Of the I as Principle of Philosophy

The book a twenty-year-old seminarian wrote to find philosophy's single unconditioned starting point — the absolute I, grasped in one act of intellectual intuition.

by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling154 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie
First published: 1795(aged 20)
Original language: German

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Overview

Kant had rebuilt philosophy and left it without a foundation stone: a system of parts with no single principle holding them up, and the decade after him was spent arguing over what that principle should be. Reinhold proposed one, Schulze demolished it, Fichte answered with the I. Into that argument stepped a Tübingen seminary student of barely twenty, sharing rooms with Hegel and Hölderlin, who published Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie — "Of the I as Principle of Philosophy" — in 1795 with the Tübingen house Heerbrandt. It was his third published work. Its subtitle, Über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen — on the unconditioned in human knowledge — states the whole ambition: everything we know rests on conditions, and philosophy needs one thing that rests on nothing. Schelling's candidate is the absolute I, not the everyday self that wakes and remembers but a pure self-positing freedom, known not by observation but by an act he calls intellectual intuition. The book is written against dogmatism, and behind that word stands Spinoza, who had made the absolute an object, a substance the self merely belongs to; Schelling insists the absolute can only be a subject, an act. The performance made his name — the older Fichte took him for a disciple, and within three years Schelling had a chair at Jena. He would spend the rest of his life moving away from the starting point this book made famous.

Key concepts

What is the absolute I in this book?

Not the individual person or the self of everyday experience, but a pure self-positing freedom that precedes all objects. Schelling calls it absolute because it depends on nothing outside itself: its being is its own act. Ordinary consciousness, the world and every particular fact are conditioned; the absolute I is what makes anything conditioned possible, the first principle the whole system hangs from.

What does 'the unconditioned' mean in the subtitle?

The subtitle names the unconditioned in human knowledge. Everything we know rests on some condition, which rests on another, in a regress that never grounds itself. The unconditioned is what would end that regress: a starting point that rests on nothing further. Schelling's argument is that knowledge is impossible unless one such point exists, and that only a self-positing act can be it.

What is intellectual intuition here?

The single act by which the absolute I is grasped. Because that I is no object, it cannot be observed or inferred; it can only be known in an act where the knowing and the known are the same thing. Schelling borrows the term to mark a self-knowledge that is not sense perception and not ordinary reflection, the one door through which the unconditioned is reached.

What does Schelling mean by dogmatism?

Any philosophy that starts from an absolute treated as an object or substance to which the self merely belongs. Its great representative is Spinoza. For Schelling the dogmatist makes the self passive, a mode of something given, and so can never reach genuine freedom. His counter-move is to insist the absolute is subject and act, the ground giving itself rather than a thing found.

Why must the absolute be a subject and not a substance?

Because a substance is still something posited, an object standing over against thought, and so it too is conditioned. Only an act that posits itself owes its being to nothing else. Making the absolute a subject is Schelling's break with Spinoza: freedom, not inert being, sits at the root of things, and the self is the place where that freedom is known from within.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The one thing that rests on nothing

Everything we know rests on conditions; can anything rest on nothing at all? Schelling's wager is that one unconditioned point must ground the whole of knowledge, or nothing truly does.

Kant had left philosophy a system without a foundation stone, and the decade after him searched for the single principle to hold it up. Schelling's candidate is the absolute I, not the everyday self that wakes and remembers but a pure self-positing freedom that presupposes nothing beyond itself. Because it posits its own being, it alone escapes the regress of conditions. He builds this against Spinoza's substance, which makes the ground an object the self merely belongs to; for the twenty-year-old Schelling the unconditioned can only be a subject, an act, never a thing among things.

absolute
subjectivity
epistemology
metaphysics
idealism
ontology
totality
freedom
necessity

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Grasped by an act, not by observation

How could a mind reach a ground that is no object at all? Not by looking, Schelling answers, but by an act in which the knowing and the known coincide.

The absolute I cannot be met the way a fact is met, since it precedes every object; to observe it would be to make it a thing and lose it. Schelling's route in is intellectual intuition, a self-knowing in which the positing and what is posited are one. That edge divides him from dogmatism, and behind that word stands Spinoza: the dogmatist begins from a substance given to thought, Schelling from a freedom that gives itself. The performance won the older Fichte's approval and, within three years, a chair at Jena he would soon outgrow.

intuition
reason
methodology
freedom
subjectivity
transcendental idealism
absolute self

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Within this work

passages held: 154
distinct concepts: 278
by passages held, corpus-wide: #149

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: history with theology.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 65 shared passages in all. 74 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
history	theology	10
history	philosophy	7
methodology	philosophy	6
empiricism	theology	5
philosophy	theology	5
empiricism	history	4
empiricism	methodology	4
absolute	history	3
history	methodology	3
methodology	theology	3
philosophy	state	3
absolute	empiricism	2
absolute	epistemology	2
absolute	philosophy	2
absolute	theology	2
empiricism	epistemology	2
empiricism	philosophy	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1795 Of the I as Principle of Philosophy (Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie) you are here DE
1798 On the World Soul (Von der Weltseele)
Second of Schelling's nature-philosophy books, following the Ideen of 1797; its organic conception of force is what carried him from Fichtean idealism toward a philosophy of nature in its own right.
DE
1803 On University Studies (Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums)
A Jena lecture course from Schelling's identity-philosophy years, addressed to students rather than to fellow philosophers; its idea of the university as an organic unity of the sciences anticipates Humboldt's Berlin model.
DE
1827 On the Nature of Philosophy as Science (Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft)
The hinge between Schelling's early identity-philosophy and the "positive philosophy" of his final decades, delivered at Erlangen in the winter of 1820–21 and unpublished in his lifetime.
DE
1841 Philosophy of Revelation (1841-42) (Philosophie der Offenbarung)
The capstone of Schelling's positive philosophy, delivered in Berlin from 1841; an unauthorised transcript appeared in 1843, the authorised text only posthumously in the collected works of 1858. Its critique of purely rational system is the historical seed of later existential thought.
DE
1850 On the Source of the Eternal Truths (Abhandlung über die Quelle der ewigen Wahrheiten)
A short Berlin Academy address of 1850, from Schelling's final years and published posthumously; it applies his late doctrine of God as the ground of possibility to the classical problem of the eternal truths.
DE
1859 The Philosophy of Art (Philosophie der Kunst)
The aesthetics of Schelling's identity-philosophy, spoken at Jena and Würzburg between 1802 and 1805 and unpublished until the collected works of 1859; it treats art as the supreme presentation of the absolute.
DE

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