No More Learning

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. We have chosen to make this distinction--or, at the very least, our conclusion that it exists--explicit by using "being" where the Ger- man seems to denote what we call "being as expression" and "essence" where the German seems to denote the "core of being. " We have not done so lightly because, as we remarked in the "Translators' Note," we realize how inappropriate the term "essence" can be outside of its native (and, largely Scholastic) environment. Nonetheless, close attention to Schelling's text has recommended this choice to us, since Schelling does seem to suggest that there is an essential core to being (even if this es- sence is hardly an Aristotelian, but rather very much a legalistic and, therefore, modern one), though he then swiftly proceeds to undermine this essentiality by indicating that it results from man's own act. In doing so, Schelling appears merely to reinscribe his position within the "Kan- tian paradox" mentioned in the "Introduction" to this volume. The argu- ment is basically circular: I freely choose to act, but I cannot do so other than in accordance with the essential character of my being, hence, I freely choose to be according to what I already am, hence, I freely choose to be what I am. On the surface, this is a perplexing argument at best, but it can muster greater interest if one considers that Schelling's variety of transcendental idealism, his identity between subject and ob- ject, man and nature, is in fact eloquently expressed here (if in a pecu- liarly Fichtean way). As Robert Pippin notes:
To a degree still, I think, unappreciated, the young Schelling quickly realized that the whole approach [of Fichtean self- determination--our note] necessarily generated a basic problem. It was one whose logic would first appear in the German counter- Enlightenment (especially in Jacobi) and then in many, many forms later (certainly in Kierkegaard, later in Nietzsche's account of "life," and thanks to Heidegger, in thinkers such as Gadamer and Derrida). The task had been to think through the implications of the claim that being in any cognitive relation to the world, to have disclosed any sense (or being the true subject of one's deeds) is necessarily to have assumed such a relation actively, to have deter- mined oneself to be in such a relation. This does indeed make all the contents or objects of such a relation necessarily the results of some self-conscious self-determining. Yet we, as embodied agents
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in the world, are already natural or at least pre-volitionally situ- ated beings, already thinking in a certain way, with a certain inher- itance, with certain capacities we clearly share with non-human animals (like perception). It is only in being a kind of being, within a certain sort of world with kinds of beings, at a certain historical time, that we could be the particular self-determining subjects or agents. To view the issue of this sort of pre-reflective situation as it- self a result, or in terms of "what we must think" to make sense of "our" conditions of intelligibility, seems to miss the point pro- foundly. (Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Varia- tions [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 404-405)
Nonetheless, Schelling's ambivalence concerning a proper response to this perplexity, the mystery of identity, is the very bedrock of his ever restless thinking--here Heidegger is surely correct--and it extends to the very end of his career becoming, in some respects, an increasing concern with narrativity. In this respect and, for another perspective on this central difficulty, see notes 24 and 76.
71. Schelling applies the notion of free will as "the system of the equilibrium of free will" to intelligible being, expanding the analysis begun with the discussion of Buridan, and it might be useful here to refer to Heidegger's interpretation of this initial notion of indifference, as the ultimate form of freedom if freedom is defined solely as a kind of "freedom from," in con- nection with his generally incisive taxonomy of the varieties of freedom discussed in the Philosophical Investigations. Heidegger notes:
If freedom means man's complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete inde- terminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of free- dom is again a negative one, only in another respect, familiar in the history of thought as the libertas indifferentiae, the seventh concept of freedom in our count. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 102)
The other six are:
1) Freedom as capability of self-beginning [Selbstanfangenko? nnen]. 2) Freedom as not being bound to anything, freedom from (negative freedom).
3) Freedom as binding oneself to, libertas determinationis, freedom for (positive freedom).
4) Freedom as control over the senses (inappropriate freedom).
5) Freedom as self-determination in terms of one's own essential law (appropriate freedom), formal concept of freedom. This in- cludes all of the previous determinations. (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 88)
And of course 6), that "freedom is the capability of good and evil. " (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 97)
72. The original Latin, "determinatio est negatio," stems from Spinoza's let- ters and had a considerable impact on the German idealists and, per- haps, on Hegel in particular. (See H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spi- noza [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1934], 134. )
73. This sentence reflects a central thought in Tolstoy's so-called philoso- phy of history in War and Peace which, in general, is merely the abstract expression of the governing narrative principles of that capacious novel. Tolstoy famously writes:
Reason expresses the laws of necessity. Consciousness ex- presses the essence of freedom.
Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life in human consciousness. Necessity without content is reason in its three forms. Freedom is the thing examined. Necessity is what examines.
Freedom is the content. Necessity is the form.
Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one
another as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately incomprehensible concepts of freedom and necessity. Only by uniting them do we get a clear representation of human
life.
Outside these two concepts, which in their unity mutually de-
fine each other as form and content, no representation of life whatsoever is possible. (L. N. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991], 1302; trans- lation modified)
This remarkable passage, from Chapter X of the Second Part of the Epi- logue to War and Peace, seems prima facie to allude to Schelling. But it is in fact a great deal more likely that Tolstoy gleaned these very Schellin- gian thoughts from his reading of Schopenhauer's prize essay on free- dom in which he was intensely engaged when he wrote these lines. None- theless, the similarity is striking.
74. Wesenheit has posed a problem for us as another use of Wesen. We have chosen a rather clumsy paraphrase to avoid a perhaps even clumsier neologism (essentiality/beingness).
75. The German reads: "Der Mensch, wenn er auch in der Zeit geboren wird, ist in den Anfang der Scho? pfung (das Centrum) erschaffen. " The unusual use of the accusative here--in den Anfang--has been carried over to the En- glish where it is equally unusual. The notion of change of location here seems quite intentional and suggests a birth where one is "thrown" into the beginning (although one should not confuse this with Heidegger's notion of "thrownness" or Geworfenheit).
76. This is one of the most enigmatic sections of the Philosophical Investiga- tions where the timeless and time-bound meet. Or do they? Several com- mentators (Hennigfeld, Snow) have tended to view Schelling's insistence
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on an "act which is eternal by its very nature" as somewhat fanciful, a mere fac? on de parler, and they are perhaps correct in holding such a view in so far as the act is associated with an intelligible being, a kind of being that, strictly speaking, has only a most peculiar sort of being. Yet, while it does manifestly seem wise to be cautious about the ontological intent and plausibility of Schelling's claim, it is fair to say that a founding act of the nature Schelling contemplates cannot by definition belong to time if it indeed is in a very strong sense responsible for the governing interpre- tation of, or attitude to, time that is one of the basic constituent ele- ments of a self or character, of whatever is created through this central act. And it is likely fairest to say that a self or character or life is only ex- pressed in a narrative, in a time-bound form which, to be founded as a narrative, to have a structure as a narrative, however, must also be out- side time to that particular extent. For all narratives must have begin- nings, and these beginnings to be beginnings cannot be subject to the rules or terms they create, to use discredited language, they must transcend the narratives they found; if this were not the case, there could be no narrative at all. This point is made with splendid irony by Thomas Mann in his "Prelude: Descent into Hell" with which begins The Stories of Jacob, the first novel in the great tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers. (For a further development of Mann's opening in connection with similar issues in the context of The Ages of the World, see Wolfram Hogrebe, Pra? dikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings "Die Weltalter" [Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp Ver- lag, 1989], 7. )
Yet, Schelling does seem to be more radical than that in so far as he sug- gests that character is determined in an even more intimate and particular way, determined with reference to a very particular plot-line indeed-- Judas being the paradigm here. It is this particularity itself that might of- fend and bring into doubt Schelling's account because it tends toward a form of metaphysical speculation rather too bold for modern or postmod- ern taste. But, as Z? iz? ek has said, Schelling at his boldest, or wildest, is often also at his closest to everyday experience, and this goes for the kind of thinking he expresses here as well. For choosing a certain narrative, along with all that comes with it, through a founding act is to choose al- ways within a context, to take a position vis-a`-vis a dominating narrative, and this position by its very nature must be a particular one, one that de- fines a self and, as such, seems to reveal a character that is outside the tra- dition which imposes the dominating narrative because it would be ex- traordinarily difficult to explain the possibility of such dissent or particularization without having recourse to that outside. Now, one may hesitate to associate that outside with intelligible character or the like, but some explanatory figure is necessary, since this simple experience of dis- sent is the clearest and most immediate indication of its necessity.
But Schelling appears to stumble into further problems by noting that the free act also is a necessary one. Here again, the answer might be that
the founding act determines, that it is both an act of freedom, a declara- tion in the void, and an imposition of necessity since it dictates all subse- quent acts that flow from it. See ? Zi? zek, The Indivisible Remainder, 16-22.
77. Schelling plays on two basic meanings of the word Anstoss, which can mean either a "hindrance or an "obstacle," as we have translated it here following Gutmann, or an impetus or "motivating factor. " The relation between the two meanings seems quite clear and brings to mind Rousseau's account of the origins of a certain kind of modern eros in the second part of his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger D. and Judith Masters (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 142-143.
78. What does this kind of predestination mean? Again, as remarked in note 76, the sense of predestination seems to reflect the notion that, as T. S. Eliot says, "in my beginning is my end" ("East Coker"), that the constitu- tive acts by which I become myself also constitute a sort of predestina- tion, that as constitutive acts, they must be outside time, yet they dictate what time will hold.
But, as stated before, the imputation of an eternal character, that someone is bound to a particular character, whether evil or good, is very problematic, not only in itself but also in regard to the kind of theodicy Schelling may be pursuing.
Here emerges the central ambiguity, which we mentioned in terms of the translation of Wesen. Does Schelling argue that there is something akin to an essence in God and human beings or does he deny this pos- sibility? Is there a darkness that conceals a "hidden" light or does light somehow determine itself on its emergence from darkness--in other words, is genesis a genesis of something that precedes genesis or of something that becomes itself in genesis--the older way of saying this is to look at genesis as necessary emergence or as a coalescence of chance.
It seems to us that this ambiguity courses through the entire treatise and is neither openly nor tacitly resolved (and this despite Schelling's closing arguments which very explicitly rehearse one last time the no- tion that God has some kind of innate identity), and its impact on the theodicy and anthropology of the treatise is profound because it shows a fundamental indecision about the possibility of the grand structure of thought set forth in the treatise--in this sense, the latter is indeed both a primary example of idealism and its destruction (and, in this same sense, both of Heidegger's opinions expressed at different times--1936 and 1941--are correct).
79. Here Schelling emphasizes a key point, that evil is not an expression of the passions allowed to reign due to debility, but rather that evil is thoroughly imbued with mind or spirit--to posit the self is to entertain the possibility of evil hitherto "dormant" but nonetheless fundamental, a
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constitutive force in the self, and therefore "radical. " Schelling relies on Kant of course and reproves Fichte, who discusses radical evil in his System der Sittenlehre (1798) at 198-205. Fichte notes:
This is what we presuppose: man will do nothing which is not simply necessary and which, pressed onward by his nature [Wesen], he is not compelled to do. Accordingly, we presuppose an original lethargy [Tra? gheit] in reflection and, as a consequence, in action pursuant to this reflection. Accordingly, this would be a true, positive, radical evil; not just something negative as it hitherto seemed to be. Then it had to be that way as well. We must have something positive merely in order to be able to explain the nega- tive. (Fichte, Werke, IV/199)
80. The Greek means quite literally "by bastard reasoning," a combination which suggests an unanchored and wavering way of thinking that cannot tell the difference between original and copy. The term appears in the Ti- maeus at 52b3 and the crucial portion of the text is this:
So because of all these and other kindred notions, we are also not able on waking up to distinguish clearly the unsleeping and truly ex- isting nature, owing to our dream-like condition, nor to tell the truth--how that it belongs to a copy [eik ? on]--seeing that it has not for its own that for which it came into being, but fleets ever as a phan- tom [fantasma] of something else--to come into existence in some other thing, clinging to existence as best it may, on pain of being nothing at all; whereas to the aid of that which truly is [to ont ? os on] there comes the precise and true argument, that so long as one thing is one thing, and another something different, neither of the two will ever come to exist in the other so that the same thing becomes simul- taneously both one and two. (Plato, Timaeus, trans. R. G. Bury [Cam- bridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1929], 122-125)
81. Buchheim finds a reference to Jacobi's epistolic novel, cumbersomely ti- tled Edward Allwill's Collection of Letters edited by Friedrich Heinrich Ja- cobi with an Addition from Letters of His Own, and, specifically, to letter XX. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal & Kingston: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1994), 465-472.
82. Likely a further reference to Jacobi (and perhaps Schlegel as well).
83. The German reads: "Gewissenhaftigkeit erscheint nicht eben notwendig und immer als Enthusiasmus oder als ausserordentliche Erhebung u? ber sich selbst, wozu, wenn der Du? nkel selbstbeliebiger Sittlichkeit niedergesch- lagen ist, ein anderer und noch viel schlimmerer Hochmutsgeist gerne auch
diese machen mo?