Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 3

3,695 words

A young Martin Heidegger.

Part 3 of 15 (Part 1 here. Part 2 here.)

Self-Affirmation as Being

We have seen that Schelling claims “there is no being other than will. Will is primal being [Ursein] to which alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence from time, self-affirmation.” We must now look more closely at these “predicates of being.” Three of the four are traditional metaphysical conceptions of being, dating back to Parmenides (fl. 475 BC). The fourth is peculiar, as we shall see, but Schelling claims that all four apply to the will.

To say that will is “groundless” means that it has no foundation: it rests upon nothing, in the sense that it is not caused by anything else. Will is bedrock. Will is “eternal” because it has no beginning in time and will have no end. Sometimes “eternity” (Ewigkeit) is equated with “independence from time” (Unabhängigkeit von der Zeit) but here Schelling clearly distinguishes them. By “independence from time,” Schelling probably means that will does not change. Heidegger writes, “‘Independence from time’ means: that which is as such is not torn along in the flow of succession; rather, that which is as such remains untouched by such changes.”[1]

This leaves us with the fourth predicate, “self-affirmation” (Selbstbejahung). At first glance, this certainly does not appear to be one of the traditional predicates of being. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle say nothing about it. It is really necessary to look to modern philosophy to find the source of Schelling’s claim that self-affirmation is a predicate of being. Schelling’s immediate source for this idea is Fichte. For Fichte, the self-affirming “I” is the being of beings, because all beings derive their being from their relationship to subjectivity. The “I” affirms itself in its ceaseless striving to remake the things of the world according to its own ends. The “I,” Fichte continually reminds us, furthermore, is an act, not a thing. There are thus some immediately obvious parallels between the Fichtean “I” and Schelling’s will. (See my series of essays on Fichte – eight in total – beginning with “Fichte’s Faustian Modernism: An Introduction.”)

However, the idea of will as “primal being,” an eternal striving that forms the basis of existence itself, is also to be found in Jacob Boehme, who, as we discussed in the first installment, is the major influence on the Freiheitsschrift both in its ideas and in its vocabulary. There is thus a remarkable coincidence of ideas between these two modern thinkers – Boehme and Fichte. I do not know of any evidence that Fichte read Boehme. His ideas seem to be entirely a development of Kant’s, with the self-affirming “I” essentially constituting a radicalization of Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception” (see “Fichte as Avatar of the Metaphysics of Presence”).

Echoes of these ideas are also to be found in other philosophers. For Leibniz, being or substance just is the mind in its act of perceiving. Further, Leibniz understands this perceiving as inherently appetitive; it is a striving for power. Heidegger writes, comparing Leibniz’s position to Schelling’s, “Representing and striving (willing) are the fundamental ways of the being of beings.”[2] Thus, for Leibniz, being = perceptio + appetitus (voluntas). Or, being is the unity of perception and will.[3] (For an extensive discussion, see “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Six: G. W. Leibniz’s Will-to-Power.”) Or consider Descartes. His quest for an absolutely certain foundation for all human knowledge results in the discovery of the self-affirming “I”: cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. “‘I am, I exist,’” Descartes says, “is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind.”[4]

As Michael Allen Gillespie points out in his extremely useful commentary Nihilism Before Nietzsche,

“I am, I exist” is not logically true but necessarily true whenever it is asserted, i.e., willed, to be true by the thinker. Thus, “Descartes’ fundamental principle is the will’s judgment and affirmation of itself as necessary and indubitable; it is, in other words, the will’s self-grounding act, its self-creation.”[5]

This principle is the Archimedean point from which Descartes rescues the existence of the universe from hyperbolical doubt, and from which he attempts to prove the existence of God. Note the priority here of self to God: first certainty of the self, then knowledge of God. With Descartes, the subject thus becomes final authority for all truth and all Being, even that of God. This is why Heidegger can say elsewhere that in modern philosophy man “becomes that being upon which every being, in its way of being and its truth, is founded. Man becomes the referential center of beings as such.”[6] (For a fuller discussion, see “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Four: The Cartesian Destruction of Being.”)

Heidegger traces a direct line from Descartes’s self-affirming “I think” – which, please note, is an act and not a thing[7]– to Leibniz’s appetitive, willful monads, to the “I think” of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, to Fichte’s self-affirming Absolute Ego, to the self-affirmation of Schelling’s will as “primal being,” to Hegel’s substance become subject, and to the radical self-affirmation of Nietzsche’s “will to power.”[8]

But this “centrality of subjectivity” and of “will” does not emerge out of nowhere in the modern period. We can trace it to the centrality of divine subjectivity that dominates medieval philosophy. And before this to Aristotle’s God, the highest of all beings, who is not a thing but an eternal act of self-awareness, and thus, in Schelling’s terms, engaged in a kind of self-affirmation. (For more information, see “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part One: Platonism.”) The sea change of modernity does not consist in making subjectivity absolute, but in making human subjectivity absolute, and in a “humanism” that transfers to man the characteristics of God. It has become a cliché to say that in the modern period man makes himself into God, but like all clichés it is also true. We will have much more to say about this when we turn to Schelling’s conception of evil and the use Heidegger makes of it.

Portret van Réné Descartes. Frans Hals

So now we can see that it is quite understandable that Schelling would include “self-affirmation” as one of the traditional predicates of being – along with groundlessness, eternality, and independence from time. Of course, these are also the traditional characteristics of God. And so, we must ask, does Schelling claim that will is God? No, he does not. (Though we might consider, much later, whether he has unwittingly turned will into God.) This may seem extremely puzzling, and we might demand to know, “How can will not be God if will is groundless, if it has no cause? If will is not God, then, if Schelling believes in God (and he does) surely he must hold that will has its origin or cause in God.” As extraordinary as it may seem, Schelling will argue that God requires a ground, and that the ground of God is will – a “primal being” more primal even than the divine.

Freedom as the Capacity for Good and Evil

Is this primal will the same thing as human “free will”? No, it is not. Indeed, we will find that in an important sense the primal will is not free at all, because it lacks self-awareness. Humanity and human freedom develop later in Schelling’s system. Human freedom is actually constituted by a capacity to choose between the primal will just mentioned, and a very different sort of will, which we shall encounter later. Schelling does indeed affirm free will, though, as we have seen, he holds that it is possible only if man and his freedom are immanent within God. Otherwise, if man is “outside” God, his freedom would be illusory, as it would “limit” the divine omnipotence, which cannot be limited.

However, Schelling’s conception of human freedom is radically new. Earlier philosophers had often conceived freedom as an “uncaused cause.” In other words, freedom is our capacity to act as a cause in the universe, a capacity that does not itself have a prior ground or cause. Freedom thus seems to be an exception to the principle that all things have a cause. But to reject the idea that freedom has any sort of ground or cause includes a rejection of the idea that my free choices can even have reasons. For example, suppose I say that I chose to eat the salad rather than the candy bar because I am committed to the idea of healthy eating. My reasons in this case clearly determined my choice. The implication of this is that a truly free action would have to be, in essence, arbitrary. Schelling thus describes this conception of freedom as merely “a prerogative to act entirely irrationally,” and implies that this would in truth be inhuman.[9]

Heidegger comments:

If freedom means man’s complete indeterminacy, neither for good nor for evil, then freedom is conceived merely negatively, as mere indecisiveness, behind which and before which stands nothing. This in-decisiveness thus remains nugatory, a freedom which is anything else but a ground of determination; it is complete indeterminacy which can never get beyond itself. This concept of freedom is again a negative one, only in another respect, familiar in the history of thought as the libertas indiffirentiae [.] . . . Freedom as mere indecisiveness is neither freedom for the good nor freedom for evil. It is not freedom for something at all, it is also not freedom from something.[10]

To this wrongheaded concept of freedom, Schelling opposes something truly original: “the real and vital concept is that freedom is the capacity for good and evil.”[11] Note his choice of words here: Schelling does not speak of “good or evil” but of “good and evil.” We know that evil exists; that men frequently choose evil. But we usually think of evil as an aberration that does not have to be. Men could choose otherwise; indeed they could choose to not do evil at all. By contrast, Schelling will argue that evil is a necessary part of existence itself. Men have a capacity for good and evil and they will bring about both, of necessity. And yet, Schelling will maintain, the choice to do each is free.

So far so good, it seems, but Schelling has created a major problem for himself by insisting that man and his freedom exist inside God; that God comprises or contains them. For if man’s freedom is the capacity for good and evil, then evil would seem to be a part of the being of God! Schelling now presents us with another dilemma, which constitutes his system’s “problem of evil”:

1. If everything is immanent within God, and we admit that evil is real, then evil is a part of God, which destroys the idea of God as a perfect being.

or . . .

2. If we deny the reality of evil, then what Schelling regards as the only true concept of freedom – the capacity for good and evil – is destroyed.

In short, if evil is real then God is not God; if evil is not real, then we are not free. One way around this problem is to embrace dualism and to posit a source of evil independent of God – an evil being, a Satan figure. But Schelling dispenses with this idea very quickly. An evil being acting independently of God would limit God’s power and his goodness. Such a possibility generates the classical problem of evil: if God cannot stop evil then he is not omnipotent; if he can stop evil but chooses not to, then it appears he is not good. So, any sort of dualism of a good God and a Satan figure is rejected by Schelling.

Ground and Existence

His solution to this problem is extraordinarily bold and, at first glance, just a bit mad. Schelling will argue that evil is, indeed, inside God, yet it is not a part of God. To offer an analogy of my own, the child carried by a pregnant woman is inside her, but not literally a “part” of her; it is a genetically distinct being. Or, perhaps a more apt analogy would be this one: the cancerous tumor in a man’s body is inside him, but not a part of him, in the proper sense of “part” that we use to refer to his heart, kidneys, liver, etc.

Schelling establishes this position argumentatively by making a fundamental distinction between “being [Wesen] in so far as it exists [existiert] and being in so far as it is merely the ground of existence [Grund von Existenz].”[12] This distinction is crucially important for the Freiheitsschrift, though Schelling employs it in his earlier writings on the philosophy of nature. Here, he simply presupposes the distinction and barely explains it, so we have to work a bit to tease out the meaning.

First of all, note that in the quote above Schelling twice uses “being,” which translates the German Wesen. Wesen, depending upon the context, is often translated as “essence,” however it can also mean “being” in the basic sense of something that is; e.g., “a living being,” to use Heidegger’s helpful example. “In every being of this kind,” Heidegger writes, “we must distinguish its ‘ground’ and its ‘existence.’” “Ground” means exactly what it sounds like: basis, foundation, or “substratum.” Schelling does not mean “ground” in the sense of a reason or rational justification, as in “grounds for divorce.” In fact, Heidegger points out that “ground,” for Schelling, means “precisely the nonrational.”[13] Just why this is the case will emerge shortly. To sum up: quite simply, the ground of a being is its basis, which makes possible its existing.

In explaining Schelling’s concept of “existence,” Heidegger very helpfully draws our attention to the word’s etymology: “Schelling uses the word existence in a sense which is closer to the literal etymological sense than the usual long prevalent meaning of ‘existing’ as objective presence. Ex-sistence, what emerges from itself and in emerging reveals itself.”[14] Typically, when we say that something “exists” we mean that it is “really there” or “out there in the world,” or, to use Heidegger’s language, “objectively present” – as opposed to not being “out there.” Termites exist – they really are “out there”; whereas gremlins (so far as we know) do not exist, and thus are not “out there.”

Heidegger is saying that Schelling uses “existence” in a different sense, one that draws on its literal meaning. Etymologically, “existence” (which is derived from Latin) comes from ex, meaning “out,” plus sistere, meaning “to set” or “to place,” and ultimately derived from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to stand.” Thus, “to exist” literally means “to stand out”; to ex-sist (hence Heidegger’s hyphenated creation “ex-sistence”). Stand out from what? From a ground. Every being has a ground, a basis for its being a being, and every being emerges from that ground or stands out from it: it ex-sists.

This can be the case in multiple senses. The ground of the butterfly is the caterpillar. When the butterfly emerges from its cocoon, then, to use Heidegger’s pregnant language, it “emerges from itself and in emerging reveals itself”; it ex-sists. Or, let’s take a much simpler example, drawing on the familiar “figure-ground” distinction. In our perceptual experience, all objects stand out from a ground – as when a man we did not know was present suddenly emerges from the shadows, or when we finally notice Waldo amidst dozens of other figures. In his 1936 lectures, Heidegger refers to the distinction of ground and existence as the “jointure of Being” (Seynsfüge). Schelling’s construal of “existence” is actually quite close to Heidegger’s phenomenological account of being.[15]

Everything that exists must have a ground from which it emerges, comes to be, or stands out – and Schelling claims that God is no exception. Recall, however, that Schelling has affirmed that all things are immanent within God. This would mean, then, that God must have his ground within himself. Schelling notes that many philosophers and theologians have made just this claim. They have claimed that God is “self-grounding”; i.e., he is his own ground or has his ground within himself. However, like so many of the assertions made by theologians, they have put this forward as a “mere concept” and have not succeeded in making it into “something real [reel] and actual [wirklich].”[16]

What the theologians have missed, according to Schelling, is that the ground of a being obviously must be distinct from the being itself – as the shadows from which a man emerges into the light are clearly distinct from the man, and the mother is obviously distinct from the child that will emerge from her womb. Applying this principle to God, we must therefore reckon with the fact that God’s ground must be (a) contained within him, yet (b) fundamentally distinct from him. The orthodox theologians are indeed on the right track when they speak loosely of God having his ground within himself. But Schelling understands this literally: the ground of God is not God – it is something distinct from God – yet God nevertheless contains this ground. Heidegger summarizes this point as follows: “The ground in God is that which God as himself is not and which still is not outside of him.”[17]

Though Schelling understands this containment as literal, it is very important not to take his words in a literal-minded way. There is no physical containment implied here. The ground, as we will see, is not a physical object, and though the fullest expression of God’s “existence” (his standing out from the ground) involves the coming into being of a physical universe within him (within “the whole”) God is nevertheless something over and above this physical expression and is not reducible to it – just as my identity cannot be correctly understood simply as a collection of organs.

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Summoning the Gods here.

Thus far, we have established the ground-existence distinction and shown that it applies to God just as to anything else. The difference between God and other things, again, is that God contains his ground within himself (though one must constantly bear in mind that it is not him or a “part” of him). But we introduced these ideas when we were discussing the problem that evil poses for Schelling’s system. What does the ground-existence distinction have to do with evil? Recall that our problem was that if evil is real then God, since he is the whole, must contain evil within himself. But if that is the case, wouldn’t that negate God’s absolute goodness? The reader may already have made the necessary inferences: the ground within God is none other than the self-affirming “primal will” spoken of earlier. Furthermore, this will, when it expresses itself in a certain manner, is the source of all evil.

Thus, evil really is contained within God. Nevertheless, this does not make God evil since the evil emerges from the ground of God which, as we have seen, is distinct from him. However, though Schelling seems to have evaded a certain form of the “problem of evil,” he may well have created other problems with this strange conception. Granted that the ground is not God, God nevertheless emerges from this ground – in a manner we will shortly discuss – and the ground is also the source of evil. It thus seems, on the surface at least, highly problematic that God and evil have the same source.

And there is a further problem. Recall Schelling’s statement that will is “primal being” and that in “the final and highest judgment, there is no being other than will.” What Schelling means by this, essentially, is that will is the source of all else. This includes God, and the universe of beings that comes to be within God. The will is ground of both of these. But if the will is also the source of evil (note that I am not identifying it with evil), then it seems that our universe is somehow implicated in evil. Shades of Gnosticism, and the theory that the world comes to be as a result of evil: an evil creator, or demiurge. It will become clear how Schelling answers these problems as we proceed.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 68. Henceforth, “MGI.”

[2] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 95. Henceforth, “ST.”

[3] See Heidegger, MGI, 68-69. Heidegger discusses this point in other texts. See, for example, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 37.

[4] Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 18.

[5] Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46.

[6] Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 66.

[7] Descartes does treat mind as substance – as “unextended [i.e., immaterial] substance.” Thus, he treats mind as thinglike, and as a container that contains our thinking, doubting, willing, desiring, etc. But mind and its thinking are distinct. Mind may be a thing, but thinking is an act. The foundation of Descartes’s philosophy is not mind, it is the self-affirming act of thinking “I am, I exist.”

[8] This genealogy is a major preoccupation of Heidegger’s “history of metaphysics.” A brief precis occurs in the 1941 Schelling lectures. See Heidegger, MGI, 64.

[9] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 48.

[10] Heidegger, ST, 102.

[11] Schelling, 23.

[12] Schelling, 27.

[13] Heidegger, ST, 107.

[14] Heidegger, ST, 107. Italics in original.

[15] It is, indeed, remarkably close to Heidegger’s discussion of phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics. There, he argues that the early Greeks understood Being as phusis (φύσις), a word that is normally (though, for Heidegger, questionably) translated as “nature”: “Now what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance – in short, the emerging-abiding sway. . . . Phusis is the event of standing forth. Arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.” Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 15-16.

[16] Schelling, 27.

[17] Heidegger, ST, 111. Italics in original.