No More Learning

This nothingness has been a crux for understanding for a long time now. A scriptural expression gives a hint: man is created ek t ? on m ? e ont ? on, from that which does not exist, just like the celebrated m ? e on of the ancients, which like the creation from nothingness, might receive for the first time a
positive meaning through the above-noted distinction.
Since it is undeniably real, at least as general opposite, there can in- deed be no doubt from the outset that it was necessary for the revela- tion of God; exactly this results from what has been previously said as well. For, if God as spirit is the inseverable unity of both principles, and this same unity is only real in the spirit of man, then, if the princi- ples were just as indissoluble in him as in God, man would not be distinguishable from God at all; he would disappear in God, and there would be no revelation and motility of love. For every essence can only reveal itself in its opposite, love only in hate, unity in conflict. Were there no severing of principles, unity could not prove | its om- nipotence; were there no discord, love could not become real [wirk- lich]. Man is placed on that summit where he has in himself the source of self-movement toward good or evil in equal portions: the bond of principles in him is not a necessary but rather a free one. Man stands on the threshold [Scheidepunkt]; whatever he chooses, it will be his act: but he cannot remain undecided because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all can remain am- biguous in creation. Nonetheless, it seems that he also may not be able to step out of his indecision exactly because this is what it is. That is why there must be a general ground of solicitation, of tempta- tion to evil, even if it were only to make both principles come to life in man, that is, to make him aware of the principles. Now it appears that the solicitation to evil itself can only come from an evil fundamental being [Grundwesen], and the assumption that there is such a being seems nonetheless unavoidable; it also appears that that interpreta- tion of Platonic matter is completely correct according to which mat- ter is originally a kind of being that resists God and for that reason is an evil being in itself. 58 As long as this part of the Platonic teaching remains in darkness, as it has until now,* a definite judgment about this issue is, however, impossible. The preceding reflections clarify in which sense, nonetheless, one could say of the irrational principle that it resists the understanding or unity and order without suppos- ing it to be an evil fundamental being on that account. In this way one is likely able to explain the Platonic phrase that evil comes from
* Would that this be elucidated by the incisive exegete of Plato or still sooner by the sturdy Bo? ckh who has already given rise to the best hopes in this respect through his occasional comments on Platonic harmonics and through the announcement of his edition of the Timaeus.
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ancient nature. For all evil strives back into chaos, that is, back into that state in which the initial centrum had not yet been subordinated to the light and is a welling up in the centrum of a yearning still with- out understanding. Yet we have proven once and for all that evil as such could only arise in creatures in so far as light and darkness or | both principles can be unified in a severable manner only in them. The initial fundamental being can never be evil in itself because there is no duality of principles in it. But we also cannot presuppose some- thing like a created spirit which, having fallen itself, tempted man to fall, for the question here is exactly how evil first arose in creatures. Hence, we are given nothing else toward an explanation of evil aside from both principles in God. God as spirit (the eternal bond of both) is the purest love: there can never be a will to evil in love just as little as in the ideal principle. But God himself requires a ground so that he can exist; but only a ground that is not outside but inside him and has in itself a nature which, although belonging to him, is yet also differ- ent from him. The will of love and the will of the ground are two differ- ent wills, of which each exists for itself; but the will of love cannot with- stand the will of the ground, nor abolish it because it would then have to oppose itself. For the ground must be active so that love may exist, and it must be active independently of love so that love may really exist. If love now wanted to break the will of the ground, it would be struggling against itself, would be at odds with itself and would no longer be love. This letting the ground be active is the only conceivable concept of permission that in the usual reference to man is completely unacceptable. Thus the will of the ground admittedly also cannot break love nor does it demand this, although it often seems to; for it must be particular and a will of its own, one turned away from love, so that love, when it nonetheless breaks through the will of the ground, as light through darkness, may now appear in its omnipotence. The ground is only a will to revelation, but precisely in order for the latter to exist, it must call forth particularity and opposition. The will of love and that of the ground become one, therefore, exactly because they are separate and each acts for itself from the beginning on. That is why the will of the ground already arouses the self-will of creatures in the first creation, so that when spirit now appears as the will of | love, the lat- ter finds something resistant in which it can realize itself.
The sight of nature as a whole convinces us that this arousal has occurred by which means alone all life first reached the final degree
of distinctiveness and definiteness. The irrational and contingent, which show themselves to be bound to that which is necessary in the formation of beings, especially the organic ones, prove that it is not merely a geometric necessity that has been active here, but rather that freedom, spirit and self-will were also in play. Indeed, every- where where there is appetite and desire, there is already in itself a sort of freedom; and no one will believe that desire, which deter- mines the ground of every particular natural being, and the drive to preserve oneself not in general but in this defined existence, are added on to an already created being, but rather that they are them- selves that which creates. The empirically discovered concept of the basis [Basis], which will assume a significant role for the entire sci- ence of nature, [if] acknowledged scientifically, also must lead to a concept of selfhood and I-hood. 59 But in nature there are contingent determinations only explicable in terms of an arousal of the irrational or dark principle in creatures--in terms of activated selfhood--hav- ing occurred already in the first creation. Whence unmistakable signs of evil in nature, alongside preformed moral relationships, if the power of evil was only aroused by man; whence appearances which, even without regard to their dangerousness for man, nonetheless arouse a general, natural abhorrence? * That all organic beings ad- vance toward | dissolution absolutely cannot appear to be an origi- nal necessity; the bond of forces that defines life could be just as in- dissoluble according to its nature, and if anything, a created being, which has restored what has become lacking in it through its own strength, appears destined to be a perpetuum mobile. Evil, in the meantime, announces itself in nature only through its effects; it can
* Thusthecloseconnectionthattheimaginationofallpeoples,especiallyall fables and religions of the east, makes between the snake and evil is cer- tainly not an idle one. The complete development of the auxiliary organs, which has reached its highest point in man, indeed already suggests the will's independence from desires or a relation of centrum and periphery that is really the only healthy one, since the former has stepped back into its freedom and sobriety, having removed itself from what is simply (pe- ripheral or) instrumental. Where, to the contrary, the auxiliary organs are not developed | or completely lacking, there the centrum has walked into the periphery; or it is the circle without a middle point in the comment to the above-mentioned citation from Fr. Baader.
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itself break through only in its immediate appearance at the endpoint [am Ziel] of nature. For, as in the initial creation, which is nothing other than the birth of light, the dark principle had to be as ground so that the light could be raised out of it (as from mere potency to actu- ality),60 so there must be another ground of the birth of spirit and, hence, a second principle of darkness that must be just as much higher than the first as spirit is higher than the light. This principle is the very spirit of evil that has been awoken in creation by arousal of the dark ground of nature, that is, the turning against each other [Entz- weiung] of light and darkness, to which the spirit of love opposes now a higher ideal, just as the light had done previously in regard to the anarchic movement of initial nature. For, just as selfhood in evil had made the light or the word its own and for that reason appears precisely as a higher ground of darkness, so must the word spoken in the world in opposition to evil assume humanity or selfhood and be- come personal itself. This occurs alone through revelation, in the most definitive meaning of the word, which must have the same stages as the first manifestation in nature; namely so that here too the highest summit of revelation is man, but the archetypical [urbildlich] and divine man who was with God in the beginning and in whom all other things and man himself are created. The birth of spirit is the realm of history as the birth of light is the realm of nature. The same periods of creation | which are in the latter are also in the former; and one is the likeness and explanation of the other. The same princi- ple, which was the ground in the first creation, only in a higher form, is here also the germ and seed from which a higher world is devel- oped. For evil is surely nothing other than the primal ground [Ur- grund] of existence to the extent this ground strives toward actuality in created beings and therefore is in fact only the higher potency of the ground active in nature. But, just as the latter is forever only ground, without being itself, precisely on this account evil can never become real and serves only as ground so that the good, developing out of the ground on its own strength, may be through its ground inde- pendent and separate from God who has and recognizes himself in this good which, as such (as independent), is in him. But, as the undi- vided power of the initial ground comes to be recognized only in man as the inner aspect (basis or centrum) of an individual, so in history as well evil at first remains latent in the ground, and an era of innocence
or unconsciousness about sin precedes the era of guilt and sin. In the same way, namely, as the initial ground of nature was active alone perhaps for a long time and attempted a creation for itself with the di- vine powers it contained, a creation which, however, again and again (because the bond of love was missing) sank back into chaos (per- haps indicated by the series of species that perished and did not re- turn prior to the present creation), until the word of love issued forth [erging]61 and with it enduring creation made its beginning, likewise, the spirit of love also did not immediately reveal itself in history, but rather, because God perceived the will of the ground as the will for his revelation and, according to his providential vision, recognized that a ground independent from him (as spirit) would have to be the ground for his existence, he let the ground be active in its indepen- dence; or, expressed in another way, he set himself in motion only in accordance with his nature and not in accordance with his heart or with love. Because the ground now held the whole of the divine being in itself as well, only not as unity, only individual divine | beings could preside over this being-active-for-itself [Fu? r-sich-wirken] of the ground. This primeval [uralt] time begins thus with the golden age of which only a frail memory in legend remains for modern mankind, a time of blessed indecision in which there was neither good nor evil; then there followed the time of the presiding gods and heroes or the omnipotence of nature in which the ground showed what for itself it had the capacity to do. 62 At that time understanding and wisdom came to men only from the depths; the power of oracles flowing forth from the earth led and shaped their lives; all divine forces of the ground dominated the earth and sat as powerful princes on secure thrones. This appeared to be the time of the greatest exaltation of na- ture in the visible beauty of the gods and in all the brilliance of art and profound [sinnreich] science until the principle active in the ground finally emerged as a world-conquering principle to subordi- nate everything to itself and establish a stable and enduring world empire. Because, however, the being of the ground can never generate for itself true and complete unity, there comes the time when all this magnificence dissolves and, as if by a terrible sickness, the beautiful body of the previous world collapses and chaos finally emerges once again. Already prior to this, and before complete collapse has set in, the presiding powers in this whole assume the nature of evil spirits
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just as the same forces, which in healthy times were beneficial guar- dians of life, become malignant and poisonous in nature as dissolution approaches; the belief in gods vanishes and a false magic, complete with incantations and theurgic formulas, strives to call the fleeing ones back and to mollify the evil spirits. The attractive force of the ground shows itself ever more determinately; anticipating [voremp- findend] the coming light, the ground in advance thrusts all forces out of indecision to meet the light in full conflict. As a thunderstorm is caused in a mediated way by the sun but immediately by an opposing force of the earth, so is the spirit of evil (whose meteoric nature we have already explained earlier) aroused by the approach of the good not through a sharing but rather by a spreading out of forces. Hence, only in connection with the decisive | emergence of the good, does evil also emerge quite decisively and as itself [als dieses] (not as if it only first arose then, but rather because the opposition is now first given in which it alone can appear complete and as such), [just] as, in turn, the very moment when the earth becomes for the second time desolate and empty becomes the moment of birth for the higher light of the spirit that was in the world from the very beginning, but not comprehended by the darkness acting for itself, and in a yet closed and limited revelation; and, in order to counter personal and spiritual evil, the light of the spirit in fact appears likewise in the shape of a human person and as a mediator in order to reestablish the rapport between God and creation at the highest level. For only what is per- sonal can heal what is personal, and God must become man so that man may return to God. 63 The possibility of being saved (of salvation) is restored only through the reestablished relation of the ground to God. Its beginning is a condition of clairvoyance which, through di- vine imposition, befalls individuals (as the organs chosen for this purpose), a time of signs and miracles in which divine forces counter- act everywhere emergent demonic ones and mollifying unity counter- acts the dispersion of forces. Finally a crisis ensues in the turba gen- tium [tumult of peoples] that overflows the foundations of the ancient world, just as once the waters of the beginning covered the creations of the primeval time [Urzeit] again in order to make a sec- ond creation possible--a new division of peoples and tongues, a new empire in which the living word enters as a stable and constant cen- trum in the struggle against chaos, and a conflict declared between
good and evil begins, continuing on to the end of the present time, in which God reveals himself as spirit, that is, as actu real. *
Hence, there is a general evil which, if not exactly of the beginning, is first awoken in the original revelation of God by the reaction | of the ground; a general evil which, though it never becomes real, yet continually strives toward that end. Only after coming to know gen- eral evil is it possible to grasp good and evil in man. If, namely, evil al- ready has been aroused in the first creation, and through the ground's being-active-for-itself was developed finally into a general principle, then a natural propensity [Hang] of man to do evil seems to be explicable on that basis because the disorder of forces engaged by awakening of self-will in creatures already communicates itself to them at birth. Yet the ground continues to be incessantly active in in- dividuals as well and arouses individuality [Eigenart] and the particu- lar will precisely so that the will of love may appear in contrast. God's will is to universalize everything, to raise everything up toward unity with the light or keep it there; the will of the ground, however, is to particularize everything or to make it creaturely. The will wants dif- ference [Ungleichheit] only so that identity [Gleichheit] can become perceptible to itself and to the will. For that reason the will reacts necessarily against freedom as that which is above the creaturely and awakes in freedom the appetite for what is creaturely just as he who is seized by dizziness on a high and steep summit seems to be beck- oned to plunge downward by a hidden voice; or, according to the an- cient legend, the irresistible song of the sirens reverberates from the depths in order to drag the passing sailor into the maelstrom. The connection of the general will with a particular will in man seems al- ready in itself a contradiction, the unification of which is difficult if not impossible. The fear of life itself drives man out of the centrum into which he was created64: for this centrum, as the purest essence of all willing, is for each particular will a consuming fire; in order to be able to live within it the man of all particularity must become extinct [absterben], which is why the attempt to step out of this center into the periphery is almost necessary in order to seek there some calm
* One should compare this whole section with the author's Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, VIII. "Lecture on the Historical Construction of Christianity. "
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for his selfhood. Hence, the general necessity of sin and death as the actual extinction of particularity through which all human will as a fire must cross in order to be purified. 65 Notwithstanding this general | ne- cessity, evil remains always an individual's own choice; the ground cannot make evil as such, and every creature falls due to its own guilt. But just how in each individual the decision for good or evil might now proceed--this is still shrouded in complete darkness and seems to de- mand a specific investigation.
We have generally focused up to this point less on the formal es- sence of freedom, although insight into it seems to be strapped with no less difficulty than explication of the real concept of freedom.
For the common concept of freedom, according to which freedom is posited as a wholly undetermined capacity to will one or the other of two contradictory opposites, without determining reasons but simply because it is willed, has in fact the original undecidedness of human being as idea in its favor; however, when applied to individual actions, it leads to the greatest inconsistencies. To be able to decide for A or -A without any compelling reasons would be, to tell the truth, only a prerogative to act entirely irrationally and would not dis- tinguish man in exactly the best way from the well-known animal of Buridan which, in the opinion of the defenders of this concept of free will [Willku? r], would have to starve if placed between two piles of hay of equal distance, size and composition (namely because it does not have this prerogative of free will). 66 The only proof for this concept consists in referring to the fact that, for example, anyone has the power now to draw back or extend his arm without further reason; for, if one says, he stretches his arm just in order to prove his free will, then he could say this just as well of when he draws it back; interest in proving the statement can only determine him to do one of the two; here the equilibrium [Gleichgewicht] is palpable, and so forth; this is a generally bad manner of proof since it deduces the non-existence of a determining reason from lack of knowledge about it; but this argument could be used in the completely opposite way here, for exactly | where lack of knowledge enters, determination takes place all the more certainly. The main issue is that this concept introduces a complete contingency [Zufa? lligkeit] of individual ac- tions and, in this respect, has been compared quite correctly with the contingent swerve of atoms that Epicurus conceived in physics with the same intention, namely, to evade fate. 67 But contingency is
impossible; it contests reason as well as the necessary unity of the whole; and, if freedom is to be saved by nothing other than the com- plete contingency of actions, then it is not to be saved at all. Deter- minism (or, according to Kant, predeterminism68) counters this system of the equilibrium of free will and, indeed, with complete jus- tification, since it claims the empirical necessity of all actions be- cause each is determined by representations or other causes that lie in the past and that no longer remain within our power during the ac- tion itself. Both systems adhere to the same point of view; but if there were no higher one, then the latter would undeniably earn the advan- tage. For both, that higher necessity remains unknown which is equi- distant from contingency and from compulsion or external determi- nation, which is, rather, an inner necessity springing from the essence of the acting individual itself. All improvements, however, which one has sought to make to determinism, for example, the Leib- nizian ones that motivating causes only incline but do not determine the will, are of no help at all in the main issue. 69
Idealism actually first raised the doctrine of freedom to that very region where it is alone comprehensible. According to idealism, the intelligible being of every thing and especially of man is outside all causal connectedness as it is outside or above all time. 70 Hence, it can never be determined by any sort of prior thing since, rather, it it- self precedes all else that is or becomes within it, not so much tempo- rally as conceptually, as an absolute unity that must always already exist fully and complete so that particular action or determination may be possible in it. We | are expressing namely the Kantian con- cept not exactly in his very words, but indeed in the way, as we be- lieve, that it would have to be expressed in order to be comprehen- sible. But if this concept is assumed, then the following appears also to be correctly deduced: free action follows immediately from the in- telligible aspect of man. But it is necessarily a determined action, for example, to take what is nearest at hand, a good or an evil one. There is, however, no transition from the absolutely undetermined to the determined. That, for instance, the intelligible being should deter- mine itself out of pure, utter indeterminacy without any reason leads back to the system of the equilibrium [Gleichgu? ltigkeit] of free will dis- cussed above. 71 In order to be able to determine itself, it would al- ready have to be determined in itself, admittedly not from outside, which contradicts its nature, also not from inside through some sort
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of merely contingent or empirical necessity since all this (the psycho- logical as well as the physical) is subordinate to it; but rather it would have to be its determination itself as its essence, that is, as its own na- ture. This is of course not an undetermined generality, but rather de- termines the intelligible being of this individual; the saying determina- tio est negatio [determination is negation]72 holds in no way for such determinateness since the latter is itself one with the position and the concept of its being, therefore it really is the essence in its being. Hence, the intelligible being can, as certainly as it acts as such freely and absolutely, just as certainly act only in accordance with its own inner nature; or action can follow from within only in accordance with the law of identity and with absolute necessity which alone is also absolute freedom. For free is what acts only in accord with the laws of its own being and is determined by nothing else either in or outside itself.
At least one thing is achieved with this notion of the matter, that the inconsistency of the contingent is removed from individual action. This must be established, in every higher view as well: that individual action results from the inner necessity of a free being and, accord- ingly, from necessity itself, which must not be confused, as still hap- pens, with empirical necessity based on compulsion (which is itself, | however, only disguised contingency). But what then is this inner ne- cessity of the being itself? Here lies the point at which necessity and freedom must be unified if they are at all capable of unification. Were this being a dead sort of Being [ein totes Sein] and a merely given one with respect to man, then, because all action resulting from it could do so only with necessity, responsibility [Zurechnungsfa? higkeit] and all freedom would be abolished. But precisely this inner necessity is it- self freedom; the essence of man is fundamentally his own act; neces- sity and freedom are in one another as one being [Ein Wesen] that ap- pears as one or the other only when considered from different sides, in itself freedom, formally necessity. 73 The I, says Fichte, is its own act; consciousness is self-positing--but the I is nothing different from this self-positing, rather it is precisely self-positing itself. This con- sciousness, however, to the extent it is thought merely as self- apprehension or cognition of the I, is not even primary and all along presupposes actual Being, as does all pure cognition. This Being, pre- sumed to be prior to cognition, is, however, not Being, though it is like- wise not cognition: it is real self-positing, it is a primal and fundamental
willing, which makes itself into something and is the ground of all ways of being [Wesenheit]. 74
But, in their immediate relation to man, these truths are valid in a much more definite sense than in this general one. Man is in the initial creation, as shown, an undecided being--(which may be portrayed mythically as a condition of innocence that precedes this life and as an initial blessedness)--only man himself can decide. But this deci- sion cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time and, hence, together with the first creation (though as a deed distinct from creation). Man, even if born in time, is indeed created into the beginning of the creation (the centrum). 75 The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eter- nity: it also does not temporally precede life but goes through time (unhampered | by it) as an act which is eternal by nature. Through this act the life of man reaches to the beginning of creation; hence, through it man is outside the created, being free and eternal begin- ning itself. 76 As incomprehensible as this idea may appear to conven- tional ways of thinking, there is indeed in each man a feeling in ac- cord with it as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time. Hence, notwithstanding the undeniable necessity of all actions and, although each individual, if he is aware of himself, must admit that he is by no means arbitrarily or by accident good or evil, an evil individual, for example, surely ap- pears to himself not in the least compelled (because compulsion can be felt only in becoming and not in Being) but rather performs his ac- tions in accordance with and not against his will. That Judas became a betrayer of Christ, neither he nor any other creature could change, and nevertheless he betrayed Christ not under compulsion but will- ingly and with complete freedom. * It is exactly the same with a good individual; namely he is not good arbitrarily or by accident and yet is so little compelled that, rather, no compulsion, not even the gates of hell themselves, would be capable of overpowering his basic disposi- tion [Gesinnung]. This sort of free act, which becomes necessary, ad- mittedly cannot appear in consciousness to the degree the latter is merely self-awareness and only ideal, since it precedes consciousness
* This is what Luther maintains, correctly, in his treatise de servo arbitrio, even though he did not grasp the unification of such unwavering necessity with freedom of action in the correct manner.
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just as it precedes essence, indeed, first produces it; but, for that rea- son, this is no act of which no consciousness at all remains in man since anyone, for instance, who in order to excuse a wrong action, says "that's just the way I am" is surely aware that he is like he is through his guilt, as much as he is right that it was impossible for him to act otherwise. How frequently does it occur that, from childhood on, from a time when, considered empirically, we can hardly attribute to him freedom and self-reflection, an individual shows a propensity [Hang] to evil from which it can be | anticipated that he will bend nei- ther to discipline nor to doctrine, and which consequently brings to ripeness the wicked fruit that we had foreseen in the earliest sprout [Keim]; and yet no one doubts his capacity to deliberate, and all are as convinced of this individual's guilt as they could only ever be if each particular action had stood within his power. This general as- sessment of a propensity to evil as an act of freedom which, in accor- dance with its origin, is utterly unconscious and even irresistible points to an act and, thus, to a life before this life, except that it is not to be thought just as prior in time since that which is intelligible is altogether outside of time. Because there is the highest harmony in creation, and nothing is as discrete and consecutive as we must por- tray it to be, but rather in what is earlier that which comes later is also already active, and everything happens at once in one magic stroke, accordingly, man, who appears decided and determinate here, apprehends himself in a particular form in the first creation and is born as that which he had been from eternity since through this act even the type and constitution of his corporeal formation is deter- mined. The assumed contingency of human actions in relation to the unity of the world as a whole already outlined in the divine under- standing has been forever the greatest obstacle [Anstoss] in the doc- trine about freedom. 77 Hence, then, the presumption of predestina- tion, since neither the prescience of God nor genuine foresight can be relinquished. The authors of this presumption felt that human ac- tions had to have been determined from eternity; but they sought this determination not in the eternal act contemporaneous with crea- tion that institutes the being of man itself but rather in an absolute, that is, utterly groundless, decision of God whereby one would be predestined to damnation, the other to blessedness and, in so doing, they abolished the root of freedom. We too assert a predestination but in a completely different sense, namely in this: as man acts here
so has he acted from eternity and already in the beginning of crea- tion. His action does not become, just as he | himself does not be- come as a moral being, but rather it is eternal by nature. Thus this oft- heard and tormenting question also falls by the wayside: Why is exactly this individual destined to act in an evil and base manner while, in contrast, another is destined to act piously and justly? For the question presupposes that man is not initially action and act and that he as a spiritual being has a Being which is prior to, and indepen- dent of, his will, which, as has been shown, is impossible. 78
Once evil had been generally aroused in creation by the reaction of the ground to revelation, man apprehended himself from eternity in his individuality and selfishness, and all who are born are born with the dark principle of evil within even if this evil is raised to self- consciousness only through the emergence [Eintreten] of its oppo- site. As man is now, the good as light can be developed only from the dark principle through a divine transformation [Transmutation]. This original evil in man, which can be denied only by one who has come to know man in and outside himself only superficially, although wholly independent of freedom in relation to contemporary empiri- cal life, is still in its origin his own act and for that reason alone origi- nal sin; something that cannot be said about the admittedly equally undeniable disorder of forces that propagated itself like a contagion after the collapse had taken place. For the passions in themselves do not constitute evil, nor do we have to struggle just with flesh and blood but with an evil in and outside of us that is spirit. Only this evil, contracted through our own act but from birth, can on that account [daher] be called radical evil; and it is remarkable how Kant, who had not raised himself in theory to a transcendental act that determines all human Being, was led in his later investigations, merely by faithful observation of the phenomena of moral judgment, to the recognition of, as he expressed it, a subjective ground of human actions preced- ing every act apparent to the senses but that itself must be nonethe- less an actus of freedom. Whereas Fichte, who had grasped specula- tively the | concept of such an act, fell prey once again to the philanthropism [Philanthropismus] prevalent in his moral theory and wanted to find this evil that precedes all empirical action in the leth- argy of human nature. 79
There seems to be only one argument [Ein Grund] to advance against this point of view: that it cuts out all turning of man from evil
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toward good, and vice versa, at least for this life. But suppose now that human or divine assistance--(man always requires some assis- tance)--may destine an individual to convert to the good, then, that he grants the good spirit this influence and does not positively shut himself off from it, lies likewise already in the initial action whereby he is this individual and no other. That is why in the man in which this transformation has not taken place but in which the good principle is also not completely extinguished, the inner voice of his own better nature [Wesen], in terms of what he now is, never ceases to exhort him to such a transformation, just as he first finds peace within his own inner realm [in seinem eignen Innern] through a real and deci- sive turnaround and, as if only now the initial idea [Idea] had been satisfied, finds himself reconciled with his guardian spirit. It is true in the strictest understanding that, given how man is in fact created, it is not he himself but rather the good or evil spirit in him that acts; and, nonetheless, this does no harm to freedom. For precisely the allowing-to-act-within-himself [das in-sich-handeln-Lassen] of the good and evil principles is the result of an intelligible act whereby his being and life are determined.
After we have thus outlined the beginning and emergence of evil up to its becoming real in the individual, there seems to be nothing left but to describe its appearance in man.
The general possibility of evil consists, as shown, in the fact that man, instead of making his selfhood into the basis, the instrument, can strive to elevate it into the ruling and total will and, conversely, to make the spiritual within himself into a means. If the dark principle of selfhood and self-will in man is thoroughly penetrated by the light and at one with it, then God, as | eternal love or as really existing, is the bond of forces in him. But if the two principles are in discord, an- other spirit usurps the place where God should be, namely, the re- versed god, the being aroused to actuality by God's revelation that can never wrest actuality from potency, that, though it never is, yet always wants to be and, hence, like the matter of the ancients, can- not be grasped actually (actualized) by the complete understanding but only through the false imagination (logismo ? i notho ? i*), which is sin
* The Platonic expression in the Timaeus p. 349, Vol. IX of the Zweibr. Ed. : earlier in Tim. Locr. De an. Mundi, ibid. , p. 5.
itself; for this reason, since, having no Being itself, it borrows the ap- pearance of Being from true Being, as the serpent borrows colors from the light, it strives by means of mirrorlike images to bring man to the senselessness in which it alone can be understood and accepted by him. 80 That is why it is presented correctly not only as an enemy of all creatures (because they come to be only through the bond of love) and, above all, of man, but also as the seducer of man who entices him toward false pleasure [falsche Lust] and the acceptance of what does not have Being in his imagination; there it is supported by the tendency to evil proper to man, whose eyes, being incapable of be- holding constantly the luster of the divine and the truth, always look away to what does not have Being [das Nichtseiende]. Thus is the be- ginning of sin, that man transgresses from authentic Being into non- Being, from truth into lies, from the light into darkness, in order to be- come a self-creating ground and, with the power of the centrum which he has within himself, to rule over all things. For the feeling still re- mains in the one having strayed [gewichen] from the centrum that he was all things, namely, in and with God; for that reason he strives once again to return there, but for himself, and not where he might be all things, namely, in God. From this arises the hunger of selfishness which, to the degree that it renounces the whole and unity, becomes ever more desolate, poorer, but precisely for that reason greedier, hungrier, and more venomous. In evil there is the self-consuming and always annihilating | contradiction that it strives to become crea- turely just by annihilating the bond of creaturely existence and, out of overweening pride [U? bermut] to be all things, falls into non-Being. In- cidentally, obvious sin does not fill us with regret, as does mere weakness or incapacity, but with fear and horror, a feeling that is only explicable on the basis that sin strives to break the word, touch the ground of creation, and profane the mystery. But this should also be revealed, for only in the opposition of sin is revealed the most inner bond of the dependence of things and the being of God which is, as it were, before all existence (not yet mitigated by it) and, for that rea- son, terrifying. For God himself cloaks this principle in creatures and covers it with love in so far as he makes it into the ground and, so to speak, the carrier of beings. This principle becomes actual [aktuell] for and against anyone who now provokes it by misusing self-will raised to the level of selfhood. For, because God cannot be disturbed,
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much less abolished, in his existence, so, according to the necessary correspondence that occurs between God and his basis [Basis], pre- cisely that radiant glimpse of life in the depths of darkness in every individual flares up in the sinner into a consuming fire, just as in a liv- ing organism a particular joint or system, as soon as it has strayed from the whole, perceives the unity and cooperative effort itself to which it is opposed as fire (= fever) and ignites from an inner heat.
We have seen how, through false imagining and cognition that orients itself according to what does not have Being, the human spirit opens itself to the spirit of lies and falsehood and, fascinated by the latter, soon loses its initial freedom. It follows from this that, by contrast, the true good could be effected only through a divine magic, namely through the immediate presence of what has Being in consciousness and cognition. An arbitrary good is as impossible as an arbitrary evil. True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, the likes of which we perceive in essential cognition, when spirit and heart, bound only by their own | law, freely affirm what is necessary. If evil exists in the discord of the two principles, then good can exist only in the complete accord of the two, and the bond that unifies both must be divine since they are one, not in a conditional, but in a complete and unconditional, manner. Hence, it is not possible to present the relation of both as an arbitrary morality or one originat- ing in self-determination. The latter concept presupposed that the two principles were not in themselves one; but how are they sup- posed to become one if they are not one? Moreover, this concept leads back to the inconsistent system of equilibrium of free will. The relation of both principles is that of a ligature of the dark principle (selfhood) onto the light. It may be permitted to us to express this through religiosity according to the original meaning of the word. We do not understand by this meaning what a sickly era calls idle brood- ing, rapturous divination, or a willing-to-feel [Fu? hlen-wollen] of the divine. 81 For God is the clear cognition in us or the spiritual light it- self in which everything else first becomes clear--far be it that it should itself be unclear; and one who has this cognition is not per- mitted by it to be idle or to celebrate. This cognition is, where it really is, something much more substantial than our philosophers of feeling [Empfindungsphilosophen] think. 82 We understand religiosity in the original, practical meaning of the word. It is conscientiousness
or that one act in accordance with what one knows and not contra- dict the light of cognition in one's conduct. An individual for whom this contradiction is impossible, not in a human, physical, or psychological, but rather in a divine way, is called religious, con- scientious in the highest sense of the word. One is not conscientious who in a given instance must first hold the command of duty before himself in order to decide to do right out of respect for that com- mand. Already, according to the meaning of the word, religiosity does not permit any choice between opposites, any aequilibrium ar- bitrii (the plague of all morality), but rather only the highest reso- luteness in favor of what is right without any choice.
Conscientious- ness just does not necessarily and always appear as enthusiasm or as an extraordinary elevation over oneself which, | once the conceit of arbitrary morality has been struck down, another and much worse spirit of pride would happily have it become as well. 83 Con- scientiousness can appear quite formal in the strict fulfillment of duty, where even the character of hardness and cruelty is added to it, as in the soul of M. Cato, to whom one ancient ascribed this inner and almost divine necessity of action by saying that Cato most re- sembled virtue because he never acted correctly in order to act in that way (out of respect for the command), but rather because he could not at all have acted otherwise. 84 This severity of disposition is, like the severity of life in nature, the seed from which true grace and divinity first come forth into bloom; but the ostensibly more noble morality that believes it is permitted to heap scorn on this seed is like a sterile blossom that produces no fruit. * The highest, just because it is the highest, is not always generally valid; and whoever has come to know the race of spiritual libertines, whom precisely the highest in science and sentiment must serve for the most outrageous improprieties of spirit and elevation [of self] above the so-called general sense of duty, will surely hesitate to declare it as such. It is already predictable that on the path where everyone wanted to be a beautiful soul rather than a rational one, to be called noble rather than just, that moral doctrine, too, will be lead back to the general concept of taste whereby vice would then still consist in
* ThefrequentlycitedreviewbyMr. Fr. SchlegelintheHeidelb. Annuals,p. 154 contains very just observations concerning this moral genius of the era.
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bad or ruined taste only. * If the divine principle of this doctrine shows through as such in a serious disposition, virtue appears thus as enthusiasm; as | heroism (in the struggle against evil), as the beau- tiful free courage of man to act as his God instructs him and not to fall away in action from what he has acknowledged in thought; as belief, not in the sense of a holding-to-be-true [Fu? rwahrhalten], which is seen as commendable or as leaving something out in regard to certainty-- a meaning that has been foisted onto this word through usage for common things--but in its original meaning as trusting, having confi- dence, in the divine that excludes all choice. If finally a ray of divine love lowers itself into an unshakable seriousness of disposition, which, however, is always presupposed, then a supreme clarity of moral life arises in grace and divine beauty.
We have now investigated to the extent possible the genesis of the opposition of good and evil and how both act through each other in the creation. But the highest question of this investigation returns yet again. God has been considered thus far as a self-revealing being. But how, then, does he relate to this revelation as a moral being? Is reve- lation an action that ensues with blind and unconscious necessity or is it a free and conscious act? And if it is the latter, how does God as a moral being relate to evil, the possibility and actuality of which de- pend on the self-revelation? If he willed the latter, did he also will evil, and how is this willing to be reconciled with the holiness and highest
perfection in God, or, as commonly expressed, how, given the fact of evil [wegen des Bo? sen], is God to be justified?
The preliminary question in fact seems to have been decided by the foregoing due to the freedom of God in the self-revelation. If God were for us a merely logical abstraction, then everything would have to proceed from him with logical necessity as well; he himself would be, as it were, only the highest law from which all things flow out, but without personhood [Personalita? t] and consciousness of personhood.
* A young man who, probably like many others now, is too arrogant to walk along the honest path of Kant and is yet incapable of lifting himself up to a level that is actually better, blathers about aesthetics [a? sthetisch irreredet], has already announced such a grounding of morality through aesthetics. With such advances perhaps something serious too will come of the Kant- ian joke that Euclid should be considered a somewhat ponderous introduc- tion to drawing.
But we have explained God as a living unity of forces; and if personal- ity [Perso? nlichkeit] is founded, according to our previous explana- tion, on the connection between a self-determining [selbsta? ndig] being and a basis independent of him, then, similarly, because both of these completely | saturate the other and are but one being, God is the highest personality through the connection of the ideal principle in him with the (relative to it) independent ground, since basis and things existing in him necessarily unify themselves in one absolute existence; or also, if the living unity of both is spirit, then, as their ab- solute bond, God is spirit in the eminent and absolute understanding. It is so certain that the personality in him is grounded only through the bond of God with nature that, by contrast, the God of pure ideal- ism, as well as the God of pure realism, is necessarily an impersonal being, of which the concepts of Spinoza and Fichte are the clearest proofs. But, because in God there is an independent ground of reality and, hence, two equally eternal beginnings of self-revelation, God also must be considered in regard to his freedom in relation to both. The first beginning for the creation is the yearning of the One to give birth to itself or the will of the ground. The second is the will of love, whereby the word is spoken out into nature and through which God first makes himself personal. 85 That is why the will of the ground can- not be free in the sense in which the will of love is. It is not a con- scious will nor one connected with reflection, although it is also not a completely unconscious one that moves according to blind, mechan- ical necessity; but it is rather of intermediate nature, as desire or ap- petite, and is most readily comparable to the beautiful urge of a na- ture in becoming that strives to unfold itself and whose inner movements are involuntary (cannot be omitted), without there being a feeling of compulsion in them. Plainly free or conscious will is, how- ever, the will of love, precisely because it is what it is: the revelation that results from it is action and act. The whole of nature tells us that it in no way exists by virtue of a merely geometrical necessity; in it there is not simply pure reason but personality and spirit (as we likely distinguish the rational author from one possessing wit); other- wise the geometrical understanding that has ruled for so long would have long ago had to penetrate into nature and prove its idol of gen- eral and eternal natural laws to a greater degree than has | occurred thus far, whereas it has had to recognize the irrational relation of na- ture to itself rather more every day. The creation is not an occurrence
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but an act. There are no results from general laws; rather, God, that is, the person of God, is the general law, and everything that happens, happens by virtue of the personality of God, not according to some abstract necessity that we in acting would not tolerate, to say nothing of God. In the Leibnizian philosophy, which is ruled far too much by the spirit of abstraction, the recognition of laws of nature as morally, but not geometrically, necessary, and just as little arbitrary, is one of its most pleasing aspects. "I have found," says Leibniz, "that the laws which are actually to be proved in nature are still not absolutely de- monstrable, but this is also not necessary. Though they can be proved in various ways, yet something must always be presupposed which is not entirely geometrically necessary. Hence, these laws are the proof of a highest, intelligent, and free being against the system of absolute necessity. They are neither entirely necessary (in this ab- stract understanding), nor entirely arbitrary, but rather stand in the middle as laws that are derived from a perfect wisdom which is above all things. "* The highest striving of the dynamic mode of ex- planation is nothing else than this reduction of natural laws to mind, spirit and will.
In order to define the relation of God as a moral being to the world, general cognition of freedom in creation nevertheless does not reach far enough; moreover, the question still remains whether the act of self-revelation was free in the sense that all consequences of it were foreseen in God? But this too is necessarily to be affirmed; for the will to revelation would not itself be living if no other will turning back into the inner realm of being did not oppose it: but in this holding-in- itself [An-sich-halten] emerges a reflexive picture of all that is impli- citly contained in the essence in which God ideally realizes himself or, what is the same thing, recognizes himself beforehand in his | be- coming real. Thus, since there is a tendency in God working against the will to revelation, love, and goodness or the communicativum sui [self-evidence] must predominate so that there may be revelation; and this, the decision, only really completes the concept of revelation as a conscious and morally free act.
Notwithstanding this concept, and, although the action of revela- tion in God is necessary only morally or in regard to goodness and love, the notion remains of God's deliberating with himself or of a
* Tentam. Theod. Opp. T. I, pp. 365, 366.
choice among various possible worlds, a notion that is groundless and untenable. To the contrary, just as soon as the closer determina- tion of a moral necessity is added, the proposition is utterly undeni- able: that everything proceeds from the divine nature with absolute necessity, that everything which is possible by virtue of this nature must also be actual, and what is not actual also must be morally im- possible. Spinozism is by no means in error because of the claim that there is such an unshakable necessity in God, but rather because it takes this necessity to be impersonal and inanimate. For, since this system grasps altogether only one side of the absolute--namely the real one or the extent to which God functions only in the ground-- these propositions indeed lead to a blind necessity bereft of under- standing [verstandlos]. But if God is essentially love and goodness, then what is morally necessary in him also follows with a truly meta- physical necessity. If choice in the truest understanding were re- quired for complete freedom in God, then one would still have to go on further. For, there would only then have been perfect freedom of choice, if God also had been able to create a less complete world than was possible according to all conditions. Likewise, since nothing is so inconsistent that it also has not been put forth once, it has been claimed by some and in seriousness--not merely like the Castilian King Alphonso, whose well-known utterance concerned only the then dominant Ptolemaic system--that, if he wanted to, God could have created a better world than this one. 86 Thus the arguments [Gru? nde] against the unity of possibility and actuality | in God are derived as well from the wholly formal concept of possibility, that everything is possible which is not self-contradictory; for example, in the well- known objection that all coherently imagined novels must be actual occurrences. Even Spinoza did not have such a merely formal con- cept; all possibility is valid for him only in relation to divine perfec- tion; and Leibniz accepts this concept obviously merely in order to stress a choice in God and thereby distance himself as far as possible from Spinoza. "God chooses," he says, "among possibilities and for that reason chooses freely without necessitation: only then would there be no choice, no freedom, if only one thing were possible. " If nothing more is lacking for freedom than such an empty possibility, it can be admitted that formally, or without having regard to the divine way of being [Wesenheit], infinite things were and still are possible; but this entails wanting to claim divine freedom through a concept
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that is in itself false and is possible merely in our understanding, not in God, in whom disregard for his essence or perfections can likely not be thought. With respect to the plurality of possible worlds, an anarchy in itself, as is, according to our explanation, the original movement of the ground, seems to offer an infinity of possibilities, like material that has not yet been formed but can receive all forms; and if, for instance, the possibility of several worlds should be based on this material, then it would only need to be remarked that surely no such possibility would follow in regard to God since the ground is not to be called God, and God according to his perfection can only will one thing. But by no means is this anarchy also to be thought as if there were no archetype [Urtypus] in the ground containing the only possible world according to God's essence, which in the actual crea- tion is raised from potency into action [zum Aktus] only through divi- sion, regulation of forces and exclusion of the darkening or hindering anarchy. In the divine understanding itself, however, as in primeval [uranfa? nglich] wisdom in which God realizes himself ideally or as archetype [urbildlich], there is only one possible world as there is only one God. |
In the divine understanding there is a system; yet God himself is not a system, but rather a life; and the answer to the question as to [wegen] the possibility of evil in regard to God, for the sake of which the foregoing has been set out, also lies in this fact alone. All exis- tence demands a condition so that it may become real, namely per- sonal, existence. Even God's existence could not be personal without such a condition except that he has this condition within and not out- side himself. He cannot abolish the condition because he would oth- erwise have to abolish himself; he can come to terms with the condi- tion only through love and subordinate it to himself for his glorification. There would also be a ground of darkness in God, if he had not made the condition into his own, bound himself to it as one and for the sake of absolute personality. Man never gains control over the condition, although in evil he strives to do so; it is only lent to him, and is independent from him; hence, his personality and self- hood can never rise to full actuality [zum Aktus]. This is the sadness that clings to all finite life: and, even if there is in God at least a rela- tively independent condition, there is a source of sadness in him that can, however, never come into actuality, but rather serves only the eternal joy of overcoming. Hence, the veil of dejection that is spread
over all nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life. Joy must have suffering, suffering must be transfigured in joy. Hence, what comes from the mere condition or the ground, does not come from God, although it is necessary for his existence. But it cannot also be said that evil comes from the ground or that the will of the ground is the originator of evil. For evil can always only arise in the innermost will of our own heart and is never accomplished without our own act. The solicitation by the ground or the reaction against that which is beyond creaturely existence [das U? berkreatu? rliche] awakens only the appetite for creaturely existence or the individual will; but this reaction awakens it only so that there may be an inde- pendent ground for the good and so that it may be overtaken and penetrated by the good. For aroused selfhood is not evil in itself but only to the extent that it has completely | torn itself away from its op- posite, the light or the universal will. But exactly this renunciation of the good alone is sin. Activated selfhood is necessary for the rigor of life; without it there would be sheer death, a falling asleep of the good; for, where there is no struggle, there is no life. Therefore only the reviving of life is the will of the ground, not evil immediately and in itself. If the human will includes love in activated selfhood and sub- ordinates itself to the light as the general will, then actual goodness first arises, having become perceptible through the rigor proper to the will. Therefore in the good the reaction of the ground is an acting in favor of the good, in evil it is an acting in favor of evil, as scripture says: In pious things you are pious, and in perverted ones you are perverse. 87 Good without active selfhood is itself inactive good. The same thing that becomes evil through the will of the creature (if it tears itself completely free in order to be for itself), is in itself good as long as it remains wrapped up in the good and in the ground. Only selfhood that has been overcome, thus brought back from activity to potentiality, is the good and, as having been overtaken by the good, it also remains in the good from then on according to its potency. Were there no root of cold in the body, warm could not be felt. To think an attracting and repelling force for itself is impossible, for against what should that which repels act if that which attracts provides no resis- tance, or against what should that which attracts act, if it does not have in itself at the same time something that repels? Hence it is en- tirely correct to say dialectically: good and evil are the same thing only seen from different sides, or evil is in itself, that is, considered in
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the root of its identity, the good, just as the good, to the contrary, considered in its turning from itself [Entzweiung] or non-identity, is evil. For this reason the statement is also entirely correct that, whoever has neither the material nor the force in himself to do evil, is also not fit for good, of which we have seen plenty of examples in our own time. The passions against which our negative morality wages war are forces of which each has a common root with its | corre- sponding virtue. The soul of all hate is love, and in the most violent wrath only the stillness of the most inner centrum, attacked and ex- cited, shows itself. In appropriate measure and organic equilibrium the passions are the strength of virtue itself and its immediate tools. "If the passions are the limbs of dishonor," says the excellent J. G. Hamann, "do they--because of this--cease to be weapons of man- hood? Do you understand the letter of reason more cleverly than the allegorizing chamberlain of the Alexandrian church understood that of scripture, who castrated himself for the sake of the kingdom of heaven? The prince of this era makes those who do themselves the greatest evil into his cherished ones. His court (the devil's) jesters are the worst enemies of beautiful nature which, admittedly, has Cor- ybants and Galli as priests of the belly, but strong spirits for its true admirers. "*,88 Then may only those whose philosophy is made more for a gynaeceum than for the Academy or the Palaestra of the Lyceum not bring these dialectical propositions before the public who, mis- understanding the latter just as they themselves do, sees in them an abolition of all distinction of right from wrong, of good from evil, and before whom these propositions belong as little as, for instance, the propositions of the ancient dialecticians, of Zeno and the other Eleatic thinkers, belonged before the forum of shallow devotees of beauty [Scho? ngeister]. 89
The arousal of self-will occurs only so that love in man may find a material or opposition in which it may realize itself. To the extent that selfhood is the principle of evil in its breaking away [Lossagung], the ground does indeed arouse the possible principle of evil, yet not evil itself and not for the sake of evil. 90 But even this arousal occurs not according to the free will of God, who does not move in the ground according to this will or his heart, but rather only according to his own properties.
* Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters II, p. 196.
Whoever might thus claim that God himself willed evil, would have to seek the basis for this claim in the act of self-revelation as creation, just as it has also often been thought that he | who willed the world must have willed evil as well. Solely because God brought order to the disorderly offspring of chaos and proclaimed [ausgesprochen] his eternal unity into nature, he opposed darkness and posited the word as a constant centrum and eternal beacon against the anarchical movement of the principle bereft of understanding. The will to crea- tion was therefore immediately only a will to give birth to the light and the good along with it; but evil did not come into consideration in this will, neither as means nor even, as Leibniz says, as the conditio sine qua non of the greatest possible perfection of the world. *,91 It was neither the object of a divine decision nor, and much less so, of a permission. The question, however, of why God, since he necessarily foresaw that evil would follow at least as a companion from the self- revelation, did not prefer not to reveal himself at all, does not in fact deserve any reply. For this would be precisely as much as to say that, in order that there could be no opposition to love, there should be no love itself, that is, the absolutely positive should be sacrificed to what has existence only as an opposite, the eternal to the merely tem- poral. We have already explained that the self-revelation in God would have to be considered not as an unconditionally arbitrary, but rather as a morally necessary, act in which love and goodness over- come absolute inwardness. Thus if God had not revealed himself for the sake of evil, evil would have triumphed over the good and love. The Leibnizian concept of evil as conditio sine qua non can | only be applied to the ground so that the latter arouse the creaturely will (the possible principle of evil) as the condition under which alone the will to love could be realized. We have likewise already shown why God
* Tentam. Theod. P. 139: Ex his concludendum est, Deum antecedenter velle omne bonum in se, velle consequenter optimum tanquam finem; indifferens et malum physicum tanquam medium; sed velle tantum permittere malum morale, tanquam conditionem, sine qua non obtineretur optimum, ita nim- irum, ut malum nonnisi titulo necessitatis hypotheticae, id ipsum cum op- timo connectentis, admittatur. --p. 292: Quod ad vitium attinet, superius ostensum est, illud non esse objectum decreti divini, tanquam medium, sed tanquam conditionem sine qua non-- et ideo duntaxat permitti. These two passages contain the core of the entire Leibnizian theodicy.
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does not now resist the will of the ground or abolish it. This would be precisely as much as to say that God would abolish the condition of his existence, that is, his own personality. Thus, in order that there be no evil, there would have to be no God himself.
Another objection, which relates not merely to this view but rather to every metaphysics, is this: even if God did not want evil, he in fact continues to be active in the sinner and gives him the strength to ac- complish evil. With appropriate qualification [Unterscheidung], this point is, then, entirely to be admitted. The primal ground of existence also continues to be active in evil as health continues to be active in disease, and even the most dissolute and false life still remains and moves within God to the extent that he is the ground of existence. But it [this life] perceives him as consuming fury [Grimm] and is posited by the attraction of the ground itself in an ever higher tension against unity until it arrives at self-destruction and final crisis. 92
After all this the question always remains: Will evil end and how? Does creation have a final purpose at all, and, if this is so, why is it not reached immediately, why does what is perfect not exist right from the beginning? There is no answer to these questions other than that which has already been given: because God is a life, not merely a Being. All life has a destiny, however, and is subject to suffering and becoming. God has thus freely subordinated himself to this as well, ever since he first separated the world of light from that of darkness in order to become personal. Being becomes aware of itself only in becoming. In Being there is admittedly no becoming; rather, in the lat- ter, Being itself is again posited as eternity; but, in its realization by opposition, it is necessarily a becoming. Without the concept of a hu- manly suffering God, one which is common to all mysteries and spir- itual religions of earliest time, all of history would be incomprehen- sible; scripture also | distinguishes periods of revelation and posits as a distant future the time when God will be all in all things, that is, when he will be fully realized. The first period of creation is, as has been shown earlier, the birth of the light. The light or the ideal princi- ple is, as the eternal opposite of the dark principle, the creating word which delivers [erlo? st] the life hidden in the ground from non-Being and lifts it from potentiality [Potenz] into actuality [zum Aktus]. The spirit rises above the word, and spirit is the first being which unifies the world of darkness with that of the light and subordinates both principles to its realization and personality. Yet, the ground reacts
against this unity and asserts the initial duality, but only toward ever greater increase and toward the final separation of good from evil. The will of the ground must remain in its freedom until all this may be fulfilled and become actual. If the will of the ground were vanquished earlier, the good would remain hidden in it together with evil. But the good should be raised out of the darkness into actuality in order to live with God everlastingly, whereas evil should be separated from the good in order to be cast out eternally into non-Being. For this is the final purpose of creation that, whatever could not be for itself, should be for itself in so far as it is raised out of the darkness into ex- istence as a ground that is independent of God. Hence the necessity of birth and death. God yields the ideas that were in him without in- dependent life to selfhood and to what does not have Being so that, when called to life from the latter, they may be in him once again as independently existing [beings]. *,93 In its freedom, the ground there- fore effects separation and judgment [krisis] and, precisely in doing so, the complete actualization of God. For evil, when it is entirely sep- arate from good, also no longer exists as evil. It could only have been active through the (misused) good that was in it without its being conscious of it. In life, it still savored the forces of external nature with which it attempted to create and still had an | indirect participa- tion in the goodness of God. But in dying it is separated from every- thing good and, indeed, it remains behind as desire, as an eternal hunger and thirst for actuality, yet it is unable to step out of potential- ity. Its state is thus a state of non-Being, a state of constant consump- tion of activity or of that which strives to be active in it. For that rea- son it also does not require in any way a reconstitution of evil to goodness (of the return [Wiederbringung] of all things) for realization of the idea of a final, all-encompassing perfection; for evil is only evil to the extent that it exceeds potentiality, but, reduced to non-Being or the state of potency, it is what it always should be, basis, subordinate and, as such, no longer in contradiction with God's holiness or love. Hence, the end of revelation is casting out evil from the good, the ex- planation of evil as complete unreality. By contrast, the good, hav- ing risen out of the ground, is linked in eternal unity with the original good; those born out of darkness into the light join themselves to the ideal principle as limbs to a body in which the ideal principle is fully
* Philosophy and Religion (Tu? bingen, 1804), p. 73.
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realized and now a wholly personal being. As long as the initial dual- ity lasted, the creating word ruled in the ground, and this period of creation goes through all up to the end. But if the duality is destroyed through separation, the word, or the ideal principle, subordinates it- self, and the real principle that has become one with it, communally to spirit, and the latter, as divine consciousness, lives in the same way in both principles; as the scripture says about Christ: He must rule until all his enemies lie under his feet. 94 The last enemy to be abolished is death (for death was only necessary for the separation, the good must die in order to separate itself from evil, and evil must do so in order to separate itself from good). But when everything will be subordinate to him, then the son will also subordinate himself just as quickly to him who has subordinated all to the son, so that God may be all in all. For even the spirit is not yet the highest thing; it is but spirit or the breath | of love. Yet love is the highest. It is what ex- isted, then, before the ground and before that which exists (as separ- ate) but not yet as love, rather--how should we describe it?
Here we finally reach the highest point of the entire investigation. For a long time already we have heard the question: What end should serve this primary distinction between being in so far as it is ground and in so far as it exists? For there is either no common point of contact for both, in which case we must declare ourselves in favor of absolute dualism, or there is such a point; thus, both coincide once again in the final analysis. We have, then, one being [Ein Wesen] for all oppositions, an absolute identity of light and darkness, good and evil, and for all the inconsistent results to which any rational system falls prey and which have long been manifest in this system too.
We have already explained what we assume in the first respect: there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality--how can we call it anything other than the original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference [In- differenz] of both. 95 Most people forget, when they come to that point of examination where they must recognize a disappearance of all op- posites, that these have now really disappeared, and they once again predicate the opposites as such as arising from the indifference which had emerged precisely due to their total cessation. Indifference
is not a product of opposites, nor are they implicitly contained in it, but rather indifference is its own being separate from all opposition, a being against which all opposites ruin themselves, that is nothing else than their very not-Being [Nichtsein] and that, for this reason, also has no predicate, except as the very lacking of a predicate, without it being on that account a nothingness or non-thing. Therefore they ei- ther posit indifference actually in the non-ground that precedes any ground; thus they have | neither good nor evil--(for we are leaving aside for the moment the fact that raising the opposition between good and evil up to this standpoint is generally impermissible)--and also cannot predicate of it either the former or the latter or even both at the same time, or they posit good and evil and, thus, they also posit at once duality and therefore already no longer posit the non-ground or indifference. Let the following be said as a commentary to the lat- ter point! Real and ideal, darkness and light, as we otherwise want to describe the two principles, can never be predicated of the non- ground as opposites. But nothing hinders that they be predicated of it as non-opposites, that is, in disjunction and each for itself whereby, however, precisely duality (the actual two-ness [Zweiheit] of princi- ples) is posited. There is nothing in the non-ground itself by which this would be hindered. For, precisely because it relates to both as total indifference, it is neutral toward both. Were it the absolute iden- tity of both, it could be both only at the same time, that is, both would have to be predicated of it as opposites and thereby would themselves be one again. Duality (which is something entirely different from op- position, even though we should have used both synonymously up to now since we had not yet reached this point in the investigation) breaks forth therefore immediately from the Neither-Nor, or indiffer- ence, and without indifference, that is, without a non-ground, there would be no two-ness of principles. Therefore, instead of abolishing this distinction once again, as was thought, the non-ground rather posits and confirms it. Far from the distinction between the ground and that which exists having been merely logical, or one called on as a heuristic aid and again found to be artificial in the end, it has shown itself rather as a very real distinction that from the highest standpoint was first correctly proved and fully grasped.
Following this dialectical discussion, we can explain ourselves therefore entirely concretely in the following manner. The being of the ground, as of that which exists, can only be | that which comes
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before all ground, thus, the absolute considered merely in itself, the non-ground. But, as proved, it cannot be this in any other way than in so far as it divides into two equally eternal beginnings, not that it can be both at once, but that it is in each in the same way, thus in each the whole, or its own being. But the non-ground divides itself into the two exactly equal beginnings, only so that the two, which could not exist simultaneously or be one in it as the non-ground, become one through love, that is, it divides itself only so that there may be life and love and personal existence.