Fichte,
Introductions
to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (In- dianapolis: Hackett, 1994), xxxvi.
Schelling-Philosophical-Investigations-into-the-Essence-of-Human-Freedom
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 ? 93:
In gravity (? 54 comment) we indeed had to recognize absolute identity according to its essence, yet not as having being, since gravity is in the latter as the ground of its Being. Absolute identity is not in the cohesiveness, but rather gravity (? 92) which in itself does not exist. Absolute identity and actuality emerge in light. Gravity flees into eternal night, and absolute identity partially re- moves the seal under which it is contained, although it is com- pelled to emerge and, as it were, step into the light as the potency [in der Potenz] of A and B, but still as one identical thing. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 386)
c) Explanation to ? 145:
It is explained above that we understand by nature absolute identity first and foremost to the extent absolute identity exists in the form of A and B actu (? 61). Now absolute identity exists as such, however, only in cohesiveness and the light. But since abso- lute identity is ground of its own Being as A3 through cohesiveness and the light, just as it was ground of its own Being as A2 through gravity, and since it is perhaps as A3 once again ground of its own Being (in a yet higher potency [Potenz]), we will be able say in gen- eral: by nature we understand absolute identity to the extent it is considered not as having Being, but as ground of its Being, and we foresee from this that we can call nature all things which lie beyond the absolute Being of absolute identity. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 426) These hints are by no means clear, and we may do better to examine
the relation between ground and existence further by looking at the Phil- osophical Investigations themselves. From that standpoint, it is impor- tant first of all to reject the many possible binary combinations that may seem to describe the relation such as, for example, that of the infinite to the finite or that of essence to existence or ground to consequence--the latter merely a causal relationship that cannot explain the relation and that carries one back to Schelling's discussion of the relation of God to things.
The relation is rather one of the ground's being a condition or me- dium through which God's existence first comes to light; it is the condi- tion for the appearance of the light. In this sense, the ground is first rec- ognized as such in terms of the existence of God; thus it does not exist independently of God (although it is "different" from him), nor does it exist prior to God, yet its existence is necessary so that God reveal him- self. Hence, the condition of God's existence is itself conditioned, by that existence, and this sort of dialectical relation is a far cry indeed from the other relations mentioned above; it both complies with the basic dogmatic claim of God's eternality, that he must always be, even if that being must also have been before creation, and offers an explana- tion for the emergence of God (i. e. , differentiation) in so far as that emergence is conditional.
Yet, what is the ground? Here Schelling's analogy with gravity is quite useful, for it clarifies the nature both of ground and existence. If ground is likened to gravity in its relation to light, then ground is a necessary force of contraction without which the expansion (of light) would not be possible. The roots of this thinking in Schelling's philosophy of nature are clear in so far as the constitutive relation is dyadic and dynamic; however, the tension between ground and existence is not one of attrac- tion and repulsion but rather of contraction and expansion--the move- ment into the light is one of constant expansion, the movement condi- tioning this movement as its condition of possibilty is one of contraction or self-concealment (here one is reminded of Heraclitus' famous "phusis
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kruptesthai philei" [nature loves to hide/conceal itself]); each movement is defined with and against the other, they function together harmoni- ously, and the whole that emerges out of this movement is not compre- hensible as a whole without it.
But if ground remains a condition in God, it does not necessarily have to do so in man--this is the great difference between God and man; hence, the danger of man, his inner dissonance, lies in the possibility that the ground may subordinate expansion to itself, that contraction may triumph over expansion by perverting it--in short, that the relation reverses itself in favor of the ground wherein the principle of light and expansion is harnessed to the ground, spirit becomes the voice of ground, the universal the mask of the particular. Here the ground ceases being a condition by which existence may become what it is, but seeks to become that for the sake of which existence becomes what it is, it seeks to become absolute.
The difference between the two is fundamental, it is the basis for the dif- ference between good and evil in the Philosophical Investigations, a difference which,asZ? iz? eknotes,inheresinthenatureoftheunitybetweengroundand existence, evil being a unity oriented to the ground's freeing itself from its own conditionality and good being a unity where ground's conditionality is retained and affirmed (Z? iz? ek, The Indivisible Remainder, 63).
33. The first edition has a comma before the "it" ["Er"], which is capitalized in the German, and so does the edition from Buchheim, although the lat- ter notes that a period should likely be set here before the "it. " Having interpreted this unusual capitalization as sign of a printing mistake, we have inserted a period instead of a comma.
34. As noted, this analogy is the principal way that the Presentation of My System deals with the relation of ground to existence. (See Schelling, Zeitschrift, 368-370. )
35. The German reads: "In dem Zirkel, daraus alles wird, ist es kein Wider- spruch, dass das, wodurch das Eine erzeugt wird, selbst wieder von ihm ge- zeugt werde. Es ist hier kein Erstes und kein Letztes, weil alles sich gegen- seitig voraussetzt, keins das andere und doch nicht ohne das andere ist. "
36. We chose to translate the German werden in this and in the preceding sentence literally rather than by a paraphrase like "come into being. " We have done so because we preferred to retain the inherent dynamism of the German even though as English the use of "become" in this way (without a predicate object of becoming) is unnatural.
37. See the excerpt from Boehme in this volume, especially the opening paragraph.
38. The German reads: "Dennoch ist sie ein Willen des Verstandes . . . " We read ein Wille instead of ein Willen and assume the latter is a typograph- ical mistake (found both in the first edition and that of Buchheim). The alternative here would be to read ein Wollen, which is also possible, but not likely given the subsequent repetition of Wille in the same sentence (see the immediately following note below).
39. ein ahndender Wille--we have chosen to translate old ahnden (= ahnen) by the verb "divine," and this may well be a somewhat controversial choice. The verb ahnen means in general "to foresee," "to have a pre- sentiment or foreboding of," or "to suspect. " Gutmann translates the term variously by "prescient" or "anticipating," both of which are ade- quate but slightly inaccurate, since they seem to indicate advance ac- cess to knowledge, which should not yet be available to the yearning in this case (and that is why "to foresee" is also a problem). Hayden-Roy uses "presentient," and "presentiment," which is much closer but carries a sensory element in the adjective that is unwelcome. In their respective translations of The Ages of the World, where the verb is featured in the first sentence, Wirth uses "to intimate" and Norman "to divine," both of which seem to us to be much closer to the mark since they suggest an al- most ineffable inkling of something without necessarily freighting that inkling with a notion of foreknowledge that suggests Platonic anamn ? esis, the recollection of something seen before.
40. Please see the "Translators' Note" regarding our choice to use "anarchy" and "anarchical" to translate regellos and das Regellose here instead of Gutmann's "unruly" and "unruliness. " Once again, we should like to em- phasize that the association of this original "unstate" in the ground with darkness, chaos, disorder, and so on, leads us to believe a much stronger term like "anarchy" is a more appropriate translation.
41. This is a striking statement, and one that supports the interpretation of the ground not as an essence or unactualized quidditas that remains in potentia until some necessarily mysterious triggering moment but as an absence, an inexplicable void.
42. This proverbial expression for those who wrest confusion from clarity is taken from Horace's de arte poetica (at line 143):
quanto rectius hic, qui nil molitur inepte:
"dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes"
non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat, Antiphaten, Scyllamque et cum Cyclope Charybdin.
In prose: How much more correct is he who does not exert himself in- eptly--"Tell me, Muse, of the man who saw the cities and ways of many men after the capture of Troy"--and proposes not to give smoke from a flash of light but light from smoke in order to bring forth the splendid and wondrous tales of Antiphates, Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.
43. Buchheim suggests that the reference to Fichte here pertains to three treatises Fichte wrote between 1804 and 1806, all of which denigrate na- ture as having being--as being alive--in the same way as the knowing subject. See Die Grundzu? ge des gegenwa? rtigen Zeitalters (1804); U? ber das Wesen des Gelehrten (1805); and Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806)-- to the best of our knowledge, none of these works from Fichte's generally neglected post-Jena period has been translated into English.
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44. This reference to John 12:24 has strong epistemological and theodical overtones. For the former, see J. G. Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. J. Nad- ler (Vienna: Herder Verlag, 1949-1957), 2:74. The latter are dealt with most famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov where this verse is the epilogue and guiding thread of the very explicitly theo- dical narrative (F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Rich- ard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [New York: Vintage, 1990], 2).
45. This recalls Plato's Timaeus:
Now the nurse [tith ? en ? e] of becoming [geneseos], having turned wa- tery and fiery and receiving the forms of earth and air as well, and suffering all the other properties that accompany these, assumes every variety of appearance; yet since she is filled with powers that are neither similar nor evenly balanced, none of her is in balance [ouden aut ? es isoroppein]; she sways irregularly in every direction as she herself is shaken by these forms, and as they are set in mo- tion, she in turn shakes them. And as they are moved, they drift continually, in one direction or another, separating from one an- other. Just as grain sifted and winnowed from sieves or other such instruments [organa] used for cleaning grain fall in one place if they are firm and heavy but fly off and settle in another place if they are light. (Plato, Platonis opera, ed. J. Burnet, vol. IV [Oxford: Oxford UP (1902) 1978], 52d4-53a2; our translation)
46. For Plato's use of "instrument," see the immediately preceding citation from Timaeus (52e7).
47. The German reads: "Weil na? mlich dieses Wesen (der anfa? nglichen Natur) nichts anderes ist als der ewige Grund zur Existenz Gottes, so muss es in sich selbst, obwohl verschlossen, das Wesen Gottes gleichsam als einen im Dunkel der Tiefe leuchtenden Lebensblick enthalten. " Here Wesen is of particular difficulty. Our translation gives "being" for the first and "es- sence" for the second use of Wesen in this sentence, thus bringing up a thorny issue. This is because the choice is hardly immediate and re- veals a serious philosophical problem, an ambiguity or, indeed, an am- bivalence that seems to course through the Philosophical Investigations. On the one hand, the ground seems to be a sort of primordial chaos, an unknown and unknowable X from which springs the variety of existence and, above all, the existence of God. But if the ground truly is this dark- ness, then how can God have an identity and not any identity? Schelling's use of Wesen in this sentence implies (at the very least) that there is some identity or essence lying "dormant" in the ground, waiting to escape it into the light. This implication turns against the notion of the ground as a darkness except in so far as it may be obscure to us but clear to God--in other words, is the ground inscrutable in itself or merely due to the limits of human cognitive power? Is God's "uncon- scious" self, a self that emerges into the light or is it indeed anything at all or are both positions somehow correct depending on the point of view one takes and can take?
48. This recalls Plato's famous wax analogy from Theaetetus at 191d2-191e1: SOCRATES: Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argu- ment, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another; in some men rather hard, in others soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency.
THEAETETUS: All right, I'm supposing that.
SOCRATES: We may look on it, then, as the gift of Memory [Mn ?
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 ? 93:
In gravity (? 54 comment) we indeed had to recognize absolute identity according to its essence, yet not as having being, since gravity is in the latter as the ground of its Being. Absolute identity is not in the cohesiveness, but rather gravity (? 92) which in itself does not exist. Absolute identity and actuality emerge in light. Gravity flees into eternal night, and absolute identity partially re- moves the seal under which it is contained, although it is com- pelled to emerge and, as it were, step into the light as the potency [in der Potenz] of A and B, but still as one identical thing. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 386)
c) Explanation to ? 145:
It is explained above that we understand by nature absolute identity first and foremost to the extent absolute identity exists in the form of A and B actu (? 61). Now absolute identity exists as such, however, only in cohesiveness and the light. But since abso- lute identity is ground of its own Being as A3 through cohesiveness and the light, just as it was ground of its own Being as A2 through gravity, and since it is perhaps as A3 once again ground of its own Being (in a yet higher potency [Potenz]), we will be able say in gen- eral: by nature we understand absolute identity to the extent it is considered not as having Being, but as ground of its Being, and we foresee from this that we can call nature all things which lie beyond the absolute Being of absolute identity. (Schelling, Zeitschrift, 426) These hints are by no means clear, and we may do better to examine
the relation between ground and existence further by looking at the Phil- osophical Investigations themselves. From that standpoint, it is impor- tant first of all to reject the many possible binary combinations that may seem to describe the relation such as, for example, that of the infinite to the finite or that of essence to existence or ground to consequence--the latter merely a causal relationship that cannot explain the relation and that carries one back to Schelling's discussion of the relation of God to things.
The relation is rather one of the ground's being a condition or me- dium through which God's existence first comes to light; it is the condi- tion for the appearance of the light. In this sense, the ground is first rec- ognized as such in terms of the existence of God; thus it does not exist independently of God (although it is "different" from him), nor does it exist prior to God, yet its existence is necessary so that God reveal him- self. Hence, the condition of God's existence is itself conditioned, by that existence, and this sort of dialectical relation is a far cry indeed from the other relations mentioned above; it both complies with the basic dogmatic claim of God's eternality, that he must always be, even if that being must also have been before creation, and offers an explana- tion for the emergence of God (i. e. , differentiation) in so far as that emergence is conditional.
Yet, what is the ground? Here Schelling's analogy with gravity is quite useful, for it clarifies the nature both of ground and existence. If ground is likened to gravity in its relation to light, then ground is a necessary force of contraction without which the expansion (of light) would not be possible. The roots of this thinking in Schelling's philosophy of nature are clear in so far as the constitutive relation is dyadic and dynamic; however, the tension between ground and existence is not one of attrac- tion and repulsion but rather of contraction and expansion--the move- ment into the light is one of constant expansion, the movement condi- tioning this movement as its condition of possibilty is one of contraction or self-concealment (here one is reminded of Heraclitus' famous "phusis
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kruptesthai philei" [nature loves to hide/conceal itself]); each movement is defined with and against the other, they function together harmoni- ously, and the whole that emerges out of this movement is not compre- hensible as a whole without it.
But if ground remains a condition in God, it does not necessarily have to do so in man--this is the great difference between God and man; hence, the danger of man, his inner dissonance, lies in the possibility that the ground may subordinate expansion to itself, that contraction may triumph over expansion by perverting it--in short, that the relation reverses itself in favor of the ground wherein the principle of light and expansion is harnessed to the ground, spirit becomes the voice of ground, the universal the mask of the particular. Here the ground ceases being a condition by which existence may become what it is, but seeks to become that for the sake of which existence becomes what it is, it seeks to become absolute.
The difference between the two is fundamental, it is the basis for the dif- ference between good and evil in the Philosophical Investigations, a difference which,asZ? iz? eknotes,inheresinthenatureoftheunitybetweengroundand existence, evil being a unity oriented to the ground's freeing itself from its own conditionality and good being a unity where ground's conditionality is retained and affirmed (Z? iz? ek, The Indivisible Remainder, 63).
33. The first edition has a comma before the "it" ["Er"], which is capitalized in the German, and so does the edition from Buchheim, although the lat- ter notes that a period should likely be set here before the "it. " Having interpreted this unusual capitalization as sign of a printing mistake, we have inserted a period instead of a comma.
34. As noted, this analogy is the principal way that the Presentation of My System deals with the relation of ground to existence. (See Schelling, Zeitschrift, 368-370. )
35. The German reads: "In dem Zirkel, daraus alles wird, ist es kein Wider- spruch, dass das, wodurch das Eine erzeugt wird, selbst wieder von ihm ge- zeugt werde. Es ist hier kein Erstes und kein Letztes, weil alles sich gegen- seitig voraussetzt, keins das andere und doch nicht ohne das andere ist. "
36. We chose to translate the German werden in this and in the preceding sentence literally rather than by a paraphrase like "come into being. " We have done so because we preferred to retain the inherent dynamism of the German even though as English the use of "become" in this way (without a predicate object of becoming) is unnatural.
37. See the excerpt from Boehme in this volume, especially the opening paragraph.
38. The German reads: "Dennoch ist sie ein Willen des Verstandes . . . " We read ein Wille instead of ein Willen and assume the latter is a typograph- ical mistake (found both in the first edition and that of Buchheim). The alternative here would be to read ein Wollen, which is also possible, but not likely given the subsequent repetition of Wille in the same sentence (see the immediately following note below).
39. ein ahndender Wille--we have chosen to translate old ahnden (= ahnen) by the verb "divine," and this may well be a somewhat controversial choice. The verb ahnen means in general "to foresee," "to have a pre- sentiment or foreboding of," or "to suspect. " Gutmann translates the term variously by "prescient" or "anticipating," both of which are ade- quate but slightly inaccurate, since they seem to indicate advance ac- cess to knowledge, which should not yet be available to the yearning in this case (and that is why "to foresee" is also a problem). Hayden-Roy uses "presentient," and "presentiment," which is much closer but carries a sensory element in the adjective that is unwelcome. In their respective translations of The Ages of the World, where the verb is featured in the first sentence, Wirth uses "to intimate" and Norman "to divine," both of which seem to us to be much closer to the mark since they suggest an al- most ineffable inkling of something without necessarily freighting that inkling with a notion of foreknowledge that suggests Platonic anamn ? esis, the recollection of something seen before.
40. Please see the "Translators' Note" regarding our choice to use "anarchy" and "anarchical" to translate regellos and das Regellose here instead of Gutmann's "unruly" and "unruliness. " Once again, we should like to em- phasize that the association of this original "unstate" in the ground with darkness, chaos, disorder, and so on, leads us to believe a much stronger term like "anarchy" is a more appropriate translation.
41. This is a striking statement, and one that supports the interpretation of the ground not as an essence or unactualized quidditas that remains in potentia until some necessarily mysterious triggering moment but as an absence, an inexplicable void.
42. This proverbial expression for those who wrest confusion from clarity is taken from Horace's de arte poetica (at line 143):
quanto rectius hic, qui nil molitur inepte:
"dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes"
non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat, Antiphaten, Scyllamque et cum Cyclope Charybdin.
In prose: How much more correct is he who does not exert himself in- eptly--"Tell me, Muse, of the man who saw the cities and ways of many men after the capture of Troy"--and proposes not to give smoke from a flash of light but light from smoke in order to bring forth the splendid and wondrous tales of Antiphates, Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops.
43. Buchheim suggests that the reference to Fichte here pertains to three treatises Fichte wrote between 1804 and 1806, all of which denigrate na- ture as having being--as being alive--in the same way as the knowing subject. See Die Grundzu? ge des gegenwa? rtigen Zeitalters (1804); U? ber das Wesen des Gelehrten (1805); and Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806)-- to the best of our knowledge, none of these works from Fichte's generally neglected post-Jena period has been translated into English.
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44. This reference to John 12:24 has strong epistemological and theodical overtones. For the former, see J. G. Hamann, Sa? mtliche Werke, ed. J. Nad- ler (Vienna: Herder Verlag, 1949-1957), 2:74. The latter are dealt with most famously by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov where this verse is the epilogue and guiding thread of the very explicitly theo- dical narrative (F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Rich- ard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky [New York: Vintage, 1990], 2).
45. This recalls Plato's Timaeus:
Now the nurse [tith ? en ? e] of becoming [geneseos], having turned wa- tery and fiery and receiving the forms of earth and air as well, and suffering all the other properties that accompany these, assumes every variety of appearance; yet since she is filled with powers that are neither similar nor evenly balanced, none of her is in balance [ouden aut ? es isoroppein]; she sways irregularly in every direction as she herself is shaken by these forms, and as they are set in mo- tion, she in turn shakes them. And as they are moved, they drift continually, in one direction or another, separating from one an- other. Just as grain sifted and winnowed from sieves or other such instruments [organa] used for cleaning grain fall in one place if they are firm and heavy but fly off and settle in another place if they are light. (Plato, Platonis opera, ed. J. Burnet, vol. IV [Oxford: Oxford UP (1902) 1978], 52d4-53a2; our translation)
46. For Plato's use of "instrument," see the immediately preceding citation from Timaeus (52e7).
47. The German reads: "Weil na? mlich dieses Wesen (der anfa? nglichen Natur) nichts anderes ist als der ewige Grund zur Existenz Gottes, so muss es in sich selbst, obwohl verschlossen, das Wesen Gottes gleichsam als einen im Dunkel der Tiefe leuchtenden Lebensblick enthalten. " Here Wesen is of particular difficulty. Our translation gives "being" for the first and "es- sence" for the second use of Wesen in this sentence, thus bringing up a thorny issue. This is because the choice is hardly immediate and re- veals a serious philosophical problem, an ambiguity or, indeed, an am- bivalence that seems to course through the Philosophical Investigations. On the one hand, the ground seems to be a sort of primordial chaos, an unknown and unknowable X from which springs the variety of existence and, above all, the existence of God. But if the ground truly is this dark- ness, then how can God have an identity and not any identity? Schelling's use of Wesen in this sentence implies (at the very least) that there is some identity or essence lying "dormant" in the ground, waiting to escape it into the light. This implication turns against the notion of the ground as a darkness except in so far as it may be obscure to us but clear to God--in other words, is the ground inscrutable in itself or merely due to the limits of human cognitive power? Is God's "uncon- scious" self, a self that emerges into the light or is it indeed anything at all or are both positions somehow correct depending on the point of view one takes and can take?
48. This recalls Plato's famous wax analogy from Theaetetus at 191d2-191e1: SOCRATES: Now I want you to suppose, for the sake of the argu- ment, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another; in some men rather hard, in others soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency.
THEAETETUS: All right, I'm supposing that.
SOCRATES: We may look on it, then, as the gift of Memory [Mn ?
