Myles Bur- nyeat, in
Complete
Works, ed.
Schelling-Philosophical-Investigations-into-the-Essence-of-Human-Freedom
Thus, although Schelling argues (in his cri- tique, along Kantian lines, of the ontological proof) that the Dass of God is not deducible a priori from his essence, yet this still leaves open the option of establishing God's essence by a posteriori means and on the basis of his Dass.
This consideration suggests to Schelling a new line of approach to the philosophies of religion and mythology. Corresponding to the distinction between the essence and the Dass, he divides his system into two separate, yet complementary branches: the "nega- tive" and the "positive. " The task of the negative philosophy is to define and order the various possibilities of things--that is, to de- termine their formal structures considered exclusively as possibil- ities, but without reference to whether or not they actually exist. The highest order of possibility is that of a pure actuality which . . . transcends the very limits of thinkability--if indeed it exists at all. This is the possibility of the Dass. But the actuality of the Dass must be intuited directly. The positive philosophy, accordingly, begins with the "experience" of immediate existence in and through the Dass, and proceeds from there, in tandem with the negative philoso- phy, to establish when and how the bare possibilities become con- crete actualities.
Schelling characterizes the negative branch as "rational philoso- phy," insofar as it deals with the purely possible. Yet the term "ra- tional" is somewhat misleading, for among the possibilities to be considered are those of a nonrational ground (i. e. , blind nature, or chaos) and of a suprarational, ordering directive (the will of God). Both of these, for different but related reasons, are supposed to es- cape rational determination; indeed, they are literally inconceivable. And yet the thought of their being inconceivable can and must be conceived. Thus, the negative philosophy, as understood by Schell- ing, paradoxically includes within itself the concept of a reality transcending all conceptual determinations, as well as the rationale of a struggle with the powers of unreason. Similarly, the positive phi- losophy represents the actuality of that struggle as revealed in human history, a process hopefully leading to the final triumph of reason over blind nature. In this way, the positive and negative phi- losophies are mutually to reinforce each other in the search for truth. (Edward Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 107)
27. In this section of the Philosophical Investigations, Schelling presents three characterizations of evil in order to evaluate the possibility of free- dom within God as a capacity for good and evil:
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(a) Immanence: admitting freedom to do evil leads to the denial of God's benevolence and omnipotence, while to deny the freedom to do evil simply denies freedom tout court.
(b) Concursus Dei: even the most distant connection between God and creatures suggests a level of participation in their actions; otherwise God cannot retain omnipotence. Hence, God must share responsibility for evil actions which offends the notion of benevolence, of God's essen- tial goodness. To deny this participation is to deny any positive ontolog- ical status to evil, to deny evil and, thus, to deny freedom once again.
(c) Emanation: evil as an estrangement or fall from God is riddled with inconsistencies. The most important among these relate to the origin of a falling away from God. If that origin is in God (he casts them out), then he is responsible for evil and his benevolence is impugned; if that origin is in creatures, then God must still be responsible, impugning his be- nevolence, for, if he is not, then he is no longer omnipotent and one has declared another origin of evil; if the origin is neither in God nor crea- tures, then the entire structure fails. Moreover, if evil is what is farthest from God, what is it? If it is as that which is not, it still is. Hence, evil even as privation of being has a curious being that is more than just the efflu- vium of a debating trick.
In each case, the compatibility of freedom (as the capacity to do evil) with God's omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence is shown to be impossible without eliminating freedom. Moreover, to assert freedom then becomes indistinguishable from a denial of God's complete author- ity that can only give rise to the suggestion that there may be another contrary authority (in evil).
Here Schelling is at his most powerful, setting out by means of the equation of freedom and evil the conditions which any monism must meet if it is to admit freedom and avoid a vitiating dualism. In doing so, he engages in a rather veiled placement of Hegel and Kant, as, respec- tively, primary advocates of monism and dualism, within the terms of the Christian justification of God and, thus, of the whole. The most intri- guing result of this tacit placement is the deflation of Hegelianism as a theodicy that cannot perform its task any better than traditional Chris- tian thought due to the denials that it must undertake as a condition of maintaining its essential monism as well as the equally wicked deflation of Kantianism as having three main consequences, a triumphant monism a` la Hegel that is both a return to, and departure from, Christian monism, a "monist dualism" of endless struggle or conflict a` la Fichte that may eu- phemistically be termed "asymptotic dualism" (as opposed to merely Si- syphean striving) or a most radical assertion of freedom a` la Nietzsche, this final possibility being present only as an implication or anticipation of collapse, but a most prescient one.
28. The relevant passage from Plotinus referred to in Schelling's note reads: One can grasp the necessity of evil in this way too. Since not only the Good exists, there must be the last end to the process of
going out past it, or if one prefers to put it like this, going down or going away: and this last, after which nothing else can come into being, is evil. Now it is necessary that what comes after the First should exist, and therefore that the Last should exist; and this matter, which possesses nothing at all of the Good. And in this way too evil is necessary. (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Arm- strong, vol. 1 [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Li- brary), 1989], 299)
29. This is a distant echo of a famous sentence in The Critique of Pure Reason (A51/B75): "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and with- out understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193-194).
30. This is a reference to the orgiastic cult of Cybele whose male devotees would attempt to achieve union with her through castrating themselves and dressing like women. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 117.
INVESTIGATION
DEDUCTION FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
31. Schelling is likely referring primarily to Boehme here.
32. The distinction between being as ground of existence and as existence
is crucial to the Philosophical Investigations; the entire positive argu- ment of the treatise flows from this distinction. It might be stated right from the start that Schelling makes no argument to support this distinc- tion; rather, he simply asserts it and refers to its first "scientific presen- tation. " That presentation is found in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy [Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie] from 1801, a work typically associated with Schelling's "identity philosophy," and the reference here shows just how porous the periodization of Schelling's thought can be (see Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], 93 and Snow, End of Idealism, 141). Moreover, that reference is to a "scientific" presentation, and at least one commentator has suggested that the Phil- osophical Investigations is an exoteric or "dialogic" exposition of Schelling's thought which is given more "rigorous" treatment in the foremost published scientific work of this period, the Presentation of My System (one presumes here that the model is Aristotle whose dialogues have survived only in rather insubstantial fragments) (White, System of Freedom, 93-94). Leaving the question of its supposedly more rigorous nature aside, the Presentation of My System does offer a useful prolegom- enon to elucidation of the distinction between ground and existence, not the least of whose utility is its use of the analogy of gravity to ex- plain the nature of the ground, an analogy that is taken up once again in the Philosophical Investigations.
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Here are translations of those sections of Presentation of My System to which Schelling refers in his first note (the other notes refer to the same sections more generally and arguably add only slightly to what is indi- cated in this note), where if A = A is the traditional sign of identity, A = B is the sign of identity in difference:
a) Comment to ? 54:
It is hardly doubtful that these proofs have left behind several ob-
scurities for many readers. Hence, it could first be asked to what ex- tent gravity could be thought as the ground of the reality of B, since the latter is originary [urspru? nglich] (? 44 comment 1). Yet B is only thought as having being or objectivity in relative identity; but rela- tive identity itself is nothing real (? 51). B thus, just like A, only be- comes real in so far as it is posited together with A objectively, con- sequently in relative totality. Accordingly, gravity is just as much ground from A as from B. As a result, it might be difficult for many to grasp the diverse-seeming relation of forces in absolute identity. In this respect, we make only the following comment: absolute identity is immediate ground of the primum Existens [first existing thing] not in itself, but rather through A and B, which are equivalent to it (? 53, Supplement 2). But absolute identity is absolutely immediate and in itself the ground of the reality of Being of A and B, yet for that very reason absolute identity does not yet exist in gravity. For it only ex- ists after A and B are posited as having being. Gravity is for that very reason posited immediately by absolute identity and proceeds not from its essence [Wesen], nor from its actual Being (for this is not yet posited) but rather from its nature; from the latter, however, simply and immediately from inner necessity, namely, from the fact that it exists unconditionally and cannot exist other than in the form of Being of A and B. It is evident (from gravity's being posited immedi- ately by absolute identity) that it is impossible to ground gravity as gravity, to seek to present it in its actuality [Wirklichkeit], since it must be thought as absolute identity not to the extent this exists, but to the extent it is the ground of its own Being, thus is itself not in actuality. (F. W. J. Schelling, Zeitschrift fu? r spekulative Physik, ed. Man- fred Durner [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001], 368-369)
b) Comment 1 to ? 93:
In gravity (? 54 comment) we indeed had to recognize absolute identity according to its essence, yet not as having being, since gravity is in the latter as the ground of its Being. Absolute identity is not in the cohesiveness, but rather gravity (? 92) which in itself does not exist. Absolute identity and actuality emerge in light. Gravity flees into eternal night, and absolute identity partially re- moves the seal under which it is contained, although it is com- pelled to emerge and, as it were, step into the light as the potency [in der Potenz] of A and B, but still as one identical thing. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 386)
c) Explanation to ? 145:
It is explained above that we understand by nature absolute identity first and foremost to the extent absolute identity exists in the form of A and B actu (? 61). Now absolute identity exists as such, however, only in cohesiveness and the light. But since abso- lute identity is ground of its own Being as A3 through cohesiveness and the light, just as it was ground of its own Being as A2 through gravity, and since it is perhaps as A3 once again ground of its own Being (in a yet higher potency [Potenz]), we will be able say in gen- eral: by nature we understand absolute identity to the extent it is considered not as having Being, but as ground of its Being, and we foresee from this that we can call nature all things which lie beyond the absolute Being of absolute identity. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 426) These hints are by no means clear, and we may do better to examine
the relation between ground and existence further by looking at the Phil- osophical Investigations themselves. From that standpoint, it is impor- tant first of all to reject the many possible binary combinations that may seem to describe the relation such as, for example, that of the infinite to the finite or that of essence to existence or ground to consequence--the latter merely a causal relationship that cannot explain the relation and that carries one back to Schelling's discussion of the relation of God to things.
The relation is rather one of the ground's being a condition or me- dium through which God's existence first comes to light; it is the condi- tion for the appearance of the light. In this sense, the ground is first rec- ognized as such in terms of the existence of God; thus it does not exist independently of God (although it is "different" from him), nor does it exist prior to God, yet its existence is necessary so that God reveal him- self. Hence, the condition of God's existence is itself conditioned, by that existence, and this sort of dialectical relation is a far cry indeed from the other relations mentioned above; it both complies with the basic dogmatic claim of God's eternality, that he must always be, even if that being must also have been before creation, and offers an explana- tion for the emergence of God (i. e. , differentiation) in so far as that emergence is conditional.
Yet, what is the ground? Here Schelling's analogy with gravity is quite useful, for it clarifies the nature both of ground and existence. If ground is likened to gravity in its relation to light, then ground is a necessary force of contraction without which the expansion (of light) would not be possible. The roots of this thinking in Schelling's philosophy of nature are clear in so far as the constitutive relation is dyadic and dynamic; however, the tension between ground and existence is not one of attrac- tion and repulsion but rather of contraction and expansion--the move- ment into the light is one of constant expansion, the movement condi- tioning this movement as its condition of possibilty is one of contraction or self-concealment (here one is reminded of Heraclitus' famous "phusis
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kruptesthai philei" [nature loves to hide/conceal itself]); each movement is defined with and against the other, they function together harmoni- ously, and the whole that emerges out of this movement is not compre- hensible as a whole without it.
But if ground remains a condition in God, it does not necessarily have to do so in man--this is the great difference between God and man; hence, the danger of man, his inner dissonance, lies in the possibility that the ground may subordinate expansion to itself, that contraction may triumph over expansion by perverting it--in short, that the relation reverses itself in favor of the ground wherein the principle of light and expansion is harnessed to the ground, spirit becomes the voice of ground, the universal the mask of the particular. Here the ground ceases being a condition by which existence may become what it is, but seeks to become that for the sake of which existence becomes what it is, it seeks to become absolute.
The difference between the two is fundamental, it is the basis for the dif- ference between good and evil in the Philosophical Investigations, a difference which,asZ? iz? eknotes,inheresinthenatureoftheunitybetweengroundand existence, evil being a unity oriented to the ground's freeing itself from its own conditionality and good being a unity where ground's conditionality is retained and affirmed (Z? iz? ek, The Indivisible Remainder, 63).
33. The first edition has a comma before the "it" ["Er"], which is capitalized in the German, and so does the edition from Buchheim, although the lat- ter notes that a period should likely be set here before the "it. " Having interpreted this unusual capitalization as sign of a printing mistake, we have inserted a period instead of a comma.
34. As noted, this analogy is the principal way that the Presentation of My System deals with the relation of ground to existence. (See Schelling, Zeitschrift, 368-370. )
35. The German reads: "In dem Zirkel, daraus alles wird, ist es kein Wider- spruch, dass das, wodurch das Eine erzeugt wird, selbst wieder von ihm ge- zeugt werde. Es ist hier kein Erstes und kein Letztes, weil alles sich gegen- seitig voraussetzt, keins das andere und doch nicht ohne das andere ist. "
36. We chose to translate the German werden in this and in the preceding sentence literally rather than by a paraphrase like "come into being. " We have done so because we preferred to retain the inherent dynamism of the German even though as English the use of "become" in this way (without a predicate object of becoming) is unnatural.
37. See the excerpt from Boehme in this volume, especially the opening paragraph.
38. The German reads: "Dennoch ist sie ein Willen des Verstandes . . . " We read ein Wille instead of ein Willen and assume the latter is a typograph- ical mistake (found both in the first edition and that of Buchheim). The alternative here would be to read ein Wollen, which is also possible, but not likely given the subsequent repetition of Wille in the same sentence (see the immediately following note below).
39. ein ahndender Wille--we have chosen to translate old ahnden (= ahnen) by the verb "divine," and this may well be a somewhat controversial choice. The verb ahnen means in general "to foresee," "to have a pre- sentiment or foreboding of," or "to suspect. " Gutmann translates the term variously by "prescient" or "anticipating," both of which are ade- quate but slightly inaccurate, since they seem to indicate advance ac- cess to knowledge, which should not yet be available to the yearning in this case (and that is why "to foresee" is also a problem). Hayden-Roy uses "presentient," and "presentiment," which is much closer but carries a sensory element in the adjective that is unwelcome. In their respective translations of The Ages of the World, where the verb is featured in the first sentence, Wirth uses "to intimate" and Norman "to divine," both of which seem to us to be much closer to the mark since they suggest an al- most ineffable inkling of something without necessarily freighting that inkling with a notion of foreknowledge that suggests Platonic anamn ? esis, the recollection of something seen before.
40. Please see the "Translators' Note" regarding our choice to use "anarchy" and "anarchical" to translate regellos and das Regellose here instead of Gutmann's "unruly" and "unruliness. " Once again, we should like to em- phasize that the association of this original "unstate" in the ground with darkness, chaos, disorder, and so on, leads us to believe a much stronger term like "anarchy" is a more appropriate translation.
41. This is a striking statement, and one that supports the interpretation of the ground not as an essence or unactualized quidditas that remains in potentia until some necessarily mysterious triggering moment but as an absence, an inexplicable void.
42. This proverbial expression for those who wrest confusion from clarity is taken from Horace's de arte poetica (at line 143):
quanto rectius hic, qui nil molitur inepte:
"dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes"
non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat, Antiphaten, Scyllamque et cum Cyclope Charybdin.
In prose: How much more correct is he who does not exert himself in- eptly--"Tell me, Muse, of the man who saw the cities and ways of many men after the capture of Troy"--and proposes not to give smoke from a flash of light but light from smoke in order to bring forth the splendid and wondrous tales of Antiphates, Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.
43. Buchheim suggests that the reference to Fichte here pertains to three treatises Fichte wrote between 1804 and 1806, all of which denigrate na- ture as having being--as being alive--in the same way as the knowing subject. See Die Grundzu? ge des gegenwa? rtigen Zeitalters (1804); U? ber das Wesen des Gelehrten (1805); and Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806)-- to the best of our knowledge, none of these works from Fichte's generally neglected post-Jena period has been translated into English.
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44. This reference to John 12:24 has strong epistemological and theodical overtones. For the former, see J. G. Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. J. Nad- ler (Vienna: Herder Verlag, 1949-1957), 2:74. The latter are dealt with most famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov where this verse is the epilogue and guiding thread of the very explicitly theo- dical narrative (F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Rich- ard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [New York: Vintage, 1990], 2).
45. This recalls Plato's Timaeus:
Now the nurse [tith ? en ? e] of becoming [geneseos], having turned wa- tery and fiery and receiving the forms of earth and air as well, and suffering all the other properties that accompany these, assumes every variety of appearance; yet since she is filled with powers that are neither similar nor evenly balanced, none of her is in balance [ouden aut ? es isoroppein]; she sways irregularly in every direction as she herself is shaken by these forms, and as they are set in mo- tion, she in turn shakes them. And as they are moved, they drift continually, in one direction or another, separating from one an- other. Just as grain sifted and winnowed from sieves or other such instruments [organa] used for cleaning grain fall in one place if they are firm and heavy but fly off and settle in another place if they are light. (Plato, Platonis opera, ed. J. Burnet, vol. IV [Oxford: Oxford UP (1902) 1978], 52d4-53a2; our translation)
46. For Plato's use of "instrument," see the immediately preceding citation from Timaeus (52e7).
47. The German reads: "Weil na? mlich dieses Wesen (der anfa? nglichen Natur) nichts anderes ist als der ewige Grund zur Existenz Gottes, so muss es in sich selbst, obwohl verschlossen, das Wesen Gottes gleichsam als einen im Dunkel der Tiefe leuchtenden Lebensblick enthalten. " Here Wesen is of particular difficulty. Our translation gives "being" for the first and "es- sence" for the second use of Wesen in this sentence, thus bringing up a thorny issue. This is because the choice is hardly immediate and re- veals a serious philosophical problem, an ambiguity or, indeed, an am- bivalence that seems to course through the Philosophical Investigations. On the one hand, the ground seems to be a sort of primordial chaos, an unknown and unknowable X from which springs the variety of existence and, above all, the existence of God. But if the ground truly is this dark- ness, then how can God have an identity and not any identity? Schelling's use of Wesen in this sentence implies (at the very least) that there is some identity or essence lying "dormant" in the ground, waiting to escape it into the light. This implication turns against the notion of the ground as a darkness except in so far as it may be obscure to us but clear to God--in other words, is the ground inscrutable in itself or merely due to the limits of human cognitive power? Is God's "uncon- scious" self, a self that emerges into the light or is it indeed anything at all or are both positions somehow correct depending on the point of view one takes and can take?
48. This recalls Plato's famous wax analogy from Theaetetus at 191d2-191e1: SOCRATES: Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argu- ment, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another; in some men rather hard, in others soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency.
THEAETETUS: All right, I'm supposing that.
SOCRATES: We may look on it, then, as the gift of Memory [Mn ? emo- syn ? e], the mother of the Muses. We make impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves; we hold the wax under our percep- tions and thoughts and take a stamp from them, in the way in which we take the imprints of signet rings. Whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know. (Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett, rev.
Myles Bur- nyeat, in Complete Works, ed. John Cooper [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 212)
Deduction of the Possibility of Evil
49. Division is as old as Plato where it is called diairesis and forms a major topic of discussion in two of the most important dialogues, Sophist, and The Statesman. See Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Roj- cewicz and Andre? Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) and Stanley Rosen, Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 14-36.
50. Selbstlauter and Mitlauter are the German terms we translate as vowel and consonant. Buchheim (Buchheim, PU, 128, n147) indicates that, in the sense employed by Schelling and derived from Boehme (from the Myste- rium magnum), the terms distinguish the purity of God's "spirit" or "word" as opposed to that of man, which needs to be combined with con- sonants in order to be heard; in other words, whereas God's voice is pure, the human voice is not. Also see Wirth's comments in his translation of The Ages of the World (Schelling, The Ages of the World [1815], 141, n59).
51. "The same unity that is inseverable in God must therefore be severable in man--and this is the possibility of good and evil. " This is a central thought in the Philosophical Investigations, and it reveals the considerable virtue and ultimate failure of Schelling's attempt to reassert a form of theodicy that, as Friedrich Hermanni remarks, in some ways harkens back to St. Au- gustine and, in particular, to the de libero arbitrio (On Freedom), where human freedom is first equated with the will and an encroachment on God's order. (See Friedrich Hermanni, Die letzte Entlastung, 20-21. )
Schelling's position is ambivalent in so far as God cannot fail, cannot collapse whereas man can. This move insulates God against the problems we addressed above (in note 27), but also allows for a much broader con- cept of evil than those which the tradition explicitly allowed.
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52. Archaeus is not an identifiable figure of classical mythology. Buchheim notes that the reference seems to be taken from Theophrastus Paracel- sus (Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, 1453-1541), the Swiss doctor, alchemist and philosopher-theologian, and is a sign stand- ing for the principle of organic vitality which unifies the various vital powers. As such, this is yet another example of the more arcane stream of reference that appears in the Philosophical Investigations, a stream that should not be interpreted as exemplary of eccentricity as much as of Schelling's respect for otherwise denigrated semiotic systems (and this goes for mythology as well).
53. The cited passages read:
(1) to first footnote on page 36:
20. I found in comparing the Rationale Theoligicum of Nicolaus Ve- delius with the refutation by Johann Musaeus that these two au- thors, of whom one died while a Professor at Franecker after having taught at Geneva and the other finally became the foremost theolo- gian at Jena, are more or less in agreement on the principal rules for the use of reason, but that it is in the application of these rules they disagree. For they both agree that revelation cannot be contrary to the truths whose necessity is called by philosophers 'logical' or 'metaphysical', that is to say, whose opposite implies contradic- tion. They both admit also that revelation will be able to combat maxims whose necessity is called 'physical' and is founded only upon the laws that the will of God has prescribed for Nature. Thus the question whether the presence of one and the same body in div- ers places is possible in the supernatural order only touches the application of the rule; and in order to decide this question conclu- sively by reason, one must needs explain exactly wherein the es- sence of body exists . . . (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard [La Salle, Ill. : Open Court, 1985], 86)
(2) to second footnote on page 36:
149. M. Bayle avows: 'that one finds everywhere both moral good and physical good, some examples of virtue, some examples of happiness, and that this is what makes the difficulty. For if there were only wicked and unhappy people', he says, 'there would be no need to resort to the hypothesis of the two principles. ' I wonder that this admirable man could have evinced so great an inclination towards this opinion of the two principles; and I am surprised at his not having taken into account that this novel [roman] of human life, which makes the universal history of the human race, lay fully devised in the divine understanding, with innumerable others, and that the will of God only decreed its existence because this se- quence of events was to be most in keeping with the rest of things, to bring forth the best result. And these apparent faults in the whole world, these spots on a Sun whereof ours is but a ray, rather enhance its beauty than diminish it, contributing towards that end
by obtaining a greater good. There are in truth two principles, but they are both in God, namely, his understanding and his will. The understanding furnishes the principle of evil, without being sullied by it, without being evil; it represents natures as they exist in the eternal verities; it contains within it the reason for which evil is permitted: but the will tends only towards good. Let us add a third principle, namely power; it precedes even understanding and will, but it operates as the one displays it and as the other requires it. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 216-217; translation modified)
(3) to third footnote on page 36:
380. Aristotle was right in rejecting chaos: but it is not always easy to disentangle the conceptions of Plato, and such a task would be still less easy in respect of some ancient authors whose works are lost. Kepler, one of the most excellent of modern mathematicians, recognized a species of imperfection in matter, even when there is no regular motion: he calls it its 'natural inertia', which gives it a re- sistance to motion, whereby a greater mass receives less speed from one and the same force. There is soundness in this observa- tion, and I have used it to advantage in this work, in order to have a comparison such as should illustrate how the original imperfection of the creatures sets bounds to the action of the Creator, which tends towards good. But as matter is itself of God's creation, it only furnishes a comparison and an example, and cannot be the very source of evil and imperfection. I have already shown that this source lies in the forms or ideas of the possibles, for it must be eter- nal, and matter is not so. Now since God made all positive reality that is not eternal, he would have made the source of evil, if that did not rather lie in the possibility of things or forms, that which alone God did not make, since he is not the author of his own understand- ing. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 353)
54. Here is our translation of the citation from St. Augustine:
They ask us: whence evil? We answer: from the good, but not from the highest good; therefore, evil things do arise from good things. For all evil things participate in the good and resist it purely and as given in every part of it. One really should not find these things dif- ficult who has correctly formulated the concept of evil at some time and noted that it always involves some deficiency, whereas all man- ner of perfection is possessed in an incommunicable way by God; nor is it any more possible to create an unlimited and independent creature than it is to create another God.
55. The cited passages read:
(1) to first footnote on page 37:
152. M. Bayle places the Greek philosopher Melissus, champion of the oneness of the first principle (and perhaps even of the oneness of substance) in conflict with Zoroaster, as with the first originator of duality. Zoroaster admits that the hypothesis of Melissus is more
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consistent with order and a priori reasons, but he denies its confor- mity with experience and a posteriori reasons. 'I surpass you', he said, 'in the explanation of phenomena, which is the principal mark of a good system. ' But, in my opinion, it is not a very good explana- tion of a phenomenon to assign it to an ad hoc principle: to evil, a principium maleficum, to cold, a primum frigidum; there is nothing so easy and nothing so dull. It is well-nigh as if someone were to say that the Peripatetics surpass the new mathematicians in the expla- nation of the phenomena of the stars, by giving them ad hoc intelli- gences to guide them. According to that, it is quite easy to conceive why the planets make their way with such precision; whereas there is need of much geometry and reflection to understand how from the gravity of the planets, which bears them towards the sun, com- bined with some whirlwind which carries them along, or with their own motive force, can spring the elliptic movement of Kepler, which satisfies appearances as well. A man incapable of relishing deep speculations will at first applaud the Peripatetics and will treat our mathematicians as dreamers. Some old Galenist will do the same with regard to the faculties of the Schoolmen: he will admit a chylific, a chymific and sanguific, and he will assign one of these ad hoc to each operation; he will think he has worked won- ders, and will laugh at what he will call the chimeras of the mod- erns, who claim to explain through mechanical structures what passes in the body of an animal. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 218-219)
153. The explanation of the cause of evil by a particular principle, per principium maleficum, is of the same nature. Evil needs no such explanation, any more than do cold and darkness: there is neither primum frigidum nor principle of darkness. Evil itself comes only from privation; the positive enters therein only by concomitance, as the active enters by concomitance into cold. We see that water in freezing is capable of breaking a gun-barrel wherein it is confined; and yet cold is a certain privation of force, it only comes from the diminution of a movement which separates the particles of fluids. When this separating motion becomes weakened in the water by the cold, the particles of compressed air concealed in the water col- lect; and, by becoming larger, they become more capable of acting outwards through their buoyancy. The resistance which the sur- faces of the proportions of air meet in the water, and which op- poses the force exerted by these portions towards dilation, is far less, and consequently the effect of the air greater, in large air- bubbles than in small, even though these small bubbles combined should form as great a mass as the large. For the resistances, that is, the surfaces, increase by the square, and the forces, that is, the contents or volumes of the spheres of compressed air, increase by the cube, of their diameters. This it is by accident that privation in- volves action and force. I have already shown how privation is
enough to cause error and malice, and how God is prompted to per- mit them, despite that there be no malignity in him. Evil comes from privation; the positive and action spring from it by accident, as force springs from cold. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 219-220)
(2) to first footnote on page 38:
30. Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessory to our own errors. Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use of the com- monest rules of logic and reason with even a modicum of attention. Instead of that, they became involved in oblique and ambiguous phrases, which give them a fine field for declamation, to make the most of their wit and learning. It would seem, indeed, that they have no wish to see the naked truth, perhaps because they fear that it may be more disagreeable than error: for they are not familiar with the beauty of the author of all things who is the source of truth. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 91-92; translation modified)
56. The German that we have translated by the unusual pair, "temperance" and "distemperance," is Temperatur and Distemperatur. Both terms seem to be derived from theosophic literature. Buchheim suggests that Schell- ing may have lifted them from Christoph Oetinger's Swedenborg (Buch- heim, PU 136, n182), but the terms may also have roots in Boehme. (See Francesco Moiso, "Gott als Person," in U? ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Otfried Ho? ffe and Annemarie Pieper [Berlin: Akademie Ver- lag, 1995], 198. )
57. Arians and Monotheletes are two heretical streams of thought in early Christianity. The Arians were named after Arius (d. ca. 336 C. E. ), a priest in Alexandria who asserted a powerful doctrine of divine transcendence that denied the oneness of Christ with God. Jarolslav Pelikan writes:
Even on the basis of the scraps of information about Arianism handed on principally by its opponents, we may recognize in the Arian picture of this Logos-Son, who was less than God but more than man, a soteriological as well as cosmological intermediary. The absoluteness of God meant that if the Logos was of the same essence with the Father, the Logos had to be impassible. The ortho- dox found it blasphemous when the Arians, also in the interest of the absoluteness of God, described the Logos as one possessed of a mutable nature and therefore not of the same essence with the Father. "He remains good," the Arians said, "by his own free will, so long as he chooses to do so," rather than by virtue of his oneness of essence with God. And so, according to Arius, God, foreknowing that the Logos would resist temptation and remain good, bestowed on him proleptically the glory which, as man, he would eventually attain by his own virtue. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971], 198)
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The name Monotheletes derives from Greek monon thel ? ema or "one will" and describes those who advocated Monotheletism, a controver- sial school of Christian belief in the seventh century C. E. that claimed there was only one will in Christ and not two, one reflecting his divine, the other his human nature. To cite Pelikan again:
In the Trinity there were three hypostases, but only one divine nature; otherwise there would be three gods. There was also a single will and a single action. Thus will was an attribute of a na- ture and not of a hypostasis, natural and not hypostatic. Hence, the person of Christ, with a single hypostasis and two natures, had to have two wills, one for each nature. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2 [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974], 72)
Schelling also seems to have borrowed the variatio sermonis of Enthu- siasmus and Begeisterung in this passage, which we translate by the pair "enthusiasm" and "ardor," from Baader's essay included in this volume, "On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason. "
Deduction of the Reality of Evil
58. See Timaeus, 49a-53b.
59. Schelling's use of the term Basis is derived from chemistry where
through precipitation complex compounds are separated out into their various base elements. (See Buchheim, PU, 107, n87; Moiso, "Gott als Person," 199-200. )
60. The German reads: ". . . (als aus der blossen Potenz zum Aktus) . . . " One of the more difficult translation issues in the text involves Schelling's use of the pairs Potenz and Aktus (or actu) along with Mo? glichkeit and Wirklichkeit or Realita? t to express the notion of possibility as opposed to actuality or reality. We have equivocated somewhat here, generally translating Potenz and Mo? glichkeit by "possibility," where it is clear that Schelling is not using Potenz in his more technical sense as a "po- tency. " (On this sense, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern Euro- pean Philosophy [London: Routledge, 1993], 112-115 and Beach, The Potencies of God(s), 111-146. ) And we have translated Aktus (or actu), Wirklichkeit and Realita? t either by "actuality" or "reality" as the case seemed to demand. The central issue here has been to ensure that the Aristotelian division of possibility and actuality be preserved where Schelling seeks to exploit this traditional ontological transformation by alluding to the tradition and loosened where "reality" describes better a more mundane, non-technical application of the German. The Lati- nate Potenz and Aktus are employed in the former sense, while the other terms are more variable.
61. This verb is used in a somewhat awkward way here. Yet, since it can be used to describe the enactment of a law or regulation, it seems fully ap- propriate to Schelling's context, and that is why we have translated it by somewhat awkward English.
62. This notion of a "Golden Age" is an ancient topos visible both in Hesiod's Works and Days and Ovid's Metamorphoses from whence it had tremen- dous influence on the tradition:
Golden was that first age, which with no one to compel, without a law, of its own will, kept faith and did the right [fidem rectumque co- lebat]. There was no fear of punishment, no threatening words were to be read on bronze tablets; no suppliant throng gazed fearfully upon its judge's face, but they were secure without protectors. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, vol. 1 [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1977], 9)
63. This sentence features a curiously traditional kind of theodical argu- ment and echoes the Arian view of the mediating "Logos. " (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.
This consideration suggests to Schelling a new line of approach to the philosophies of religion and mythology. Corresponding to the distinction between the essence and the Dass, he divides his system into two separate, yet complementary branches: the "nega- tive" and the "positive. " The task of the negative philosophy is to define and order the various possibilities of things--that is, to de- termine their formal structures considered exclusively as possibil- ities, but without reference to whether or not they actually exist. The highest order of possibility is that of a pure actuality which . . . transcends the very limits of thinkability--if indeed it exists at all. This is the possibility of the Dass. But the actuality of the Dass must be intuited directly. The positive philosophy, accordingly, begins with the "experience" of immediate existence in and through the Dass, and proceeds from there, in tandem with the negative philoso- phy, to establish when and how the bare possibilities become con- crete actualities.
Schelling characterizes the negative branch as "rational philoso- phy," insofar as it deals with the purely possible. Yet the term "ra- tional" is somewhat misleading, for among the possibilities to be considered are those of a nonrational ground (i. e. , blind nature, or chaos) and of a suprarational, ordering directive (the will of God). Both of these, for different but related reasons, are supposed to es- cape rational determination; indeed, they are literally inconceivable. And yet the thought of their being inconceivable can and must be conceived. Thus, the negative philosophy, as understood by Schell- ing, paradoxically includes within itself the concept of a reality transcending all conceptual determinations, as well as the rationale of a struggle with the powers of unreason. Similarly, the positive phi- losophy represents the actuality of that struggle as revealed in human history, a process hopefully leading to the final triumph of reason over blind nature. In this way, the positive and negative phi- losophies are mutually to reinforce each other in the search for truth. (Edward Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994], 107)
27. In this section of the Philosophical Investigations, Schelling presents three characterizations of evil in order to evaluate the possibility of free- dom within God as a capacity for good and evil:
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(a) Immanence: admitting freedom to do evil leads to the denial of God's benevolence and omnipotence, while to deny the freedom to do evil simply denies freedom tout court.
(b) Concursus Dei: even the most distant connection between God and creatures suggests a level of participation in their actions; otherwise God cannot retain omnipotence. Hence, God must share responsibility for evil actions which offends the notion of benevolence, of God's essen- tial goodness. To deny this participation is to deny any positive ontolog- ical status to evil, to deny evil and, thus, to deny freedom once again.
(c) Emanation: evil as an estrangement or fall from God is riddled with inconsistencies. The most important among these relate to the origin of a falling away from God. If that origin is in God (he casts them out), then he is responsible for evil and his benevolence is impugned; if that origin is in creatures, then God must still be responsible, impugning his be- nevolence, for, if he is not, then he is no longer omnipotent and one has declared another origin of evil; if the origin is neither in God nor crea- tures, then the entire structure fails. Moreover, if evil is what is farthest from God, what is it? If it is as that which is not, it still is. Hence, evil even as privation of being has a curious being that is more than just the efflu- vium of a debating trick.
In each case, the compatibility of freedom (as the capacity to do evil) with God's omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence is shown to be impossible without eliminating freedom. Moreover, to assert freedom then becomes indistinguishable from a denial of God's complete author- ity that can only give rise to the suggestion that there may be another contrary authority (in evil).
Here Schelling is at his most powerful, setting out by means of the equation of freedom and evil the conditions which any monism must meet if it is to admit freedom and avoid a vitiating dualism. In doing so, he engages in a rather veiled placement of Hegel and Kant, as, respec- tively, primary advocates of monism and dualism, within the terms of the Christian justification of God and, thus, of the whole. The most intri- guing result of this tacit placement is the deflation of Hegelianism as a theodicy that cannot perform its task any better than traditional Chris- tian thought due to the denials that it must undertake as a condition of maintaining its essential monism as well as the equally wicked deflation of Kantianism as having three main consequences, a triumphant monism a` la Hegel that is both a return to, and departure from, Christian monism, a "monist dualism" of endless struggle or conflict a` la Fichte that may eu- phemistically be termed "asymptotic dualism" (as opposed to merely Si- syphean striving) or a most radical assertion of freedom a` la Nietzsche, this final possibility being present only as an implication or anticipation of collapse, but a most prescient one.
28. The relevant passage from Plotinus referred to in Schelling's note reads: One can grasp the necessity of evil in this way too. Since not only the Good exists, there must be the last end to the process of
going out past it, or if one prefers to put it like this, going down or going away: and this last, after which nothing else can come into being, is evil. Now it is necessary that what comes after the First should exist, and therefore that the Last should exist; and this matter, which possesses nothing at all of the Good. And in this way too evil is necessary. (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Arm- strong, vol. 1 [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Li- brary), 1989], 299)
29. This is a distant echo of a famous sentence in The Critique of Pure Reason (A51/B75): "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and with- out understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193-194).
30. This is a reference to the orgiastic cult of Cybele whose male devotees would attempt to achieve union with her through castrating themselves and dressing like women. See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 117.
INVESTIGATION
DEDUCTION FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
31. Schelling is likely referring primarily to Boehme here.
32. The distinction between being as ground of existence and as existence
is crucial to the Philosophical Investigations; the entire positive argu- ment of the treatise flows from this distinction. It might be stated right from the start that Schelling makes no argument to support this distinc- tion; rather, he simply asserts it and refers to its first "scientific presen- tation. " That presentation is found in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy [Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie] from 1801, a work typically associated with Schelling's "identity philosophy," and the reference here shows just how porous the periodization of Schelling's thought can be (see Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], 93 and Snow, End of Idealism, 141). Moreover, that reference is to a "scientific" presentation, and at least one commentator has suggested that the Phil- osophical Investigations is an exoteric or "dialogic" exposition of Schelling's thought which is given more "rigorous" treatment in the foremost published scientific work of this period, the Presentation of My System (one presumes here that the model is Aristotle whose dialogues have survived only in rather insubstantial fragments) (White, System of Freedom, 93-94). Leaving the question of its supposedly more rigorous nature aside, the Presentation of My System does offer a useful prolegom- enon to elucidation of the distinction between ground and existence, not the least of whose utility is its use of the analogy of gravity to ex- plain the nature of the ground, an analogy that is taken up once again in the Philosophical Investigations.
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Here are translations of those sections of Presentation of My System to which Schelling refers in his first note (the other notes refer to the same sections more generally and arguably add only slightly to what is indi- cated in this note), where if A = A is the traditional sign of identity, A = B is the sign of identity in difference:
a) Comment to ? 54:
It is hardly doubtful that these proofs have left behind several ob-
scurities for many readers. Hence, it could first be asked to what ex- tent gravity could be thought as the ground of the reality of B, since the latter is originary [urspru? nglich] (? 44 comment 1). Yet B is only thought as having being or objectivity in relative identity; but rela- tive identity itself is nothing real (? 51). B thus, just like A, only be- comes real in so far as it is posited together with A objectively, con- sequently in relative totality. Accordingly, gravity is just as much ground from A as from B. As a result, it might be difficult for many to grasp the diverse-seeming relation of forces in absolute identity. In this respect, we make only the following comment: absolute identity is immediate ground of the primum Existens [first existing thing] not in itself, but rather through A and B, which are equivalent to it (? 53, Supplement 2). But absolute identity is absolutely immediate and in itself the ground of the reality of Being of A and B, yet for that very reason absolute identity does not yet exist in gravity. For it only ex- ists after A and B are posited as having being. Gravity is for that very reason posited immediately by absolute identity and proceeds not from its essence [Wesen], nor from its actual Being (for this is not yet posited) but rather from its nature; from the latter, however, simply and immediately from inner necessity, namely, from the fact that it exists unconditionally and cannot exist other than in the form of Being of A and B. It is evident (from gravity's being posited immedi- ately by absolute identity) that it is impossible to ground gravity as gravity, to seek to present it in its actuality [Wirklichkeit], since it must be thought as absolute identity not to the extent this exists, but to the extent it is the ground of its own Being, thus is itself not in actuality. (F. W. J. Schelling, Zeitschrift fu? r spekulative Physik, ed. Man- fred Durner [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001], 368-369)
b) Comment 1 to ? 93:
In gravity (? 54 comment) we indeed had to recognize absolute identity according to its essence, yet not as having being, since gravity is in the latter as the ground of its Being. Absolute identity is not in the cohesiveness, but rather gravity (? 92) which in itself does not exist. Absolute identity and actuality emerge in light. Gravity flees into eternal night, and absolute identity partially re- moves the seal under which it is contained, although it is com- pelled to emerge and, as it were, step into the light as the potency [in der Potenz] of A and B, but still as one identical thing. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 386)
c) Explanation to ? 145:
It is explained above that we understand by nature absolute identity first and foremost to the extent absolute identity exists in the form of A and B actu (? 61). Now absolute identity exists as such, however, only in cohesiveness and the light. But since abso- lute identity is ground of its own Being as A3 through cohesiveness and the light, just as it was ground of its own Being as A2 through gravity, and since it is perhaps as A3 once again ground of its own Being (in a yet higher potency [Potenz]), we will be able say in gen- eral: by nature we understand absolute identity to the extent it is considered not as having Being, but as ground of its Being, and we foresee from this that we can call nature all things which lie beyond the absolute Being of absolute identity. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 426) These hints are by no means clear, and we may do better to examine
the relation between ground and existence further by looking at the Phil- osophical Investigations themselves. From that standpoint, it is impor- tant first of all to reject the many possible binary combinations that may seem to describe the relation such as, for example, that of the infinite to the finite or that of essence to existence or ground to consequence--the latter merely a causal relationship that cannot explain the relation and that carries one back to Schelling's discussion of the relation of God to things.
The relation is rather one of the ground's being a condition or me- dium through which God's existence first comes to light; it is the condi- tion for the appearance of the light. In this sense, the ground is first rec- ognized as such in terms of the existence of God; thus it does not exist independently of God (although it is "different" from him), nor does it exist prior to God, yet its existence is necessary so that God reveal him- self. Hence, the condition of God's existence is itself conditioned, by that existence, and this sort of dialectical relation is a far cry indeed from the other relations mentioned above; it both complies with the basic dogmatic claim of God's eternality, that he must always be, even if that being must also have been before creation, and offers an explana- tion for the emergence of God (i. e. , differentiation) in so far as that emergence is conditional.
Yet, what is the ground? Here Schelling's analogy with gravity is quite useful, for it clarifies the nature both of ground and existence. If ground is likened to gravity in its relation to light, then ground is a necessary force of contraction without which the expansion (of light) would not be possible. The roots of this thinking in Schelling's philosophy of nature are clear in so far as the constitutive relation is dyadic and dynamic; however, the tension between ground and existence is not one of attrac- tion and repulsion but rather of contraction and expansion--the move- ment into the light is one of constant expansion, the movement condi- tioning this movement as its condition of possibilty is one of contraction or self-concealment (here one is reminded of Heraclitus' famous "phusis
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kruptesthai philei" [nature loves to hide/conceal itself]); each movement is defined with and against the other, they function together harmoni- ously, and the whole that emerges out of this movement is not compre- hensible as a whole without it.
But if ground remains a condition in God, it does not necessarily have to do so in man--this is the great difference between God and man; hence, the danger of man, his inner dissonance, lies in the possibility that the ground may subordinate expansion to itself, that contraction may triumph over expansion by perverting it--in short, that the relation reverses itself in favor of the ground wherein the principle of light and expansion is harnessed to the ground, spirit becomes the voice of ground, the universal the mask of the particular. Here the ground ceases being a condition by which existence may become what it is, but seeks to become that for the sake of which existence becomes what it is, it seeks to become absolute.
The difference between the two is fundamental, it is the basis for the dif- ference between good and evil in the Philosophical Investigations, a difference which,asZ? iz? eknotes,inheresinthenatureoftheunitybetweengroundand existence, evil being a unity oriented to the ground's freeing itself from its own conditionality and good being a unity where ground's conditionality is retained and affirmed (Z? iz? ek, The Indivisible Remainder, 63).
33. The first edition has a comma before the "it" ["Er"], which is capitalized in the German, and so does the edition from Buchheim, although the lat- ter notes that a period should likely be set here before the "it. " Having interpreted this unusual capitalization as sign of a printing mistake, we have inserted a period instead of a comma.
34. As noted, this analogy is the principal way that the Presentation of My System deals with the relation of ground to existence. (See Schelling, Zeitschrift, 368-370. )
35. The German reads: "In dem Zirkel, daraus alles wird, ist es kein Wider- spruch, dass das, wodurch das Eine erzeugt wird, selbst wieder von ihm ge- zeugt werde. Es ist hier kein Erstes und kein Letztes, weil alles sich gegen- seitig voraussetzt, keins das andere und doch nicht ohne das andere ist. "
36. We chose to translate the German werden in this and in the preceding sentence literally rather than by a paraphrase like "come into being. " We have done so because we preferred to retain the inherent dynamism of the German even though as English the use of "become" in this way (without a predicate object of becoming) is unnatural.
37. See the excerpt from Boehme in this volume, especially the opening paragraph.
38. The German reads: "Dennoch ist sie ein Willen des Verstandes . . . " We read ein Wille instead of ein Willen and assume the latter is a typograph- ical mistake (found both in the first edition and that of Buchheim). The alternative here would be to read ein Wollen, which is also possible, but not likely given the subsequent repetition of Wille in the same sentence (see the immediately following note below).
39. ein ahndender Wille--we have chosen to translate old ahnden (= ahnen) by the verb "divine," and this may well be a somewhat controversial choice. The verb ahnen means in general "to foresee," "to have a pre- sentiment or foreboding of," or "to suspect. " Gutmann translates the term variously by "prescient" or "anticipating," both of which are ade- quate but slightly inaccurate, since they seem to indicate advance ac- cess to knowledge, which should not yet be available to the yearning in this case (and that is why "to foresee" is also a problem). Hayden-Roy uses "presentient," and "presentiment," which is much closer but carries a sensory element in the adjective that is unwelcome. In their respective translations of The Ages of the World, where the verb is featured in the first sentence, Wirth uses "to intimate" and Norman "to divine," both of which seem to us to be much closer to the mark since they suggest an al- most ineffable inkling of something without necessarily freighting that inkling with a notion of foreknowledge that suggests Platonic anamn ? esis, the recollection of something seen before.
40. Please see the "Translators' Note" regarding our choice to use "anarchy" and "anarchical" to translate regellos and das Regellose here instead of Gutmann's "unruly" and "unruliness. " Once again, we should like to em- phasize that the association of this original "unstate" in the ground with darkness, chaos, disorder, and so on, leads us to believe a much stronger term like "anarchy" is a more appropriate translation.
41. This is a striking statement, and one that supports the interpretation of the ground not as an essence or unactualized quidditas that remains in potentia until some necessarily mysterious triggering moment but as an absence, an inexplicable void.
42. This proverbial expression for those who wrest confusion from clarity is taken from Horace's de arte poetica (at line 143):
quanto rectius hic, qui nil molitur inepte:
"dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes"
non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat, Antiphaten, Scyllamque et cum Cyclope Charybdin.
In prose: How much more correct is he who does not exert himself in- eptly--"Tell me, Muse, of the man who saw the cities and ways of many men after the capture of Troy"--and proposes not to give smoke from a flash of light but light from smoke in order to bring forth the splendid and wondrous tales of Antiphates, Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.
43. Buchheim suggests that the reference to Fichte here pertains to three treatises Fichte wrote between 1804 and 1806, all of which denigrate na- ture as having being--as being alive--in the same way as the knowing subject. See Die Grundzu? ge des gegenwa? rtigen Zeitalters (1804); U? ber das Wesen des Gelehrten (1805); and Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806)-- to the best of our knowledge, none of these works from Fichte's generally neglected post-Jena period has been translated into English.
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44. This reference to John 12:24 has strong epistemological and theodical overtones. For the former, see J. G. Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. J. Nad- ler (Vienna: Herder Verlag, 1949-1957), 2:74. The latter are dealt with most famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov where this verse is the epilogue and guiding thread of the very explicitly theo- dical narrative (F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Rich- ard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [New York: Vintage, 1990], 2).
45. This recalls Plato's Timaeus:
Now the nurse [tith ? en ? e] of becoming [geneseos], having turned wa- tery and fiery and receiving the forms of earth and air as well, and suffering all the other properties that accompany these, assumes every variety of appearance; yet since she is filled with powers that are neither similar nor evenly balanced, none of her is in balance [ouden aut ? es isoroppein]; she sways irregularly in every direction as she herself is shaken by these forms, and as they are set in mo- tion, she in turn shakes them. And as they are moved, they drift continually, in one direction or another, separating from one an- other. Just as grain sifted and winnowed from sieves or other such instruments [organa] used for cleaning grain fall in one place if they are firm and heavy but fly off and settle in another place if they are light. (Plato, Platonis opera, ed. J. Burnet, vol. IV [Oxford: Oxford UP (1902) 1978], 52d4-53a2; our translation)
46. For Plato's use of "instrument," see the immediately preceding citation from Timaeus (52e7).
47. The German reads: "Weil na? mlich dieses Wesen (der anfa? nglichen Natur) nichts anderes ist als der ewige Grund zur Existenz Gottes, so muss es in sich selbst, obwohl verschlossen, das Wesen Gottes gleichsam als einen im Dunkel der Tiefe leuchtenden Lebensblick enthalten. " Here Wesen is of particular difficulty. Our translation gives "being" for the first and "es- sence" for the second use of Wesen in this sentence, thus bringing up a thorny issue. This is because the choice is hardly immediate and re- veals a serious philosophical problem, an ambiguity or, indeed, an am- bivalence that seems to course through the Philosophical Investigations. On the one hand, the ground seems to be a sort of primordial chaos, an unknown and unknowable X from which springs the variety of existence and, above all, the existence of God. But if the ground truly is this dark- ness, then how can God have an identity and not any identity? Schelling's use of Wesen in this sentence implies (at the very least) that there is some identity or essence lying "dormant" in the ground, waiting to escape it into the light. This implication turns against the notion of the ground as a darkness except in so far as it may be obscure to us but clear to God--in other words, is the ground inscrutable in itself or merely due to the limits of human cognitive power? Is God's "uncon- scious" self, a self that emerges into the light or is it indeed anything at all or are both positions somehow correct depending on the point of view one takes and can take?
48. This recalls Plato's famous wax analogy from Theaetetus at 191d2-191e1: SOCRATES: Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argu- ment, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another; in some men rather hard, in others soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency.
THEAETETUS: All right, I'm supposing that.
SOCRATES: We may look on it, then, as the gift of Memory [Mn ? emo- syn ? e], the mother of the Muses. We make impressions upon this of everything we wish to remember among the things we have seen or heard or thought of ourselves; we hold the wax under our percep- tions and thoughts and take a stamp from them, in the way in which we take the imprints of signet rings. Whatever is impressed upon the wax we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know. (Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M. J. Levett, rev.
Myles Bur- nyeat, in Complete Works, ed. John Cooper [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997], 212)
Deduction of the Possibility of Evil
49. Division is as old as Plato where it is called diairesis and forms a major topic of discussion in two of the most important dialogues, Sophist, and The Statesman. See Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Roj- cewicz and Andre? Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) and Stanley Rosen, Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 14-36.
50. Selbstlauter and Mitlauter are the German terms we translate as vowel and consonant. Buchheim (Buchheim, PU, 128, n147) indicates that, in the sense employed by Schelling and derived from Boehme (from the Myste- rium magnum), the terms distinguish the purity of God's "spirit" or "word" as opposed to that of man, which needs to be combined with con- sonants in order to be heard; in other words, whereas God's voice is pure, the human voice is not. Also see Wirth's comments in his translation of The Ages of the World (Schelling, The Ages of the World [1815], 141, n59).
51. "The same unity that is inseverable in God must therefore be severable in man--and this is the possibility of good and evil. " This is a central thought in the Philosophical Investigations, and it reveals the considerable virtue and ultimate failure of Schelling's attempt to reassert a form of theodicy that, as Friedrich Hermanni remarks, in some ways harkens back to St. Au- gustine and, in particular, to the de libero arbitrio (On Freedom), where human freedom is first equated with the will and an encroachment on God's order. (See Friedrich Hermanni, Die letzte Entlastung, 20-21. )
Schelling's position is ambivalent in so far as God cannot fail, cannot collapse whereas man can. This move insulates God against the problems we addressed above (in note 27), but also allows for a much broader con- cept of evil than those which the tradition explicitly allowed.
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52. Archaeus is not an identifiable figure of classical mythology. Buchheim notes that the reference seems to be taken from Theophrastus Paracel- sus (Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, 1453-1541), the Swiss doctor, alchemist and philosopher-theologian, and is a sign stand- ing for the principle of organic vitality which unifies the various vital powers. As such, this is yet another example of the more arcane stream of reference that appears in the Philosophical Investigations, a stream that should not be interpreted as exemplary of eccentricity as much as of Schelling's respect for otherwise denigrated semiotic systems (and this goes for mythology as well).
53. The cited passages read:
(1) to first footnote on page 36:
20. I found in comparing the Rationale Theoligicum of Nicolaus Ve- delius with the refutation by Johann Musaeus that these two au- thors, of whom one died while a Professor at Franecker after having taught at Geneva and the other finally became the foremost theolo- gian at Jena, are more or less in agreement on the principal rules for the use of reason, but that it is in the application of these rules they disagree. For they both agree that revelation cannot be contrary to the truths whose necessity is called by philosophers 'logical' or 'metaphysical', that is to say, whose opposite implies contradic- tion. They both admit also that revelation will be able to combat maxims whose necessity is called 'physical' and is founded only upon the laws that the will of God has prescribed for Nature. Thus the question whether the presence of one and the same body in div- ers places is possible in the supernatural order only touches the application of the rule; and in order to decide this question conclu- sively by reason, one must needs explain exactly wherein the es- sence of body exists . . . (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard [La Salle, Ill. : Open Court, 1985], 86)
(2) to second footnote on page 36:
149. M. Bayle avows: 'that one finds everywhere both moral good and physical good, some examples of virtue, some examples of happiness, and that this is what makes the difficulty. For if there were only wicked and unhappy people', he says, 'there would be no need to resort to the hypothesis of the two principles. ' I wonder that this admirable man could have evinced so great an inclination towards this opinion of the two principles; and I am surprised at his not having taken into account that this novel [roman] of human life, which makes the universal history of the human race, lay fully devised in the divine understanding, with innumerable others, and that the will of God only decreed its existence because this se- quence of events was to be most in keeping with the rest of things, to bring forth the best result. And these apparent faults in the whole world, these spots on a Sun whereof ours is but a ray, rather enhance its beauty than diminish it, contributing towards that end
by obtaining a greater good. There are in truth two principles, but they are both in God, namely, his understanding and his will. The understanding furnishes the principle of evil, without being sullied by it, without being evil; it represents natures as they exist in the eternal verities; it contains within it the reason for which evil is permitted: but the will tends only towards good. Let us add a third principle, namely power; it precedes even understanding and will, but it operates as the one displays it and as the other requires it. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 216-217; translation modified)
(3) to third footnote on page 36:
380. Aristotle was right in rejecting chaos: but it is not always easy to disentangle the conceptions of Plato, and such a task would be still less easy in respect of some ancient authors whose works are lost. Kepler, one of the most excellent of modern mathematicians, recognized a species of imperfection in matter, even when there is no regular motion: he calls it its 'natural inertia', which gives it a re- sistance to motion, whereby a greater mass receives less speed from one and the same force. There is soundness in this observa- tion, and I have used it to advantage in this work, in order to have a comparison such as should illustrate how the original imperfection of the creatures sets bounds to the action of the Creator, which tends towards good. But as matter is itself of God's creation, it only furnishes a comparison and an example, and cannot be the very source of evil and imperfection. I have already shown that this source lies in the forms or ideas of the possibles, for it must be eter- nal, and matter is not so. Now since God made all positive reality that is not eternal, he would have made the source of evil, if that did not rather lie in the possibility of things or forms, that which alone God did not make, since he is not the author of his own understand- ing. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 353)
54. Here is our translation of the citation from St. Augustine:
They ask us: whence evil? We answer: from the good, but not from the highest good; therefore, evil things do arise from good things. For all evil things participate in the good and resist it purely and as given in every part of it. One really should not find these things dif- ficult who has correctly formulated the concept of evil at some time and noted that it always involves some deficiency, whereas all man- ner of perfection is possessed in an incommunicable way by God; nor is it any more possible to create an unlimited and independent creature than it is to create another God.
55. The cited passages read:
(1) to first footnote on page 37:
152. M. Bayle places the Greek philosopher Melissus, champion of the oneness of the first principle (and perhaps even of the oneness of substance) in conflict with Zoroaster, as with the first originator of duality. Zoroaster admits that the hypothesis of Melissus is more
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consistent with order and a priori reasons, but he denies its confor- mity with experience and a posteriori reasons. 'I surpass you', he said, 'in the explanation of phenomena, which is the principal mark of a good system. ' But, in my opinion, it is not a very good explana- tion of a phenomenon to assign it to an ad hoc principle: to evil, a principium maleficum, to cold, a primum frigidum; there is nothing so easy and nothing so dull. It is well-nigh as if someone were to say that the Peripatetics surpass the new mathematicians in the expla- nation of the phenomena of the stars, by giving them ad hoc intelli- gences to guide them. According to that, it is quite easy to conceive why the planets make their way with such precision; whereas there is need of much geometry and reflection to understand how from the gravity of the planets, which bears them towards the sun, com- bined with some whirlwind which carries them along, or with their own motive force, can spring the elliptic movement of Kepler, which satisfies appearances as well. A man incapable of relishing deep speculations will at first applaud the Peripatetics and will treat our mathematicians as dreamers. Some old Galenist will do the same with regard to the faculties of the Schoolmen: he will admit a chylific, a chymific and sanguific, and he will assign one of these ad hoc to each operation; he will think he has worked won- ders, and will laugh at what he will call the chimeras of the mod- erns, who claim to explain through mechanical structures what passes in the body of an animal. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 218-219)
153. The explanation of the cause of evil by a particular principle, per principium maleficum, is of the same nature. Evil needs no such explanation, any more than do cold and darkness: there is neither primum frigidum nor principle of darkness. Evil itself comes only from privation; the positive enters therein only by concomitance, as the active enters by concomitance into cold. We see that water in freezing is capable of breaking a gun-barrel wherein it is confined; and yet cold is a certain privation of force, it only comes from the diminution of a movement which separates the particles of fluids. When this separating motion becomes weakened in the water by the cold, the particles of compressed air concealed in the water col- lect; and, by becoming larger, they become more capable of acting outwards through their buoyancy. The resistance which the sur- faces of the proportions of air meet in the water, and which op- poses the force exerted by these portions towards dilation, is far less, and consequently the effect of the air greater, in large air- bubbles than in small, even though these small bubbles combined should form as great a mass as the large. For the resistances, that is, the surfaces, increase by the square, and the forces, that is, the contents or volumes of the spheres of compressed air, increase by the cube, of their diameters. This it is by accident that privation in- volves action and force. I have already shown how privation is
enough to cause error and malice, and how God is prompted to per- mit them, despite that there be no malignity in him. Evil comes from privation; the positive and action spring from it by accident, as force springs from cold. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 219-220)
(2) to first footnote on page 38:
30. Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessory to our own errors. Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use of the com- monest rules of logic and reason with even a modicum of attention. Instead of that, they became involved in oblique and ambiguous phrases, which give them a fine field for declamation, to make the most of their wit and learning. It would seem, indeed, that they have no wish to see the naked truth, perhaps because they fear that it may be more disagreeable than error: for they are not familiar with the beauty of the author of all things who is the source of truth. (Leibniz, Theodicy, 91-92; translation modified)
56. The German that we have translated by the unusual pair, "temperance" and "distemperance," is Temperatur and Distemperatur. Both terms seem to be derived from theosophic literature. Buchheim suggests that Schell- ing may have lifted them from Christoph Oetinger's Swedenborg (Buch- heim, PU 136, n182), but the terms may also have roots in Boehme. (See Francesco Moiso, "Gott als Person," in U? ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Otfried Ho? ffe and Annemarie Pieper [Berlin: Akademie Ver- lag, 1995], 198. )
57. Arians and Monotheletes are two heretical streams of thought in early Christianity. The Arians were named after Arius (d. ca. 336 C. E. ), a priest in Alexandria who asserted a powerful doctrine of divine transcendence that denied the oneness of Christ with God. Jarolslav Pelikan writes:
Even on the basis of the scraps of information about Arianism handed on principally by its opponents, we may recognize in the Arian picture of this Logos-Son, who was less than God but more than man, a soteriological as well as cosmological intermediary. The absoluteness of God meant that if the Logos was of the same essence with the Father, the Logos had to be impassible. The ortho- dox found it blasphemous when the Arians, also in the interest of the absoluteness of God, described the Logos as one possessed of a mutable nature and therefore not of the same essence with the Father. "He remains good," the Arians said, "by his own free will, so long as he chooses to do so," rather than by virtue of his oneness of essence with God. And so, according to Arius, God, foreknowing that the Logos would resist temptation and remain good, bestowed on him proleptically the glory which, as man, he would eventually attain by his own virtue. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971], 198)
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The name Monotheletes derives from Greek monon thel ? ema or "one will" and describes those who advocated Monotheletism, a controver- sial school of Christian belief in the seventh century C. E. that claimed there was only one will in Christ and not two, one reflecting his divine, the other his human nature. To cite Pelikan again:
In the Trinity there were three hypostases, but only one divine nature; otherwise there would be three gods. There was also a single will and a single action. Thus will was an attribute of a na- ture and not of a hypostasis, natural and not hypostatic. Hence, the person of Christ, with a single hypostasis and two natures, had to have two wills, one for each nature. (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 2 [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974], 72)
Schelling also seems to have borrowed the variatio sermonis of Enthu- siasmus and Begeisterung in this passage, which we translate by the pair "enthusiasm" and "ardor," from Baader's essay included in this volume, "On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason. "
Deduction of the Reality of Evil
58. See Timaeus, 49a-53b.
59. Schelling's use of the term Basis is derived from chemistry where
through precipitation complex compounds are separated out into their various base elements. (See Buchheim, PU, 107, n87; Moiso, "Gott als Person," 199-200. )
60. The German reads: ". . . (als aus der blossen Potenz zum Aktus) . . . " One of the more difficult translation issues in the text involves Schelling's use of the pairs Potenz and Aktus (or actu) along with Mo? glichkeit and Wirklichkeit or Realita? t to express the notion of possibility as opposed to actuality or reality. We have equivocated somewhat here, generally translating Potenz and Mo? glichkeit by "possibility," where it is clear that Schelling is not using Potenz in his more technical sense as a "po- tency. " (On this sense, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern Euro- pean Philosophy [London: Routledge, 1993], 112-115 and Beach, The Potencies of God(s), 111-146. ) And we have translated Aktus (or actu), Wirklichkeit and Realita? t either by "actuality" or "reality" as the case seemed to demand. The central issue here has been to ensure that the Aristotelian division of possibility and actuality be preserved where Schelling seeks to exploit this traditional ontological transformation by alluding to the tradition and loosened where "reality" describes better a more mundane, non-technical application of the German. The Lati- nate Potenz and Aktus are employed in the former sense, while the other terms are more variable.
61. This verb is used in a somewhat awkward way here. Yet, since it can be used to describe the enactment of a law or regulation, it seems fully ap- propriate to Schelling's context, and that is why we have translated it by somewhat awkward English.
62. This notion of a "Golden Age" is an ancient topos visible both in Hesiod's Works and Days and Ovid's Metamorphoses from whence it had tremen- dous influence on the tradition:
Golden was that first age, which with no one to compel, without a law, of its own will, kept faith and did the right [fidem rectumque co- lebat]. There was no fear of punishment, no threatening words were to be read on bronze tablets; no suppliant throng gazed fearfully upon its judge's face, but they were secure without protectors. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller, vol. 1 [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1977], 9)
63. This sentence features a curiously traditional kind of theodical argu- ment and echoes the Arian view of the mediating "Logos. " (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.
