No More Learning

" If this view of life as polemos evinces sharply contrasting connections with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the true kernel of Schelling's thought is an extraordinary originality that has perhaps not yet been given its due. 6
Leibniz's beginning
The Theodical Project
Modern theodicy originates with Leibniz and the Essays on Theodicy (Essais de the? odice? e sur la bonte? de Dieu, la liberte? de l'homme et l'origine du mal) he published in 1710. One could not implausibly argue that Leibniz's treatise is a baroque encomium to the claim that nihil est sine ratione, "nothing is without a reason. " Everything that is has a reason for being, a rationality (a preestablished harmony) lies submerged in all existence and explains or, at the very least, offers an explanation why things are rather than not--in other words, the fact of being as opposed to pure nothingness is rationally accessible; the whole is intelligible and, hence, it may be grasped by a human mind, which is not as radically different from the divine mind in a qualita- tive as in a quantitative sense. 7 As Hans Blumenberg suggests, this unabashed triumph of rationality affirms in the strongest possible way that the world is caught in the webs of reason, that there is a per- fect rational order binding together ostensibly chaotic dispersion into a world-system whose end is the expression of pure rationality it- self: this is indeed the best of all possible worlds. 8
If we read Leibniz's claim that "nothing is without a reason" from a different point of view, as Heidegger bids us to,9 we can come to grasp the notion of evil that Leibniz relies on in making his case for the overwhelming rationality of the world. "Nothing is without a reason"; nothing is that which has no reason to be, which cannot explain (and thereby legitimate) its own existence. For Leibniz evil is this nothing, this pure privation of being that cannot be thought other than as a wont of being, of that which is good simply because it is. Having no being of its own, evil is entirely parasitic and dependent on the beings to which it relates.
Leibniz equates lack of being with evil. This is the root concept of evil that Leibniz calls "metaphysical evil" in the Essays on Theodicy and, it also applies to the two other basic categories of his famous threefold distinction, moral and physical evil. With this conception of evil Leibniz is able to make the familiar defenses of God's goodness, omniscience and omnipotence. But, what is more, he is able to de- fend the indwelling rationality of creation as system by showing that evil cannot have any other function in the perfect order of the system than an ancillary one, the function of a servant. What emerges from
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this way of thinking is a reinterpretation of evil that situates it use- fully within the context of modern systematic thought; evil as nega- tion becomes the loyal servant of system and, as such, evil works good. Having no existence of its own, evil can be nothing more than an expression of being's own limitation, the necessary condition for the articulation of the overall rationality of the system, the highest good of all.
If this connection of evil with the unfolding of system is distinc- tively new, the justification of evil as servant of a good that retreats from our limited vision the closer it comes to its own purity is as old as Christian apologetics. 10
Hegel's Culmination
Hegel is the culminating point of this distinctive line of thought. He shows a substantial debt to Leibniz to the extent that his own pursuit of theodicy, while indelibly shaped by Hegel's own preoccupation with Kantian dualism, refines and complicates some crucial assump- tions of Leibniz's thought. As Hegel wrote in his "Introduction" for the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
The aim of human cognition is to understand that the intentions of eternal wisdom are accomplished not only in the natural world, but also in the realm of the [spirit] which is actively present in the world. From this point of view, our investigation can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God (such as Leibniz attempted in his own metaphysical manner, but using categories which were as yet abstract and indeterminate). It should enable us to comprehend all the ills of the world, including the existence of evil, so that the thinking spirit may be reconciled with the negative aspects of existence; and it is in world history that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil. 11
Although it would be a mistake to efface the extremely important and obvious differences between Hegel and Leibniz, it is worth noting that, in both cases, evil as negation, as the paradoxical expression of negativity, "das nichtende Nicht," seems to play a crucial role in the successful self-definition of the system or, in Hegel's terms, in the di- alectical self-realization of the absolute. Nonetheless, Hegel is hardly candid about the association of negation with evil--he is, to say the least, not as direct as Leibniz--and with good reason. For Hegel turns
the Leibnizian association of negation with evil and imperfection on its head in order to overcome this association and thereby rid his system of any traces of the difficulties immanent in the Leibnizian theodicy. Indeed, he gives negation a fundamentally positive dynamic role in the structure of his system, as the elusive and restless energy of thought itself, without, however, granting it any positive (i. e. , finite) being of its own. This role is immediately complicated by its deeply ambiguous nature, a product of the profound conceptual transforma- tion of which it is the beneficiary; in this respect, one has only to recall the remarkably polysemous description Hegel sets out in the "Pref- ace" to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he refers to the negative as an "ungeheure Macht," which is the "energy of thought, of the pure I. "12 It is a "monstrous power" indeed that cannot be defined in any positive way other than by reference to what it brings about. But, to paraphrase Goethe's Mephistopheles, this power is still one that works good; it brings about its own dissolution in the end, the acces- sion to the absolute. 13 The problematic ambiguity of negation is purely Hegelian; it reflects the difficult transition from finite to infinite, from negation as limitation to negation as helpmate of the whole-- both views are possible, but one comes from the weakness of finite thought, while the other from the strength of infinite thought. 14
Hegel directs the essential patterns of Leibniz's thinking to very traditional ends in that he construes evil to be a moment in the real- ization of the absolute that can be seen entirely differently and more benevolently with the advent of infinite thought; in other words, if one could see from the point of view of God or the God-like philoso- pher, one would see that evil is productive, that it really is a neces- sary moment in the positive labor of the self-realization of the abso- lute. Here is the essentially reconciliatory position so characteristic of Hegel, one that manifests itself explicitly in the Lectures on the Phi- losophy of Religion, where he equates evil with cognition, with the "cleavage" (Entzweiung) or contradiction, that is both a necessary as- pect of cognition and one that is overcome in the dialectical Aufhe- bung through which a reconciliation of the contradiction is enacted. 15
With this all too brief survey, we wish to make two central points about theodicy and the conception of evil developed to function within this theodicy.
First, it is evident that theodicy as conceived by the philosophers also presents a God suitable for the philosophers. While Leibniz tries
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to avoid the "lifeless machine" of Spinoza, his God has many more af- finities with Spinoza's than one might think--the essence of God for Leibniz is very much pure rationality, God being nothing more than the fullest expression of systematic rationality, the prima causa and first origin of all that is. In Hegel, matters are none too straightfor- ward, but God is still primarily a principle of systematic rationality, if in the Hegelian case, this rationality is dynamic and dialectical. Here it should come as no surprise that Hegel's most far-reaching system- atic work is the Science of Logic, which endeavors to outline the self- realization of the absolute as a logical process, that is, a process of thought, logos or ratio, coming to the fullest expression of its essen- tial nature.
The upshot of this is that the philosophical attempt to demon- strate the rationality of the world is a bulwark support of modern science's drive to impose human authority over nature. In this re- spect, one could argue that the God of the philosophers is merely the instrument of a revolutionary coup d'e? tat by which human reason takes hold of nature, and, in doing so, is exoterically justified by the accessibility of nature to human reason--theodicy becomes the tool of purely human ambitions for hegemonic mastery over an only ap- parently hostile nature. 16
Second, the notion of evil that accompanies this profound (and profoundly veiled) anthropocentric system-building eros is a curious one, which shows its origins in the Christian tradition while also tak- ing on a new role as a solid systemic citizen, a deceptive "source" of differentiation and systemic definition that serves the rhetoric of modern revolutionary philosophy. Why deceptive? Here negativity is made to have a positive dynamic energy--negativity fuels difference and transition, and this positive function risks conferring on evil as the purely negative a shadowy, only virtual positivity that menaces systemic integrity.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that the notion of evil as negation, as an ever unreal force, leads to obvious questions about the ade- quacy of this theodical project to the realities of human experi- ence. If one may accuse Voltaire's Candide of being somewhat un- fair to Leibniz, there should be little question that Voltaire's attacks must be taken into account because they do point out the gap between philosophical imagination and unavoidable reality. In this regard, all one has to do is ask a question, the very question that
haunts Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: What systemic good does a murder achieve? And who can think of this systemic good in an impartial way? Who among us can think with God? And what if this murder is itself systemic, a rude parody of the thesis that evil is a tool of the good, participating in a divine rationality that may be beyond us? Is this rationality not necessarily beyond us? 17
The Kantian Intervention
These questions are not merely insistent, they are definitive, and in modern philosophy a different way of dealing with evil exists along- side the theodical project we have just described that attempts a more adequate response to them. Kant is the crucial figure here; his exploration of radical evil provides the basis for the alternative theo- dicy of Schelling and represents a momentous break in the tradition in modern German thought that runs from Leibniz to Hegel; indeed, Hegel's focus on reconciliation may be interpreted as a most power- ful reaction to Kant's refusal of theodicy.
Kant's thought finds itself in a particular bind. 18 He seeks to pro- vide an adequate account of the nature of evil while not overturning the faith in science that theodicy has attempted to foster in the mod- ern era. He partakes in the modern revolution while also attempting to deal with its "excesses of enthusiasm. " Kant's attempt to justify faith in science is too complex and well-known to address here, suf- fice it to say that his daring project of delimiting the proper bounds of reason is guided by an apparently paradoxical intention: to defend and advance the authority of reason by having it engage in a critique of its proper realm of activity. 19 But, in this respect, it is important to note at the outset that Kant decisively forgoes the route of theodicy as his famous brief essay, On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical At- tempts at Theodicy (1791), attests. Instead, Kant develops his concept of evil within the context not of metaphysics but of morality.
This of course makes sense, since theodicy is a striving to explain the function of evil with relation to God. Whether that be the tradi- tional God of the theologians or the God of the philosophers, the pur- pose of theodicy in either case is ostensibly directed toward the whole first and only latterly toward the role of human beings within it. Kant removes the focus of philosophical investigation away from God to human beings. Hence, evil for Kant is an essentially human problem to be dealt with in the sphere of morality. This is an exceedingly bold
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move and one entirely consistent with Kant's project of autonomy while also showing in great clarity the difficult ambiguities that at- tend this project and have led to long and complex debates over Kant's position: whether he celebrates a notion of autonomy that es- sentially replaces God with human beings or whether he is engaged in renovating (and thereby restoring) the relation of God to human beings. 20 The key problem here, as Schelling understood so well, is one of freedom. For Kant, freedom is the highest goal of modern thought and must be presupposed if moral agency is to have any meaning for human beings.
Kant's thinking about radical evil introduces evil as a propensity (Hang) in human beings that is basic (i. e. , radical, reaching to the root or radix) and ineradicable. In doing so, Kant seems to confer on evil a status that had hitherto been denied it, the status of positivity--no longer is evil simply that which is not. Now, indeed, evil can be a pos- itive guide for action. But one has to be careful to set out the various elements of Kant's complex teaching in order to avoid substantial misunderstandings and thereby distort Schelling's own attitude to- ward Kant.
The most important aspect of Kant's conception of radical evil is to assert that evil can be a guide for action. But the exact nature of this guidance needs to be made clear. The traditional notion of evil as deficiency or a wont of perfection suggests too that evil can be a guide for action but only based on the deficiency or frailty of the actor or agent, and this deficiency was typically associated with mat- ter and, thus, with our material selves and the host of inclinations or motivations connected with them. Evil as a guide for action in this sense meant nothing more than succumbing to such inclinations.
To read Kant in this way is problematic. Kant does not associate our physical inclinations and motivations with evil, and one of the primary reasons for this is that they are not in themselves subject to moral judgment until there is a notion of choice involved. Indeed, if there is no notion of choice involved, if someone acts wholly in ac- cordance with physical inclination, it is very hard to discern any no- tion of agency at all (something that Sade was quick to notice and ex- ploit). 21 Agency can only be invoked if there is an underlying freedom that allows for choice, and it is one of the most powerful as- pects of Kantian thought to insist that this freedom, precisely as freedom of the will, is the sine qua non of moral existence and that,
without such freedom, it is quite difficult to understand how moral action could be possible in any way.
Kant maintains that there is choice, and that this choice deter- mines the moral nature of the actions. What kind of choice is this? Choice always implies criteria on which a choice can be made, and for Kant these criteria are weighed rationally. If the choice is one that pur- sues rational ends for the sake of those ends, it is rational and good. If, however, the choice is one that pursues ends, whether rational or not, for any other sake, then the action is evil. To explain this, it is neces- sary to investigate Kant's moral theory in somewhat greater detail.
A good choice is one that pursues rational ends; it is exercised for the sake of the moral law, for the sake of duty, and both duty and law are universal in so far as they are the products of reason in the form of a categorical imperative, an imperative that by its very nature must be universal. An evil choice is one that is exercised for the sake of inclination, that is, the inclination of a particular individual. And this inclination, as personal, subjective, and deeply contingent, is thereby turned into a maxim of action that subordinates to its par- ticularity the universality contained in the moral law and duty at- tached to it. For Kant, radical evil is precisely this chosen subordina- tion of that which is universal to that which is particular, of the inherent universality of reason to the inherent particularity of per- sonal inclination. This reversal of the relation between universal and particular is the "perversion" at the heart of Kant's conception of rad- ical evil, and it represents a very powerful innovation in the tradition, since it insists on the primacy of choice and the autonomy of the sub- ject that can act positively in an evil manner.
In looking at evil as the pursuit of one's own inclinations over those of duty or the moral law, Kant comes rather close to his great predecessor and teacher, Rousseau. In condemning the subordina- tion of the whole to the part, the will of the many to the will of one, Kant seems to follow what Rousseau says in Book IV of Emile:
. . . the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked man orders the whole in relation to himself. The latter makes himself the center of all things, the former measures his radius and keeps to the circumference. Then he is ordered in relation to the com- mon center, which is God, and in relation to all the concentric circles, which are the creatures. 22
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The importance of Kant's concept of evil for our purposes is its ex- pression of the power in human beings to do good or evil and the placement of that power in the will. Evil is no longer merely a lack, a parasitic negation, but a force than can threaten to subvert or per- vert the claim to structure and coherence of the moral law that binds free individuals together; the basic character of evil, then, is that, in contravening the moral law, it seeks to become a law of its own. 23
Yet, there is an additional problem in Kant's account of radical evil that is not only quite relevant for Schelling but also for a better grasp of the basically divided nature of Kant's thought, a division which Hegel sought to solve in one way, and Schelling in another. 24
The freedom to choose to act according to maxims either in accor- dance with or contravention of the proper hierarchy of universal and particular, of the moral law and personal inclination, is a curious one. For how can there be a propensity for evil in a being that must in some sense always be completely free? Specifically, if human beings are free to act either for good or evil, how can they be said to have a propensity to act for the evil--does this propensity not restrict their freedom; indeed, does this propensity not suggest that they are not free at all?
Kant does try to address this issue by creating a notion of moral dis- position (Gesinnung) that "inclines and does not necessitate," but ulti- mately the problem remains: How can one consider someone as good or evil, as having a propensity to either without undermining the no- tion of freedom or spontaneity essential to autonomy? In other words, how can one reconcile the kind of radical autonomy that is of the very essence of Kant's philosophical project with the notion of character, disposition, or any other limiting qualities? For some commentators this attempt to combine Aristotelian hexis with Kantian spontaneity is misguided and, by its very nature, destined to failure, for others, like Goethe, it indicates Kant's peculiar form of esotericism whereby he at- tempts to clothe his revolutionary pursuit of autonomy in the guise of a variant of traditional notions of original sin25; for still others this awk- ward combination of innate quality with freedom points to the greatest incoherence of Kantian thought, the attempt to derive necessary rules from freedom, a problem that has been otherwise referred to as the "Kantian paradox" or which has been seen as the clearest indication that the Kantian project is inherently unstable, a tissue of ambiguities concealed by a conscious rhetoric of concealment. 26
All these cases turn on Kant's apparent intention to combine autonomy and spontaneity with some notion of inhibitive normativ- ity, the inherently problematic creation of an identity that defines but not to such an extent that freedom is ever relinquished. Schelling works through this difficult combination of necessity and freedom with great daring and skill in his attempt to explain evil in the Philo- sophical Investigations, and his response is very much determined by the problem that Kant's own thinking isolates; for Schelling attempts to place normativity in the very essence of the whole, in God, while leaving to human beings the freedom to ignore or subvert that nor- mativity. If radical evil in Kant places a certain kind of question mark behind his thinking about autonomy, suggesting a pessimism about human beings that courses through all of Kant's thought, Schelling, in striving to overcome that pessimism, takes it to a more dangerous brink, an "abyss of freedom," that Kant could not have countenanced.
Schelling's Response
To this point, we have outlined major conflicting tendencies regard- ing theodicy that Schelling tries to face squarely in his Philosophical Investigations. Let us bring the various strands of our discussion to- gether now in order to give a brief account of the complex problem Schelling seeks to solve.
On the one hand, Schelling perceives with his customary acuity the utter inadequacy of conceptions of evil designed--or so it may seem--to serve the ends of theodicy, of a justification of the world as friendly to the modern pursuit of hegemony. On the other hand, Schelling also perceives the danger in Kant, that Kant's repudiation of theodicy, coupled with his development of a more far-reaching con- cept of evil, cannot help but put in question the place of human be- ings in the world, in turn opening the way for radical assertions of the world's ever frustrating inscrutability.
The great gamble of the Philosophical Investigations, its central striving, is to affirm both the project of theodicy and the more power- ful concept of evil that Kant developed. What Schelling seems to have understood is that the unreality of the privation concept of evil is just as much an admission of the frailty of theodicy as the adoption of a more powerful concept of evil, one that does not serve any systemic
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purpose, which cannot be contained but at any given time threatens to burst the bounds of system. And here is one of the central points of Schelling's approach, that evil introduces a necessary imbalance into the system of the world, that this imbalance is itself the origin and life of the system, the impulsion to the self-revelation of the absolute or God. Yet, evil is not on that account a good systemic citizen, it is es- sentially chaotic or anarchic and, as such, it always threatens to turn system to its own ends, to make system its servant; precisely this ter- rible tension is the essential medium of life, of the organic struggle of forces that constitutes the true basis of the whole. Vitality becomes the highest value, a vitality that exists only because of the ceaseless struggle of forces.
Schelling builds these points out of an unusual interpretation of the whole as resulting from the union of two different (and largely op- posed) ways of being, ground and existence, an interpretation osten- sibly derived from his explorations of nature. 27 It is important not to underestimate the innovative character of this distinction which Schelling's own explanatory apparatus, the association of ground and existence with darkness and light, tends to confuse by suggest- ing an affinity with traditional notions of chaos and order, nothing- ness and being, or infinite and finite. Since this distinction both de- pends on, and departs from, the expected usages of the metaphysical tradition, we need to look at it on its own merits, considering ground as a principle of inwardness or contraction and existence as a princi- ple of expansion--ground tending to retreat into darkness, existence tending toward light as an essentially creative unfolding. 28
This conflict emerges mysteriously with the word, the utterance of the logos or ratio, which is the self-revelation of the pure light, the pure principle of form and intelligibility that is God. In this regard, what is so surprising and puzzling about Schelling's account of the emergence of the word is the apparent arbitrariness of it. While Schelling does claim that the word must reveal itself, he does not ex- plain why it must reveal itself. Nor does he offer an account of why the word emerges in any specific beginning. In both cases, Schelling avoids explanations because they would limit God's freedom. But this limitation presents a striking problem.
Slavoj ? Zi? zek has rightly called attention to this problem,29 that the point of beginning in Schelling has the character of the arbitrary, and this is a very important problem because Schelling quite strikingly
departs from the orthodox notion of divine necessity; namely, if God is as he must be, then he cannot not have been or been in a way other than he is. But Schelling tries to play a careful dual game here. He suggests, in line with the tradition, that God always is even when that "is" refers to a presumably "dormant" being within the ground. The emergence of God by means of the ground is not in fact the tran- sition from nothingness to being (hence, the caution about conflat- ing Schelling's terms with traditional conceptual distinctions) but the point of revelation of a being that in some sense was always al- ready there, even if "dormant"; here it is also important to stress that the ground only emerges with the revelation; it is in fact the latter's very condition of possibility.
The fact is, however, that the point of God's emergence does seem arbitrary and this arbitrariness points to a troubling concern, since the inchoate remainder in the ground persists as a threat to under- mine the integrity of God's existence, his logos-being or emergent ra- tionality--it remains as a darkness from which God cannot seem fully to extricate himself, despite Schelling's ambivalent and questionable protestations to the contrary (especially toward the end of the Philo- sophical Investigations). Simply put, Schelling's attempt to reconcile God's necessary nature with his freedom is beset with fundamental conflict and reveals one of the central ambiguities in Schelling's thought: God seems to play a delicate balancing act in his own self- revelation, which both may (as conditioned by the ground) and must not (as somehow overcoming this condition) end in a disastrous contraction back into the ground. 30
This supposedly impossible possibility of disastrous contraction is of such importance because Schelling transposes the struggle in God, whose outcome, however unsure, must nonetheless "express" God's triumph, to human beings as the highest form of creaturely being, as the ultimate reflection of God's nature in the hierarchy of creation. This transposition is indeed the way of defining the dependent and in- dependent aspects of human beings, dependent because human be- ings emerge from the ground in God, independent because the osten- sibly necessary unity of ground and existence in God becomes their possible disunity in contingent human beings; for, if ground remains a condition in God, it need not do so in human beings. In other words, the ambiguity merely hinted at as an impossible or negative possibil- ity in regard to God, becomes very explicitly possible in regard to
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human beings whose contingency makes them the site of incessant conflict, nature's struggle with itself. If God is that in which existence triumphs over the ground, no matter how perplexing or unconvincing that triumph may be, in human beings this triumph is simply never se- cure at all, and those cases where human action is dominated by the contracting principle of ground are expressions of evil; evil being a perversion of the relation of ground to existence in which ground as the selfish (and self-conscious or "rational") will of the individual seeks to turn the whole to its own advantage, to make of the whole a pliant servant, to be no longer a condition of the revelation of the whole but that for which the whole is conditioned--in a word, it seeks to become absolute.
Z? iz? ek refers to this perversion of the relation of ground and exis- tence as the creation of a universal singularity and goes on to say:
Man is the only creature which can elevate itself to this duality and sus- tain it: he is the highest paradox of universal singularity--the point of utmost contraction, the all-exclusive One of self-consciousness, and the embracing All--a singular being (the vanishing point of cogito) which is able to comprehend/mirror the entire universe . . . with the ap- pearance of man, the two principles--Existence and its Ground--are posited in their distinction, they are not merely opposed to each other: their unity also has to be posited--that is to say, each of them is in the same breath posited as united with its opposite, as its opposite's inher- ent constituent. In other words, from the previous indifference of the two principles we pass to their unity--and it is here that we encounter freedom as freedom for Good and Evil, since this unity can take two forms, the form of the true or of the perverted unity . . . 31
What Z? iz? ek calls a universal singularity can be vividly clarified by ref- erence to Sade, whose work could act as paradigmatic of Schelling's bolder characterization of evil.
Simone de Beauvoir's famous essay "Must We Burn Sade? " (Faut- il bru^ler Sade? ) makes precisely this point, that Sade's entire oeuvre is aimed at transforming his singular singularity, all the more shocking for its bizarre and brutal features, into a universality, claiming more or less distinctly and clearly that the "polymorphic" perversity his novels never tire of depicting in myriad profusion is actually an accurate portrayal of the true nature of human beings,
provided we are free and courageous enough to accept this na- ture. 32 In Sade's world, the passions of the body rule with the active collaboration of the mind; the most brutal acts are "spiritual- ized"--"elegant" form being conferred on them--and they are the subject of careful, ostensibly "learned" disquisition, the true "torch of philosophy. " Indeed, this "spirituality" first lends interest and pi- quancy to the passions, as if their products could be the subject of exquisitely precise mathematical deductions brought forth into the most monstrous sensual form. Nothing could be more exemplary of Schelling's expression of a kind of evil which is the product neither of a lack nor a deficiency, but rather of a positive, vital force, one in which all the powers that are typically associated with the good, such as rationality, rigor, and probity, come to serve the most bru- tal and selfish impulses, the ever varying whims of physical desire, of the most "earthly" appetites.
Here one glimpses the deeper movement of Schelling's thought along with its powerful affinity with Kant; for the subordination of reason to the advocacy of the body, its serving as an instrument for the complication and elaboration of the body's necessarily selfish pleasures, is the ultimate affront to reason as inherently universal, as authorizing a categorical imperative--once the body's dictates become categorical imperatives, nothing but the most extreme re- jection of the universal as such, as something to which all could as- sent, is achieved. This brings us back to the Sadean revolutionary who deploys all the resources of reason in service of the most par- ticular, evanescent and selfish interests and, what is more, clothes those selfish interests in the guise of universal principles, this being a part of the titillation his perversions provide--here is the will to power gone mad, the possibility of the universal as something that is inherently egalitarian fades away, and all that can remain is the im- position of the universal by force as a proton pseudos, the more or less arbitrary basis for the ascent of the particular to universal heg- emony or, as Wirth says, for "the propensity of the creaturely, as the child of the super-creaturely, to shun the abyss of its origin and the abyss of its future and move towards itself and affirm the presence only of itself. "33
Now, one may interject that Schelling's thinking as described here really does not seem to differ all that significantly from the no- tion of radical evil Kant develops. Schopenhauer certainly saw it
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this way and, in his typically vituperative manner, criticized Schell- ing for merely rehashing what Kant had already said more clearly and consequentially. But here Schopenhauer is surely wrong be- cause he fails to acknowledge--or tacitly rejects--the way that Schelling returns evil to its status as a fundamental aspect of being and not only of one being. In other words, by transposing the divine structure onto human beings, Schelling immediately ties the whole to the part, whether in harmony or conflict and, in so doing, avoids the division of the concept of evil into metaphysical and moral spheres--here the moral is the metaphysical and vice versa. Schell- ing thereby returns the question of evil to its wider ontological con- text while incorporating the stronger concept of moral evil he found in Kant. 34 This combination lays the foundations for reviving the problem of theodicy by combining a palliative normativity that le- gitimates the whole with a force that threatens actively to under- mine all normativity.
The End of Theodicy?
What concept of theodicy does this combination create? Commenta- tors may be divided as to its exact nature, but almost all agree that Schelling is working within the traditional confines of theodicy. They note that the transposition of an apparently stable structure in God to human beings as an unstable structure absolves God of respon- sibility for evil and, thus, fulfills one of the primary conditions of theodicy. 35 But they also note that the transfer of the locus of evil to human beings as a positive concept still leaves the question open of why God should permit this evil in his creation, a sort of evil that, by its very nature, presents a challenge to God--as a positively nega- tive concept, evil now seems to have a far greater power because it always threatens to undermine God. Evil is no longer an obedient servant but a surly and dangerous one who seeks to rid himself of his master.
The commentators' difficulty stems from nagging doubts about whether the attempt to combine traditional theodicy with a much more aggressive concept of evil, one that seems to make a mockery of theodicy, is in fact possible. From this standpoint, it seems that Schelling's daring combination of incompatibles in fact fails. Even
Heidegger, one of Schelling's most formidable (and, at least initially, sympathetic) readers, sees Schelling's failure precisely in his attempt to remain within the tradition of theodicy, and for Heidegger that means systematic thought, while asserting a much more generous ac- count of freedom and the reality of evil that is inseparable from it:
That is the difficulty which emerges more and more clearly in Schelling's later efforts with the whole of philosophy, the difficulty which proves to be an impasse (Scheitern). And this impasse is evident since the factors of the jointure of Being, ground and existence and their unity not only become less and less compatible, but are even driven so far apart that Schelling falls back into the rigidified tradition of Western thought without creatively transforming it. But what makes this failure so significant is that Schelling thus only brings out difficul- ties which were already posited in the beginning of Western philoso- phy, and because of the direction which this beginning took were pos- ited by it as insurmountable. For us this means that a second beginning becomes necessary through the first, but is possible only in the complete transformation of the first beginning, never by just let- ting it stand. 36
Heidegger suggests that the very dissonance Schelling discovers in the Philosophical Investigations simply cannot admit of reconcilia- tion with the notion of system, that it leads to the final destruction of this notion since it shows with unparalleled acuity that which system must ignore or sacrifice in order to maintain its own legiti- macy. This fundamental freedom, a freedom that cannot be possible other than as an affront to system, refuses to obey, for this refusal is its very essence, an essence that is expressed by the ground and the anarchic impulse it "contains"; hence, any system must also seem to be merely a fiction, a "ruling by fiat" whose authority can never be absolute, can never achieve the apparent calm of Leibnizian reason or Hegelian reconciliation.
? Zi? zek comes to a view that is not that much different but strikes more directly at the key problem of contingency. As we noted be- fore, the apparent contingency lingering in the emergence of the word must cast a long shadow on any attempt to assert even God's necessity; indeed, this is the most sensitive point of the entire anal- ysis. How can God's emergence into existence be both necessary
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and contingent: In other words, can a coherent concept of God suc- cessfully, that is, harmoniously, combine necessity and freedom? And if, indeed, God's emergence into existence is somehow neces- sary and free, does this necessity not in a very significant way undermine the homology between God and human beings that Schelling is otherwise careful to preserve? One might argue with some justice that this difference is so immense that it vitiates the en- tire comparison and points to what seems to be an indelicately forced aspect of Schelling's thought, a purely dogmatic and, as such, seemingly arbitrary desire to preserve the most important elements in the tradition of theodicy against an analysis of human being that cannot but destroy them. 37
From this point of view (and perhaps this point of view only) one is hard pressed to distinguish ? Zi? zek from Heidegger in regard to the es- sential thrust of argument, since both identify the basic frailty of Schelling's attempt at reconciliation in the problematic nature of his assertion of a homology between God and human beings that seems to admit of its own impossibility and, in doing so, tends to undermine the identity between God and human beings that must be the crucial foundation for any form of theodicy. If God is simply not like human beings, and the question of necessity and contingency raises the specter of this difference like none other, there may be no way to rec- oncile the two, and no way to explain how all the qualities that are in- timately connected with God could in any way be connected with human beings other than as useful fictions or projections that are in- distinguishable from fictions.
Coda
But a different view may be argued if one risks the conjecture that Schelling in effect redefines theodicy as a way of preserving it within the context of his much more adventurous concept of evil. To explore this conjecture, we have to look at the purpose of theodicy, the ends to which theodicy is put, once again.
We have already suggested that theodicy arises as the bulwark of the modern scientific revolution; its purpose is to make the broadest claims for the intelligibility and accessibility of the world to human rationality and, thus, to human domination. The dream of mastering
nature and thereby overcoming the meanness of our mortal estate is underwritten by theodicy--absolute knowledge is possible, the human mind can accede to complete understanding because thought and being are one. This is the boldest claim of theodicy, and it is also a very controversial claim about theodicy itself because it assumes that God becomes the tool of the philosophers, of an eros to domi- nate that has nothing of piety about it;38 that the notion of mastering nature is merely a coded way of expressing the ascent of human be- ings from their mortal estate to that of a god.
Kant scuppers this exuberance, and it has been argued that Kant in fact sees nothing more pernicious than the elevation of human beings to the status of gods. 39 But this may not be a fair statement. It seems to us much better to claim that Kant is terribly ambiguous, that his thinking shows the greatest tension between the desire to elevate and to level human beings, as noted previously, the desire to save the true nature of enlightenment aggression by curbing its most danger- ous excesses. In this Schelling is very much Kant's disciple and his philosophical journey reveals the intolerable nature of the tensions in Kant, their inherent instability. 40
In our opinion, the Philosophical Investigations is one of Schelling's most daring attempts to make sense of the tensions in Kant by re- interpreting their instability as the very essence of a theodicy of life, as the living surface of a whole justified by its vital dynamism. Here a central point for Schelling is precisely that a homology between God and man must not be possible; to the contrary, such a homology would be the highest expression of evil itself, a sort of cosmic suicide, because its achievement would mean not only the disappearance of God but that of man as well. What we suggest here, then, is that theo- dicy understood in the modern sense as ultimately demanding (and also despairing of) such a homology, whether openly or covertly, is indeed a most terrible form of evil, a leap into madness that seeks to close the universe at the cost of life itself; the search to become a god leaves human beings in the tatters of aging Oedipus, strangers to themselves and the world--this surely is the essence of evil as Schell- ing sees it. Hence, the corrosive irony is that the modern theodicy of life is indistinguishable from an evil condemnation of life (and, ulti- mately, of itself as an untenable and unfortunate fiction).
Schelling's daring reformulation of theodicy reflects a unique oscil- lation between this madness and a sobriety of reconciliation,
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between the desire to be a god and the desire to live as a human being, between the tragic and comic sides of human striving; Schelling's theodicy is one that sees struggle as the end of creation and the very wellspring of life. Imbalance and dissonance are of the essence and, without them, all turns into meaningless indifference, the Ungrund, a rejection of the constant interestedness that is life, its tirelessly changing fusion of contraction and expansion. As Schelling writes in the 1815 draft of the Ages of the World:
All life must pass through the fire of contradiction. Contradiction is the engine of life and its innermost essence. From this it follows that, as an old book says, all deeds under the sun are full of trouble and every- thing languishes in toil, yet does not become tired, and all forces inces- santly struggle against each other. Were there only unity and every- thing were in peace, then, truly nothing would want to stir itself and everything would sink into listlessness. 41
One might well accuse Schelling of being rather naive. But he is in fact showing a deeply Goethian respect for the integrity of struggle, for the recognition that evil emerges from the unquenchable desire to overcome the ambiguous terms of human life in a brutal pursuit of quietude, a quietude that can only be a form of self-destruction, whether it emerges in monastic self-immolation or in the more brutal pursuits of domination that haunt the history of the twentieth- century as well as our ceaseless striving for control over our bodies and the earth.
Hence, the reformulation of theodicy Schelling advances is one that respects the whole as a necessarily free and unstable interplay of essentially tragic and comic forms of striving; it is a dynamic struc- ture which reflects Schelling's point that the absence of a complete homology between God and human being, expressed through the in- stability in the human synthesis of ground and existence, is the grave dissonance that works life, the evil that works good.
But Heidegger and ? Zi? zek cannot be so easily dismissed. For has Schelling merely renewed the traditional view of evil as servant of the good in a remarkably circuitous way, has he merely engaged in a complex subterfuge that has not managed to conceal itself all that well? One might respond in typically Schellingian fashion by sug- gesting that he both does and does not. While Schelling invokes this
traditional view, he also seems to undermine it by suggesting that evil is not a loyal systemic servant but rather one who always threatens to become master and may (and rather ambiguously must not) have the power to do so. For Schelling, fundamental instability is of the essence of theodicy; the ineradicable possibility of collapse creates the manifold tensions from which the whole emerges as a vi- brant plenitude. Indeed, these manifold tensions--the tensions of restless life itself--must be present at every moment; since instabil- ity endows the moment with an alluring promise of being that is the foremost gift of theodicy, a theodicy always threatened and ever re- stored, at once ending and beginning anew.
INTRODUCTION | xxix
Translators' Note
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase. --Vladimir Nabokov
It has become customary to preface translations with a statement of impossibility, that the translation simply cannot capture the original, that translation is a traitor to the work translated (traduttore tradi- tore) or that all translation is "merely" an interpretation tainted by limited knowledge, time, and so forth. All three statements, and the great number of variations on them that may be found in any sam- pling of contemporary translations, constitute a modern variant of humility topos; as such they allude to an act of veneration that inevi- tably corrupts to the extent the ever mysterious "grace," by which the blessed tongue may speak the truth freely across the barriers of alien customs and grammar, falters or is unexpectedly withdrawn. While we have no wish to quarrel with these well-worn conventions of the translator's art, we do wish to make a claim that heads in the opposite direction, that suggests the vitality of translation as a means of discovering a text, of bringing the original alive in a new and unac- customed form; every worthy translation is in this sense a restora- tion of an original that may never have existed as such but appears refreshed and refurbished through the translator's efforts if, indeed, they meet with success.
Now, Schelling's celebrated essay on freedom is a notoriously difficult work, and we have tried to hold a fine line between not tainting or masking its difficulty and making it sufficiently access- ible to an audience perhaps only slightly familiar with the conven- tions and habits of writing prevalent in German philosophical dis- course at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and, even for those with more than passing familiarity, Schelling's style can be quite opaque). But, as a practical matter, we have generally pre- ferred to retain the genuine flavor of the original. In particular, we
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have sought to preserve its syntactic structure and idiosyncrasy as generously as possible on all levels, from the simple phrase to the exceedingly complex agglomerations that emerge and transform themselves in the course of Schelling's argument. And this move- ment from the simple phrase to a broader series of echoes of that phrase, both in sound and syntax, is one of the more remarkable features of the treatise's linguistic texture; here we have a carefully wrought structure in which internal echoes and changes in tone play a significant role, one that is indeed extremely hard to capture effectively but that merits the attempt.
To that end, we have thus erred in many ways on the side of the ostensibly more literalist attitude to translation that marks the re- cent Cambridge edition of Kant's works as well as some of the more distinguished translations produced by those following what one might call the "Straussian" imperative to capture the strangeness of the original text and not to efface its linguistic peculiarity (or, for that matter, clumsiness) through palliative simplification or con- descending colloquialism. In this respect, we have sought to avoid the undoubted excesses of hermeneutic approaches derived from Heidegger while not dismissing the virtue of enhancing strange- ness through explanatory paraphrase; yet, we usually have thought it best to keep paraphrase of this nature to the notes or certain combinations (like, e. g. , "beings in the world" for Weltwe- sen) that may in turn be considered deliberatively provocative or overly Heideggerian or, indeed, "mock-Heideggerian. " The upshot is that our translation tends in general toward a painstaking mim ? e- sis of the German text that makes as many sacrifices to English as seemed necessary to avoid loss of the translation's greatest ally, a reasonably idiomatic English prose; in other words, our translation presents Schelling "warts and all" but in what we hope is a suffi- ciently English manner that the warts are not simply all or do not overwhelm the whole.
This approach has led us to several difficult translation choices that merit some discussion in advance, either because the words at issue are ones that have been traditional sources of perplexity to translators or because our way of using them departs from the previ- ous reception of the text or indicates philosophical choices that must be made explicit.
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Anarchy, Anarchical
We have used "anarchy" and "anarchical" to translate, respectively, das Regellose and regellos. This may prove to be a very controversial choice since James Gutmann's rendering of these terms as "unruliness" or "un- ruly" has been widely accepted in discussions of the text. 1 Gutmann's rendering has the virtue of translating the German into cognate English and thereby also preserving Schelling's contrast between "rule" and "unruliness" where an equivalent contrast between "arche ? " and "an- archy" is not possible. Yet, the problem with "unruliness" is twofold. The word seems to us to sound increasingly archaic in modern Ameri- can English and, where it does not, to have largely more benign associa- tions than the German may be said to have since, for example, unruli- ness can refer to children (or, for that matter, mischievous spirits) and, then, in a gently ironic way, one suggesting perhaps some degree of be- mused approval. We chose instead to emphasize what we consider the more striking ambivalence suggested by the word "anarchy," its range of reference both to a terrifying and liberating absence of order. In our view, this ambivalence captures more powerfully the tension between ground and existence, between contraction and expansion, that is such a central aspect of Schelling's thought in a way that "unruliness" or "un- ruly" cannot. Moreover, the broad application of the word "anarchy" to a number of contexts (political, historical, philosophical) enhanced its appeal for us, since it emphasizes the great sweep of Schelling's trea- tise, that the latter is neither so hermetic nor so divorced from immedi- ate reality that it must remain on dusty shelves as just another aban- doned metaphysics or shipwreck of thought appropriate primarily for the historian of philosophy.
Essence, being, and Being
Jason Wirth has recently pointed out that Schelling's use of the Ger- man Wesen is a great source of difficulty for the translator, and we could not agree with him more. Wesen in German philosophical writ- ing has had strong associations with the Latin essentia and, as dem- onstrated by Bonitz's celebrated translation of Aristotle's Metaphys- ics, the Greek ousia as well. Both essentia and ousia may be (and have
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been) translated into English as "essence," as that "what-ness" of a thing that distinguishes it as the thing it is, as that definition which gives the thing the general identity it has. Hence, Wesen translated as "essence" refers to an abstract universal, something that describes things in time, where they are subject to the cycle of generation and decay, but which, as a condition of its being able to do so, must be freed from that cycle. Now, Wirth has suggested that to translate Schelling's use of Wesen as "essence" is inevitably to distort because Schelling does not associate Wesen with an abstract universal; in- deed, according to Wirth, Wesen for Schelling is fundamentally dy- namic, naming "the tension between present being (existence) and the simultaneous intimation of that which is as no longer being (the past) and that which is as not yet being (the future). " Wirth's solution to this problem--one he freely admits is problematic--is to avoid use of the word "essence" to translate Wesen in favor of "being" with the definite or indefinite article as required. 2
While we appreciate the validity of the problem Wirth identifies and have followed him in practice to a significant degree, we have nonetheless chosen a somewhat different guiding principle in our translation; namely, we have translated Wesen either by "essence" or by "being" depending on the particular shade of meaning Schelling seems to emphasize in a given instance. We freely admit, however, that this shade of meaning has not at all been easy to isolate with as- surance in many of these instances. For example, we have chosen to retain the conventional translation of the title of the essay as a trea- tise regarding the "essence of human freedom" rather than the "being of human freedom. " We have done so because it seems to us that in this instance Schelling is indeed seeking to express a sort of "abstract universal" to the extent the essay is intended to set out the what-ness of human freedom, a definition that is not subject to time but, indeed, in a sense determines what time is or may be. In other cases, where Schelling refers to what is quite evidently a form of being originating or existing within a narrative horizon, that is, within some interpreta- tion of time, we have used the term "being. " In this latter respect, one of the most difficult decisions we made involves reference to the Wesen of the ground as a form of being. But we chose this usage pre- cisely to avoid the assimilation of Schelling's characterization of the relation between ground and existence to that between essence and existence, an assimilation inimical to the polysemy inherent in this
LOVE AND SCHMIDT | TRANSLATORS' NOTE | xxxv
characterization which both suggests a similarity to the tradition (present here as a sort of conceptual "shadow") and a departure from it, since God's essence has traditionally been equivalent to his exis- tence and not (in a carefully qualified manner) prior to it.
Finally, where Schelling uses the substantive Sein, we have trans- lated it with the capitalized "Being" to avoid confusion between Wesen and Sein. In the case of the participial Seiendes, we have em- ployed a circumlocution, "that which has being. " Regarding both these choices, we have followed Wirth's practice in his translation of The Ages of the World.
Man, Mankind
Schelling very frequently uses the word Mensch to describe the whole species. We have translated this word throughout by "man" and its variants where necessary. Not only is this translation somewhat inac- curate--because Mensch does not refer to one of the sexes only, but, like the Greek anthro ? pos, to the species without regard to the sexes-- it also involves a degree of gender bias that is repugnant. And yet the demands of English have presented us with somewhat of a dilemma both grammatically and in regard to well-worn phrases like the rela- tion of "man to God. " Moreover, the strongest alternative we consid- ered, "human beings," is in many cases both unusual and cumber- some. While these may seem like exculpatory reasons themselves, we also want to point out that, as Judith Norman mentions in her translation of The Ages of the World, Mensch in the German philosoph- ical tradition was associated with a masculine subject, and this too seems to be present in the Philosophical Investigations. 3
In closing, we note that our translation follows Thomas Buchheim's excellent recent critical edition of the Philosophical Investigations, although we have not hesitated to check other editions where nec- essary. 4 We should also like to express our appreciation to the pre- vious translators of the Philosophical Investigations, from whose work we have learned a great deal, even if we have not infrequently made different choices, and, in this regard, we hope our choices prove worthy of their work.
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM AND MATTERS CONNECTED THEREWITH
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
PREFACE
This collection will contain individual philosophical treatises by the author that have already been published in various places together with others, as yet unpublished. 1
Those already published in this volume are mostly idealist in con- tent. The first, Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the Uncondi- tioned in Human Knowledge, shows idealism in its most youthful guise and, perhaps, in a sense that it subsequently lost. At least the I is still taken everywhere as absolute or as identity of the subjective and objective and not as subjective.
The Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (No. II), which appeared first in Niethammer's philosophical journal in 1796, contain a lively polemic against the then almost generally accepted and variously misused, so- called moral, proof of the existence of God from the point of view of the then no less generally prevailing opposition of subject and object. 2 For the author this polemic seems still to have its full force in regard to the way of thinking to which it refers. Not one of those who has re- mained at the same standpoint to this day has refuted it. However, the observations contained in the ninth letter at p. 178, et passim, concern- ing the disappearance of all oppositions of conflicting principles in the absolute, are the clear seeds of later and more positive views.
These show themselves in a more definite way in the Treatises in Ex- planation of the Idealism of the Doctrine of Science [Wissenschaftslehre] (No. III) which first appeared in the philosophical journal of Fichte and Niethammer, and which indisputably contribute much to the gen- eral understanding of this system, especially in the third treatise.
The following treatise, On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature (No. IV), is an academic speech of which only a small number of cop- ies were made on the first occasion of its appearance, so that it likely first will come into the hands of most more distant readers through this second printing. Incidentally, some new comments have been added at the end of the treatise. 3
OA V-VII
4 OA VIII-XII
The fifth treatise of this volume, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Matters Connected Therewith, is new and appears in print here for the first time.
| The author finds but little to remark about this same treatise.
Since reason, thinking and knowing are accounted to the essence of the spiritual [geistig] nature first of all, the opposition of nature and spirit was properly considered first from this perspective. This way of considering the matter is adequately justified by the firm belief in a purely human reason, the conviction that all thinking and knowing are completely subjective and that nature is utterly without reason and thought, as well as the mechanistic kind of representation [Vor- stellungsart] prevalent everywhere in so far as even the dynamism that was revived by Kant changed again only into a higher mecha- nism and was in no way recognized in its identity with the spiritual. 4 This root of opposition has now been torn out, and securing of a more correct view can be calmly given over to general advancement toward better knowledge.
It is time that the higher or, rather, the genuine opposition emerge, that of necessity and freedom, with which the innermost centerpoint of philosophy first comes into consideration.
Since the author has confined himself wholly to investigations in the philosophy of nature | after the first general presentation of his system (in the Journal for Speculative Physics), the continuation of which was unfortunately interrupted by external circumstances, and after the beginning made in the work, Philosophy and Religion-- which, admittedly, remained unclear due to faulty presentation--the current treatise is the first in which the author puts forth his concept of the ideal part of philosophy with complete determinateness. 5 Hence, if that first presentation should possess any importance, he must first place alongside it this treatise, which, according to the na- ture of its topic, must already contain deeper disclosures about the entire system than all more partial presentations.
Although up to now the author had nowhere expressed himself re- garding the main points that come to be spoken of in this treatise, the freedom of the will, good and evil, personality, and so on (excepting the one work, Philosophy and Religion), this has not prevented the at- tribution to him of definite opinions regarding these matters by oth- ers as they saw fit, even when wholly inappropriate to the content of
that--as it seems utterly ignored--work. Unsolicited, so-called fol- lowers may have brought forth many distortions as well, as in other so also in these matters, apparently in accordance with the basic principles of the author.
Indeed, only a complete, finished system should have, so it seems, adherents in the genuine sense. Until now the author has never estab- lished anything of the like, but rather has shown only individual fac- ets of such a system (and these often only in a particular, e. g. , polem- ical, connection as well). Hence, he has declared his works fragments of a whole, to perceive the interconnection of which required a finer gift of observation among intrusive followers and a better will among opponents than is commonly found in either. The only scientific pres- entation of his system, since it was not completed, was in its genuine intent understood by no one or by very few. Immediately after the ap- pearance of this fragment, there began slander and falsification on the one hand, and, on the other hand, clarification, adaptation and translation, of which that into a supposedly more brilliant language (since at the same time an entirely unrestrained poetic frenzy had taken hold of minds) was | the worst sort. Now it seems that a healthier time is again upon us. The unwavering, the diligent and the inner are again being sought. One is beginning in general to recognize for what it is the emptiness of those who have gamboled about with the phrases of the new philosophy like French stage heroes or who have gestured like tightrope walkers. At the same time, others have sung to death in all the market squares the new that has been seized upon, as if to the accompaniment of a barrel organ, and have finally aroused such a general disgust that they will soon find no audience remaining; especially if critics, who are, in passing, not ill-disposed, did not say that every unintelligible rhapsody in which some turns of phrase of a well-known writer have been brought together is com- posed in accordance with his fundamental principles. Let them rather treat each such writer as an original, which each fundamen- tally wishes to be, and which, in a certain sense, quite a few also are.
May this treatise thus serve to strike down, on the one hand, many prejudices and, on the other hand, much loose and shallow chatter.
Finally, we wish that those who have openly or furtively attacked the author from prejudice should now also present their points of view just as candidly as has happened here. If complete mastery of one's
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topic makes possible its free and technically rich [Kunstreich] develop- ment, then the artificial tergiversations [ku? nstliche Schraubenga? nge] of polemic indeed cannot be the form of philosophy. But we wish still more that the spirit of general endeavor secure itself ever more and that the sectarian spirit, which only too often prevails among Ger- mans, not impede achievement of a knowledge and point of view whose development always seemed destined for Germans and that was perhaps never nearer to them than now.
Munich, March 31, 1809 |
F. W. J. Schelling
Philosophical investigations into the essence of human freedom can in part address the correct concept of freedom in so far as the fact of freedom, no matter how immediately the feeling of which is im- printed in every individual, lies in no way so fully on the surface that, in order merely to express it in words, an uncommon clarity and depth of mind would not be required; in part, they can deal with the connection of this concept with the whole of a scientific worldview. 6 Since no concept can be defined in isolation, however, and only proof of its connection with the whole also confers on it final scientific com- pleteness, this must be preeminently the case with the concept of freedom, which, if it has reality at all, must not be simply a subordi- nate or subsidiary concept, but one of the system's ruling center- points: thus both these sides of the investigation coincide here, as everywhere. According to an old but in no way forgotten legend, the concept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with system, and every philosophy making claim to unity and wholeness should end up with the denial of freedom. 7 It is not easy to dispute general assurances of this kind; for who knows which limiting no- tions have already been linked to the word system, so that the claim asserts something which is of course very true, but also very trivial. Or, if opinion is this, that the concept of system opposes the concept of freedom generally and in itself, then it is curious that, since | indi- vidual freedom is surely connected in some way with the world as a whole (regardless of whether it be thought in a realist or idealist man- ner), some kind of system must be present, at least in the divine understanding, with which freedom coexists. To claim generally that this system can never be brought to clarity in human understanding is again to claim nothing, in so far as, according to how it is under- stood, the statement can be either true or false. It depends on deter- mination of the principle by which man comes to have knowledge of
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any kind; and what Sextus says in regard to Empedocles should be applied to this assumption: the learned and the ignorant can con- ceive of such an assumption as emerging from boastfulness and arro- gance, qualities which must be foreign to anyone having even meager practice in philosophy; yet one who starts out from the theory of na- ture and knows that it is a very ancient doctrine that like is recog- nized by like (which supposedly comes from Pythagoras but is also encountered in Plato, and was declared by Empedocles a good deal earlier) will understand that the philosopher claims such a (divine) understanding because, holding his understanding clear and un- dimmed by malice, he alone grasps the god outside through the god in himself. *,8 However, it is customary among those who are ill- disposed to science to understand thereby a kind of knowledge that is utterly abstract and inanimate like common geometry. It would be more succinct and decisive to deny system even in the will or under- standing of the primal being [Urwesen], to say that there are only in- dividual wills of which each determines its own center for itself and is, according to Fichte's expression, the absolute substance of each and every "I. "9 Reason, which strives for unity, like feeling, which in- sists on freedom and personality, is, however, always dismissed only by a fiat [Machtspruch] that lasts for a while and finally comes to ruin. Thus Fichte's doctrine had to attest to its recognition of | unity, if only in the paltry form of a moral ordering of the world, in which it nonetheless immediately fell into contradictions and unacceptable propositions. Therefore it seems that no matter how much may be brought to support this claim from a merely historical standpoint, namely, from previous systems--(we have not found anywhere argu- ments [Gru? nde] that were drawn from the essence of reason and knowledge themselves)--connection of the concept of freedom with the whole of a worldview will likely always remain the object of a nec- essary task without whose resolution the concept of freedom would teeter while philosophy would be fully without value. For this great task alone is the unconscious and invisible driving force [Trieb- feder] of all striving for knowledge, from the lowest to the highest; without the contradiction of necessity and freedom not only philoso- phy but each higher willing of the spirit would sink into the death that is proper to those sciences in which this contradiction has no
* Sext. Empir. adv. Grammaticos L. I, c. 13, p. 283, ed. Fabric.
application. To pull oneself out of the conflict by renouncing reason seems closer to flight than to victory. With the same justification, an- other could turn his back on freedom in order to throw himself into the arms of reason and necessity without there being cause for tri- umph on either the one or the other side.
The same opinion has been more decisively expressed in the phrase: the only possible system of reason is pantheism, but this is inevitably fatalism. * It is an undeniably excellent invention that with such labels entire viewpoints are described all at once. If one has found the right label for a system, the rest falls into place of itself, and one is spared the effort of examining what is characteristic about it more meticulously. As soon as such labels are given, with their | help even one who is ignorant can pass judgment on the most thought- through matters. Nevertheless, with such an extraordinary claim, all
depends on the closer determination of the concept. For thus it should likely not be denied that, if pantheism denotes nothing more than the doctrine of the immanence of things in God, every rational viewpoint in some sense must be drawn to this doctrine. 10 But pre- cisely the sense here makes the difference. That the fatalistic sense may be connected with pantheism is undeniable; but that this sense is not essentially connected with it is elucidated by the fact that so many are brought to this viewpoint through the most lively feeling of freedom. Most, if they were honest, would confess that, given how their ideas have been formed, individual freedom would seem to them to be inconsistent with almost all properties of a highest being, for example, with omnipotence. Through freedom a fundamentally unlimited power is asserted next to and outside of divine power, which is unthinkable according to these concepts. As the sun in the firmament extinguishes all the lights in the sky, even more so does in- finite extinguish every finite power. Absolute causality in One Being leaves only unconditional passivity to all others. This entails the de- pendence of all beings in the world on God, and that even their con- tinued existence is only an ever-renewed creation in which the finite being is produced not as an undefined generality but rather as this
* Earlier claims of this kind are well known. We leave open the question of whether Fr. Schlegel's statement in his work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indian People, p. 141, "Pantheism is the system of pure reason," has perhaps another meaning.
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12 OA 404-407
definite, individual being with such and such thoughts, strivings, ac- tions and no others. It explains nothing to say that God holds his om- nipotence in reserve so that man can act or that he permits freedom: if God were to withhold his omnipotence for a moment, man would cease to be. Is there any other way out of this argument than to save personal freedom within the divine being itself, since it is unthinkable in opposition to omnipotence; to say that man is not outside of, but rather in, God and that his activity itself belongs to the life of God? It is exactly from this standpoint that mystics and religious natures of all times have attained to the belief in the unity of man with God, a be- lief that seems to accord with the deepest feeling as much as, | if not more than, with reason and speculation. Indeed, scripture itself finds exactly in the consciousness of freedom the seal and pledge of the be- lief that we are and live in God. Now, how can the doctrine necessarily be at odds with freedom, which so many have asserted in regard to man precisely in order to save freedom? 11
But another and, as commonly believed, more accurate explana- tion of pantheism is that it consists in a complete identification of God with things; a blending of creator and created being [Gescho? pf]12 from which yet another set of difficult and unbearable assertions is derived. However, a more total differentiation of things from God than that found in Spinoza, the presumed classic for this doctrine, is hardly conceivable. God is what is in itself and is understood only from itself; what is finite, however, is necessarily in another and can only be understood from this other. According to this differentiation, things are obviously not different from God simply in degree or through their limitedness, as it may appear, however, on a superfi- cial consideration of the doctrine of modifications, but toto genere. Whatever for that matter their relation to God may be, they are abso- lutely separate from God due to the fact that they can only exist in and according to another (namely, to Him), that their concept is a de- rived one that would not be possible at all without the concept of God; since, to the contrary, the latter concept alone is what is inde- pendent and original, alone what affirms itself, that to which every- thing else can be related only as affirmed, only as consequence to ground. Other properties of things, for example, their eternality, are valid solely on this assumption. God is eternal according to his na- ture, things only with him and as a result of his existence, that is, only in a derivative way. Precisely because of this difference, all individual
things together cannot amount to God, as commonly maintained, in so far as no sort of combination can transform what is by nature de- rivative into what is by nature original, just as little as the individual points on a circumference | when taken together can amount to that circumference, since as a whole, and according to its concept, it must necessarily precede them. Still more fatuous is the conclusion that in Spinoza even the individual thing is equivalent to God. Then, if even the strong expression that every thing is a modified God is to be found in Spinoza, the elements of the concept are so contradictory that, once they are combined together, the concept falls apart again. A modified, that is, derivative, God is not God in the genuine and emi- nent sense; due to this one addition, things return to their place whereby they are forever divided from God. The reason [Grund] for such misinterpretations, which in large measure other systems have also experienced, lies in the general misunderstanding of the law of identity or the meaning of the copula in judgment. It can at once be made comprehensible to a child that in no possible proposition (which according to the assumed explanation states the identity of the subject with the predicate) is stated a sameness [Einerleiheit] or even only an unmediated connection of these two--in so far as, for example, the proposition, "This body is blue," does not have the meaning that the body is, in and through that in and through which it is a body, also blue, but rather only the meaning that the same thing which is this body is also blue, although not in the same respect: and yet this assumption, which indicates complete ignorance regarding the nature [Wesen] of the copula, has constantly been made in rela- tion to the higher application of the law of identity in our time. For ex- ample, if one puts forward the proposition: "The perfect is the imper- fect," the meaning is this: the imperfect is not due to that through which it is imperfect, but rather through the perfect that is in it; how- ever, in our time it has this meaning: the perfect and the imperfect are the same [einerlei], all is the same [gleich] in itself, the worst and the best, foolishness and wisdom. Or: good is evil, which means to say roughly that evil does not have the power to exist through itself; that within evil which has being is (considered in and for itself) the good. This is interpreted in the following manner: the eternal difference between justice and injustice, virtue and vice is denied; both are logi- cally the same. | Or, if in a different turn of phrase, necessary and free things are explained as One, the meaning of which is that the
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14 OA 408-410
same thing (in the final judgment) which is the essence of the moral world is also the essence of nature, then this is understood as follows: free things are nothing but forces of nature, coil springs [Springfeder], which, like any other, are subject to mechanism. The same thing oc- curs in the proposition that the soul is one with the body, which is interpreted as suggesting that the soul is material, air, ether, nerve fluid, and the like; for the reverse, that the body is the soul, or, in the preceding proposition, that the seemingly necessary is in itself free, though it is at once just as valid to infer from the proposition, is in a well-considered way set aside. Such misunderstandings, which, if they are not deliberate, presuppose a level of dialectical immaturity that Greek philosophy surpasses almost in its first steps, make recom- mending the thorough study of logic into a pressing duty. The ancients' profoundly meaningful [tiefsinnig] logic differentiated subject and predicate as what precedes and what follows (antecedens et conse- quens) and thereby expressed the real meaning of the law of identity. 13 This relation persists even in tautological propositions, if they are not to be utterly without meaning. Whoever says, "The body is body," surely thinks something different with respect to the subject of the sen- tence than with respect to the predicate; with respect to the former namely, unity, with respect to the latter, the individual properties con- tained within the concept of body that relate to it as antecedens to con- sequens. Just this is the meaning of another ancient explanation ac- cording to which subject and predicate are set against each other as what is enfolded to what is unfolded (implicitum et explicitum). * |
* Mr. Reinhold, too, who wanted to re-create all of philosophy through logic, does not, however, seem to recognize what Leibniz, in whose footsteps he claims to walk, said about the meaning of the copula in regard to the objec- tions of Wissowatius (Opp. T. I ed. Dutens, p. 11) and still toils away in this labyrinth, where he confuses identity with sameness. In a paper before us is the following passage from him: "According to the demands of Plato and Leibniz, the duty of philosophy consists in showing the subordination of the finite to the infinite, according to the demands of Xenophanes, Bruno, Spinoza, and Schelling, in showing the unconditional unity of both. " To the extent that unity in the sense of opposition is obviously supposed to de- note sameness here, I assure Mr. Reinhold that he is mistaken at least in re- gard to both of the last named. Where is there a more incisive expression for the subordination of the finite to | the infinite to be found than the one
However, defenders of the foregoing claim will now say that pantheism does not speak at all about the fact that God is everything (which is not easy to avoid according to the common notion of his properties), but rather about the fact that things are nothing, that this system abolishes all individuality. Yet it seems that this new de- termination contradicts the preceding one, for, if things are nothing, how is it possible to blend | God with them?