey of the Spirit”
- DOI
- 10.5922/0207-6918-2025-2-2
- Pages
- 36-60
Abstract
In this article I propose a reconstruction of the link between the concept of the system of philosophy as “the history of self-consciousness” put forward by Schelling in the treatise The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), and one of the key elements of the Kantian critical philosophy, the teaching on the transcendental ideal. Differentiating three meanings of the term “history” in The System, I concentrate on the broadest of these meanings which describes the system as a whole and is expressed by the topos “odyssey of the spirit”. Based on Petr Rezvykh’s hypothesis on the formative significance of this teaching for the early period of Schelling’s work I interpret Schelling’s dialectics of the ideal and the real, the subjective and objective in self-consciousness as a reworking of Kant’s antithesis of the transcendental assertion and transcendental negation. I argue that Schelling’s main method seeks to turn the Kantian critical order of presentation (from the conditioned to conditions) into a systematic one (from the unconditional to the conditioned). I show that the concept of intellectual intuition developed in The System is based on Kant’s distinction of two aspects of the transcendental ideal (the matter of determination and the ground of determination). In conclusion, using the example of the beginning of the ‘first epoch’ of the theoretical part of The System which explores the sensation and its link with the thing-in-itself, I explain how the dialectic of the boundary modeled by Schelling grounds the historicity of self-consciousness and raise the question of the possibility of grounding various strategies of understanding historicity of consciousness on the basis of Schelling’s premises.
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