Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 10

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Part 10 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Final Theological Questions

Now, very late in the essay, Schelling raises new questions. Will evil ever end? If so, how? Does creation have a final purpose or end goal? If so, why is it not reached immediately? “Why,” as Schelling puts it, “does what is perfect not exist right from the beginning?”^[1] Initially, Schelling states, rather unhelpfully, that the answers to these questions are implicit in the foregoing. Thankfully, however, he does go on to sketch out responses to them. Evil will never end because it is a condition, as we have discussed already, for God’s existence. Recall: “in order that there be no evil, there would have to be no God himself.”

As to creation having a final purpose, Schelling remarks, tantalizingly, that “scripture . . . distinguishes periods of revelation and posits as a distant future the time when God will be all in all things, that is, when he will be fully realized.”^[2] But does this mean that Schelling believes that the world-process that is God reaches some end goal or culmination? Does he believe in an “end of history”?  A few lines later he states, “this is the final purpose of creation that, whatever could not be for itself, should be for itself insofar as it is raised out of the darkness into existence as a ground that is independent of God.”^[3]

By “for itself” (für sich) Schelling seems simply to mean “existing in its own right.” But this is a “final purpose” that is not achieved once and for all. Instead, it is continually achieved in a never-ending cycle. (“Hence the necessity of birth and death,” Schelling writes.^[4]) God, the whole, continually generates itself. Heidegger writes: “Created nature is not to be understood as nature as it is now, as we see it, but as becoming, creating nature, as something creating which is itself created, the natura naturans as natura naturata of Scotus Eriugena.”^[5] And later Heidegger says, “Creation is eternal and ‘is,’ understood dialectically, the existence of the Absolute itself.”^[6]

As to the question of why “what is perfect” does not exist right from the start, Schelling states, “If the will of the ground were vanquished earlier, the good would remain hidden in it together with evil.”^[7] Evil is a necessary condition for the good – or for the good to reveal itself. Schelling states the same idea in various ways throughout the essay. For example, at one point he says that sin is necessary because “only in the opposition of sin is revealed the most inner bond of the dependence of things and the being of God.”^[8] And, later: “The arousal of self-will occurs only so that love in man may find a material or opposition in which it may realize itself.”^[9]

This is, in fact, the fundamental reason why Schelling speaks of freedom as the capacity for “good and evil” rather than “good or evil.” The choice of the good is a rejection of evil. Thus, for this choice to occur at all, evil – the evil that men do – must already exist and be an ever-present reality. Heidegger’s account of this principle is well worth quoting at length:

We said that human freedom is the faculty of good and evil. Perhaps we have not yet adequately noted that Schelling says the faculty of good and of evil, or we have at best only noted it to the extent that we are at bottom offended by this version as being imprecise. For it would really have to read of good or evil. No, as long as we think this we have not yet grasped the given essential interpretation of human freedom. For freedom as a real faculty, that is, a decided liking of the good, is in itself the positing of evil at the same time. What would something good be which had not posited evil and taken it upon itself in order to overcome and restrain it? What would something evil be which did not develop in itself the whole trenchancy of an adversary of the good? Human freedom is not the decidedness for good or evil, but the decidedness for good and evil, or the decidedness for evil and good.^[10]

Of course, one can also argue that “what is perfect” does not appear immediately because, once again, God is life, and this implies change, development, and maturation. All life, Schelling says, has a “destiny,” and is subject to “suffering and becoming.” Using figurative language once again, Schelling states that “God has freely subordinated himself to this as well,” and that this began when God “first separated the world of light from that of darkness in order to become personal.”^[11] So far as I can see, Schelling is referring here to the separation of light and darkness that occurs in man. In God, as we have discussed, the two principles are inseverable, but in man they are separated, thus requiring man to choose one or the other; to choose the light or the good, or the dark principle that, in separation from the light, is the root of all evil. God, or the whole, “suffers” or undergoes a process of development or self-specification that culminates in man, who chooses good and evil.

Schelling writes that, “Without the concept of a humanly suffering God, one which is common to all mysteries and spiritual religions of earliest time, all of history would be incomprehensible.”^[12] There is much in this statement. Schelling makes a point of referring to what is common to “all mysteries and spiritual religions of earliest time.” In addition to Christ, we seem to be invited to consider such mythological figures as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Zagreus, Attis, and Dionysos. These are all “dying and rising” deities who “humanly suffer.” Yet it is Christ that is clearly uppermost in Schelling’s mind.

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Like Hegel, Schelling offers us an ostensibly “Christian” philosophy, in which the Christian mysteries provide a template for understanding history. The advent of Christ – the human incarnation of God – is understood to be a necessary moment in the development of human spirit, an event through which the ultimate truth about human spirit is revealed: that it plays a necessary role in the coming-into-being of God in the world, or the divine evolution. The path to this realization, and beyond it to the philosophical possession of the inner meaning of the incarnation, is a “way of suffering” for spirit. Hegel refers to spirit’s via dolorosa, and “the Calvary of absolute spirit.”^[13] In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he writes,

But the life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment [think Osiris, Dionysus, et al.], it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.^[14]

The Ungrund

Schelling now turns to an entirely different issue: the question of whether the fundamental distinction of ground and existence has some common source, or whether we are left, instead, with an absolute dualism. Schelling wants to avoid such a dualism, so he insists that ultimately ground and existence must coincide. It is here that he introduces the concept of Ungrund (unground, or non-ground), to which we alluded in an earlier installment. Schelling derives this term from Jacob Boehme, who appears to have coined it. Schelling writes that “there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality – how can we call it anything other than the original ground [Urgrund] or the Ungrund?”^[15]

Schelling emphatically states that the Ungrund is not the identity of the opposites of ground and existence, but rather their “absolute indifference” (absolute Indifferenz).^[16] Ground and existence are not somehow implicitly contained in the Ungrund, since indifference is “its own being separate from all opposition.” However, he goes on to say, rather confusingly, that “darkness and light . . . can never be predicated of the Ungrund as opposites [Gegensätze],” but they can be predicated of the Ungrund as “non-opposites” (Nichtgegensätze). Meaning that they are “in” the Ungrund “in disjunction and each for itself whereby, however, precisely duality . . . is posited. . . . For, precisely because [the Ungrund] relates to both as total indifference, it is neutral toward both.”^[17]

The idea seems to be that the Ungrund is a prior sort of “one” from which the duality of ground and existence arises. If these opposites were predicated of the Ungrund, “they would themselves be one again,” Schelling explains.^[18] Opposites are “one” in the sense that each has its being in the other; each is what it is only in opposition to the other. Thus, while the two may be “in” the Ungrund, they must be in it in total dis-relation to each other. They are, in short, “indifferent” to each other. Throughout all these remarks, Schelling is implicitly linking Boehme’s Ungrund to his own conception of the “indifference point” (Indifferenzpunkt) beyond subject and object, which figures in his earlier philosophical writings.

Schelling states here that the Ungrund “divides itself into two equally eternal beginnings [ground and existence]” and that it is “in each in the same way, thus in each the whole, or its own being.”^[19] Aside from the opacity of these remarks, they present what appears to be a significant problem for Schelling. Despite his insistence on using the term Ungrund – not-ground – to describe this primal indifference, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Ungrund serves as a further, prior ground for ground and existence. But this would entirely defeat the purpose of referring to the ground as ground. Schelling, of course, would vigorously deny that he has introduced an additional ground.

He writes that “The being of the ground, as of that which exists, can only be that which comes before all ground, thus the absolute considered merely in itself, the Ungrund.”^[20] The basic idea here seems to be kabbalistic in character (as is much of Boehme’s thought). God or the absolute can be considered in two ways. First, there is God as he is in himself – the Hebrew Ein Sof, or infinite – which is absolutely unknowable. God as he is “for himself” (or for us) is revealed in creation. In Schelling’s language, God in himself is Ungrund (or indifference point), and God “for himself” is the whole wealth of creation, the externalized God.

The difference, however, is that in the conceptual world of post-Kantian German idealism, the “in itself” is understood as inchoate potential, and the “for itself” as actualized manifestation. Thus, God as Ungrund is the inchoate, and hence inferior God. It does not seem to be the case that this is true of the kabbalist distinction, where Ein Sof is usually understood as God as he really is (in his essence), and creation merely as God as he appears to us. Of course, Schelling’s claims about the Ungrund “dividing itself” do little to dispel the impression that it is in reality a further ground. Perhaps he came to have misgivings about the Ungrund, for it does not figure in his subsequent, Boehme-influenced writings (such as the Stuttgart Lectures, 1810, and The Ages of the World, 1811-1815).

Pantheism Revisited: An Esoteric Doctrine?

Nearing the end of the text, Schelling makes a number of summary remarks which are occasionally illuminating – though every time Schelling restates his positions (as he does repeatedly in the Freiheitsschrift), new problems of interpretation arise. He writes, for example,

Nature is the first or Old Testament, since things are still outside of the centrum [i.e., ground] and, hence, subject to the law. Man is the beginning of the new covenant through which as mediator, since he is himself tied to God, God (after the last division) also accepts nature and makes it into himself. Man is hence the redeemer of nature toward which all archetypes [Vorbilder] in nature aim. The word that is fulfilled in human beings is in nature as a dark, prophetic (not yet fully pronounced) word.^[21]

Here we have an account that comes quite close to Schelling’s earlier philosophical ideas, though expressed in highly figurative language. Man is the “mediator” (Mittler) through which God makes nature into himself (an idea that Schelling effectively adapts from Fichte). And, further, man is the “redeemer” (Erlöser) of nature insofar as he is the ideal toward which all the “archetypes” of lower nature are merely a kind of approximation.

Schelling returns to these ideas near the very end of the essay:

We have an older revelation than any written one – nature. The latter contains archetypes [Vorbilder] that no man has yet interpreted, whereas the written one received its fulfillment and interpretation long ago. If the understanding of this unwritten revelation were made manifest, the only true system of religion and science would appear not in the poorly assembled state of a few philosophical and critical concepts, but rather at once in the full brilliance of truth and nature. It is not the time to rouse old oppositions once again, but rather to seek that which lies outside of, and beyond, all opposition.^[22]

The “written” revelation which “received its fulfillment and interpretation long ago” probably refers to the Christian revelation, the incarnation of God in man and the fulfillment of creation itself. In conceiving of nature as a hitherto mysterious and “unwritten” revelation, Schelling seems to endorse the theosophical idea of nature as “emblem book,” in which natural forms are “archetypes” or symbols waiting to be interpreted by the theosopher in order to reveal the “true system of religion and science.”

In the concluding pages of the essay, Schelling also returns to the issue of pantheism, with which he began the entire discussion. He states, “Whoever finally would want to name this system [i.e., the system of the Freiheitsschrift] pantheism, because all oppositions disappear considered simply in relation to the absolute, may also be granted this indulgence.”^[23] But Schelling goes on to make clear that calling his system pantheism is, in his view, a shallow interpretation. He writes that “it can glibly [geschwind] be said that a system teaches the immanence of things in God; but nonetheless with respect to [my own system] this would mean nothing, even though it could not exactly be called untrue.”^[24] Thus, even though Schelling readily grants that his system is “sort of” pantheistic, he regards the label as a poor fit.

It is true that in the metaphysics of the Freiheitsschrift, all beings are contained within God – yet Schelling introduces a hierarchy of beings, or “great chain of being” (to use Arthur O. Lovejoy’s famous expression) that cannot be described accurately with the vague label of “pantheistic.” Yes, God is the whole, but Schelling states that all beings in nature are “merely peripheral beings in relation to God.” The exception, however, is man: “Only man is in God and capable of freedom exactly through this being-in-God [in-Gott-Sein]. . . . All things are created in [the centrum] just as God only accepts nature and ties it to himself through man.”^[25] In other words, while we may speak – accurately – of all things as “being in God,” on a deeper level it is only man who has being-in-God, in virtue of the fact that man is the highest or most adequate “mirror” of the divine. In man, as we have seen, the dark and light principles are sundered, whereas in God they are indivisible. Freedom – the freedom to choose darkness and light – only realizes itself in the divine whole through the coming into being of man.

In a highly polemical footnote, Schelling speaks of pantheism in much stronger terms. He states that he finds himself agreeing with Friedrich Schlegel’s wish that the “unmanly pantheist swindle [unmännliche pantheistische Schwindel] in Germany might cease.” He goes on to say that it is very easy to perpetrate a fraud in Germany “where a philosophical system becomes the object of a literary industry.”^[26] Schelling insists that he has never endorsed or encouraged the pantheist swindle. He goes on to make some highly personal remarks about the course his work has taken, his desire never to found a sect (as it would limit his “freedom of investigation”), and how his opponents totally ignored his earlier work, Philosophy and Religion (1804). His complete disavowal of pantheism in this footnote has caused some scholars to suggest that the entire Freiheitsschrift is an example of esoteric writing, since Schelling leads us to believe, early on in the text, that he is quite sympathetic to pantheism and only wants to provide a “correct” version of it.^[27]

Schelling states, in the same footnote, that in future “he [i.e., the author] will also maintain the course that he has taken in the present treatise where, even if the external form of a dialogue is lacking, everything arises as a sort of dialogue.” Here he alludes to what I have described earlier as the “spiral” form of the text. The course of Schelling’s argument involves him building a metaphysical account by continually returning to and expanding upon key ideas, often in response to questions and hypothetical objections, just as we would find in a text that took the form of a dialogue. He then remarks that

Many things here could have been more sharply defined and treated less casually, many protected more explicitly from misinterpretation. The author has refrained from doing so partially on purpose. Whoever will and cannot accept it from him thus, should accept nothing from him at all and seek other sources.^[28]

It certainly seems that here Schelling is announcing the fact that he has deliberately made things difficult for the reader – another reason (perhaps) to believe that he is engaged in esoteric writing. Schelling then ruefully remarks that he hopes his opponents might “honor” the Freiheitsschrift by ignoring it completely, as they did Philosophy and Religion.

He concludes the essay by announcing that the present treatise “will be followed by a series of others in which the entirety of the ideal part of philosophy will gradually be presented.”^[29] In fact, he never offered these works to the public. Schelling followed the Freiheitsschrift with two other “theosophical” texts, the Stuttgart Lectures, delivered to a private audience in 1810, and The Ages of the World, of which he produced various versions between 1811 and 1815. These were published by Schelling’s son, Karl, after his father’s death.

In the final five installments of this series our focus will shift to Heidegger. We will examine Heidegger’s criticisms of Schelling and how Schelling’s essay can (according to Heidegger) illuminate Western metaphysics as a whole. Most significantly, we will examine Heidegger’s own theory of evil and how it was heavily influenced by Schelling. Heidegger’s theory of evil provides us with an important tool for understanding the modern world – and an important justification for belief in “the reality of evil.” The next installment will deal with Heidegger’s criticisms of Schelling in 1936.

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), 66.

[2] Schelling, 66.

[3] Schelling, 67.

[4] Schelling, 67.

[5] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985) (henceforth, ST), 135.

[6]  Heidegger, ST, 136. Italics in original.

[7] Schelling, 67.

[8] Schelling, 55.

[9] Schelling, 64.

[10] Heidegger, ST, 156. Italics in original.

[11] Schelling, 66.

[12] Schelling, 66.

[13] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 49; 493.

[14] Hegel, 19.

[15]  Schelling, 68.

[16] Schelling, 68.

[17] Schelling, 69.

[18] Schelling, 69.

[19] Schelling, 70.

[20] Schelling, 69-70.

[21] Schelling, 72-73. Love and Schmidt render Vorbilder as “typology.” I think that “archetypes” is a better choice. For one thing, it preserves the plurality of Vorbilder.

[22] Schelling, 77.

[23] Schelling, 71.

[24] Schelling: Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago: Open Court, 1936), 92. I have employed Gutman’s translation of the sentence here as it is much clearer than Love and Schmidt’s rendition, while at the same time being entirely accurate.

[25] Schelling, 72.

[26] Schelling, 71.

[27] See, for example, Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 107.

[28] Schelling, 72.

[29] Schelling, 77.