Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 5

3,729 words

Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler. 1885.

Part 5 of 15 (Part 1 begins here.)

Unintelligibility is the Core of What is Real

It is tempting to think of Schelling’s ground as a “material principle” along the lines of Aristotle’s hulē or Plato’s hupodochē – or, for that matter, the “indefinite dyad” of Plato’s so-called “unwritten teaching” (as reported by Aristotle). This is acceptable so long as we understand that the ground is not a “stuff.” It is a curious combination of void and will – closer to chaos or to the Norse Ginnungagap. My readers may have wondered long ago how Schelling can claim, on the one hand, that all beings must have a ground for their existence, and, on the other hand, claim that “primal being” (Ursein), the will, is “groundless.” Doesn’t he contradict himself?

In fact, I think it would be entirely reasonable for Schelling to take the position that all beings must have a ground – except will. Will is “primal being” (Ursein) in the sense that it is a “first being”: all else can be traced to it. Now, we must remember that Schelling’s use of temporal language is figurative. Therefore, we have to be careful not to think of will as a “first cause,” standing way back at the beginning of time, and to think of it instead as an eternal cause, continually causing (in a manner we will explore more fully later on).

In any sort of analysis, we have to accept the fact that there is likely to be an ultimate level or stopping point beyond which further analysis is impossible. It was this realization that animated Aquinas’s very sensible claim that the causal series in the universe could not stretch back in time infinitely, but had to have a starting point, else nothing would have ever “got going” at all. Analysis has to stop somewhere. Schelling’s cosmology in the Freiheitsschrift reasons similarly: there is some ultimate thing, to which everything else owes its existence, and it is will, the ground of all.

Still, the mind simply rebels at Schelling’s claim that primal being is something that is ultimately unintelligible. Of course the mind rebels, especially the modern mind: it insists that everything must be open to understanding and analysis. Schelling comments: “The arrogance of man rises up [sträubt sich] against this origin from the ground and even seeks moral reasons against it.”[1] The last part of this sentence is probably a reference to J.G. Fichte, who was a major influence on Schelling – up to a point. Fichte believed that the vocation of man was to achieve total knowledge of the universe, and to completely transform nature according to human ideals. He recognized that such a project was an infinite task (i.e., one that can never be fully realized). But Fichte rejected, on moral grounds, any attempt to place limits on man’s power to know and transform, given that he saw this as an affront to human dignity.

However, Schelling is not simply claiming that we can never fully understand the ground or will. He is saying something much more radical than this: he is actually saying that unintelligibility is at the very core of what is real. Primal being itself, the root of all that exists, is an abyss, an impenetrable darkness. The origin of all is darkness. Recall that “existence,” in Schelling’s special sense (rendered by Heidegger as “ex-sistence”), is understanding, light, order, and the expression of the universal or ideal. It is the light-world that is intelligible to us, that yields to reason.

But what is the ground of this existence? Obviously, the ground cannot be identical to what emerges from it. The ground cannot be light; thus, it must be darkness. It cannot be ordered; thus, it must be chaos. It cannot be the universal or the ideal: thus, it must be unanalyzable particularity or individuality. Consequently, to quote Schelling’s words once more, “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.”

And, a little later, he remarks:

All birth is birth from darkness into light; the seed kernel must be sunk into the earth and die in darkness so that the more beautiful shape of light may lift and unfold itself in the radiance of the sun. Man is formed in the maternal body; and only from the obscurity of that which is without understanding (from feeling, yearning, the sovereign mother of knowledge) grow luminous thoughts.[2]

The God Who Was Begotten in God Himself

We have spent a great deal of time wrestling with Schelling’s strange conceptions of the ground and the “will of the ground,” and now we must follow him in the next steps of his account. Just after the lines quoted above, he writes:

Thus we must imagine the original yearning as it directs itself to the understanding, though still not recognizing it, just as we in our yearning seek out unknown and nameless good, and moves foreboding itself [und sich ahnend bewegt], like a wave-wound, whirling sea, akin to Plato’s matter, following dark, uncertain law, incapable of constructing for itself anything enduring. But, corresponding to the yearning, which as the still dark ground is the first stirring of divine existence, an inner, reflexive representation is generated in God himself through which, since it can have no other object but God, God sees himself in an exact image of himself.[3]

The first part of this quote again describes the ground as a will, a “yearning” after understanding. It “forbodes itself” – meaning that, as we noted earlier, this dark, unconscious will dimly portends the birth, through itself, of understanding. We should also note the reference to “Plato’s matter,” likely an allusion to the Timaeus (as discussed in the last installment). But then Schelling introduces something else – something entirely new. We are told that an “inner, reflexive representation” (eine innere reflexive Vorstellung) is generated within God. This representation “corresponds” to the yearning (Sehnsucht) – meaning, presumably, that it is a representation or image of yearning. In this representation “God sees an exact image of himself.”

Again, we need to keep squarely in mind here that much of Schelling’s language is figurative, including statements that imply a sequence in time. We have established that the will of the ground yearns for “understanding,” which amounts to the desire for full and complete self-expression. We might also say that it desires to objectify itself: to become an object to itself. This is the same thing, of course, as the desire for self-knowledge, self-confrontation, self-understanding – however we might like to put it. The first step in the realization of this process is that the will now seems to “double back” on itself and to become its own object.

Heidegger comments on this as follows:

Three things are to be emphasized here: (1) God’s representing turned back to himself is co-original with the longing of the ground, (2) this representation is the word of that longing, and (3) representing as the true coming-to-oneself out of the original being-outside-of-itself of longing is the first existence, the first manner, of the absolute reality of the God himself. . . . This self-representing occurs by the ground’s being represented. Thus, God sees “himself” in the darkness of the ground, but in the counterimage of the ground. He sees his “likeness” but hidden in the un-unfolded ground.[4]

We will turn in a moment to what Heidegger means by “the word of that longing.” But first we must ask why will would “double back” on itself or turn toward itself at all. The reason has to do with an aspect of the will of the ground about which so far we have said little. We have characterized the will of the ground as a yearning for self-expression. This makes it seem as if the will is wholly “outward turning” or “extraverted,” bent on expressing itself outwardly. In fact, while the will of the ground does yearn for self-expression, it cannot achieve this – not in the sense of giving rise to something other in which it expresses itself.

This is not just because it “unconscious,” it is because it is fundamentally “inward turning,” “egocentric,” or, we might even say, “autistic.”[5] Schelling’s insistence that the will is “self-affirming” is a clue to this fact. And so is his identification, in the later Ages of the World text, of the will of the ground with “contraction” (and the will of understanding, by contrast, with “expansion”). The source for these ideas is, once again, Jacob Boehme, who named the first of his “source spirits” Sour (Herb), and the second, its opposite, Sweet (Süss). Sweet is a will to openness and expansion. Sour is a dark, contracting will to close itself off.

However, for Schelling, as for Boehme, there is a presentiment of opening already in closing, as there is always a presentiment of one member of a pair of opposites in the other: the will of the ground (Boehme’s Sour) dimly yearns for “understanding” (ex-sistence) but its self-directed or inward-directed nature makes it incapable of achieving this. However, it is precisely this self-directed quality that makes possible, quite without the will of the ground being aware of this or intending it, the coming into being of a first, primitive “representation” of the will to itself. Simply think of the matter quite literally: if the contracting, inward-drawing will turns toward itself, surely what results is a self-confrontation, in which is born a “representation” of itself.

In this primal self-confrontation, the deep essence of God is born. For God, recall, is the whole, the whole that has achieved perfect and complete self-expression and self-confrontation. In the developed God, this is achieved by the generation of otherness – the generation of nature – in which God confronts himself (preeminently in one being that is both natural and super-natural – namely, man). True divine understanding or ex-sistence is born when God produces something else as a mirror in which to behold himself – something external to his innermost essence. However, in the primal act of the will of the ground’s self-confrontation only the basic essence of this self-confrontation is born.

Schelling says that through this act of will’s self-representation “God sees himself in an exact image of himself.” But this language is, once again, figurative. In fact, “God” is “not yet” born in full. The dim beginning of this birth occurs in this first, primal self-representation. Schelling writes, “This representation is the first in which God, considered as absolute, is realized, although only in himself; this representation is with God in the beginning and is the God who was begotten in God himself.”[6]

Schelling’s language here is very curious. What does it mean to speak of “the God who was begotten in God himself”? Where in God? It seems unlikely that Schelling can mean “in the ground,” since, quite obviously, the representation of the will of the ground is something distinct from the ground itself (it is the first glimmering of God to emerge from the ground). In fact, what Schelling seems to be doing here is introducing a distinction between God and the “Godhead” (Gottheit), such as we find in Meister Eckhart – though it is important to note that Schelling does not use this term.

To simplify somewhat, we can speak of the Godhead as the innermost essence of God. This is what is generated when the will confronts itself. Note Schelling’s language: “This representation is the first in which God, considered as absolute, is realized, although only in himself.” What is God “considered as absolute”? It is God considered in his absolute or basic essence. This is God “in himself.” In the language of German idealism, something is “in itself” if it is potential or unmanifest (or not-yet-manifest). This is, in other words, the essence of God prior to manifestation.[7]

The First Manifestation of God

How can we express the content of this “basic essence”? We can say this: God is a will to self-affirmation (or revelation) that affirms (or reveals) itself by growing a world in which it can behold itself. (Heidegger states that “God is truly himself as the existent, that is, as he who emerges from himself and reveals himself.”[8]) The will that is capable of this, of bringing God to full maturity, is, however, not the will of the ground. The will of the ground is a dark, unconscious presentiment of this self-revelation, and the will of the ground’s primal self-representation is only, as it were, a crude sketch of God’s mature self-confrontation. In it we can recognize only the basic pattern of that self-confrontation to come. Nevertheless, it is the first manifestation of self-awareness in God – or, we could simply say, the first manifestation of God – for it comes to the same thing.

God’s true self-expression will only come about through the will of understanding which, as we shall now see, is born from the ground. Schelling goes on to tell us that the representation of will to itself is “at the same time the understanding – the Word of this yearning [i.e., of the will of the ground].”[9] Thus, the representation of the will of the ground to itself is the first appearance of understanding. He refers to it as “the Word.”[10] Schelling’s German here is das Wort, but it must inevitably call to mind the divine logos – as in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[11]

The history of the term logos is very complex. It is associated with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, with the Stoics, with Christian theology, with Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and with Boehme. Its Greek meanings include “word,” “speech,” “reason,” and “account.” Here we may safely assume that Schelling has in mind “speech,” though not in a literal sense. The Word is “the understanding . . . of this yearning”; it is the utterance of the will of the ground, its “crying out,” as it were.

Recall our discussion earlier of Schelling’s peculiar use of “understanding”: he tends to use it interchangeably with “existence,” which essentially means “standing forth from a ground.” Understanding is thus fundamentally an ex-pression of the ground. In the most complete and perfect sense, however, this expression must be a self-confrontation: true understanding comprehends itself. Hence, when the will of the ground doubles back on itself it utters “the Word,” and this Word is its self-comprehension in germinal form. Understanding is thus born.

We now have before us what appears to be a fundamental dualism in the metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift. There is the yearning, the will of the ground, and then there is understanding/ex-sistence/expression that is born of this ground. Though his language is highly obscure, Schelling suggests that what is born here is actually a second will. We can refer to it as the “will of the understanding” or “will of existence,” though Schelling will later refer to it as the “will of love” (and these appear to all be the same thing). Let us now consider Schelling’s full statement on this matter, which we have so far only partially quoted:

This representation is at the same time the understanding – the Word of this yearning, and the eternal spirit which, perceiving the word within itself and at the same time the infinite yearning, and impelled by the love that it itself is, proclaims the Word so that the understanding and yearning together now become a freely creating and all-powerful will and form in the initial anarchic nature [in der anfänglich regellosen Natur bildet] as in its own element or instrument.[12]

It seems that here we are told that yearning and the understanding are somehow blended together to form a new “freely creating and all-powerful will,” and that the original yearning of the will of the ground is overcome or superseded. This cannot be Schelling’s meaning, however, for he makes it very clear in the text that the will of the ground is eternal, that it is never superseded, and that it remains in creation and in God as an eternal source. (In general, as we have already established, nothing in this history of the divine development can be understood as passing away, since there is no temporal sequence here.) Thus, he can only mean that a new or second will is now born, in addition to the will of the ground: the will of the understanding.

That there are now two wills is reinforced by Schelling’s remark in a footnote that “This is the only correct dualism, namely that which at the same time permits a unity.”[13] Schelling’s footnote number is inserted just after the words “This representation is at the same time the understanding – the Word of this yearning,” thus implying, so far as I can see, that the “dualism” to which he refers has to do with understanding and yearning. Notice, too, the language of “proclaims the Word,” thus reinforcing the idea, discussed above, that “the Word” is an utterance, an expression. And what is it that proclaims the Word? It is “eternal spirit” (ewige Geist).

This is the first time that the term “spirit” has been introduced in Schelling’s account of the divine birth. It is, of course, a term that is of great importance for German idealism generally, though it is now more closely associated with Hegel (who produced both a Phenomenology of Spirit and a Philosophy of Spirit). We must now explore what Schelling can mean by the term here. First, as we have said, spirit is that which “proclaims the Word.” It is, in a sense, the “voice” of God speaking for the first time. The ground’s self-representation, the first expression of something beyond the inward-drawing of the ground and the first, primitive expression of the divine self-confrontation, is “uttered” by spirit.

What can this obviously figurative language mean? We know that what is produced here within “the Godhead,” in God’s “inner essence,” is, as it were, a kind of sketch of both the developed divine being to come, and of nature (which, of course, flows from God and is contained within God). Fully realized ex-sistence, as we have seen, entails self-comprehension. As Heidegger puts it, “For Schelling, existence always means a being insofar as it is aware of itself.”[14] And: “The propensity to present itself is the will to bring itself before itself, to re-present itself.”[15] In fully realized nature, it will be human beings who function as the vehicle of God’s self-comprehension. As Heidegger writes, further, “spirit is that through which God as the existing brings himself before himself.”[16]

Just why men are the vehicle of God’s self-revelation will emerge later – but we can say here that it has to do with human freedom. At the “beginning,” however, and in the Godhead, this self-revelation is only glimpsed or portended in its absolute, basic essence: the ineradicable yearning, the primal being, confronts itself, bends back on itself, sees itself and – “Lo!” – it is as if it awakes in this moment. Spirit just is this awakened self-confrontation. It is born as a saying of the Word, as a saying of this self-representation. And it must be said, because otherwise the self-representation is not a conscious possession.

But now we must come to terms with what Schelling means when he says that spirit “impelled by the love that it itself is [die er selbst ist], proclaims the Word so that the understanding and yearning together now become a freely creating and all-powerful will.” Spirit is “impelled by love” but, as Schelling clearly states, it itself is this love. He equates spirit with love, in other words. As Schelling states much later, “this is the secret of love, that it links such things of which each could exist for itself, yet does not and cannot exist without the other.”[17] Love is what draws together that which can be apart, but cannot truly be in being apart. For example, men and women can be apart, but insofar as they are apart, they are not truly realized or actualized as men and women. Through love, they realize their fundamental nature and are fulfilled.

Schelling is maintaining that love is not confined to the relationships of sentient creatures; it is a fundamental metaphysical principle. However, it is not like the “love” (φιλότης) of Empedocles, which simply seems to have been a physical force of attraction (opposing “hate,” νεῖκος, the force of expansion). Love is instead the principle of “wholeness” that shall animate the whole, or God itself, and thus all of nature (which shall come to be within God). Recall that very early on in our discussion of the Freiheitsschrift we discussed the principle of “organicism” that Schelling (and, after him, Hegel) sees operative in the universe: 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. The many beings that make up the universe are not absolutely separable; they exist in a relationship of interdependence.

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), 29.

[2] Schelling, 29.

[3] Schelling, 30. I have altered the translation to make it more literal.

[4] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 126. Henceforth, “ST.”

[5] These are all my terms, not Schelling’s.

[6] Schelling, 30. First italics mine.

[7] We must note, however, that in Schelling’s text “in himself” is in ihm selbst. The expression I have referred to, “in itself,” is normally rendered as an sich (as in Kant’s Ding an sich). Nevertheless, the language of in ihm selbst still suggests the “in itselfness” that I have discussed. And, frankly, I can think of no other way in which Schelling’s language can be interpreted.

[8] Heidegger, ST, 119.

[9] Schelling, 30. Italics in original.

[10] I have followed the translators, Love and Schmidt, in capitalizing Word, to indicate that it is being used in a special sense, one related to logos.

[11] Heidegger writes, “Understanding is ‘logos’ . . . and thus raises the will beyond the level of the merely ‘divining will.’ The understanding is the ‘universal will.’” Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 70.

[12] Schelling, 30. I have altered the translators’ punctuation – which is different from Schelling’s and creates the potential for misunderstanding.

[13] Schelling, 30.

[14] Heidegger, ST, 109.

[15] Heidegger, ST, 125. Italics in original.

[16] Heidegger, ST, 127.

[17] Schelling, 70.