of the limits of a narrowly deterministic Newtonianism that leaves no
room for an adequate understanding of life. But that does not shake his
fundamental trust in modern science because he is quite optimistic that
deterministic physicalism can be overcome. At least he sees a new, rea-
sonable naturalism in the works of Leibniz, Buffon, or in Kant’s Critique
of Judgment, and he sees his own System of Transcendental Idealismin
this tradition. This new naturalism is a version of philosophical realism.
Schelling fully agrees with Kant that one major task of modern philos-
ophy is to support empirical realism by explaining how knowledge about
the world is possible. His naturalism even goes beyond Kant’s when he
insists that we need something like a natural history of mankind, which
has to make the existence of sapient beings intelligible.^23 In short,
Schelling advocates a quite robust form of modern, objective, realist
naturalism. But why then does he label his own philosophy ‘transcen-
dental idealism’?
First of all, Schelling borrows the term ‘transcendental idealism’
from Kant who claimed that the only possibility of defending empirical
realism against skepticism is transcendental idealism.^24 But Kant’s
claim, as well as the justification he offers, is a rather abstract, elusive
matter. Schelling therefore seeks for a different justification of Kantian
transcendental idealism. In Schelling’s version, the argument for tran-
scendental idealism goes more or less like this: Any version of objective
naturalism cannot, on pain of self-contradiction, deny that knowledge is
subjective in a certain sense. Any knowledge-claim presupposes the
existence of a ‘subject’. No knowledge without a knower. This is the les-
son that Descartes has taught us. But knowledge is a peculiar kind of
mental state. It necessarily involves an idea of how things are. Ideas are
representational, they are about something. But in order to be knowledge
they have to be adequate. They have to represent things as they really
are. Any form of constructivism or anti-realism, Berkeleyan idealism or
scepticism is thus ruled out.
This point is rather uncontroversial, or at least it ought to be.
However, Schelling insists that there is something like a subjective, ‘ide-
alistic’ aspect of knowledge that simple-minded naturalists tend to over-
look, thus becoming vulnerable to skeptic challenges. It may sound rather
paradoxical for adherents of objective naturalism today, but Schelling fol-
lows Kant when he claims that the only way to avoid skepticism and anti-
realism is to recognize that any knowledge is—at least potentially—our
knowledge, that it is we human beings who claim to know something.
There is something like a methodological subjectivism or rather anthro-
pocentrism^25 involved in any sensible philosophy of knowledge.62 Henning Tegtmeyer