No More Learning

40. It is important to keep in mind that Schelling is hardly an irrationalist.
Despite all his changes, his Protean philosophical personality, he never abandoned his essential adherence to understanding the nature of ra- tionality. See Dale E. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
41. F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 90.
Translators' Note
1. See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (La Salle: Open Court, 1936), 34. See also Priscilla Hayden-Roy's more recent (1987) translation in which she uses the terms "ruleless" and "something ruleless" to translate, respectively, "regellos" and "das Regellose. " F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investiga- tions into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, trans. Pris- cilla Hayden-Roy (New York: Continuum, 1987), 238.
2. See "Translator's Introduction," in Schelling, The Ages of the World, xxxi- xxxii.
3. See F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Ju- dith Norman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 112.
4. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen u? ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenha? ngenden Gegensta? nde, ed. Thomas Buchheim (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1997). We have fol- lowed Buchheim's practice of giving the pagination of the German origi- nal both in the first edition, designated as "OA," and in the Collected Works compiled by Schelling's son and designated here as "SW. " See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen u? ber das Wesen der menschli- chen Freiheit und die damit zusammenha? ngenden Gegensta? nde in Philoso- phische Schriften (Philipp Kru? ll: Landshut, 1809), 397-511 and in Sa? mmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling vol. VII (J. G. Cotta: Stuttgart,
1856-1861), 336-416.
We have also used Buchheim's very useful divisional headings for our
notes to the Philosophical Investigations. But, since these headings are not in Schelling's original text, we have avoided inserting them into the main body of our translation.
Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith
Preface to the First Edition
1. The Philosophical Investigations first appeared in 1809 in volume 1 of what was to be a collected edition of Schelling's writings published by Philipp Kru? ll in Landshut. No further volumes were in fact published. Indeed, Schelling published only one other substantial work in his lifetime, a
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polemic against Jacobi called, F. W. J. Schelling's Memorial to Mr. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Writing on the Divine Things etc. and to the Accusation Made against Him Therein Regarding an Intentionally Deceiving and Lying Atheism (F. W. J. Schellings Denkmal der Schrift von den go? ttlichen Dingen usw des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi und der ihm in derselben gemach- ten Beschuldigung eines absichtlich ta? uschenden, Lu? ge redenden Atheis- mus), which appeared in 1812.
The other writings collected in the volume represent a selection from the very beginning of Schelling's philosophical activity, Of the I as Princi- ple of Philosophy or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge (1795)-- Schelling's second major work, which he published at the age of twenty--Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795), The Treatises in Explanation of the Doctrine of Science (1796-1797), along with a later work, his speech, On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature (1807). The ten-year lacuna (from 1797 to 1807) represented here is re- markable and poses a question that Schelling himself answers somewhat cryptically in the "Preface. " This cryptic answer emerges by inference from Schelling's claim that the Philosophical Investigations is the first treatise "in which the author puts forth his concept of the ideal part of philosophy with complete determinateness. " The inference is that the other works included in the volume show different stages of the develop- ment of Schelling's concept of the ideal part of philosophy and, there- fore, offer an interpretative path into the heart of the Philosophical Inves- tigations. This inference seems to be more persuasive when one takes into account Schelling's focus on the philosophy of nature between 1797 and 1800 and that he seems to regard two other important treatises, the Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801) and Philosophy and Reli- gion (1804), as more or less unsuccessful precursors to the Philosophical Investigations.
This self-interpretation may seem somewhat disingenuous to those who emphasize "Protean" discontinuity in Schelling's work rather than its continuity (see Xaver Tilliette, Schelling: une philosophie en devenir, vol. 1 [Paris: J. Vrin, 1970], 12-13). For many among the former, the Philo- sophical Investigations is more representative of a rupture in Schelling's thought that lays the foundation for the investigations of the late philoso- phy. According to a typical periodization of Schelling's work that empha- sizes rupture rather than continuity, one identifies an early "Fichtean" pe- riod (1794-1797), followed by the natural philosophy (1797-1800), the philosophy of identity (1801-1804), and, finally, after a period of transi- tion that ends with the Philosophical Investigations, the late philosophy starting with the Ages of the World (1811-1854). But one ignores Schelling's self-interpretation at one's own risk; at the very least, Schelling's apparent willingness to place the Philosophical Investigations in a direct line of investigation stemming from his earliest major writings evinces a plea for continuity, and, if continuity is based as much on the nature of the problem to be solved as on the solutions proffered, this plea
should not be dismissed lightly. In this respect, Heidegger's own some- what exaggerated claim about Schelling, that "there was seldom a thinker who fought so passionately ever since his earliest periods for his one and unique standpoint," is worth taking seriously even though one may argue (as with most of Heidegger's grand assertions about other thinkers) that it applies more to Heidegger himself (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, 6).
2. This journal is the Philosophical Journal of a Society of German Scholars (Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft teutscher Gelehrten) that served as a principal conduit of the Fichtean line of idealism at Jena and was edited by Fichte along with Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848). Schelling's early publication in this journal is a sign of his being consid- ered a proper follower of Fichte.
3. This academic speech was given on October 12, 1807 for a celebration in honor of the nameday of King Maximilian I at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (of which Schelling was a prominent member).
4. Schelling is referring to Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sci- ence (Metaphysische Anfangsgru? nde der Naturwissenschaft) (1786) and, in particular, to Kant's dynamic theory of matter, which had consider- able influence on Schelling as his first foray into Naturphilosophie, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) shows, especially in the discus- sion of matter set out in Book II. Kant's thinking proved attractive to Schelling because Kant does not consider matter to be some lifeless substrate but rather a balance of attractive and repelling forces that are in fact the condition for the very possibility of matter as such; in other words, matter is intrinsically dynamic, a tissue woven of oppos- ing forces and not a sort of static, homogenous "non-thing" that is the basis of things. (Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004], 62-74. )
5. The Journal for Speculative Physics (Zeitschrift fu? r spekulative Physik) was edited by Schelling and intended to be a forum for the propagation and discussion of the philosophy of nature. The journal did not last very long. Indeed, only two volumes were produced, one in 1800, the other in 1801. Schelling abandoned the journal due to a disagreement with his publisher, Christian Gabler (1770-1821).
The Investigation Introduction
6. The expression translated here as "scientific worldview" is "wissen- schaftliche Weltansicht. " In his 1936 lectures on the Philosophical Investi- gations, Heidegger comments on the notion of "science" [Wissenschaft] relevant to German Idealism:
In the age of German Idealism, science (Wissenschaft) means pri- marily and truly the same as philosophy, that knowledge which knows the last and the first grounds, and in accordance with this fundamental knowledge presents what is essential in everything
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knowable in a reasoned-out essential connection. In this sense Fichte uses the term "Doctrine of Science" (the science of science-- the philosophy of philosophy) for his major work. Hegel speaks of the "System of Science" (First part; The Phenomenology of Spirit), of the Science of Logic.
Heidegger proceeds further to discuss the notion of a "worldview": The coinage of this term "world view" (Weltanschauung) comes from Kant, and he uses it in the Critique of Judgment. The term has there a still narrower and more definite meaning: it means the im- mediate experience of what is given to the senses, of appearances . . . Man is the Cosmotheoros (world onlooker) who himself creates the element of world cognition a priori from which as a world in- habitant he fashions world contemplation at the same time in the Idea . . . But behind this use of the word "world," lurks an ambiguity which becomes apparent in the question of how many worlds there can be. There can only be One World, if world equals the totality of things. But there is a plurality of worlds if world is always a per- spective of totality . . .
It is the direction of this second meaning of the concept of world, which we can grasp as the opening of totality, always in a definite direction and thus limited, that Schelling's use of the con- cepts "world" and "world view" takes. (Heidegger, Schelling's Trea- tise, 16-17)
7. This has often been taken to be an allusion to Jacobi. (See, e. g. , the sec- ond excerpt from Jacobi included in this volume, at XXII. ) The impor- tance of Jacobi for the Philosophical Investigations is a question of some moment, and at least one scholar has suggested that Jacobi's thinking about freedom had a decisive impact on Schelling. (See Siegbert Peetz, Die Freiheit im Wissen [Frankfurt a. M. : Klostermann Verlag, 1995], 11- 13. ) Others have suggested that Schelling refers to Friedrich Schlegel as well and, in particular, to his so-called Indierbuch, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indian People (U? ber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier). See, for example, Horst Fuhrmans's note on this section in his edition of the Philosophical Investigations. (F. W. J. Schelling, U? ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Horst Fuhrmans [Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1961], 139-140)
8. The original reads in Bury's translation (slightly modified):
For the Grammarian and the ordinary man will suppose that the philosopher gave utterance to these sayings out of boastfulness [kat'alazdoneian] and contempt for the rest of mankind,--a thing alien to one who is even moderately versed in philosophy, not to speak of a man of such eminence. But the man who sets out from physical investigation knows clearly that the dogma "like is known by like" is nothing but an old one which is thought to have come down from Pythagoras and is found also in Plato's Timaeus; and it
was stated much earlier by Empedocles himself,--
We behold earth through earth and water through water Divine ether through ether, destructive fire through fire Love through love, hate through grievous hate.
Such a man will understand that Empedocles called himself a god because he alone had kept his mind free from evil and unmud- died and by means of the god within him apprehended the god without. (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 4 [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP (Loeb Classical Library), 1949], 174-177)
9. In this connection, Buchheim cites a passage from Fichte's Doctrine of Science in which Fichte notes that "[t]he theoretical part of our Doctrine of Science . . . is in fact, as will be shown at the proper time, systematic Spinozism except that each I is itself the sole highest substance . . . " (See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen u? ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenha? ngenden Gegensta? nde, ed. Thomas Buchheim [Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2000], 93, n20, hereinafter referred to as PU, and J. G. Fichte, Fichtes Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter (reprint), 1971], I:122.
10. In this section Schelling outlines three central ways in which pantheism as the "doctrine of the immanence of things in God" can be misinter- preted by misunderstanding the meaning of immanence. They may be summarized as follows:
(a) God is the same as things, yet, due to the fact that things only exist in a derived way, as a result of God's existence, they simply cannot be the same as God and, taken all together, cannot amount to God--here the qualitative difference vitiates the possibility of quantitative equality.
(b) Individual things are the same as God, yet, due to the qualitative difference between things and God, this also cannot hold, for how can there be a "derivative God," how can a thing be derivative and God, dependent and independent? Here Schelling moves to discuss the copula which has been interpreted as creating a false unity or sameness [Einerleiheit] between subject and predicate.
(c) Things are nothing, yet, if this is so, how can they be said to be "in" God, indeed, how can they be said to be? The relation simply collapses in empty identity, God is God.
11. The German reads: "Wie kann nun die Lehre notwendig mit der Freiheit streiten, welche so viele in Ansehung des Menschen behauptet haben, ge- rade um die Freiheit zu retten? " Here the referent of welche is arguably ambiguous and, hence, the sentence may also be read as: "Now, how can the doctrine, which so many have asserted in regard to man precisely in order to save freedom, necessarily be at odds with freedom? "
12. We have chosen to translate das Gescho? pf by "created being" with the in- tention of differentiating it from die Kreatur, which we translate as the creature(s), and the more general Wesen when used simply to refer to a being or beings. Despite this recognition of difference in our translation,
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the fact is that the difference between Schelling's use of the native Ger-
man das Gescho? pf and Latinate die Kreatur is simply not clear.
13. In this and the preceding sentence, Schelling seems to be referring pri- marily to Leibniz rather than to the logic of the ancients which, in this context, can only be considered a reference to Aristotle (since knowl- edge of other streams of thought about logic in antiquity seems to have been still quite rudimentary in Schelling's time). And Schelling is likely speaking of the logic of identity as inclusion, that the predicate is con- tained in the subject ("verum est affirmatum, cujus praedicatum inest subjecto"), which plays a foundational role in Leibniz's thought and, in particular, in his thought regarding freedom. If the subject contains all its possible predicates; if, in other words, the subject merely needs to be unfolded or, as we say, "unpacked," then there are two broad pos- sibilities for such "unpacking": (1) that the subject is "closed," all pred- icates may be deduced from the subject alone; and (2) that the subject is "open," all predicates may not be deduced from the subject alone but show themselves to be within it only in time. The difference here is essentially one between truths of reason and truths of fact, a priori and a posteriori, to borrow Kant's terms. But it is important to keep in mind that, for Leibniz, in both cases the subject does contain its predicates as an antecedent, as their basis or subjectum (Gr: hupokeimenon, or "that which lies under"). The upshot of this, as Heidegger notes, is an essentially "aprioristic" way of conceiving the world (as a proposi- tional matrix in which all propositions may ultimately resolve them- selves into identities--a position the Philosophical Investigations puts in question) that nonetheless recognizes the difference in quality between divine and human knowledge, the former immediate and intui- tive, the latter bound to time and, in this sense, discursive. (See Gott- fried Wilhelm Leibniz, Opuscules et fragments ine? dits, ed. Louis Coutu- rat [Paris: Fe? lix Alcan, 1903], 16-24 and Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 47-50. ) The further reference to the relation of subject and predicate as one of "enfolded" to "unfolded" seems to be derived from Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) according to Buchheim
(Buchheim, PU, 97, n41).
14. The German reads: "Spinozas ha? rtester Ausdruck is wohl der: das ein-
zelne Wesen sei die Substanz selbst, in einer ihrer Modifikationen, d. h. Folgen, betrachtet.
" Schelling's richness of reference here may be some- what attenuated if one translates the German Folge by "effect" suggest- ing as it may the very essence of the separation of agent and effect that is in question. Spinoza says of this relation (in Ethics I, Prop. VIII, Scho- lium 2):
For, by substance they would understand that which exists in it- self and is conceived for itself, that is, that of which knowledge does not require knowledge of any other thing. By modifications, how- ever, that which is in another and of which the concept is formed on the basis of the concept of that in which the modifications exist.
[Nam per substantiam intelligerent id, quod in se est et per se concipi- tur, hoc est id, cujus cognitio non indiget cognitione alterius rei. Per modificationes autem id, quod in alio est et quarum conceptus a con- ceptu rei, in qua sunt, formatur. ]
The relation between substance and modification thus seems to en- compass that of efficient, formal and material causes, three of the tetrad of Aristotelian causes (the causa finalis being the other), and that is why we have chosen the somewhat vaguer and arguably broader "conse- quence" to replace the more common "effect. " Moreover, in this way we are attempting to anticipate Schelling's own rejection of causality in the relation of ground and existence which has a cloying structural similar- ity--at least on the surface--to that of substance and modification as Schelling describes it.
15. See Jacobi's comments on this in the first Jacobi excerpt included in this volume, namely:
Lessing: . . . Now, according to what ideas do you believe the oppo- site of Spinozism? Do you find that the Principia by Leibniz put an end to it?
I. How could I in view of the firm conviction that the incisive deter- minist does not differ from the fatalist? . . . The monads together with their vincula [bonds] leave extension and thinking, reality in general, as incomprehensible to me as before, and there I know nei- ther right nor left. It seems to me as if, ultimately, a confidence trick were being played on me . . . For that matter, I don't know of any doctrinal edifice that would agree as much with Spinozism as that of Leibniz; and it would be difficult to say which one of these au- thors fooled us and himself the most; with all due respect! . . . Men- delssohn proved publicly that the harmonia praestabilita is in Spi- noza. From this alone it already follows that Spinoza must contain much more of Leibniz's basic doctrines, or else Leibniz and Spinoza (on the basis of whose doctrine Wolff's lessons would hardly have flourished) would not have been the striking minds [Ko? pfe] that they indisputably were. I dare to explain on the basis of Spinoza Leibniz's complete doctrine concerning the soul . . .
16. See note 14 above. The terminology used here seems to be derived from Kant and, indeed, it seems to be taken from a passage in the Critique of Pure Reason, (A73/B99). (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998], 208)
17. The German reads: "Wa? re das in einem andern Begriffene nicht selbst lebendig, so wa? re eine Begriffenheit ohne Begriffenes, d. h. es wa? re nichts begriffen. " Here, as in the preceding two sentences, Schelling plays on the meaning of begreifen as both "to grasp" or "to under- stand" and, in the sense of Begriffensein, "to be included" or "to be contained. " Since the German wordplay cannot be captured literally in English, we have chosen with hesitance to maintain the latter meaning in the text over the former, while in the German a homology between
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the two is effortlessly suggested, particularly in the sentence we cite here. Moreover, the notion of containment advanced here refers back somewhat ironically to the preceding discussion of the subject- predicate relation, where the predicate is said to be contained (inesse) in the subject.
18. See Boehme's Mysterium pansophicum included in this volume. Snow comments appositely on this sentence:
This conjures up an almost irresistible picture of God as an un- speakably prolific author who is gazing in amazement at the antics of the characters with whom he has peopled the vast fiction of the world. The German expression fu? r sich fortwirkend, which is trans- lated by Gutmann as "works on in its own way," might more felici- tously and idiomatically be rendered as "takes on a life of its own"; this seems to me to better capture the sense of the burgeoning autonomy of both ideas and human individuals to which Schelling is referring, and which forms an important basis for the concept of personality. (Snow, End of Idealism, 155)
19. The German reads: "Gott schaut die Dinge an sich an. " Our translation interprets the German quite literally rather than using the arguably more appropriate translation through the verb "intuit," which would read: "God intuits things in themselves. " The problem here stems primarily from the translation of the noun Anschauung as "intuition," which has become cus- tomary in translations of Kant where the term describes an immediate "looking" or "gazing at" what is, the way of receiving impressions from the senses whose two fundamental a priori forms are space and time. This translation itself seems to be indebted to the description of divine knowl- edge as a kind of immediate seeing (visio Dei) that one finds in scholastic texts; there the Latin intuitus is merely the nominal form of the classical de- ponent verb intueor, which means "to look upon" or "to gaze at. " This link- age is not at all clear, however, when one uses "intuit" or "intuition" in En- glish where the association with the simple act of looking has become quite obscure. We sought to restore this association and the link with the immediacy of vision as that of the "eye of the mind" that runs through the entire tradition from Plato on--after all, the word "idea" is derived from the aorist infinitive of the Attic Greek verb "to see" (idein).
20. The reference here is somewhat obscure, but it is likely that Schelling means the more aggressive expressions of French materialism such as the writings of Baron d'Holbach and La Mettrie whose influential work, L'Homme machine, is one of the most starkly mechanistic visions of this current of thought. In general, the thrust of Schelling's Naturphilosophie is to undermine the mechanist view of nature projected by Newtonian physics and its various derivatives. And there is little question that the more radically materialist thinkers among the philosophes of the French Enlightenment not only supported Newtonian physics but sought to "purify" it of its connection to the deity and, in doing so, they created a vision of a law-abiding but purposeless universe, one that has no regard
for human ends, that is essentially anti-anthropomorphic. (See Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1963], 3-35. )
21. Once again, Jacobi is the target. But it should be noted that the allusion to Jacobi is by no means simply negative. The relationship between Schelling and Jacobi (who was Schelling's immediate superior as Presi- dent of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences) seems to have been cordial at first, and at least one commentator has suggested that there was a vi- brant intellectual exchange between the two that has not yet been given its proper due (Peetz, Die Freiheit im Wissen, 77). Nonetheless, relations became increasingly strained, ending with the complete break of 1812 in the so-called third pantheism debate.
22. Pygmalion's story is recorded both in Apollodorus (III. 14. 3) and Ovid (Metamorphoses X. 243 passim). He fell in love with Aphrodite (Venus) and made an image of her which he placed in his bed because she would not sleep with him. He prayed to her for pity, and she breathed life into the image as Galatea who bore him a son, Paphos.
23. The German reads: "In dieser (der Freiheit) wurde behauptet, finde sich der letzte potenzierende Akt, wodurch sich die ganze Natur in Empfindung, in Intelligenz, endlich in Willen verkla? re. " Buchheim notes a basic refer- ence here to the conception of potencies set out in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) where the "whole sequence of the transcendental philosophy is based merely upon a continual raising of self-intuition to increasingly higher powers [potenzieren], from the first and simplest exercise of self-consciousness, to the highest, namely the aesthetic. " The final "empowering" act is at once the most free, creative and necessitated--it is the union of freedom and necessity. (See F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism [1800], trans. Peter Heath [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978], 233. )
24. This is an extremely radical and enigmatic statement within the whole of the Philosophical Investigations because it brings up in its way the question of authority. For if there is "no other Being than will" what is there? In other words, if will is all that is, then how can there be any- thing outside will; namely, how can there be any authority beyond will? If this is at the heart of what Schelling is in fact telling us, he runs into a great problem, one that besets any way of thinking that does not grant primary authority to thought. If thinking is not primary, then what is it if not dependent? If thinking is dependent, then whence the synoptic view of freedom that the philosopher seems to offer us--is that not an act of will in itself?
Schelling avoids this question (while raising it again in another form) by equating the will of primal Being with God. Yet, such an answer does not give us much insight into the authority presumed by the thinker in presenting this view. The issue did not escape notice by Schelling's con- temporaries. Even though mentioned in a slightly different context-- that of Schelling's concept of intellectual intuition--Hegel's criticism of
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this notion of intuition (quoted at length in Snow's excellent treatment of the issue) is indicative:
[S]ince the immediate presupposition in Philosophy is that individ- uals have the immediate intuition of this identity of subjective and objective, this gave the philosophy of Schelling the appearance of indicating that the presence of this intuition in individuals de- manded a special talent, genius, or condition of mind of their own, or as though it were generally speaking an accidental faculty which pertained to the specifically favored few. (Snow, End of Idealism, 63) The notion of genius as special talent seems well suited to the kind of
authority enjoyed by the author of the Philosophical Investigations as well. In other words, if the synoptic view set forth by Schelling here is not to be taken as merely a creation of the philosopher, thereby eliminat- ing the distance between philosopher and artist, then it must be taken as the product of genius in the sense of an immediate apprehension or in- tuition of the whole--philosophic genius becomes vatic and prophetic with the philosopher bearing the vision of the truth vouchsafed to him by virtue of his genius. Few positions could have been more offensive to Hegel for whom reason holds the promise of equality (as something ac- cessible to all rational beings despite differences in acuity) and for whom intuition is thus a fickle and arbitrary master, an imposition of un- questionable authority that differs little from the visions of prophets and madmen.
This question of authority hangs over the Philosophical Investigations. If there is nothing higher than will, nothing to regulate will, then how can one come to any other conclusion? Either Schelling purports to speak on behalf of the divine will, thus taking on the mantle of the vatic artist and prophet, or he is speaking on his own behalf in which case he claims to be a god or cosmourgos, the philosopher-artist as world-maker. In either case, philosophy as rational apprehension of the whole has come to an end as an act of discovery (if it indeed ever was) and has become instead an act of poetry.
25. Here we chose to translate the German Ichheit following the example of Daniel Breazeale's authoritative translations of Fichte. See, for example, J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (In- dianapolis: Hackett, 1994), xxxvi.
26. This is an intimation of the crucial distinction in Schelling's late philoso- phy between negative and positive philosophy. Edward Beach succinctly and judiciously describes this distinction as well as the interrelation of the two different kinds of philosophy:
The next important step towards this goal [of constructing a ration- ally coherent metaphysics--our note] is to distinguish between ab- stract essence (quidditas) and concrete "thatness" (quodditas) . . . As we have seen, it is Schelling's position that the essence, logical structure, or "whatness" (Was) of the universe--and even of God himself--is, in principle, a bare possibility, which either could exist
or not exist. The "thatness" (or Dass), on the other hand, Schelling defines as the pure fiat on which being, as well as the very possibil- ity of being, depends. The Dass he regards as the transcendent Cause of existence and therefore as standing at the pinnacle of the universal chain of being. 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 ?