3,049 words
Part 2 of 15 (Read Part 1 here)
- Freedom, System, and Pantheism
Schelling begins the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (henceforth referred to as the Freiheitsschrift) by challenging the widespread idea that the existence of human freedom is incompatible with “system.” Schelling writes, “According to an old but in no way forgotten legend, the concept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with system, and every philosophy making claim to unity and wholeness should end up with the denial of freedom.”[1]
This language of “system” will seem strange to anyone unacquainted with modern German philosophy. All the Germans from Leibniz to Hegel understood themselves as building “systems of philosophy.” Indeed, the insistence on having “systems” of knowledge is characteristic of modernity, and there was no such talk prior to the modern period.[2] In his lectures on Schelling, Heidegger writes that “The knowing conquest of being as . . . system and the will to system, is not some discovery of idiosyncratic minds, but is the innermost law of existence of this whole age.”[3] And, referring specifically to German idealism, he writes that the quest for “system” is “a battle call and an inmost requirement.”[4] When recent historians of philosophy refer, for example, to the “systems” of Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger understands them to be anachronistically projecting a modern model of philosophy onto pre-modern materials.
Just exactly why this mania for system arises in the modern period is a matter we cannot go into here – however, Heidegger treats it at length elsewhere, and I have discussed his thoughts on the subject in “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Five: The Age of the World Picture.” What constitutes a “system of philosophy” is a complex issue, which cannot detain us for long. Fortunately, Schelling provides us with a clue when he states that systematic philosophy makes a claim to “unity and wholeness.” For Schelling – and also for Hegel, Schelling’s erstwhile friend and one-time follower – philosophy must be a system because existence itself is a system.
For Schelling, the universe is a “whole” or a “one.” Like the organs in a living body, all things in the universe derive their being from their place within the whole, and each is related to every other, such that changes to any one thing affects the others. Schelling adopts the classical Pythagorean idea that philosophy is the love of wisdom, and that wisdom would be knowledge of the whole. For philosophy to achieve its aim it must therefore mirror the “wholeness” and systematicity of the whole – the universe – itself. Heidegger writes “System [for the German idealists] is the structure of beings as a whole. This structure knows itself as absolute knowledge.”[5] (“Absolute knowledge” – absolutes Wissen – is a term Hegel uses interchangeably with “philosophy.”)
As a result, Schelling aspired to create a system of ideas in which each subsidiary element presupposes every other, and all jointly provide a complete picture, in fundamental terms, of everything that is. His inspiration in this ambition, however, was not Kant, nor was it Fichte – both of whom could also be characterized as “systematic philosophers,” though not in the sense just described. Instead, his model was not a German at all, it was the Dutch Jew Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza equated the whole with God, and therefore claimed that all things are immanent within God. By contrast, traditional theology maintained that God is absolutely distinct from nature. Spinoza completely rejects this, arguing that nature (“extension”) and thought are the two primary modes of God’s being.
For the early Schelling and many others, this was a sublime conception. But proponents of orthodoxy accused Spinoza of collapsing the distinction between God and nature, which they took to be a denial of God. Spinozism was therefore equated with atheism. As a consequence of this, and other matters, Spinoza was officially “excommunicated” from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656.[6] More sympathetic critics equated Spinoza’s position with “pantheism,” and Schelling came of age during the notorious Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy) of the late seventeenth century.
The controversy was sparked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s 1785 work On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn (Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn), in which Jacobi reported a private remark made by Gotthold Lessing: “The orthodox concepts of the deity are no longer for me. Hen kai pan, I know no other.” Jacobi was a fervent opponent of Spinozism, but his book resulted in a revival of interest in Spinoza and pantheism, which sharply divided both intellectuals and the literate public. (Heidegger writes, “Jacobi wants to show here that pantheism is really Spinozism, Spinozism is fatalism, and fatalism is atheism.”[7])
Schelling, Hegel, and also Hölderlin were all initially very sympathetic to Spinozism and pantheism, and jointly adopted hen kai pan (“one and all,” i.e., “all is one”) as their collective motto during their time together as schoolmates.[8] In his subsequent philosophical writings, Schelling adopted Spinoza’s equation of the whole with God. But he also abhorred the fact that Spinoza’s “pantheism” (a term which, to be clear, Spinoza never used himself) seemed to entail determinism. For Spinoza, man is a part of nature and exists within the same nexus of causes (conceived mechanistically) as all other beings. His actions, in other words, are caused by forces over which he has no control. There thus seems to be no room for freedom in Spinoza’s universe, if one conceives of human freedom as an uncaused cause.
Baruch Spinoza
The foregoing is the context necessary to understand why Schelling opens the Freiheitsschrift with the problem of “freedom vs. system.” Because of the specter of Spinozism, it was common in Schelling’s time to think that any philosophy that purported to be a rational system would, in order to be fully consistent, have to result in a denial of freedom. Schelling writes, evidently with tongue in cheek, “the terrible truth was declared in this way: all philosophy – absolutely all – that is purely rational is or becomes Spinozism!”[9] Schelling wishes to challenge this idea, and also to rehabilitate the idea of pantheism by liberating it from its association with Spinozist determinism.
Why? Because, Schelling says, “if pantheism denotes nothing more than the doctrine of the immanence of things in God, every rational viewpoint in some sense must be drawn to this doctrine.” Since he is committed to the idea that all things are immanent within God, Schelling himself is powerfully attracted to pantheism. Further, he writes that “so many are brought to this viewpoint [i.e., to pantheism] through the most lively feeling of freedom.” [10] Here, Schelling clearly speaks for himself. He therefore seems to feel a personal imperative to reconcile the idea of the immanence of all things in God with freedom.
But we get a sense that matters will be much more complicated than simply proving the existence of “free will” when Schelling remarks, a little later, that “only one who has tasted freedom can feel the longing to make everything analogous to it, to spread it throughout the whole universe.”[11] Heidegger remarks on this passage,
[Only] the primordial feeling of human freedom allows us to have primordial feeling for the unity of all beings in and in terms of their ground at the same time. . . . Having a feeling for the fact of freedom includes a certain anticipation of the whole of beings, and this preliminary feeling for the whole of beings is determined by an anticipation of human freedom.[12]
Schelling seems to be hinting that the “freedom” his essay will deal with is not simply one human faculty among others, but somehow woven into the very fabric of the universe itself. Just how this is the case will only emerge later in our account.
- Pantheism Become Panentheism
Further, as Heidegger makes clear, Schelling holds that the “primordial feeling of human freedom” requires pantheism.[13] Thus, in Schelling’s view, not only is “system” – as pantheism – compatible with freedom, the only true system must involve freedom. Heidegger summarizes Schelling’s argument for this position as follows:
The unconditioned causality of [God seems to demand the] unconditioned unfreedom of man. But in opposition to this demand stands the feeling of our own [freedom]. However, if our freedom persists as something unconditioned, it stands in opposition to the unconditionedness of [God]. Now if neither [God] nor the fact of our freedom can be removed . . . and if thus this freedom of ours cannot absolutely be against the unconditionedness of [God], what “way out” is left but to realize that man cannot be “next to” [or] “outside of” God, that he cannot be against God but toward him and that he can only be this if he somehow belongs to [God]; that is, he is in [God]. This immanence of things in God, that is, pan-theism, is required by the strife honestly experienced . . . between human freedom and divine omnipotence.[14]
Here is a simplified version of this argument, which involves setting up a dilemma:
[Implicit Premise: There is a God.]
Premise 1: God’s absolute and infinite causality seems to exclude the possibility of
human freedom.
Premise 2: Nevertheless, we have a strong and undeniable feeling of our own freedom.
Premise 3: If our freedom, however, is genuine then it seems to contradict the absolute
power of God – i.e., it seems to be exempt from God’s omnipotence, which would
negate his omnipotence.
Premise 4: This contradiction cannot be resolved by either (a) denying God, or (b)
denying our freedom, or the fact that our freedom seems to stand opposed to the
absolute power of God.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, the only way to overcome the dilemma is by conceiving of man
and his freedom not as external to God, standing opposed to him as an external other,
but as existing inside God.
Conclusion 2: Therefore, pantheism.
The reader may think Schelling naïve for effectively assuming the existence of God – but the entire point of the argument is to transcend the traditional theological conception of God as a divine “thing” existing apart from (and thus in opposition to) man and man’s freedom. The end result is an advance. It is the principle discussed earlier: the claim that the only acceptable idea of God is the whole, and thus that all exists within God. We might also note here that in terms of the vocabulary used today by historians of ideas, Schelling’s position could more accurately be described as panentheism. This term literally means “all in God (-ism)” and was coined precisely to distinguish the theory that all things are immanent within God from the theory that God is all things, or that all things are God (every squirrel, pebble, and blade of grass) which is what “pantheism” usually designates. Nevertheless, we are stuck with Schelling’s choice of terminology.
He goes on to reject several wrongheaded ways of construing pantheism, the details of which need not detain us. The error of Spinoza’s pantheism, Schelling explains, lies “by no means in his placing things in God but in the fact that they are things – in the abstract concept of beings in the world [Weltwesen], indeed of infinite substance itself, which for him is exactly also a thing.”[15] In the foregoing we have spoken loosely of the immanence of things in God, but Schelling is now challenging this conception – and he is expressing a criticism of Spinoza that both he and Hegel stated elsewhere and on more than one occasion. Spinoza treats God’s “wholeness” as if it amounted to conceiving God as a container containing distinct “things,” rather like the way my desk drawer contains an assortment of pencils, pens, and paperclips. And he even treats God (“infinite substance itself”) as a “thing.”
- Will is Primal Being
Heidegger comments, “Schelling wants to show exactly with the example of Spinoza that it is not so much pantheism, nor its theology, but the ‘ontology’ underlying it which entails the danger of fatalism, of the exclusion of freedom and its misunderstanding.”[16] But what would be the ontological alternative to conceiving the “immanence of all things in God” as the “immanence of all things in God”? It is precisely the sort of “organic” conception of the whole described earlier, in which the “things” of our world are shown not to be distinct and indifferently related “things” at all, but organically-related moments, aspects, or expressions of the whole itself – of God, in other words. And God is to be understand not as a static and complete “thing,” but as a life – and thus, like all life, in process and undergoing development. Schelling refers to this as a “dynamic notion of nature.”[17] Schelling’s argument for this organic conception of the whole is developed over the course of the entire essay.
Heidegger comments:
The treatise [states] that the “nature” of things is to be understood as becoming. This anticipates that whose possibility is to be shown. But with this, the concept of thing changes, too. The thinghood of things consists in revealing the nature of God. To be a thing means to present God’s being, which is an eternal becoming, itself as a becoming. Things refer through themselves to primordial being. And this referring-through-themselves is not an act which they perform on top of being things, but being a thing is this referring-through-itself, this transparency. The way a thinker sees “things” depends upon how primordially he comprehends the nature of being.[18]
Schelling attributes Spinoza’s determinism (which he calls “fatalism,” Fatalismus) to his treatment of God as a mere collection of things (so far as God as nature is concerned). For Spinoza, the behavior of the things within God can be entirely accounted for in terms of the actions of other things upon them. This includes human “things,” who therefore have no free will. Schelling writes that Spinoza “treats the will also as a thing and then proves very naturally that it would have to be determined in all its activity through another thing that is in turn determined by another, and so on ad infinitum.”[19]; Schelling is caustic in his criticism of Spinoza, saying that his system consequently exhibits “lifelessness,” “sterility,” a “poverty of concepts,” a “severity of definitions,” an “abstract means of presentation,” and, naturally, a “mechanistic view of nature.”[20]
Schelling challenges Spinoza’s treatment of the will as a mere thing in what is the most famous and oft-quoted passage in the Freiheitsschrift:
In the final and highest judgment, 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. All of philosophy strives only to find this highest expression.[21]
It is really here that Schelling’s metaphysical teaching in the Freiheitsschrift gets underway. And some light has now perhaps been shed on Schelling’s earlier, cryptic statement that “only one who has tasted freedom can feel the longing to . . . spread it throughout the whole universe.” For Schelling, will is not just, as it is for Spinoza, a human faculty, it is “primal being” itself; it is the root of all that exists. Nor is will a “thing.” (As Heidegger comments, will is primal being means “primal being is will.”[22]) Consider your intuitive understanding of will or willing – when, for example, you will (i.e., make a concerted effort) to understand what I am saying, or even something as simple as willing to lift a heavy plate. If you do so, you will find that your understanding of willing irresistibly suggests a “striving.” Striving is not static and “thinglike”; it is a dynamic activity.
Schelling will argue that this striving, this dynamism, is the source of all that exists – including God.
Notes
[1] 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), 9.
[2] Jacob Klein, who was a student of Heidegger, writes that “The Greek word σύστημα [sustēma] means ‘things which stand together or are made to stand together so as to form a whole,’ means in other words ‘a whole compounded of several parts.’” The Greeks applied the word to the human body and various other objects. However, as Klein notes, they do not seem to have applied it to knowledge. However, to quote Klein further, the usage of the word changes in early modernity: “From about the year 1600 on there is a sudden and most remarkable shift: book after book appears under titles like ‘System of Logic,’ ‘System of Rhetoric,’ ‘System of Grammar,’ ‘System of Theology,’ ‘System of Ethics and Politics,’ ‘System of Physics,’ ‘System of Jurisprudence,’ ‘System of Astronomy,’ of Arithmetic, of Geography, of Medicine and even ‘System of Systems.’” See Jacob Klein, “Leibniz, an Introduction,” in Jacob Klein: Lectures and Essays, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’s College, 1985), 201.
[3] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 32. Henceforth, “ST.”
[4] Heidegger, ST, 25.
[5] Heidegger, ST, 63. Heidegger continues, “as a developed jointure and a joined connection, being and the knowledge of being are the same, they belong together.”
[6] In his lectures, delivered about three years into what Germans call “the Hitler period,” Heidegger reassures his young audience that “To avoid a misunderstanding here, we must emphasize that Spinoza’s philosophy cannot be equated with Jewish philosophy. Alone the familiar fact that Spinoza was evicted from the Jewish community is significant. His philosophy is essentially determined by the spirit of the time, Bruno, Descartes, and medieval scholasticism.” Heidegger, ST, 67.
[7] Heidegger, ST, 66.
[8] For Heidegger’s remarks on hen kai pan, see ST, 68.
[9] Schelling, 19.
[10] Schelling, 11.
[11] Schelling, 22.
[12] Heidegger, ST, 68.
[13] See Heidegger, ST, 69.
[14] Heidegger, ST, 71. I have clarified and simplified the passage by omitting some puzzling turns of phrase, including some Latin, and by replacing Heidegger’s use of “primal being” (Urwesen) with “God,” because of the potential for confusion with Schelling’s designation of will as “primal being” (see below).
[15] Schelling, 20. Italics in original.
[16] Heidegger, ST, 72.
[17] Schelling, 20. This conception runs throughout Schelling’s philosophy, and is not unique to the Freiheitsschrift. Indeed, much of the Freiheitsschrift is a highly original repackaging of ideas that can be found in Schelling’s earlier writings – though there is also much here that is quite new.
[18] Heidegger, ST, 123. Compare the 1941 lectures: “Creation here is not a making, but rather a letting-become, an inner letting-‘become’ (and indeed a letting-‘oneself’-become).” Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 104.
[19] Schelling, 20.
[20] Schelling, 20.
[21] Schelling, 21.
[22] Heidegger, ST, 95.
16 comments
And that is–in fact, not in dreams–what has been created. What has been created is what we would create, if we became the creator. What does that say about the creator of such dreams? It says that we are a part of the creator who is willing itself into being right now. That is what Cosmotheism teaches–Kevin Alfred Strom
It was Heidegger’s idol and forerunner Nietzsche who said that we shall never be rid of the gods until we are rid of grammar — that is, we shall never be rid of grammar. It was Heidegger who said that language is the house of being, that language is the master of man; that man does not speak, but language speaks — speaks through man as its chosen conduit. That is, language is a living and self-conscious being that, like a virus become a god, spreads from speaker to speaker until what it wants to say finally stands present in its imperious finality.
It will be at this time that the Creator will spring forth full-blown in his completion; will reveal himself fully to his creatures — one of whom, in the end, had the honor to bring him forth out of his concealment. For the gods, like grammar, are built into the nature and the interstices of things, are latent until they are made manifest.
And what will this complete future be like? Let us let language speak for itself, language which is older than time, and which time worships: the word grammar is the root of the word glamour: a radiant splendor. And radiant beings, who may well descend from us, will stand above time and space, issuing words as commands and creating always-new worlds and new beings. It will be a Universe above all Universes, of pure consciousness, beyond the Nature we know now, a world of pure and instant creation without end.
And some light has now perhaps been shed on Schelling’s earlier, cryptic statement that “only one who has tasted freedom can feel the longing to spread it throughout the whole universe.”
This statement is only cryptic to those who have not experienced this freedom. When you have you will see that it is plain common sense. The will to freedom is the will to create, akin to what Hegel said about Shakespeare’s characters: that they are free artists of themselves. The freedom is the freedom to create ever new worlds, ever new beings, as a god oneself so that creation replicates endlessly.
William Pierce knew that we are made of the same stuff as the Earth and the stars, that we are the expanding consciousness of an evolving Universe, and that your soul is, in a very profound sense, the soul of the Universe itself. If you had to encapsulate William Pierce’s life in a single sentence, it would be: He saw that the purpose of life is the increase of consciousness; he saw that our race was the leading edge and the living agent of that increase in consciousness; and he dedicated his life to the preservation and advancement of our kind. This view of ourselves as agents of evolving Life — and Life itself as an agent of an as-yet dimly seen force immanent in the Earth and in the Cosmos itself is the heart of his philosophy. –Kevin Alfred Strom
[Schelling’s] model was not a German at all, it was the Dutch Jew Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza equated the whole with God, and therefore claimed that all things are immanent within God. By contrast, traditional [Jewish] theology maintained that God is absolutely distinct from nature. Spinoza completely rejects this, arguing that nature (“extension”) and thought are the two primary modes of God’s being.
[P]roponents of orthodoxy accused Spinoza of collapsing the distinction between God and nature, which they took to be a denial of God. Spinozism was therefore equated with atheism. As a consequence of this, and other matters, Spinoza was officially “excommunicated” from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656.[6] More sympathetic critics equated Spinoza’s position with “pantheism,..”
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Thanks for your erudite comments under part 2 of this 15-part series, Mr. Mercer, particularly Kevin Strom’s quote about William Pierce:
Douglas Mercer: September 21, 2024 William Pierce knew that we are made of the same stuff as the Earth and the stars, that we are the expanding consciousness of an evolving Universe, and that your soul is, in a very profound sense, the soul of the Universe itself. If you had to encapsulate William Pierce’s life in a single sentence, it would be: He saw that the purpose of life is the increase of consciousness; he saw that our race was the leading edge and the living agent of that increase in consciousness; and he dedicated his life to the preservation and advancement of our kind. This view of ourselves as agents of evolving Life — and Life itself as an agent of an as-yet dimly seen force immanent in the Earth and in the Cosmos itself is the heart of his philosophy. –Kevin Alfred Strom
You may be aware that William Pierce commented on the Jew Spinoza’s alleged early pantheism 47 years ago, here: “WLP86: William Pierce on Cosmotheism, Wave of the Future” on nationalvanguard.org.
[I]t would be as unnatural and awkward for a Jew to try to set himself up as a Cosmotheist as it would be for a White man to set himself up as a Talmudist and try to debate the rabbis on points of Talmudic doctrine. After all, a Jew, Baruch Spinoza, was one of the foremost expounders of pantheism in the 17th century, at a time when that was hardly a safe or a popular position for anyone to take. He was, in fact, excommunicated by his fellow Jews as a consequence. But because Spinoza was a Jew, he couldn’t help but give a Jewish flavor, a Jewish interpretation, to his pantheism. In particular, the ethical conclusions that he drew from his pantheism were strictly Jewish, and I think it’s only fair to assume that Spinoza had no ulterior motive…
The meaning of the Truth is this: Man, the world, and the Creator are not separate things, but man is a part of the world, which is a part of the Whole, which is the Creator.
The tangible Universe is the material manifestation of the Creator. All the blazing suns of the firmament; the formless gas between the stars; the silent, frozen mountain peaks of the moon; the rustling trees of earthly forests; the teeming creatures of the dark ocean depths; and man are parts of the Creator’s material manifestation.
But the Creator has a spiritual manifestation, which is the Urge toward the One Purpose. The Urge lies at the root of all things and is manifested in the relations between all things.
The Urge is in the tenuous gases of the void, for they have a purpose, which are the flaming suns and all the planets, which form from them. The Urge is in the earth, for it has a purpose, which is the realm of plants and animals which flourish on it. And the Urge is in man, for he has a purpose, which is higher man.
And the purposes of all these things are steps on the Path of Life, which leads to the One Purpose, which is the Self-realization of the Creator: the Self-completion of the Self-created.
And the matter and the spirit, the Universe and the Urge, are One, and it is the Whole.–William Pierce
And the meaning of the second way in which man serves the Creator’s Purpose is this: The evolution of the Whole toward Self-completion is an evolution in spirit as well as in matter. Self-completion, which is Self-realization, is the attainment of perfect Self-consciousness. The Creator’s Urge, which is immanent in the Universe, evolves toward an all-seeing Consciousness.
Man stands between sub-man and higher man, between immanent consciousness and awakened consciousness, between unawareness of his identity and his mission and a state of Divine Consciousness. Some men will cross the threshold, and some will not.
Those who attain Divine Consciousness will ascend the Path of Life toward their Destiny, which is Godhood; which is to say, the Path of Life leads upward through a never-ending succession of states, the next of which is that of higher man, and the ultimate that of the Self-realized Creator. True reason will illuminate the Path for them and give them foresight; it will be a mighty aid to the Creator’s Urge within them.–William Pierce
The solution the old supposed opposition of being vs. becoming is to read being as verb as in “I am being…….” ie, being not as a static state but an active verb like “I am moving……” That is being in eternity will be a state of constant transmogrification, and instant creation. Simple as.
Thank you for this wonderful series of articles. German idealistic philosophy is one of the crown jewels of Western civilization. I am glad that there is excellent and accessible articles about it available in English online.
Thank you very much! More to come…..
Collin Cleary: excellent article. You are circling into the very heart of things. As to the notion of how freedom can exist in a so called deterministic or fatalistic system see Lucretius’ notion of “the swerve” in On The Nature Of Things. Quantum Mechanics also posits that at the smallest levels of nature things behave randomly rather than in a Newtonian billiard ball manner. Man as the self-conscious agent of destiny will realize total freedom as aesthetic freedom and we will become free artists of ourselves. This freedom, as they say, was born in a German Forest and is now sailing forever through the universe (words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip their way their way across the universe–Lennon, 1966), German song accords with this.
The world is in a constant state of evolution, and in the entire history of the Universe (13.4 billion years and counting) not the all the suns, the galaxies, or the planets can hold a candle to the human brain; indeed, it is the human brain which is the point of the Universe in the first place; as far as I can tell, the human brain is a machine for understanding and creating and it has only one flaw; in order for it to work, one has to use it.
The prophet William Pierce wrote in On Living Things (1979) that man is not a spectator to this evolutionary process, but a participant in it. That is, he is an actor on the stage of eternity — and one with agency. And indeed not only is man an agent in the Universe, he is the agent in the Universe, the one and only, the one without whom the Universe cannot achieve its destiny.
This destiny is of course the final disclosure and revelation of the Creator’s purpose, the purpose which is, according to Dr. Pierce, “the self-realization of the Creator, the self-completion of the self-created.” That is, the Creator is using us (we who have Divine Consciousness) to achieve its aim, which is to show itself to us and to thus finally merge itself with us. This is as far as far can be from the notion of a “savior god” that descends from the sky to become incarnate flesh, or emerges from the clouds to save the day in the nick of time. Indeed, in reality the reality is the reverse: That is, the opposite is apposite — in simple terms, the Creator needs us in order to self-actualize. Even closer to the truth is that the relation of ourselves to our Creator is an equally reciprocal one in which the one needs the other as much as the other needs the one; that both are only partial without the working together of both. The final feast of the gods will be a joint effort, a joining of hands in Valhalla.
In order to achieve this perfect state of reality, to complete the purpose of the Creator, we must become activated. To do this is to learn how the Creator operates, and what the plan is for the world. That is, we need to listen to what it is saying; and, to do that, we need to listen to the Creator speak, for when we speak or write we do not speak or write but it speaks, and one day it will speak for itself (res ipsa loquitur) when the god comes out of a machine.
Holy spirits, you walk up there
in the light, on soft earth.
Shining god-like breezes
touch upon you gently,
as a woman’s fingers
play music on holy strings.
Like sleeping infants the gods
breathe with plan and purpose;
the spirit flowers
continually within them,
chastely cherished,
as in a small bud,
and their holy eyes
look out in still
eternal clearness.
Douglas, I appreciate your enthusiasm but your posts have little or nothing to do with my article. I am trying to make sense out of two great thinkers – Schelling and Hegel – while you insist on trying to understand them in terms of the ideas of people like Kevin Alfred Strom and William Pierce. These are interesting figures, but no one ever accused them of being great thinkers. My suggestion would be that you try to understand specifically what Schelling and Heidegger are doing. These philosophers are difficult, they defy our expectations, and they need to be understood on their own terms, before trying to relate them to other authors. And the fit you propose is not a good one – neither is a “cosmotheist.” It’s great that you want to comment, and I appreciate it – but I’d prefer that you commented on the specific content of my articles. It would also be good if you would try to confine your posts to one or two, rather than posting multiple times.
Both Nietzsche and Heidegger said they wanted successors not acolytes and the latter spoke of one who some day or other might finally make the mad dash into thinking. Pierce and Strom are indeed great thinkers, the ones who have put German Idealism finally on a solid footing, without the baggage of circumlocution and vague and ponderous formulations. Before his death Heidegger worried that the world might not have a “prophetic future” but he need not have—it is here. As for you and your suggestions I will let the dead bury the dead.
Collin Cleary: September 23, 2024 Douglas, I appreciate your enthusiasm but your posts have little or nothing to do with my article. I am trying to make sense out of two great thinkers – Schelling and Hegel… interesting figures, but no one ever accused them of being great thinkers.… [N]either is a “cosmotheist.”
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I appreciate Mr. Mercer’s enthusiasm also, as well as your article, and look forward to what else you have to offer in this series. Douglas is a Cosmotheist thinker (no need for lower case with scare quotes), follower of great thinker William Pierce’s teachings and a 21st century race-realist. Hopefully he’ll follow your suggestion to consolidate his comments.
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