Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 4

3,805 words

Part 4 of 15 (Part 1 begins here)

The Internal Differentiation of God

Schelling now throws us another curve, and it is a major one. All this time we have been speaking of the “immanence” of all things within God. But now Schelling tells us that “the concept of immanence is to be set aside completely insofar as thereby a dead containment of things in God is supposed to be expressed. We recognize rather that the concept of becoming is the only one appropriate to the nature of things.”[1]

This is an example of what we could call Schelling’s “spiral” approach: throughout the Freiheitsschrift, he keeps returning, over and over again, to certain points and expanding upon and clarifying them. Each such return is an advance. In many cases, what seems at first utterly opaque becomes much clearer later on. For this reason, objections need to be held in abeyance until we see what Schelling has in store for us. This spiral approach could also be described as dialectical: the concept of immanence has served us well – but only up to a point. Now it must be set aside in favor of a more adequate way of expressing things.

But if we jettison “immanence” in favor of “becoming” how does this change the picture we have been given thus far? The answer is that things are not simply “contained” within God, they “grow” within him. In part two, we spoke of Schelling’s concept of the whole as “organic.” However, when we referred to this idea before, we used it to mean that things in the universe are not distinct and indifferently related “things” at all, but organically related moments, aspects, or expressions of the whole itself. Now we must take this organic conception a step further. To truly understand God as an organism, and the universe as somehow “within” God, we must understand the universe as coming to be in God through a process of growth or organic self-differentiation.

To comprehend what is meant by this latter term, consider the growth of the human embryo. It begins as a single cell, the fertilized egg, and then rapidly begins dividing – two cells, then four, then eight, etc. After roughly three weeks, it develops into a sphere consisting of sixty cells called a blastula. The blastula folds in on itself and develops three basic structures, the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm. Out of the ectoderm will develop the body’s outer covering, the epidermis, as well as the brain and nervous system. The mesoderm develops into the muscles, bones, respiratory system, and circulatory system. Finally, the endoderm develops into the digestive system, as well as the lining of the respiratory system and alimentary canal. What begins as a single cell internally differentiates itself into a human body with all of its organs.

Schelling seems to hold that nature “grows” within God through a similar pattern of differentiation or articulation that is entirely self-driven. Nature is thus the “self-specification” of God – a concept one also finds in Schelling’s earlier philosophy, and in the philosophy of Hegel. Schelling therefore insists that while nature grows or becomes within God, it is not God – thus, he rejects one of the most widely held understandings of pantheism, that God is “all things” or that “all things” are God (each and every).

To stick with the embryonic analogy just a bit longer, when I look back at my own development, I can certainly say that in my mother’s womb my organs grew as part of a process of self-specification. And yet, as I said near the end of the last installment, my identity cannot be correctly understood simply as a collection of organs. These organs are mine, they are a part of my being, and yet, at the same time, they are not me. I am not my heart; my heart is not me. It is within me, a part of me. Ditto my lungs, spleen, kidneys, etc. The distinctness of things from God is rooted in the fact that they have their ground in the will. Recall that God has his ground in the will also, but that the will is distinct from God, though nevertheless contained within him. Thus, the natural world is within God, and comes to be within God, but flows from a source that is not God.

Jacob Boehme

Nevertheless, Schelling makes a point of telling us that the “becoming” of God, as well as the “becoming” of nature within God does not take place in time. Thus the “process” he will speak of is not a serial process in time (first this, then this, then this other thing . . .), but, as it were, an “eternal process” – the nature of which we will explore shortly. Because of the limitations of language and, really, because of the limitations of our minds, Schelling must resort to the figurative use of temporal language to expound his ideas. In this procedure, Schelling is following the example of Jacob Boehme, who famously said of his doctrine of the seven “source spirits” (Quellgeister) which articulates the coming-into-being of God, “I must set them [i.e., the source spirits] down one after the other in a creaturely [kreatürlicher] way and manner, otherwise you would not understand it.”[2]

Speaking of the priority of the ground to God’s existence, Schelling writes:

As far as this precedence is concerned, it is to be thought neither as precedence according to time nor as priority of being. In the circle out of which everything becomes, it is no contradiction that that through which the One [i.e., God] is generated may itself be in turn begotten by it. . . . God has in himself an inner ground of his existence that in this respect precedes him in existence; but, precisely in this way, God is again the prius [what is before] of the ground in so far as the ground, even as such, could not exist if God did not exist in actu [in actuality].[3]

In other words, the precedence or priority Schelling speaks of is not temporal priority, but a kind of logical priority. God’s existence logically presupposes a ground (see the explanation of these concepts given earlier). Thus, we could say that the ground is “prior.” But in this passage Schelling is saying that one could equally well say that God is “prior” to the ground, in that God’s actuality is that for the sake of which the ground is at all. We are thus left with an impression of circularity, which Schelling makes explicit. On a circle, each point is both prior and posterior to every other; each is “beginning” and each is “end.” Schelling draws the metaphor of circularity, once again, from Boehme, who says of his “source spirits,”

These seven births in all are none of them the first, second, third, and last; but they are all seven each the first, second, third, fourth, and last. . . . But the Godhead [Gottheit] is a wheel with seven wheels made in one another, wherein one sees neither beginning nor end.[4]

These ideas are baffling and frustrating: Schelling dangles in front of us the very interesting concept of the becoming of God and the becoming of all things within God – then insists that we not think of this becoming as taking time! The reader is encouraged to set this problem aside for a moment and simply to live with Schelling’s figurative use of temporal language; to come to understand what he is saying first as if it really were a becoming in time.

The Yearning to Be

Schelling now characterizes the ground, or the will, more fully. Recall that this will is “primal being,” which has all the usual predicates philosophers have assigned to being in the past: groundlessness, eternality, independence from time, and self-affirmation. Schelling then tells us that this will, this ground, is “the yearning [Sehnsucht] the eternal One [i.e., God] feels to give birth to itself. . . . The yearning wants to give birth to God, that is, unfathomable unity, but in this respect there is not yet unity in the yearning itself.”[5]

The primal being, the basis of all that is, even God, is a yearning to be, a yearning to give birth to itself. And so now we finally understand what Schelling meant when he stated that the will is characterized by “self-affirmation.” He tells us, however, that this ground is “will in which there is no understanding and, for that reason, also not independent and complete will, since the understanding is really the will in will.”[6] This is a strange statement, but two things in it are clear. First, the will of the ground lacks understanding. This will to self-revelation or self-affirmation is an unconscious will; it yearns, but does not know that it yearns, or what it yearns for. Second, precisely because of this, the will of the ground is “not independent or complete will.”

What is implied here is that there is, or can be, a contrasting will that is independent and complete. In fact, Schelling will introduce a distinction between the “will of the ground,” and the “will of understanding.” It would seem that the distinction here is that the latter possesses awareness or comprehension, whereas the former lacks it – and that the latter is therefore independent and complete. This is correct, but Schelling’s use of the term “understanding” – in German, Verstand – is broader than this, and quite unusual.

On the one hand, Schelling’s use of Verstand does suggest the familiar sense of understanding as comprehension or awareness. However, Schelling also uses Verstand to communicate ex-sistence (to borrow Heidegger’s rendering) in the fullest sense. Recall that for Schelling “existence” means standing forth from a ground. Existence is therefore expression, or a “making real.” In the fullest sense, however, existence must be self-confrontation. A being that stands forth from out of a ground has achieved existence. But if, in addition to this, it understands itself as having done so – if it understands from whence it came and whither it is going – then its existence achieves a kind of perfection or completion. It even comprehends itself, and thus its existence achieves a sort of closure.

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Here we may also employ the image of circularity: the being of true understanding and true existence is one that follows a trajectory of comprehension that comes to circle back upon itself, understanding even the basis of its own existence and understanding its own understanding. It is like the alchemical Ouroboros: the snake that curls around and bites its own tail. This idea of perfected existence as entailing self-comprehension is basic to the idealism of both Schelling and Hegel. Going forward, Schelling will thus refer to “understanding” and “existence” interchangeably. Heidegger writes:

[Existence] is understood beforehand as “emergence-from-self” revealing oneself and in becoming revealed to oneself coming to oneself, and because of this occurrence “being” with itself and thus in itself, “being” itself. God as existence, that is, the existing god is this god who is in himself historical [i.e., developmental; having a history]. For Schelling, existence always means a being insofar as it is aware of itself . . . . Only that, however, can be aware of itself which has gone out of itself and in a certain way is always outside of itself. Only what has gone out of itself and what takes upon itself being outside of itself and is thus a being aware of itself has, so to speak, “absolved” the inner history of its being and is accordingly absolute.[7]

Schelling writes that the will of the ground is “not a conscious but a divining will [ahnender Wille] whose divining is the understanding.”[8] In German, “to divine” is ahnen. It is sometimes translated as “foreseeing” but as the translators of the Freiheitsschrift note, this would imply knowledge, which is precisely what the will of the ground lacks. A better translation might be “foreboding will.”[9] What does the will forbode? Answer: the understanding. This primal yearning is a yearning to be, to give birth to itself, that yearns for the perfected existence of understanding. The unconscious will of the ground thus contains within it a glimmer or germ of understanding, in that it dimly portends true understanding.

Schelling writes that “After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order, and form.” By “eternal act of self-revelation” he is referring to the coming into being of God and the universe, through the will of understanding – a process Schelling is here merely foreshadowing and has not yet discussed. What is revealed in this self-revelation is a cosmos (κόσμος), which in Greek carried the sense of “lawful order”: in other words, a world possessing “rule, order, and form.” However, Schelling goes on to say that “anarchy [das Regellose] still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if anarchy had been brought to order.”[10]

The Incomprehensible Base of Reality in Things

We now see that Schelling has elaborated on the distinction between ground and understanding/existence in a surprising way. Through “understanding” – in the very special sense of the word we have just discussed – emerges “rule, order, and form.” By contrast, the ground is associated with “anarchy” (das Regellose literally means “the rule-less”). Later in the text, Schelling will employ the Greek term chaos (χάος) when referring to the ground. Chaos, it is important to note, is a term whose connotation has changed over time. For us, “the chaotic” means a kind of disordered busy-ness (its connotation in English from the seventeenth century till today). However, the original Greek meant something different. It was the gaping void or abyss, mentioned by Hesiod and others, which preceded the creation of the universe.

Traditionally, χάος has been derived by philologists from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰeh₁y- meaning “to yawn or gape.” Cognates include Proto-Germanic *gīnaną. Ginnungagap, it is claimed by some, is derived from this same root. Ginnungagap, as many of my readers know, is the Norse equivalent of the Greek mythological chaos: the magically charged void from which the rest of the universe, via a circuitous route, is ultimately derived. Now, Schelling was certainly aware of the Greek meaning of chaos. He had a very strong interest in mythology, and spent a great deal of time late in his career developing a “Philosophy of Mythology.” The parallels between Schelling’s own account (which, once again, closely follows Boehme’s ideas) and the Greek cosmogony did not escape him. Thus, the ground of which he speaks is rule-less not in the sense of being a blooming, buzzing confusion, but in the sense of being void or abyss.

Just as in the Greek and Norse accounts, however, this void is not sheer nothingness. Instead, for Schelling, it is charged with a kind of primal potency: the will to existence/understanding. Let us recall once again the words quoted earlier: “anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if anarchy had been brought to order.” Just as in the Greek mythological account, chaos precedes cosmos (order). But this chaos remains as a power which can still “break through (durchbrechen)” once order is established. Mythologically, this eternal force of chaos is represented in the Greek system by the Titans, and in the Norse system by the giants (the etins and thurses). In Schelling’s system, it is identical with what he understands to be “evil” (Böse), as we will discuss in detail later on.

I have noted already that Schelling proceeds in a “spiral” fashion, circling back to key points and elaborating upon them. In the pages that follow, he will either state outright, or at least suggest, that the ground is associated with chaos, individuality or particularity, darkness, difference, multiplicity, evil, hate, and what we might call the fleshly or creaturely. By contrast, understanding is associated with order, universality, light, identity, unity, good, love, and the ideal. We should also take note that in a somewhat later work (“The Ages of the World,” Die Weltalter, 1811-1815) Schelling characterizes the ground as “contraction” and understanding as “expansion.” This is a very helpful addition to the terminology in the Freiheitsschrift.

Immediately after Schelling’s comment on the “anarchy” of the ground, there occur some of the most famous and oft-quoted lines in the entire treatise:

This [the anarchy of the ground] is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground. The understanding is born in the genuine sense from that which is without understanding. Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance.[11]

What is Schelling saying here? Recall that the ground is an inchoate will to give birth to itself. He has described it as “primal being” (Ursein), hence his claim just now that it is the “base of reality in things.” We have seen that the will of the ground is largely unconscious, possessing only a “foreboding” of understanding, which it dimly yearns for. This base of reality is, furthermore, “incomprehensible.” Love and Schmidt are not wrong to translate Schelling’s word unergreiflich as “incomprehensible.” However, it is important to bear in mind that this word can also mean “intangible,” and can also be translated, very literally, as “ungraspable.” The will of the ground is ungraspable to itself – and also to us.

The second sentence of the quotation makes clear what we already knew was coming: Schelling will argue that the understanding and its “independent and complete” will are to be born from the dark will of the ground. Light is born from darkness. But this does not mean that the darkness is cancelled, or that it ceases to exist. No, Schelling tells us that the dark will of the ground “cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground.” And he is telling us that the eternal, ineradicable existence of this dark will is ultimately, for us, an impenetrable mystery.

Even with “the greatest exertion,” on our part as those who strive to know, who strive to bring all things into the light, the will of the ground remains fundamentally unintelligible. Schelling calls it “the indivisible remainder,” der nie aufgehende Rest. Aufgehen is a word with multiple meanings. It can mean “to rise,” “to open,” and “to come undone.” All of these are plausible translations here. Love and Schmidt have translated nie (never) aufgehende as “indivisible” because they perceive, correctly, that Schelling’s intention is to convey that the “remainder” (Rest) cannot be analyzed (from Greek ἀνάλυσις, “breaking up” or “dividing”) or understood rationally.[12]

We could translate the phrase der nie aufgehende Rest with barbarous, Heideggerean literalness as “the never rising [to the light] remainder,” or “the never opening [to our inquiry] remainder,” or even “the never coming undone [under analysis] remainder.” The key idea here is simply this: the “remainder” is precisely what is left over when reason sets about trying to understand existence. All else may be rationally intelligible, except primal being – the dark basis of all reality. Several times, Schelling draws parallels between the ground and matter (hulē; ὕλη) as conceived by the ancients. Both Plato and Aristotle held that what is intelligible in things is their “form” or “forms” (eidos, eidē; εἶδος, εἴδη); their “participation” in rationally conceptualizable universals or essences.

What more is there to a sensible thing if we factor out its forms or universals? What is the remainder (der Rest)? In the Platonic-Aristotelian conception it is matter – which is, by definition, unintelligible. Matter stands in opposition to form as a dark, unknowable stuff. Schelling alludes several times to Plato’s Timaeus, where the hupodochē (ὑποδοχὴ) is introduced as a kind of mysterious “receptacle” in which sensible objects are shaped according to eternal forms and take on material reality. The hupodochē is not matter, but instead a kind of unintelligible void, possessing no intelligible form of its own, but acting as the ground or basis for the material being of the world around us. Plato writes:

In the same way, then, if the thing that is to receive repeatedly throughout its whole self the likenesses of the intelligible objects, the things which always are – if it is to do so successfully, then it ought to be devoid of any inherent characteristics of its own. This, of course, is the reason why we shouldn’t call the mother or receptacle of what has come to be, of what is visible or perceivable every other way, either earth or air, fire or water, or any of their compounds or their constituents. But if we speak of it as an invisible and characterless sort of thing, one that receives all things and shares in a most perplexing way in what is intelligible, a thing extremely difficult to comprehend, we shall not be misled.[13]

Plato’s hupodochē is very much like the Greek mythological chaos (χάος): a void that is the ground of all being at the beginning of time. And this is, of course, Schelling’s teaching about the will of the ground. His direct source for this idea is clearly Boehme. But there is also a fascinating convergence of sources: Schelling draws upon Boehme, but sees a parallel teaching in Plato (of which Boehme himself was probably unaware), and in classical mythology. Schelling clearly sees himself as conveying a teaching that is “perennial” or “Traditional,” in just the sense familiar to us from Guénon and Evola.

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), 28. My italics.

[2] Aurora, Chapter 23, paragraph 18.

[3] Schelling, 28.

[4] Aurora, Chapter 23, paragraph 18.

[5] Schelling, 28.

[6] Schelling, 28.

[7] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 109. Compare this passage in the 1941 lectures: “Schelling’s concept of existence concerns the self-being of what is and thus thinks selfhood in the sense of ‘subjectivity,’ that is, of ‘egoity.’ . . . Nonetheless, Schelling’s concept of existence is not restricted to the human but concerns, precisely as does the traditional concept of existentia, every ‘essence,’ that is, every being. This signals that Schelling thus thinks every being in a certain way as ‘subject’ in the sense of selfhood and subjectivity.” Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 58-59.

[8] Schelling, 29.

[9] See the translators’ note on ahnender Wille in Schelling, 151. The translators also suggest “foreboding” as a possible rendering. Schelling actually employs the older spelling of the verb, ahnden.

[10] Schelling, 29.

[11] Schelling, 29.

[12] Gutmann translates nie aufgehende as “irreducible.” See Schelling: Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court, 1936), 34.

[13] Timaeus 51a. See Plato: Complete Works, John M. Cooper, Ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). (Timaeus translated by Donald J. Zehl), 1253-1254.