Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 12

2,767 words

Saturn Devouring His Son – Francisco Goya

Part 12 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Will and the Metaphysics of Presence

By 1941, when Heidegger lectured on the Freiheitsschrift again, he had attained considerably more critical distance from Schelling. Heidegger had come to decisively reject the “anthropocentrism” that had characterized his earlier thought, with its emphasis on “subjectivity,” and thus had ceased to fetishize “the will.” Heidegger now sees Schelling’s system as, in Bret Davis’s words, a metaphysics of “unbounded subjectivity.”[1] Furthermore, he claims that “the essential core of all Western metaphysics is able to be exposed in complete determinacy on the basis of this treatise.”[2]

Heidegger believes this because in the intervening years he has come to see the entire history of Western metaphysics as willful. In other words, he has come to see that there is a concealed anthropocentrism at the “essential core” of the metaphysical tradition – and, I will argue, it was Heidegger’s confrontation with Schelling that helped him arrive at this position (though it was certainly not Schelling alone). As we have seen, Schelling argues that will is primal being, the very “essence” of the real itself.

Heidegger actually goes so far as to assert that Schelling lays the groundwork for Nietzsche’s development of the doctrine of will to power. Nietzsche in effect “inverts” the relationship in the Freiheitsschrift between the will of the ground and the will of understanding, making the former supreme. The will of the ground does indeed bear more than a passing resemblance to will to power, given, for example, that Schelling attributes to it “self-affirmation” (see part three). In 1941, Heidegger states, matter-of-factly, that “The only thing left is what Nietzsche then brings about, the inversion [of the will of the ground and will of understanding].”[3]

Let us look more carefully at how the later Heidegger conceives of will, before considering in greater detail exactly why he thinks that such proto-Nietzschean willfulness is latent in Schelling. First of all, as should be obvious at this point, when Heidegger speaks of the will (Wille) he is not using the term as we often do. He does not mean “freedom of the will” (in German, Willkür). Nor does he mean what we have in mind when we say, for example, that someone quit smoking through sheer “willpower.” Instead, for Heidegger the will is a perennial tendency in human beings to strive to master or overcome otherness.

Heidegger’s 1936 Schelling lectures were delivered in the summer semester. In the winter semester of 1936-37, Heidegger lectured on Nietzsche and had much to say, of course, about the will, including the following: “He who wills is, as such, one who wills out beyond himself; in willing we know ourselves as out beyond ourselves; We sense a mastery over [something], somehow achieved; a thrill of pleasure announces to us the power attained, a power that enhances itself.”[4] Willing, in this sense, is always a striving beyond oneself. To do what? To cancel the otherness of the other; to conquer it and elevate the self above it.

You can buy Collin Cleary’s What is a Rune? here

Will can accomplish this in various ways. It can simply annihilate the other, as when vandals maliciously destroy property, or it can creatively transform it, as when a sculptor transforms a slab of marble into a statue. Actually, both cases are examples of destruction, for in both cases the object’s original nature or state is destroyed. In the same lecture course on Nietzsche, Heidegger writes,

Will is in itself simultaneously creative and destructive. Being master out beyond oneself is always also annihilation. All the designated moments of will – the out-beyond-itself, enhancement, the character of command, creation, self-assertion – speak clearly enough for us to know that will in itself is already will to power. Power says nothing else than the actuality of will.[5]

The will can also express itself in the striving for knowledge of the other. In this case, the other is not in some way materially transformed. Instead, its otherness is cancelled in making it more and more transparent to the subject. The otherness of the other does not consist entirely in its being something that occupies different spatio-temporal coordinates from our own. Its otherness also consists in its constituting, at least in some of its aspects, a mystery for us: there are aspects to the other that remain, at any given time, unknown. This otherness is cancelled, progressively, through increasing our knowledge of the other. In the modern period, it is believed that there are no inherent limits on the subject’s ability to cancel otherness in this way. As a result, “total knowledge of otherness,” or the complete and total cancellation of the otherness of the other, becomes the unstated goal of man’s striving for knowledge.

Now, in the 1930s Heidegger came to see the entire history of Western metaphysics as effectively an expression of this same tendency. In my earlier essays on Heidegger, I referred to how the Western tradition is characterized by what I called “the metaphysics of presence.” I can now reveal that “will” in Heidegger’s later philosophy is more or less equivalent to this metaphysics of presence, which I defined in the first installment of these Schelling essays as follows:

From Plato onwards, the entirety of Western metaphysics will be marked by this metaphysics, which is essentially a hidden will to distort our understanding of the being of beings by accommodating it to the human desire that beings should be (1) permanently present to us, hiding nothing, and (2) available for our manipulation.

It can easily be seen that the metaphysics of presence fits the description of “will” as we have discussed it so far.

Will and the History of Metaphysics

Heidegger tells us that the early Greek, pre-metaphysical response to being was “wonder.”[6] The Greeks wondered not just at the fact that beings present their being to mankind, but that this presentation comes forth out of concealment, and returns to concealment. Nothing ever presents to us the entirety of its being. Early Greek thinking recognizes that there is an ineluctable element of absence or concealment in being (as Heraclitus said, phusis kruptesthai philei, “phusis [“nature,” or, Heidegger argues, being] loves to hide”[7]). Not all is revealed to us. In other words, early Greek thinking affirms mystery. In so doing, it affirms that there are limits to our knowing; to our ability to make what is fully present and intelligible. To attempt to overcome those limits is hubris; it is the attitude of the Titans, who would like nothing better than to overcome the gods.

The metaphysics of presence, however, consists entirely in such hubris. In phenomenological terms, the otherness of the other consists precisely in its resistance to human knowledge and manipulation. It always holds something back. The metaphysics of presence is, in its essence, an attempt to cancel this otherness of the other. The end goal of making the other fully present (or transparent) and manipulable is the same thing as aiming to cancel the distinction between self and other, or subject and object.

Thus, the metaphysics of presence is simultaneously an attempt to absolutize the self or subject – even if this is seldom reflected on, or stated openly by any thinker in the tradition. We can understand this as an attempt to, in effect, “absorb” the object into the subject, or we can understand it as an attempt to annihilate the other. It comes to the same thing. The end goal of the metaphysics of presence is, in actual fact, theosis or divinization; making man into God. This is the “will” that Heidegger sees at the basis of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche.

Just how exactly does the entire metaphysical tradition exhibit this tendency? I have addressed this question already, at great length, in my essays on Heidegger and the history of metaphysics (see the first here[8]). These essays explain how will, or the metaphysics of presence, is operative in Plato, Aristotle, the philosophies of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte (only Fichte truly puts his cards on the table). In essays to come, I will treat Heidegger’s account of how will is at work in the philosophies of Hegel and Nietzsche.

We have seen that Schelling deals explicitly with the concept of will. However, he certainly does not conceptualize it in the same way that Heidegger does. To begin with, Schelling speaks of more than one will – the “will of the ground” and “will of understanding (or existence, or sometimes love).” If Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift belongs to the tradition of the metaphysics of presence, then Heidegger would have to maintain that his own conception of will as the drive to absolutize the subject and annul otherness is somehow operative in Schelling’s system, without the philosopher’s knowledge. This is, indeed, effectively what he does maintain.

The first thing that we must note, however, is that Heidegger’s will seems very closely related to Schelling’s conception of the “will of the ground,” which he makes the basis for evil. Indeed, I regard it as a distinct possibility that Heidegger’s own conception of the will was heavily influenced by Schelling’s characterization of the will of the ground. In an earlier installment, describing Schelling’s dark will of the ground, I said the following:

The whole – whether organism or the organic God that contains all – is absolute insofar as it unifies all that exists in one organic system. That which turns to evil – whether a diseased organ or a perverted human will – cannot be absolute in this sense, and so seeks to absolutize itself by cancelling all that which stands opposed to it as other.

And let us consider again some of Schelling’s own words: “This is the beginning of sin,” he writes, “that man transgresses from authentic being into non-being, from truth into lies, from the light into darkness, in order to become a self-creating ground and . . . to rule over all things.”[9] The result of this is that “another spirit usurps the place where God should be, namely, the reversed god.”[10] Needless to say, Schelling is highly critical of this will, or at least of the human choice to affirm it over the will of understanding. How, then, can Heidegger maintain that Schelling’s system is infected by such a will?

First, let us recall that Heidegger sees Schelling’s system as a metaphysics of “unbounded subjectivity.” The reason for this is that the will of the ground, which Schelling makes “primal being,” is a striving for self-representation: it strives to express itself and to become present to itself thereby. Thus, the very ground of all being is primal subjectivity. This is a pattern that Heidegger finds recurring again and again in the history of metaphysics. (And it is on this basis that he claims that “the essential core of all Western metaphysics is able to be exposed in complete determinacy on the basis of [Schelling’s] treatise.”) We find it in Aristotle’s claim that the highest being, or God, is a self-representing (i.e., self-knowing) subjectivity; in Descartes’s making certainty of self-existence the Archimedean point from which all truth and all being, even that of God, shall be derived; in Fichte’s insistence that the self-affirming “I” is the being of beings; and in Hegel’s “substance become subject” – to name just a few.

Now, for Schelling the will of the ground strives for self-representation, but this can only be achieved by the higher will of understanding (for reasons discussed much earlier). Further, the latter is conceived, in effect, as a “positive” will, in contrast to the negative will of the ground, whose introversion and egocentrism becomes the basis for evil. Heidegger, however, detects a fundamental identity between these two wills. To see why, it would be helpful to return momentarily to Heidegger’s own conception of will and how it is characterized in “Heideggerese” by Davis: “Willing is this movement of ecstatic-incorporation, of expanding itself out in order to come back to itself, in order to re-present itself and thereby to come into its own.”[11]

What he refers to as the will’s “ecstatic-incorporation” simply means that its going out beyond itself does not affirm “otherness” as other, but instead draws otherness into itself, negating it, incorporating it. This sounds like it could be a description of Schelling’s will of the ground – but in Heidegger’s view, the will of understanding is fundamentally identical. Quoting Davis on Schelling, “The primal longing for self-affirmative self-representation of the will fulfills itself in an ecstatic-incorporation of the world into the universal will of understanding.”[12] In other words, the dark, egocentric longing of the will of the ground comes to consummation in understanding – in the creation of the system of the whole which purports to “absorb” all things in itself. Thus, in the end, the will of understanding is simply another expression of the same will to self-representation which wills to confront itself and no other.

Quoting Davis once again: “Schelling’s ‘willing,’ as the most fundamental predicate of being, thus combines both a striving for oneself and a representing of the totality of the world. It is a dark longing for itself which is only brought to light and into its proper truth as universal understanding.”[13] Schelling’s system in the Freiheitsschrift is thus yet another expression of Heidegger’s negative will, or metaphysics of presence. I will leave it to the reader to evaluate whether Heidegger has been fair to Schelling.

In the next installment, we will explore Heidegger’s conception of the “negative will.” We will discover that Heidegger identifies it with evil, and that he sees this evil at work everywhere in the modern world.

Notes

[1] Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 101.

[2] Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysics of German Idealism, trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Rodrigo Therezo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021), 2. Henceforth, “MGI.”

[3] Heidegger, MGI, 71.

[4] Heidegger Nietzsche, Vol I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1979), 52.

[5] Heidegger, Nietzsche, 63.

^[6] Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 37.

^[7] Heidegger argues at length that for the Greeks phusis = being. See Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 15-16.

[8] Note that not all the entries in this series bear the title “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” Basically, all the essays I have written on the history of philosophy since 2020 belong in this series. See here for a list of all of my essays.

[9] F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 55. My italics. The following passage is also helpful: “For the feeling still remains in the one having strayed from the centrum that he was all things, namely, in and with God; for that reason he strives once again to return there, but for himself, and not where he might be all things, namely, in God. From this arises the hunger of selfishness which, to the degree that it renounces the whole and unity, becomes ever more desolate, poorer, but precisely for that reason greedier, hungrier, and more venomous. In evil there is the self-consuming and always annihilating contradiction that it strives to become creaturely just by annihilating the bond of creaturely existence and, out of overweening pride to be all things, falls into non-being” (p. 55).

[10] Schelling, 54. My italics. The full quotation reads as follows: “The general possibility of evil consists, as shown, in the fact that man, instead of making his selfhood into the basis, the instrument, can strive to elevate it into the ruling and total will and, conversely, to make the spiritual within himself into a means. If the dark principle of selfhood and self-will in man is thoroughly penetrated by the light and at one with it, then God, as eternal love or as really existing, is the bond of forces in him. But if the two principles are in discord, another spirit usurps the place where God should be, namely, the reversed god, the being aroused to actuality by God’s revelation that can never wrest actuality from potency, that, though it never is, yet always wants to be and, hence, like the matter of the ancients, cannot be grasped actually (actualized) by the complete understanding but only through the false imagination (logismōi nothōi), which is sin itself; for this reason, since, having no Being itself, it borrows the appearance of Being from true Being, as the serpent borrows colors from the light, it strives by means of mirrorlike images to bring man to the senselessness in which it alone can be understood and accepted by him” (pp. 54-55). Logismōi nothōi is an allusion to the Timaeus.

[11] Davis, 105.

[12] Davis, 114.

[13] Davis, 114.