In particular, Alfonso was notorious both for questioning Ptolemaic astronomy and, after having engaged in
extensive
research on it, for making his blasphemous suggestion that had he been "of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.
Schelling-Philosophical-Investigations-into-the-Essence-of-Human-Freedom
" (See note 57 above.
) However, the eschatological language, the "crisis in the turba gentium" seems to owe more to Boehme--in this connection, for exam- ple, see parts 7 and 8 of the Mysterium pansophicum included in this volume.
64. The German reads: "Die Angst des Lebens selbst treibt den Menschen aus dem Centrum, in das er erschaffen worden . . . " We use the unusual "into" to capture the equally unusual use of the accusative in das in German.
65. The German reads: "Daher die allgemeine Notwendigkeit der Su? nde und des Todes, als des wirklichen Absterbens der Eigenheit, durch welches aller menschlicher Wille als ein Feuer hindurchgehen muss, um gela? utert zu werden. "
66. This is the well-known anecdote known as "Buridan's ass," where an ass starves to death because it cannot chose between two equally distant and enticing piles of hay. The origin of this anecdote is somewhat ob- scure since it does not in fact seem to stem from the writings of the me- dieval philosopher Jean Buridan (ca. 1300-1358), whose name it carries, but from later sources among whom Spinoza is prominent (see, e. g. , Eth- ics II. Scholium to prop. XLIX).
67. The connection of the atomic "swerve" with free will [libera voluntas] is preserved in the Epicurean literature primarily through Lucretius who offers the only detailed account of this connection in On Nature [de rerum natura]. Here is an excerpt from that account (ii. 251-260):
If all movement is linked always, and new movement arises from the old movement in a fixed order, and if the first things [primordia] do not make by swerving [declinando] a beginning that breaks the bonds of fate so that cause does not follow on cause from infinity, whence comes this free will in creatures all over the earth, whence, I say, is this will wrested from the fates by which we move forward to wherever desire [voluptas] leads us and by which we swerve our movements neither at a certain time nor in a certain place, but where our mind itself has carried us. (Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Cyril Bailey, vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1947], 248, 250; our translation)
(See also A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Scep-
tics, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 57. )
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68. Schelling refers to Kant's note (at B58) in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793):
We can quickly be convinced that the concept of the freedom of the power of choice does not precede in us the consciousness of the moral law but is only inferred from the determinability of our power of choice through the law as unconditional command. We have only to ask whether we are certainly and immediately con- scious of a faculty enabling us to overcome, by firm resolve, every incentive to transgression, however great (Phalaris licet imperet, ut sis falsus, et admoto dictet periuria tauro [Phalaris should command that you be false and, having brought forth the bull, he should com- pose perjuries--Juvenal, Satire VIII: 81-82]). Everybody must admit that he does not know whether, were such a situation to arise, he would not waver in his resolve. Yet duty equally commands him un- conditionally: he ought to remain true to his resolve; and from this he rightly concludes that he must also be able to do it, and that his power of choice is therefore free. Those who pretend that this in- scrutable property is entirely within our grasp concoct an illusion through the word determinism (the thesis that the power of choice is determined through inner sufficient grounds) as though the diffi- culty consisted in reconciling these grounds with freedom--[an issue] that does not enter into anyone's mind. Rather, what we want to discern, but never shall, is this: how can pre-determinism co-exist with freedom, when according to predeterminism freely chosen ac- tions, as occurrences, have their determining grounds in antece- dent time (which, taken together with what is contained therein, no longer lies in our control), whereas according to freedom the ac- tion, as well as its contrary, must be in the control of the subject at the moment of its happening. (Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996], 93-94)
69. This is Leibniz's attempt to avoid determinism: that there is always a rea- son for an action but not a necessary one, rather one that merely inclines. As Leibniz writes in Theodicy, "[t]here is always a prevailing reason which prompts the will to its choice, and for the maintenance of freedom for the will it suffices that this reason should incline without necessitating" (Leibniz, Theodicy, 148). Few have been convinced that Leibniz's "inclin- ing reasons" are anything more than rhetorical nods to freedom that sof- ten the otherwise austere necessitarianism of his thought. For a rather sympathetic treatment, see, however, Robert M. Adams, Leibniz: Deter- minist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 34-36.
70. This and the following paragraph in the Philosophical Investigations are of particular and telling difficulty in regard to the use of Wesen. While we have translated Wesen here in most cases by "being," we have also trans- lated it with "essence" in three places. Our choice was determined by
the curious nature of the difficulty Schelling is attempting to overcome, one that appears in many guises in these notes. This difficulty arises from the attempt to define being as free but in such a way that freedom and necessity are one. In other words, freedom is defined as acting in ac- cord with necessity, namely, the inner necessity of one's own being--to be free is to act autonomously, but as the latter word suggests, to be free is to act in accordance with a certain law. Now, Schelling seems to make a distinction in these paragraphs between being, as the expression of that law, and that core of being which is itself the law; yet, he uses the same word, Wesen, to describe both this being as expression and as core of being. We have chosen to make this distinction--or, at the very least, our conclusion that it exists--explicit by using "being" where the Ger- man seems to denote what we call "being as expression" and "essence" where the German seems to denote the "core of being. " We have not done so lightly because, as we remarked in the "Translators' Note," we realize how inappropriate the term "essence" can be outside of its native (and, largely Scholastic) environment. Nonetheless, close attention to Schelling's text has recommended this choice to us, since Schelling does seem to suggest that there is an essential core to being (even if this es- sence is hardly an Aristotelian, but rather very much a legalistic and, therefore, modern one), though he then swiftly proceeds to undermine this essentiality by indicating that it results from man's own act. In doing so, Schelling appears merely to reinscribe his position within the "Kan- tian paradox" mentioned in the "Introduction" to this volume. The argu- ment is basically circular: I freely choose to act, but I cannot do so other than in accordance with the essential character of my being, hence, I freely choose to be according to what I already am, hence, I freely choose to be what I am. On the surface, this is a perplexing argument at best, but it can muster greater interest if one considers that Schelling's variety of transcendental idealism, his identity between subject and ob- ject, man and nature, is in fact eloquently expressed here (if in a pecu- liarly Fichtean way). As Robert Pippin notes:
To a degree still, I think, unappreciated, the young Schelling quickly realized that the whole approach [of Fichtean self- determination--our note] necessarily generated a basic problem. It was one whose logic would first appear in the German counter- Enlightenment (especially in Jacobi) and then in many, many forms later (certainly in Kierkegaard, later in Nietzsche's account of "life," and thanks to Heidegger, in thinkers such as Gadamer and Derrida). The task had been to think through the implications of the claim that being in any cognitive relation to the world, to have disclosed any sense (or being the true subject of one's deeds) is necessarily to have assumed such a relation actively, to have deter- mined oneself to be in such a relation. This does indeed make all the contents or objects of such a relation necessarily the results of some self-conscious self-determining. Yet we, as embodied agents
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in the world, are already natural or at least pre-volitionally situ- ated beings, already thinking in a certain way, with a certain inher- itance, with certain capacities we clearly share with non-human animals (like perception). It is only in being a kind of being, within a certain sort of world with kinds of beings, at a certain historical time, that we could be the particular self-determining subjects or agents. To view the issue of this sort of pre-reflective situation as it- self a result, or in terms of "what we must think" to make sense of "our" conditions of intelligibility, seems to miss the point pro- foundly. (Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Varia- tions [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 404-405)
Nonetheless, Schelling's ambivalence concerning a proper response to this perplexity, the mystery of identity, is the very bedrock of his ever restless thinking--here Heidegger is surely correct--and it extends to the very end of his career becoming, in some respects, an increasing concern with narrativity. In this respect and, for another perspective on this central difficulty, see notes 24 and 76.
71. Schelling applies the notion of free will as "the system of the equilibrium of free will" to intelligible being, expanding the analysis begun with the discussion of Buridan, and it might be useful here to refer to Heidegger's interpretation of this initial notion of indifference, as the ultimate form of freedom if freedom is defined solely as a kind of "freedom from," in con- nection with his generally incisive taxonomy of the varieties of freedom discussed in the Philosophical Investigations. Heidegger notes:
If freedom means man's complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete inde- terminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of free- dom is again a negative one, only in another respect, familiar in the history of thought as the libertas indifferentiae, the seventh concept of freedom in our count. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 102)
The other six are:
1) Freedom as capability of self-beginning [Selbstanfangenko? nnen]. 2) Freedom as not being bound to anything, freedom from (negative freedom).
3) Freedom as binding oneself to, libertas determinationis, freedom for (positive freedom).
4) Freedom as control over the senses (inappropriate freedom).
5) Freedom as self-determination in terms of one's own essential law (appropriate freedom), formal concept of freedom. This in- cludes all of the previous determinations. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 88)
And of course 6), that "freedom is the capability of good and evil. " (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 97)
72. The original Latin, "determinatio est negatio," stems from Spinoza's let- ters and had a considerable impact on the German idealists and, per- haps, on Hegel in particular. (See H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spi- noza [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1934], 134. )
73. This sentence reflects a central thought in Tolstoy's so-called philoso- phy of history in War and Peace which, in general, is merely the abstract expression of the governing narrative principles of that capacious novel. Tolstoy famously writes:
Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness ex- presses the essence of freedom.
Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life in human consciousness. Necessity without content is reason in its three forms. Freedom is the thing examined. Necessity is what examines.
Freedom is the content. Necessity is the form.
Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one
another as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately incomprehensible concepts of freedom and necessity. Only by uniting them do we get a clear representation of human
life.
Outside these two concepts, which in their unity mutually de-
fine each other as form and content, no representation of life whatsoever is possible. (L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991], 1302; trans- lation modified)
This remarkable passage, from Chapter X of the Second Part of the Epi- logue to War and Peace, seems prima facie to allude to Schelling. But it is in fact a great deal more likely that Tolstoy gleaned these very Schellin- gian thoughts from his reading of Schopenhauer's prize essay on free- dom in which he was intensely engaged when he wrote these lines. None- theless, the similarity is striking.
74. Wesenheit has posed a problem for us as another use of Wesen. We have chosen a rather clumsy paraphrase to avoid a perhaps even clumsier neologism (essentiality/beingness).
75. The German reads: "Der Mensch, wenn er auch in der Zeit geboren wird, ist in den Anfang der Scho? pfung (das Centrum) erschaffen. " The unusual use of the accusative here--in den Anfang--has been carried over to the En- glish where it is equally unusual. The notion of change of location here seems quite intentional and suggests a birth where one is "thrown" into the beginning (although one should not confuse this with Heidegger's notion of "thrownness" or Geworfenheit).
76. This is one of the most enigmatic sections of the Philosophical Investiga- tions where the timeless and time-bound meet. Or do they? Several com- mentators (Hennigfeld, Snow) have tended to view Schelling's insistence
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on an "act which is eternal by its very nature" as somewhat fanciful, a mere fac? on de parler, and they are perhaps correct in holding such a view in so far as the act is associated with an intelligible being, a kind of being that, strictly speaking, has only a most peculiar sort of being. Yet, while it does manifestly seem wise to be cautious about the ontological intent and plausibility of Schelling's claim, it is fair to say that a founding act of the nature Schelling contemplates cannot by definition belong to time if it indeed is in a very strong sense responsible for the governing interpre- tation of, or attitude to, time that is one of the basic constituent ele- ments of a self or character, of whatever is created through this central act. And it is likely fairest to say that a self or character or life is only ex- pressed in a narrative, in a time-bound form which, to be founded as a narrative, to have a structure as a narrative, however, must also be out- side time to that particular extent. For all narratives must have begin- nings, and these beginnings to be beginnings cannot be subject to the rules or terms they create, to use discredited language, they must transcend the narratives they found; if this were not the case, there could be no narrative at all. This point is made with splendid irony by Thomas Mann in his "Prelude: Descent into Hell" with which begins The Stories of Jacob, the first novel in the great tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. (For a further development of Mann's opening in connection with similar issues in the context of The Ages of the World, see Wolfram Hogrebe, Pra? dikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings "Die Weltalter" [Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp Ver- lag, 1989], 7. )
Yet, Schelling does seem to be more radical than that in so far as he sug- gests that character is determined in an even more intimate and particular way, determined with reference to a very particular plot-line indeed-- Judas being the paradigm here. It is this particularity itself that might of- fend and bring into doubt Schelling's account because it tends toward a form of metaphysical speculation rather too bold for modern or postmod- ern taste. But, as Z? iz? ek has said, Schelling at his boldest, or wildest, is often also at his closest to everyday experience, and this goes for the kind of thinking he expresses here as well. For choosing a certain narrative, along with all that comes with it, through a founding act is to choose al- ways within a context, to take a position vis-a`-vis a dominating narrative, and this position by its very nature must be a particular one, one that de- fines a self and, as such, seems to reveal a character that is outside the tra- dition which imposes the dominating narrative because it would be ex- traordinarily difficult to explain the possibility of such dissent or particularization without having recourse to that outside. Now, one may hesitate to associate that outside with intelligible character or the like, but some explanatory figure is necessary, since this simple experience of dis- sent is the clearest and most immediate indication of its necessity.
But Schelling appears to stumble into further problems by noting that the free act also is a necessary one. Here again, the answer might be that
the founding act determines, that it is both an act of freedom, a declara- tion in the void, and an imposition of necessity since it dictates all subse- quent acts that flow from it. See ? Zi? zek, The Indivisible Remainder, 16-22.
77. Schelling plays on two basic meanings of the word Anstoss, which can mean either a "hindrance or an "obstacle," as we have translated it here following Gutmann, or an impetus or "motivating factor. " The relation between the two meanings seems quite clear and brings to mind Rousseau's account of the origins of a certain kind of modern eros in the second part of his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. and Judith Masters (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 142-143.
78. What does this kind of predestination mean? Again, as remarked in note 76, the sense of predestination seems to reflect the notion that, as T. S. Eliot says, "in my beginning is my end" ("East Coker"), that the constitu- tive acts by which I become myself also constitute a sort of predestina- tion, that as constitutive acts, they must be outside time, yet they dictate what time will hold.
But, as stated before, the imputation of an eternal character, that someone is bound to a particular character, whether evil or good, is very problematic, not only in itself but also in regard to the kind of theodicy Schelling may be pursuing.
Here emerges the central ambiguity, which we mentioned in terms of the translation of Wesen. Does Schelling argue that there is something akin to an essence in God and human beings or does he deny this pos- sibility? Is there a darkness that conceals a "hidden" light or does light somehow determine itself on its emergence from darkness--in other words, is genesis a genesis of something that precedes genesis or of something that becomes itself in genesis--the older way of saying this is to look at genesis as necessary emergence or as a coalescence of chance.
It seems to us that this ambiguity courses through the entire treatise and is neither openly nor tacitly resolved (and this despite Schelling's closing arguments which very explicitly rehearse one last time the no- tion that God has some kind of innate identity), and its impact on the theodicy and anthropology of the treatise is profound because it shows a fundamental indecision about the possibility of the grand structure of thought set forth in the treatise--in this sense, the latter is indeed both a primary example of idealism and its destruction (and, in this same sense, both of Heidegger's opinions expressed at different times--1936 and 1941--are correct).
79. Here Schelling emphasizes a key point, that evil is not an expression of the passions allowed to reign due to debility, but rather that evil is thoroughly imbued with mind or spirit--to posit the self is to entertain the possibility of evil hitherto "dormant" but nonetheless fundamental, a
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constitutive force in the self, and therefore "radical. " Schelling relies on Kant of course and reproves Fichte, who discusses radical evil in his System der Sittenlehre (1798) at 198-205. Fichte notes:
This is what we presuppose: man will do nothing which is not simply necessary and which, pressed onward by his nature [Wesen], he is not compelled to do. Accordingly, we presuppose an original lethargy [Tra? gheit] in reflection and, as a consequence, in action pursuant to this reflection. Accordingly, this would be a true, positive, radical evil; not just something negative as it hitherto seemed to be. Then it had to be that way as well. We must have something positive merely in order to be able to explain the nega- tive. (Fichte, Werke, IV/199)
80. The Greek means quite literally "by bastard reasoning," a combination which suggests an unanchored and wavering way of thinking that cannot tell the difference between original and copy. The term appears in the Ti- maeus at 52b3 and the crucial portion of the text is this:
So because of all these and other kindred notions, we are also not able on waking up to distinguish clearly the unsleeping and truly ex- isting nature, owing to our dream-like condition, nor to tell the truth--how that it belongs to a copy [eik ? on]--seeing that it has not for its own that for which it came into being, but fleets ever as a phan- tom [fantasma] of something else--to come into existence in some other thing, clinging to existence as best it may, on pain of being nothing at all; whereas to the aid of that which truly is [to ont ? os on] there comes the precise and true argument, that so long as one thing is one thing, and another something different, neither of the two will ever come to exist in the other so that the same thing becomes simul- taneously both one and two. (Plato, Timaeus, trans. R. G. Bury [Cam- bridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1929], 122-125)
81. Buchheim finds a reference to Jacobi's epistolic novel, cumbersomely ti- tled Edward Allwill's Collection of Letters edited by Friedrich Heinrich Ja- cobi with an Addition from Letters of His Own, and, specifically, to letter XX. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal & Kingston: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1994), 465-472.
82. Likely a further reference to Jacobi (and perhaps Schlegel as well).
83. The German reads: "Gewissenhaftigkeit erscheint nicht eben notwendig und immer als Enthusiasmus oder als ausserordentliche Erhebung u? ber sich selbst, wozu, wenn der Du? nkel selbstbeliebiger Sittlichkeit niedergesch- lagen ist, ein anderer und noch viel schlimmerer Hochmutsgeist gerne auch
diese machen mo? chte. "
84. Buchheim indicates that the source here is Velleius Paterclus, Historia
romana II 35, 2 (Buchheim, PU 153, n282). The Cato referred to is M. Porcius Cato, called "the younger" or "Uticensis" (95-46 B. C. E. ) to dis- tinguish him from his great ancestor, M. Porcius Cato, the "Censor. " The former Cato was portrayed in antiquity as a veritable incarnation
of Republican virtue, the glory of staunch and stubborn Rome, before the advent of the empire, and this is especially evident in Lucan's dark epic, the Pharsalia, where the famous line, "victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni" ["The winning cause has pleased the gods, but that of the defeated Cato"] (I:128) helped set the tone (with its ironies perhaps less than intact) for Cato's subsequent historical reception.
The Freedom of God
85. The German reads: "Der zweite ist der Wille der Liebe, wodurch das Wort in die Natur ausgesprochen wird, und durch den Gott sich erst perso? nlich macht. " We have preserved the accusative sense of the German that im- plies the active power of the word in regard to nature.
86. King Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284), called "el sabio," "the learned" or "wise," is portrayed in Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) as having made daring challenges to tradition in the name of scien- tific inquiry.
In particular, Alfonso was notorious both for questioning Ptolemaic astronomy and, after having engaged in extensive research on it, for making his blasphemous suggestion that had he been "of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better. " If one wishes to take the issue that far, Alfonso's daring questioning can be seen as an example of the kind of questioning of the architect that leads to his overthrow, a rather neat prefiguration of the principal thrust of modernity. (Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. 2 [Reinier Leers: Amsterdam, 1697], 94-95; Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 14-18)
87. 2 Sam. 22:27 reads in the Revised Standard Version: With the pure thou dost show
thyself pure,
and with the crooked thou dost show thyself perverse.
88. This citation is from Hamann's Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhapsodie in Kab- balistischer Prosa (Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, 2:208). Buchheim notes (Buchheim, PU, 158 n316) that the citation is incorrect, the text having appeared in 1762 in Crusades of a Philologist (Kreuzzu? ge des Philologen). The "chamberlain of the Alexandrian church" is probably Origen (c. 185- 254 C. E. ), the outstanding thinker of the Christian East who bears com- parison in significance and scope of thought with St. Augustine, the great difference between the two being that St. Augustine has almost always been celebrated, whereas Origen has been both celebrated and calumni- ated as devoted more to Plato than to the church (indeed, for this reason much of his thought was soundly rejected in the East at the Fifth General Council in 533 C. E. ).
89. Gynaeceum (Gr. gunaik ? on or gunaik ? onitis) denotes those inner rooms of a Greek or Roman house occupied exclusively by women.
90. The German reads: "Inwiefern die Selbstheit in ihrer Lossagung das Prinzip des Bo? sen ist, erregt der Grund allerdings das mo? gliche Prinzip des Bo? sen, aber nicht das Bo? se selber, noch zum Bo? sen. "
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91. From Huggard's translation (modified to account for Schelling's use of a Latin translation of the original text which was written in French and dif- fers in the first passage cited in the note):
(1) from section 25 (Schelling's reference to p. 139):
Hence, from the foregoing it is to be concluded that God antece- dently wills all good in itself, that he consequently wills the best as an end, what is indifferent and physical evil as a means, but that he wishes to permit moral evil only as a condition without which the best may not be obtained so that evil surely may not be admitted except in the form of a hypothetical necessity that connects it to the best. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 138)
(2) from section 230 (Schelling's reference to p. 292):
Regarding vice, it has been shown above that it is not the object of a divine decree as means, but as a condition without which--and only to that extent is it permitted. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 270)
The All-Unity of Love
92. This language is derived from Boehme. See part 5 of the Mysterium pan- sophicum included in this volume.
93. Here is a relevant excerpt from the page referred to in Philosophy and Religion:
Now, as the final goal of history is reconciliation with the fall, the latter can also be looked upon from a more positive perspective. For the first selfhood of the ideas was one flowing from the immediate activity of God. But the selfhood and absolute into which they intro- duce themselves through reconciliation is self-given, so that they exist in selfhood as truly independent ideas regardless of their abso- luteness. In this way the fall becomes the means for the complete revelation of God. In so far as God, by virtue of the eternal necessity of his nature, lends selfhood to what is seen, he gives it away itself into finitude and, so to speak, sacrifices it so that the ideas which were in him without a self-given life are called into life; it is precisely in this way that they become capable, as independently existing, to be in the absolute once again, something which happens through a completed morality. (Schelling, Sa? mmtliche Werke, VI: 63)
94. In the Revised Standard Version, the passage reads: "For he must reign, until he has put all his enemies under his feet. " This passage is from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (15: 25).
95. Indifference is one of the fundamental terms in the so-called philosophy of identity, that is, the philosophical tendency associated with Schelling's writings between 1801 and 1804. This notion of "indifference" is often thought to be the target of Hegel's notorious comments in the "Preface" to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the empty absolute, the "night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black" (Hegel, Phenome- nology, 9). But it should be hardly surprising that Schelling's conception
of indifference is not to be confused with the Hegelian caricature. Indif- ference is not in fact an absence of difference, a complete surrender to a pure and, thus, unknowable (at least for a finite mind) plenitude, it is not an overcoming of opposition in pure identity, as it were, but, just as it sounds, it is a point of indifference between oppositions where they are in balance, where they are indifferent the one to the other. Indifference as such is the absolute because the first indication of difference must be an indication of limitation.
It must be admitted, however, that Schelling's notion of indifference does little to explain how difference can come to be, that is, how anything can come to be--the origin remains necessarily mysterious, ever a chal- lenge to thought, and a stern reminder of the possible limits to thought.
96. The aphorisms read:
162. The difference between a divine identity and a merely finite one is that, in the former, it is not things which are opposed but need to be connected that are connected but such of which each could exist for itself but yet does not exist without another.
163. This is the mystery of eternal love, that that which would be absolute for itself, although considering it no theft to exist for itself, yet exists only in and with others. If each thing were not a whole, but rather only a part of the whole, there would be no love: there is love, however, because each thing is a whole and nonetheless does not nor can exist without another. (Schelling, Sa? mmtliche Werke, VII: 174)
97. The somewhat overwrought German of the final clause in this sentence reads: ". . . ferner dass nur Gott als Geist die absolute Identita? t beider Prin- zipien, aber nur dadurch und insofern ist, dass und inwiefern beide seiner Perso? nlichkeit unterworfen sind. "
98. This footnote has gathered a good deal of attention. White refers to it in his attempt to adduce evidence for his claim that Schelling is engaging in esotericism (107). More recently, Peter Warnek has argued that the note reflects Schelling's "own thematizing of the movement of the word to re- coil upon the way in which freedom comes to word" (Peter Warnek, "Reading Schelling and Heidegger: The Freedom of Cryptic Dialogue," in Schelling Now, 180). Warnek continues: "Schelling's word of freedom would therefore also have to be the ecstatic movement of freedom bring- ing itself to word; it would be life saying life in the movement of life itself. This is the promise of a 'system of freedom. '" Jason Wirth also makes the following comments on this note:
. . . Schelling expressed the dialogical genesis of everything in the text. The writer composes from a particular perspective and in me- dias res within an unfolding drama still always to be completed. This dialogical demand, this indebtedness to the treatise's subject, does not grant Schelling authority over it. This writing, within a fluid context in which the Wesen can somehow emerge, does not grant Schelling the capacity to render it with sharp determinations.
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This dialogical humility knows that this is not a dialogue between equals because there is no parity among the interlocutors. The in- terlocutors are not einerlei, not of the same kind. A model of such an asymmetrical dialogue might be something like attempting to communicate with nature. Or speaking with animals, not as crea- tures to be trained for human use, but as animals per se. A more classical precedent might be Job's dialogue with the whirlwind. It is a dialogue between bodies and their animas, between the light and its concealed, indwelling darkness. It might be thought of as a di- alogue of the fractured Wesen with itself, producing discontinuities without sublimation. (Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life, 159)
99. The German here is "Finalita? t der Ursachen" or "finality of causes. " What is likely meant by this is clarified by Gutmann who translates Finalita? t by "purposiveness," thereby suggesting that Schelling is alluding to Aristo- telian teleology and, thus, the notion of a causa finalis that is the end for the sake of which (hou eneka) something happens.
100. The Latin source appears to be Horace which Schelling freely varies. Here is the original (Odes II. i):
Motum ex Metello consule civicum bellique causas et vitia et modos
ludumque fortunae gravesque principum amicitias et arma
nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus, periculosae plenum opus aleae,
tractas et incedis per ignes suppositos cineri doloso.
[In our translation: You are treating of the civil commotion under the consulship of Metellus, the causes of war, the mistakes, its phases, the game of fortune, the dire friendships among princes and the arms stained with blood--a task full of dangerous risk--and you go forth through fires hidden beneath treacherous ashes. ]
101. The section reads:
76. Let it not be objected that such rational speculations on the mysteries of religion are forbidden. --The word 'mystery', in early Christian times, meant something quite different from what we understand by it now; and the development of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if they are to be of any help to the human race. When they were revealed, of course, they were not yet truths of reason; but they were revealed in order to become such truths. They were, so to speak, the result of the calculation which the mathematics teacher announces in advance, in order to give his pupils some idea of what they are working towards. If the pupils were satisfied with knowing the result in advance, they
would never learn to calculate, and would frustrate the intention with which the good master gave them a guideline to help them with their work. (G. E. Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writ- ings, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005], 236)
102. This is an allusion to Herder's philosophy of history and, more specifi- cally, to his theory about the origin and development of Christianity as outlined, for example, in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit). In that work, Herder insists that Christianity, just as all religions, including those of the pagan cultures, must be traced back to an original religion [Urrelig- ion] and that the very idea of religion has always been a primary fact of human life. (See 9, V. "Religion Is the Oldest and Holiest Tradition of the Earth," in Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher [Frankfurt a. M. : Deutscher Klas- siker Verlag, 1989], 372-379. )
103. This alludes to Goethe's famous bon mot mentioned at the end of Baader's essay "On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason. " See that essay in this volume.
104. The essay by Baader noted here is called "On the Analogy between the Drive to Know and to Procreate" (U? ber die Analogie des Erkenntnis- und des Zeugungs-Triebes). See Franz Xaver von Baader, Sa? mmtliche Werke, ed. F. Hoffmann, vol. 1 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag [Reprint], 1963), 39-48.
105. According to Buchheim, this idea was prevalent in theosophic literature and, of course, in Boehme (Buchheim, PU 167, n372-373).
106. This is likely another reference to Schlegel and his Indierbuch (see note 7 above).
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Introductory Note
1. For an extensive treatment of the relation between Schelling and Boehme, see Robert F. Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influ- ence of Boehme on the Works of 1809-1815 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univer- sity Press, 1977).
2. For a broad overview of the Pantheism debate, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1987).
3. In this respect, see Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life, 65-100.
Boehme
1. Jakob Bo? hme, Sa? mtliche Schriften, ed. Will-Erich Peukert, vol 4 (Stuttgart: Frohmann-Holzboog [Reprint], 1955-1960), 97-111.
Baader
1. Franz Xaver von Baader, Sa? mmtliche Werke, 33-38. 2. "Evil is not a story, it's a power. "
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Lessing
1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Go? pfert, vol. VIII (Mu- nich: Hanser Verlag, 1979), 118-120.
Jacobi
1. The translation follows Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, U? ber die Lehre des Spi- noza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, ed. Marion Lauschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), 23-36 and Lessing, Werke VIII, 565- 571. As to the former, we have attempted to follow as closely as possible the various forms of emphasis in the text.
2. En-Sof [Heb: "that which has no end/the infinite"] refers to the notion of a hidden or absent God, a deus absconditus, without name and form which is the ground of all beings. The term developed into a central con- cept in the Kabbalistic philosophy of the Middle Ages. (See Go? bel, "En- soph," Lessing, Werke VIII, 751 and Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken Books, 1946], 269-273. )
3. salto mortale [literally, "by means of a fatal leap," in which a person turns head over heels in the air, e. g. , somersault].
4. This term comes from section 47 of the Monadology, which reads as fol- lows: "Accordingly, God alone is the primary unity or the original simple substance, of which all the created or derivative monads are products. They originate, so to speak, through continual fulgurations of the divin- ity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, to which it is essential to be limited . . . " See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 162.
5. Jacobi likely refers here to a Latin translation of Principes de la nature et de la grace fonde? s en raison.
6. Jacobi is referring to the "Confession of Augsburg" by Melanchthon, Lu- ther, and other theologians that was submitted to the emperor during the Reichstag of Augsburg in 1530. This "Confession" continued to incite fierce disputes between orthodox and reformed Lutherans thereafter. (See Go? bel, "Augsburgische Konfession," Lessing, Werke VII, 739. )
7. Jacobi's salto mortale is paired with a play on Kopf [head, intellect] here. The implication is that one must humble one's intellect before this leap, which has no use for it; a leap which, in other words, represents a subor- dination of reason to faith.
8. The text follows Jacobi, U? ber die Lehre des Spinoza, 166-167. As before, we have attempted to follow closely the various forms of emphasis in the text.
9. Jacobi is referring to Voltaire's tragedy Mahomet or Le fanatisme ou Ma- homet le Prophe`te (1743).
Herder
1.
64. The German reads: "Die Angst des Lebens selbst treibt den Menschen aus dem Centrum, in das er erschaffen worden . . . " We use the unusual "into" to capture the equally unusual use of the accusative in das in German.
65. The German reads: "Daher die allgemeine Notwendigkeit der Su? nde und des Todes, als des wirklichen Absterbens der Eigenheit, durch welches aller menschlicher Wille als ein Feuer hindurchgehen muss, um gela? utert zu werden. "
66. This is the well-known anecdote known as "Buridan's ass," where an ass starves to death because it cannot chose between two equally distant and enticing piles of hay. The origin of this anecdote is somewhat ob- scure since it does not in fact seem to stem from the writings of the me- dieval philosopher Jean Buridan (ca. 1300-1358), whose name it carries, but from later sources among whom Spinoza is prominent (see, e. g. , Eth- ics II. Scholium to prop. XLIX).
67. The connection of the atomic "swerve" with free will [libera voluntas] is preserved in the Epicurean literature primarily through Lucretius who offers the only detailed account of this connection in On Nature [de rerum natura]. Here is an excerpt from that account (ii. 251-260):
If all movement is linked always, and new movement arises from the old movement in a fixed order, and if the first things [primordia] do not make by swerving [declinando] a beginning that breaks the bonds of fate so that cause does not follow on cause from infinity, whence comes this free will in creatures all over the earth, whence, I say, is this will wrested from the fates by which we move forward to wherever desire [voluptas] leads us and by which we swerve our movements neither at a certain time nor in a certain place, but where our mind itself has carried us. (Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Cyril Bailey, vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1947], 248, 250; our translation)
(See also A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Scep-
tics, 2nd ed. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 57. )
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68. Schelling refers to Kant's note (at B58) in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793):
We can quickly be convinced that the concept of the freedom of the power of choice does not precede in us the consciousness of the moral law but is only inferred from the determinability of our power of choice through the law as unconditional command. We have only to ask whether we are certainly and immediately con- scious of a faculty enabling us to overcome, by firm resolve, every incentive to transgression, however great (Phalaris licet imperet, ut sis falsus, et admoto dictet periuria tauro [Phalaris should command that you be false and, having brought forth the bull, he should com- pose perjuries--Juvenal, Satire VIII: 81-82]). Everybody must admit that he does not know whether, were such a situation to arise, he would not waver in his resolve. Yet duty equally commands him un- conditionally: he ought to remain true to his resolve; and from this he rightly concludes that he must also be able to do it, and that his power of choice is therefore free. Those who pretend that this in- scrutable property is entirely within our grasp concoct an illusion through the word determinism (the thesis that the power of choice is determined through inner sufficient grounds) as though the diffi- culty consisted in reconciling these grounds with freedom--[an issue] that does not enter into anyone's mind. Rather, what we want to discern, but never shall, is this: how can pre-determinism co-exist with freedom, when according to predeterminism freely chosen ac- tions, as occurrences, have their determining grounds in antece- dent time (which, taken together with what is contained therein, no longer lies in our control), whereas according to freedom the ac- tion, as well as its contrary, must be in the control of the subject at the moment of its happening. (Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996], 93-94)
69. This is Leibniz's attempt to avoid determinism: that there is always a rea- son for an action but not a necessary one, rather one that merely inclines. As Leibniz writes in Theodicy, "[t]here is always a prevailing reason which prompts the will to its choice, and for the maintenance of freedom for the will it suffices that this reason should incline without necessitating" (Leibniz, Theodicy, 148). Few have been convinced that Leibniz's "inclin- ing reasons" are anything more than rhetorical nods to freedom that sof- ten the otherwise austere necessitarianism of his thought. For a rather sympathetic treatment, see, however, Robert M. Adams, Leibniz: Deter- minist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 34-36.
70. This and the following paragraph in the Philosophical Investigations are of particular and telling difficulty in regard to the use of Wesen. While we have translated Wesen here in most cases by "being," we have also trans- lated it with "essence" in three places. Our choice was determined by
the curious nature of the difficulty Schelling is attempting to overcome, one that appears in many guises in these notes. This difficulty arises from the attempt to define being as free but in such a way that freedom and necessity are one. In other words, freedom is defined as acting in ac- cord with necessity, namely, the inner necessity of one's own being--to be free is to act autonomously, but as the latter word suggests, to be free is to act in accordance with a certain law. Now, Schelling seems to make a distinction in these paragraphs between being, as the expression of that law, and that core of being which is itself the law; yet, he uses the same word, Wesen, to describe both this being as expression and as core of being. We have chosen to make this distinction--or, at the very least, our conclusion that it exists--explicit by using "being" where the Ger- man seems to denote what we call "being as expression" and "essence" where the German seems to denote the "core of being. " We have not done so lightly because, as we remarked in the "Translators' Note," we realize how inappropriate the term "essence" can be outside of its native (and, largely Scholastic) environment. Nonetheless, close attention to Schelling's text has recommended this choice to us, since Schelling does seem to suggest that there is an essential core to being (even if this es- sence is hardly an Aristotelian, but rather very much a legalistic and, therefore, modern one), though he then swiftly proceeds to undermine this essentiality by indicating that it results from man's own act. In doing so, Schelling appears merely to reinscribe his position within the "Kan- tian paradox" mentioned in the "Introduction" to this volume. The argu- ment is basically circular: I freely choose to act, but I cannot do so other than in accordance with the essential character of my being, hence, I freely choose to be according to what I already am, hence, I freely choose to be what I am. On the surface, this is a perplexing argument at best, but it can muster greater interest if one considers that Schelling's variety of transcendental idealism, his identity between subject and ob- ject, man and nature, is in fact eloquently expressed here (if in a pecu- liarly Fichtean way). As Robert Pippin notes:
To a degree still, I think, unappreciated, the young Schelling quickly realized that the whole approach [of Fichtean self- determination--our note] necessarily generated a basic problem. It was one whose logic would first appear in the German counter- Enlightenment (especially in Jacobi) and then in many, many forms later (certainly in Kierkegaard, later in Nietzsche's account of "life," and thanks to Heidegger, in thinkers such as Gadamer and Derrida). The task had been to think through the implications of the claim that being in any cognitive relation to the world, to have disclosed any sense (or being the true subject of one's deeds) is necessarily to have assumed such a relation actively, to have deter- mined oneself to be in such a relation. This does indeed make all the contents or objects of such a relation necessarily the results of some self-conscious self-determining. Yet we, as embodied agents
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in the world, are already natural or at least pre-volitionally situ- ated beings, already thinking in a certain way, with a certain inher- itance, with certain capacities we clearly share with non-human animals (like perception). It is only in being a kind of being, within a certain sort of world with kinds of beings, at a certain historical time, that we could be the particular self-determining subjects or agents. To view the issue of this sort of pre-reflective situation as it- self a result, or in terms of "what we must think" to make sense of "our" conditions of intelligibility, seems to miss the point pro- foundly. (Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Varia- tions [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 404-405)
Nonetheless, Schelling's ambivalence concerning a proper response to this perplexity, the mystery of identity, is the very bedrock of his ever restless thinking--here Heidegger is surely correct--and it extends to the very end of his career becoming, in some respects, an increasing concern with narrativity. In this respect and, for another perspective on this central difficulty, see notes 24 and 76.
71. Schelling applies the notion of free will as "the system of the equilibrium of free will" to intelligible being, expanding the analysis begun with the discussion of Buridan, and it might be useful here to refer to Heidegger's interpretation of this initial notion of indifference, as the ultimate form of freedom if freedom is defined solely as a kind of "freedom from," in con- nection with his generally incisive taxonomy of the varieties of freedom discussed in the Philosophical Investigations. Heidegger notes:
If freedom means man's complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete inde- terminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of free- dom is again a negative one, only in another respect, familiar in the history of thought as the libertas indifferentiae, the seventh concept of freedom in our count. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 102)
The other six are:
1) Freedom as capability of self-beginning [Selbstanfangenko? nnen]. 2) Freedom as not being bound to anything, freedom from (negative freedom).
3) Freedom as binding oneself to, libertas determinationis, freedom for (positive freedom).
4) Freedom as control over the senses (inappropriate freedom).
5) Freedom as self-determination in terms of one's own essential law (appropriate freedom), formal concept of freedom. This in- cludes all of the previous determinations. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 88)
And of course 6), that "freedom is the capability of good and evil. " (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 97)
72. The original Latin, "determinatio est negatio," stems from Spinoza's let- ters and had a considerable impact on the German idealists and, per- haps, on Hegel in particular. (See H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spi- noza [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1934], 134. )
73. This sentence reflects a central thought in Tolstoy's so-called philoso- phy of history in War and Peace which, in general, is merely the abstract expression of the governing narrative principles of that capacious novel. Tolstoy famously writes:
Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness ex- presses the essence of freedom.
Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life in human consciousness. Necessity without content is reason in its three forms. Freedom is the thing examined. Necessity is what examines.
Freedom is the content. Necessity is the form.
Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one
another as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately incomprehensible concepts of freedom and necessity. Only by uniting them do we get a clear representation of human
life.
Outside these two concepts, which in their unity mutually de-
fine each other as form and content, no representation of life whatsoever is possible. (L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991], 1302; trans- lation modified)
This remarkable passage, from Chapter X of the Second Part of the Epi- logue to War and Peace, seems prima facie to allude to Schelling. But it is in fact a great deal more likely that Tolstoy gleaned these very Schellin- gian thoughts from his reading of Schopenhauer's prize essay on free- dom in which he was intensely engaged when he wrote these lines. None- theless, the similarity is striking.
74. Wesenheit has posed a problem for us as another use of Wesen. We have chosen a rather clumsy paraphrase to avoid a perhaps even clumsier neologism (essentiality/beingness).
75. The German reads: "Der Mensch, wenn er auch in der Zeit geboren wird, ist in den Anfang der Scho? pfung (das Centrum) erschaffen. " The unusual use of the accusative here--in den Anfang--has been carried over to the En- glish where it is equally unusual. The notion of change of location here seems quite intentional and suggests a birth where one is "thrown" into the beginning (although one should not confuse this with Heidegger's notion of "thrownness" or Geworfenheit).
76. This is one of the most enigmatic sections of the Philosophical Investiga- tions where the timeless and time-bound meet. Or do they? Several com- mentators (Hennigfeld, Snow) have tended to view Schelling's insistence
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on an "act which is eternal by its very nature" as somewhat fanciful, a mere fac? on de parler, and they are perhaps correct in holding such a view in so far as the act is associated with an intelligible being, a kind of being that, strictly speaking, has only a most peculiar sort of being. Yet, while it does manifestly seem wise to be cautious about the ontological intent and plausibility of Schelling's claim, it is fair to say that a founding act of the nature Schelling contemplates cannot by definition belong to time if it indeed is in a very strong sense responsible for the governing interpre- tation of, or attitude to, time that is one of the basic constituent ele- ments of a self or character, of whatever is created through this central act. And it is likely fairest to say that a self or character or life is only ex- pressed in a narrative, in a time-bound form which, to be founded as a narrative, to have a structure as a narrative, however, must also be out- side time to that particular extent. For all narratives must have begin- nings, and these beginnings to be beginnings cannot be subject to the rules or terms they create, to use discredited language, they must transcend the narratives they found; if this were not the case, there could be no narrative at all. This point is made with splendid irony by Thomas Mann in his "Prelude: Descent into Hell" with which begins The Stories of Jacob, the first novel in the great tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. (For a further development of Mann's opening in connection with similar issues in the context of The Ages of the World, see Wolfram Hogrebe, Pra? dikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings "Die Weltalter" [Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp Ver- lag, 1989], 7. )
Yet, Schelling does seem to be more radical than that in so far as he sug- gests that character is determined in an even more intimate and particular way, determined with reference to a very particular plot-line indeed-- Judas being the paradigm here. It is this particularity itself that might of- fend and bring into doubt Schelling's account because it tends toward a form of metaphysical speculation rather too bold for modern or postmod- ern taste. But, as Z? iz? ek has said, Schelling at his boldest, or wildest, is often also at his closest to everyday experience, and this goes for the kind of thinking he expresses here as well. For choosing a certain narrative, along with all that comes with it, through a founding act is to choose al- ways within a context, to take a position vis-a`-vis a dominating narrative, and this position by its very nature must be a particular one, one that de- fines a self and, as such, seems to reveal a character that is outside the tra- dition which imposes the dominating narrative because it would be ex- traordinarily difficult to explain the possibility of such dissent or particularization without having recourse to that outside. Now, one may hesitate to associate that outside with intelligible character or the like, but some explanatory figure is necessary, since this simple experience of dis- sent is the clearest and most immediate indication of its necessity.
But Schelling appears to stumble into further problems by noting that the free act also is a necessary one. Here again, the answer might be that
the founding act determines, that it is both an act of freedom, a declara- tion in the void, and an imposition of necessity since it dictates all subse- quent acts that flow from it. See ? Zi? zek, The Indivisible Remainder, 16-22.
77. Schelling plays on two basic meanings of the word Anstoss, which can mean either a "hindrance or an "obstacle," as we have translated it here following Gutmann, or an impetus or "motivating factor. " The relation between the two meanings seems quite clear and brings to mind Rousseau's account of the origins of a certain kind of modern eros in the second part of his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. and Judith Masters (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 142-143.
78. What does this kind of predestination mean? Again, as remarked in note 76, the sense of predestination seems to reflect the notion that, as T. S. Eliot says, "in my beginning is my end" ("East Coker"), that the constitu- tive acts by which I become myself also constitute a sort of predestina- tion, that as constitutive acts, they must be outside time, yet they dictate what time will hold.
But, as stated before, the imputation of an eternal character, that someone is bound to a particular character, whether evil or good, is very problematic, not only in itself but also in regard to the kind of theodicy Schelling may be pursuing.
Here emerges the central ambiguity, which we mentioned in terms of the translation of Wesen. Does Schelling argue that there is something akin to an essence in God and human beings or does he deny this pos- sibility? Is there a darkness that conceals a "hidden" light or does light somehow determine itself on its emergence from darkness--in other words, is genesis a genesis of something that precedes genesis or of something that becomes itself in genesis--the older way of saying this is to look at genesis as necessary emergence or as a coalescence of chance.
It seems to us that this ambiguity courses through the entire treatise and is neither openly nor tacitly resolved (and this despite Schelling's closing arguments which very explicitly rehearse one last time the no- tion that God has some kind of innate identity), and its impact on the theodicy and anthropology of the treatise is profound because it shows a fundamental indecision about the possibility of the grand structure of thought set forth in the treatise--in this sense, the latter is indeed both a primary example of idealism and its destruction (and, in this same sense, both of Heidegger's opinions expressed at different times--1936 and 1941--are correct).
79. Here Schelling emphasizes a key point, that evil is not an expression of the passions allowed to reign due to debility, but rather that evil is thoroughly imbued with mind or spirit--to posit the self is to entertain the possibility of evil hitherto "dormant" but nonetheless fundamental, a
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constitutive force in the self, and therefore "radical. " Schelling relies on Kant of course and reproves Fichte, who discusses radical evil in his System der Sittenlehre (1798) at 198-205. Fichte notes:
This is what we presuppose: man will do nothing which is not simply necessary and which, pressed onward by his nature [Wesen], he is not compelled to do. Accordingly, we presuppose an original lethargy [Tra? gheit] in reflection and, as a consequence, in action pursuant to this reflection. Accordingly, this would be a true, positive, radical evil; not just something negative as it hitherto seemed to be. Then it had to be that way as well. We must have something positive merely in order to be able to explain the nega- tive. (Fichte, Werke, IV/199)
80. The Greek means quite literally "by bastard reasoning," a combination which suggests an unanchored and wavering way of thinking that cannot tell the difference between original and copy. The term appears in the Ti- maeus at 52b3 and the crucial portion of the text is this:
So because of all these and other kindred notions, we are also not able on waking up to distinguish clearly the unsleeping and truly ex- isting nature, owing to our dream-like condition, nor to tell the truth--how that it belongs to a copy [eik ? on]--seeing that it has not for its own that for which it came into being, but fleets ever as a phan- tom [fantasma] of something else--to come into existence in some other thing, clinging to existence as best it may, on pain of being nothing at all; whereas to the aid of that which truly is [to ont ? os on] there comes the precise and true argument, that so long as one thing is one thing, and another something different, neither of the two will ever come to exist in the other so that the same thing becomes simul- taneously both one and two. (Plato, Timaeus, trans. R. G. Bury [Cam- bridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1929], 122-125)
81. Buchheim finds a reference to Jacobi's epistolic novel, cumbersomely ti- tled Edward Allwill's Collection of Letters edited by Friedrich Heinrich Ja- cobi with an Addition from Letters of His Own, and, specifically, to letter XX. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal & Kingston: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1994), 465-472.
82. Likely a further reference to Jacobi (and perhaps Schlegel as well).
83. The German reads: "Gewissenhaftigkeit erscheint nicht eben notwendig und immer als Enthusiasmus oder als ausserordentliche Erhebung u? ber sich selbst, wozu, wenn der Du? nkel selbstbeliebiger Sittlichkeit niedergesch- lagen ist, ein anderer und noch viel schlimmerer Hochmutsgeist gerne auch
diese machen mo? chte. "
84. Buchheim indicates that the source here is Velleius Paterclus, Historia
romana II 35, 2 (Buchheim, PU 153, n282). The Cato referred to is M. Porcius Cato, called "the younger" or "Uticensis" (95-46 B. C. E. ) to dis- tinguish him from his great ancestor, M. Porcius Cato, the "Censor. " The former Cato was portrayed in antiquity as a veritable incarnation
of Republican virtue, the glory of staunch and stubborn Rome, before the advent of the empire, and this is especially evident in Lucan's dark epic, the Pharsalia, where the famous line, "victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni" ["The winning cause has pleased the gods, but that of the defeated Cato"] (I:128) helped set the tone (with its ironies perhaps less than intact) for Cato's subsequent historical reception.
The Freedom of God
85. The German reads: "Der zweite ist der Wille der Liebe, wodurch das Wort in die Natur ausgesprochen wird, und durch den Gott sich erst perso? nlich macht. " We have preserved the accusative sense of the German that im- plies the active power of the word in regard to nature.
86. King Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284), called "el sabio," "the learned" or "wise," is portrayed in Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) as having made daring challenges to tradition in the name of scien- tific inquiry.
In particular, Alfonso was notorious both for questioning Ptolemaic astronomy and, after having engaged in extensive research on it, for making his blasphemous suggestion that had he been "of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better. " If one wishes to take the issue that far, Alfonso's daring questioning can be seen as an example of the kind of questioning of the architect that leads to his overthrow, a rather neat prefiguration of the principal thrust of modernity. (Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. 2 [Reinier Leers: Amsterdam, 1697], 94-95; Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 14-18)
87. 2 Sam. 22:27 reads in the Revised Standard Version: With the pure thou dost show
thyself pure,
and with the crooked thou dost show thyself perverse.
88. This citation is from Hamann's Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhapsodie in Kab- balistischer Prosa (Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, 2:208). Buchheim notes (Buchheim, PU, 158 n316) that the citation is incorrect, the text having appeared in 1762 in Crusades of a Philologist (Kreuzzu? ge des Philologen). The "chamberlain of the Alexandrian church" is probably Origen (c. 185- 254 C. E. ), the outstanding thinker of the Christian East who bears com- parison in significance and scope of thought with St. Augustine, the great difference between the two being that St. Augustine has almost always been celebrated, whereas Origen has been both celebrated and calumni- ated as devoted more to Plato than to the church (indeed, for this reason much of his thought was soundly rejected in the East at the Fifth General Council in 533 C. E. ).
89. Gynaeceum (Gr. gunaik ? on or gunaik ? onitis) denotes those inner rooms of a Greek or Roman house occupied exclusively by women.
90. The German reads: "Inwiefern die Selbstheit in ihrer Lossagung das Prinzip des Bo? sen ist, erregt der Grund allerdings das mo? gliche Prinzip des Bo? sen, aber nicht das Bo? se selber, noch zum Bo? sen. "
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91. From Huggard's translation (modified to account for Schelling's use of a Latin translation of the original text which was written in French and dif- fers in the first passage cited in the note):
(1) from section 25 (Schelling's reference to p. 139):
Hence, from the foregoing it is to be concluded that God antece- dently wills all good in itself, that he consequently wills the best as an end, what is indifferent and physical evil as a means, but that he wishes to permit moral evil only as a condition without which the best may not be obtained so that evil surely may not be admitted except in the form of a hypothetical necessity that connects it to the best. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 138)
(2) from section 230 (Schelling's reference to p. 292):
Regarding vice, it has been shown above that it is not the object of a divine decree as means, but as a condition without which--and only to that extent is it permitted. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 270)
The All-Unity of Love
92. This language is derived from Boehme. See part 5 of the Mysterium pan- sophicum included in this volume.
93. Here is a relevant excerpt from the page referred to in Philosophy and Religion:
Now, as the final goal of history is reconciliation with the fall, the latter can also be looked upon from a more positive perspective. For the first selfhood of the ideas was one flowing from the immediate activity of God. But the selfhood and absolute into which they intro- duce themselves through reconciliation is self-given, so that they exist in selfhood as truly independent ideas regardless of their abso- luteness. In this way the fall becomes the means for the complete revelation of God. In so far as God, by virtue of the eternal necessity of his nature, lends selfhood to what is seen, he gives it away itself into finitude and, so to speak, sacrifices it so that the ideas which were in him without a self-given life are called into life; it is precisely in this way that they become capable, as independently existing, to be in the absolute once again, something which happens through a completed morality. (Schelling, Sa? mmtliche Werke, VI: 63)
94. In the Revised Standard Version, the passage reads: "For he must reign, until he has put all his enemies under his feet. " This passage is from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (15: 25).
95. Indifference is one of the fundamental terms in the so-called philosophy of identity, that is, the philosophical tendency associated with Schelling's writings between 1801 and 1804. This notion of "indifference" is often thought to be the target of Hegel's notorious comments in the "Preface" to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the empty absolute, the "night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black" (Hegel, Phenome- nology, 9). But it should be hardly surprising that Schelling's conception
of indifference is not to be confused with the Hegelian caricature. Indif- ference is not in fact an absence of difference, a complete surrender to a pure and, thus, unknowable (at least for a finite mind) plenitude, it is not an overcoming of opposition in pure identity, as it were, but, just as it sounds, it is a point of indifference between oppositions where they are in balance, where they are indifferent the one to the other. Indifference as such is the absolute because the first indication of difference must be an indication of limitation.
It must be admitted, however, that Schelling's notion of indifference does little to explain how difference can come to be, that is, how anything can come to be--the origin remains necessarily mysterious, ever a chal- lenge to thought, and a stern reminder of the possible limits to thought.
96. The aphorisms read:
162. The difference between a divine identity and a merely finite one is that, in the former, it is not things which are opposed but need to be connected that are connected but such of which each could exist for itself but yet does not exist without another.
163. This is the mystery of eternal love, that that which would be absolute for itself, although considering it no theft to exist for itself, yet exists only in and with others. If each thing were not a whole, but rather only a part of the whole, there would be no love: there is love, however, because each thing is a whole and nonetheless does not nor can exist without another. (Schelling, Sa? mmtliche Werke, VII: 174)
97. The somewhat overwrought German of the final clause in this sentence reads: ". . . ferner dass nur Gott als Geist die absolute Identita? t beider Prin- zipien, aber nur dadurch und insofern ist, dass und inwiefern beide seiner Perso? nlichkeit unterworfen sind. "
98. This footnote has gathered a good deal of attention. White refers to it in his attempt to adduce evidence for his claim that Schelling is engaging in esotericism (107). More recently, Peter Warnek has argued that the note reflects Schelling's "own thematizing of the movement of the word to re- coil upon the way in which freedom comes to word" (Peter Warnek, "Reading Schelling and Heidegger: The Freedom of Cryptic Dialogue," in Schelling Now, 180). Warnek continues: "Schelling's word of freedom would therefore also have to be the ecstatic movement of freedom bring- ing itself to word; it would be life saying life in the movement of life itself. This is the promise of a 'system of freedom. '" Jason Wirth also makes the following comments on this note:
. . . Schelling expressed the dialogical genesis of everything in the text. The writer composes from a particular perspective and in me- dias res within an unfolding drama still always to be completed. This dialogical demand, this indebtedness to the treatise's subject, does not grant Schelling authority over it. This writing, within a fluid context in which the Wesen can somehow emerge, does not grant Schelling the capacity to render it with sharp determinations.
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This dialogical humility knows that this is not a dialogue between equals because there is no parity among the interlocutors. The in- terlocutors are not einerlei, not of the same kind. A model of such an asymmetrical dialogue might be something like attempting to communicate with nature. Or speaking with animals, not as crea- tures to be trained for human use, but as animals per se. A more classical precedent might be Job's dialogue with the whirlwind. It is a dialogue between bodies and their animas, between the light and its concealed, indwelling darkness. It might be thought of as a di- alogue of the fractured Wesen with itself, producing discontinuities without sublimation. (Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life, 159)
99. The German here is "Finalita? t der Ursachen" or "finality of causes. " What is likely meant by this is clarified by Gutmann who translates Finalita? t by "purposiveness," thereby suggesting that Schelling is alluding to Aristo- telian teleology and, thus, the notion of a causa finalis that is the end for the sake of which (hou eneka) something happens.
100. The Latin source appears to be Horace which Schelling freely varies. Here is the original (Odes II. i):
Motum ex Metello consule civicum bellique causas et vitia et modos
ludumque fortunae gravesque principum amicitias et arma
nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus, periculosae plenum opus aleae,
tractas et incedis per ignes suppositos cineri doloso.
[In our translation: You are treating of the civil commotion under the consulship of Metellus, the causes of war, the mistakes, its phases, the game of fortune, the dire friendships among princes and the arms stained with blood--a task full of dangerous risk--and you go forth through fires hidden beneath treacherous ashes. ]
101. The section reads:
76. Let it not be objected that such rational speculations on the mysteries of religion are forbidden. --The word 'mystery', in early Christian times, meant something quite different from what we understand by it now; and the development of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if they are to be of any help to the human race. When they were revealed, of course, they were not yet truths of reason; but they were revealed in order to become such truths. They were, so to speak, the result of the calculation which the mathematics teacher announces in advance, in order to give his pupils some idea of what they are working towards. If the pupils were satisfied with knowing the result in advance, they
would never learn to calculate, and would frustrate the intention with which the good master gave them a guideline to help them with their work. (G. E. Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writ- ings, trans. H. B. Nisbet [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005], 236)
102. This is an allusion to Herder's philosophy of history and, more specifi- cally, to his theory about the origin and development of Christianity as outlined, for example, in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit). In that work, Herder insists that Christianity, just as all religions, including those of the pagan cultures, must be traced back to an original religion [Urrelig- ion] and that the very idea of religion has always been a primary fact of human life. (See 9, V. "Religion Is the Oldest and Holiest Tradition of the Earth," in Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. Martin Bollacher [Frankfurt a. M. : Deutscher Klas- siker Verlag, 1989], 372-379. )
103. This alludes to Goethe's famous bon mot mentioned at the end of Baader's essay "On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason. " See that essay in this volume.
104. The essay by Baader noted here is called "On the Analogy between the Drive to Know and to Procreate" (U? ber die Analogie des Erkenntnis- und des Zeugungs-Triebes). See Franz Xaver von Baader, Sa? mmtliche Werke, ed. F. Hoffmann, vol. 1 (Aalen: Scientia Verlag [Reprint], 1963), 39-48.
105. According to Buchheim, this idea was prevalent in theosophic literature and, of course, in Boehme (Buchheim, PU 167, n372-373).
106. This is likely another reference to Schlegel and his Indierbuch (see note 7 above).
SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
Introductory Note
1. For an extensive treatment of the relation between Schelling and Boehme, see Robert F. Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influ- ence of Boehme on the Works of 1809-1815 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univer- sity Press, 1977).
2. For a broad overview of the Pantheism debate, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1987).
3. In this respect, see Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life, 65-100.
Boehme
1. Jakob Bo? hme, Sa? mtliche Schriften, ed. Will-Erich Peukert, vol 4 (Stuttgart: Frohmann-Holzboog [Reprint], 1955-1960), 97-111.
Baader
1. Franz Xaver von Baader, Sa? mmtliche Werke, 33-38. 2. "Evil is not a story, it's a power. "
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172 | NOTES TO PAGES 81-130
Lessing
1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Go? pfert, vol. VIII (Mu- nich: Hanser Verlag, 1979), 118-120.
Jacobi
1. The translation follows Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, U? ber die Lehre des Spi- noza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, ed. Marion Lauschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000), 23-36 and Lessing, Werke VIII, 565- 571. As to the former, we have attempted to follow as closely as possible the various forms of emphasis in the text.
2. En-Sof [Heb: "that which has no end/the infinite"] refers to the notion of a hidden or absent God, a deus absconditus, without name and form which is the ground of all beings. The term developed into a central con- cept in the Kabbalistic philosophy of the Middle Ages. (See Go? bel, "En- soph," Lessing, Werke VIII, 751 and Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken Books, 1946], 269-273. )
3. salto mortale [literally, "by means of a fatal leap," in which a person turns head over heels in the air, e. g. , somersault].
4. This term comes from section 47 of the Monadology, which reads as fol- lows: "Accordingly, God alone is the primary unity or the original simple substance, of which all the created or derivative monads are products. They originate, so to speak, through continual fulgurations of the divin- ity from moment to moment, limited by the receptivity of the created being, to which it is essential to be limited . . . " See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh: Uni- versity of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 162.
5. Jacobi likely refers here to a Latin translation of Principes de la nature et de la grace fonde? s en raison.
6. Jacobi is referring to the "Confession of Augsburg" by Melanchthon, Lu- ther, and other theologians that was submitted to the emperor during the Reichstag of Augsburg in 1530. This "Confession" continued to incite fierce disputes between orthodox and reformed Lutherans thereafter. (See Go? bel, "Augsburgische Konfession," Lessing, Werke VII, 739. )
7. Jacobi's salto mortale is paired with a play on Kopf [head, intellect] here. The implication is that one must humble one's intellect before this leap, which has no use for it; a leap which, in other words, represents a subor- dination of reason to faith.
8. The text follows Jacobi, U? ber die Lehre des Spinoza, 166-167. As before, we have attempted to follow closely the various forms of emphasis in the text.
9. Jacobi is referring to Voltaire's tragedy Mahomet or Le fanatisme ou Ma- homet le Prophe`te (1743).
Herder
1.
