JustinG wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 4:06 am
I thin this comes down to whether dialectical methodology prioritizes thought over being, and contemplation over practice, or visa versa. Hegel prioritized thought but, after Hegel, others such as Italian philosophers Labriola, Gramsci, Croce and Gentile reversed this prioritization. Croce and Gentile were idealists too, so this is not a matter of Marxists vs idealists.
In terms of my paper on the causal efficacy of consciousness, in this paper (
https://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index. ... e/view/263) philosopher Arran Gare uses the dialectical approach of Schelling to support process metaphysics rather than idealism, so the arguments I made are consonant with the position of Gare. Some excerpts:
Gare wrote:
Focusing on the crucial question of teleology and the nature of life, in this paper I will argue that in his early career, under the tutelage of Goethe, Schelling not only advanced Kant’s insights but successfully used these advances to overcome the incoherencies in Kant’s whole system of philosophy while preserving Kant’s most important insights. In doing so, he created a more coherent system of philosophy than Kant (or Hegel) which was neither idealist nor materialist, but as he himself claimed, a system that overcame the oppositions between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism. It was, I will argue, the first coherent system of process metaphysics, and should be seen as the origin of the tradition of process philosophy.....
For dialectical thinking as it was developed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, “subjectivity and objectivity, of both mind and the encompassing world of nature, are mutually implicating aspects of a single, comprehensive system.” While Schelling concurred with Fichte and Hegel on this, in opposition to their dialectics in which logically implicit contents are progressively unfolded, Schelling developed a form of dialectics that requires thought to confront causal influences from what exists as well as to draw inferences (although Schelling appeared to depart from this view for a time with his Philosophy of Identity). For Schelling, thought is inherently synthetic, and begins with genuine opposition either between thought and something opposing it, or other factors within thought. in which the I sees itself as unintentionally but necessarily engaged, precisely through the act of self-positing.” This form of dialectics does not reduce Nature to either law governed matter or “nothing more than the organ of self-consciousness” but affirms that “[t]he first maxim of all true natural science, to explain everything by the forces of nature, is therefore accepted in its widest extent in our science.”
...... By overcoming the limitation of Kant’s philosophy, Schelling has provided the basis for definitively transcending scientific materialism, in doing so, overcoming the opposition between science and the humanities and enabling people to understand themselves as culturally formed, socially situated, creative participants within nature.
If this is all relevant to your paper, then I am not sure why we created a new thread, as it will make it more difficult for others to follow. But that's fine.
You have opened up very important avenues of discussion above. The bolded part reflects Schelling's early work, I believe in
Naturphilosophie, which is tightly aligned with Hegel and Fichte. All three advanced past Kant because they recognized that the essential "I" (Thinking activity) cannot be explained by any external factors. It
precedes all dualisms of subject-object, ideal-real, etc. - that is the "
self-positing" they all asserted. My understanding is that Schelling later did an about face and regressed back to Kant, looking to find an external explanation for the "I" activity of Thinking. I believe you are also doing the same thing - you are implicitly assuming a dualism between personal "thought" and Nature which exists "out there". That is the exact
same implicit assumptions Kant made when deriving his epistemology. It views our Thinking activity as something separate from "being and practice" (i.e. Nature), and therefore rejects the
participatory understanding of Thinking of Goethe, Coleridge, early Fichte, Hegel, early Schelling, Steiner, Jung, etc.
It is from that flawed dualism which one then "reverses the prioritization" of Thinking activity. Idealism is not at all compatible with any ontic dualism in that manner. Basically it is a dualism of "personal" vs. "transpersonal", and a consistent metaphysical idealism can only recognize the ontic reality of the latter. There is no "personal" realm of Thinking and thought-forms. As implied in the OP, though, we don't need to rely on any metaphysical systems to confirm the "self-positing" of the essential "I" i.e. Thinking activity which Hegel, early Fichte, and early Schelling concluded. We can start with the givens of our experinece as we observe them in our own Thinking activity. That phenomenology is laid out clearly in Steiner's PoF. It's not true that "objective idealism" or "absolute idealism" in this manner is incompatible with "process philosophy". All of the thinkers mentioned in this post clearly hold to a process philosophy, as the Spirit-"I"-Thinking is forever metamorphosing. It is really the "reversal" view which denies processual foundation, as it seeks to
fix natural relations in space-time in order to understand their essence. That is pretty clear from modern "secular" Darwinian theory.