Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 8

3,856 words

Myra Hindley

Part 8 of 15 (Read the whole series here.)

The Spiritedness of Evil

Schelling writes, “As disease is admittedly nothing having essential being [nichts Wesenhaftes], really only an apparent picture of life and merely a meteoric appearance of it – an oscillation between being and non-being – yet announces itself nevertheless as something very real to feeling, so it is with evil.”[1]

Here Schelling draws our attention to how his conception of evil differs from previous philosophical and theological theories. Almost all other philosophers had considered evil to be a “privation,” meaning a lack or absence. An evil person, according to this theory, would be someone who lacked virtue or good character; e.g., a lack of temperance or self-control. Physical evil such as disease would be considered a lack of proper harmony or equilibrium in the body. Deformity, such as a club foot, would be considered a lack of proper form.

In every case, according to this traditional theory, evil is nothing real in itself; it is simply an absence of good. We can find the roots of this theory in Plato, and it is explicitly adopted by most medieval philosophers, and survives into the modern period in thinkers such as Leibniz (who Schelling discusses at some length in the present context). The problem with this theory is that, while it is certainly elegant and simple, it does not do justice to human experience. Evil absolutely does not seem like something “unreal,” but just the opposite: something quite real that affects our lives in devastating ways.

Schelling gives certain prima facie reasons to think that the “privation” theory is inadequate. He states, for example, that only man is capable of evil but that given that man is “the most complete of all visible creatures” – i.e., the most versatile, adaptable, and intelligent – it seems unlikely that the ground of evil could consist “in lack or deprivation.” Afterall, he writes, “The devil, according to the Christian point of view, was not the most limited creature, but rather the least limited one.”[2]

It is also an enormous mistake to think that evil men, lacking self-control, simply give way to that which is “animalistic” in their nature. Animals bring about destruction, killing and devouring their prey and causing terrible suffering. But they do this in order to eat and therefore to live. They do not revel in destruction purely for its own sake. The lion’s objective in pouncing on the gazelle and devouring it is to feed, not to cause suffering as an end in itself.

Schelling cites Franz von Baader as taking the position that “it would be desirable that the corruption in man were only to go as far as his becoming animal; unfortunately, however, man can stand only below or above animals.”[3] Man can stand above the animal in consciously identifying with the light, with universal will. In identifying with the darkness and choosing evil, however, he chooses something much worse than being “animalistic.” Heidegger writes that “the dubious advantage is reserved for man of sinking beneath the animal, whereas the animal is not capable of reversing the principles [of light and darkness].”[4]

Evil men are not helplessly in thrall to instinct, as we take animals to be. No, they consciously choose destruction and suffering – and positively revel in it. Schelling notes that “just as there is an enthusiasm for the good, there is a spiritedness [Begeisterung] of evil.”[5] Consider any serial killer. Take, for example, the horrific crimes of the “Moors murderers,” Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, who sexually brutalized and murdered several children in the mid-60s in Northwest England – in one case audiotaping the sufferings of one 10-year-old victim to keep as a souvenir. Is it plausible to attribute their crimes to a “lack of self-control”? In fact, such a claim seems downright absurd.

Ancient, medieval, and early modern ethical theories give insightful descriptions of the “bad” person, who is usually understood to be someone who would like to control his inclinations – who would like to be good – but who generally fails. However, there is a qualitative difference between “bad” and “evil,” which these older theories simply fail to articulate.[6] The closest Aristotle comes to a description of evil is when he tells us in the Nicomachean Ethics that the vicious person, the opposite of the virtuous, is someone who simply has no interest at all in being good. But this is also insufficient to explain the ferocity and perversion of characters like Brady and Hindley, who not only had no interest in being good, but seemed driven to cause suffering and harm for their own sake.

Putting things in the modern language of psychology does not help much either, for psychology mainly stays within the “privation” paradigm. For modern psychologists, Brady and Hindley were sociopaths: people whose privations are a lack of empathy and a lack of moral sense. Yet these privations, on their own, are also not sufficient to explain such deplorable crimes, since the majority of diagnosed sociopaths never commit acts of violence.

Evil really does seem like something “positive” in its own right – meaning that it is not merely an absence or lack. One struggles for a word to describe it. “Force” seems undesirable since it would involve us in theologically tinged assertions of “forces of evil.” But perhaps this is correct; perhaps there really is a “force of evil.” “Drive” and “inclination” also seem inadequate, but I will use them anyway.

The evil person, for Schelling, is someone who has thoroughly identified with the self-will of the ground, unleavened by the light, by the universal will towards form, order, regularity, wholeness. Instead of affirming that he exists as a member of a whole greater than himself, the evil person takes himself to be the whole and regards all otherness, all that is not himself, as opposed. Recall that the ground is within God, but not God. The will of the ground desires to give birth to itself, but its natural tendency is contracting and indrawing; it is a profound selfishness that resists manifestation. It is only when the darkness gives birth to the light that manifestation is possible – that the coming into being of God and the world is possible.

Evil is Required for the Revelation of God

Now, what does it mean for an individual to wholly identify with the ground, with the dark principle? It means to desire to give birth to itself, to express itself – while nonetheless contracting inward in fundamental egocentrism, resisting manifestation, resisting otherness. What can result from this except a human ego existing in adversarial relationship to the entire world – seeking either to put everything under the thumb of the ego, to manipulate all, or, failing this, to lash out and destroy? Evil thus amounts to the most profound nihilism possible; a drive to absolutize the self by negating all else; to deify the dark, infantile self-will.

Thus, for Schelling, evil is most definitely not a mere absence of good, but something that, in effect, can seize and possess the human soul. He states in the passage quoted earlier that, like disease, evil has no “essential being” and that it oscillates “between being and non-being.” By this he does not mean that evil is a mere negation or non-being in the sense of sheer nothingness. (As Heidegger states, “nothingness is not nugatory; but, rather, something tremendous, the most tremendous element in the nature of being.”[7])

Schelling argues that the evil soul tries and fails to establish itself as essential being; to live on its own terms as something that exists in its own right, depending upon nothing. It cannot do this, however, for its relation to all else is a nihilating hostility; its “selfhood” is merely negative. In other words, evil is not in itself a sheer absence or negation – it is, Schelling says, “very real” – but it eeks out its perverted existence through an active negation of all else. It is not itself simply void, but is instead an act of voiding or negating all otherness. It thus exists on the borderline between being and non-being: trying to be something, yet succeeding only in being a will to bring non-being into the world through active negation.

Suppose we now ask the classical question: why does evil have to exist? Why is it necessary? (For Schelling does regard it as absolutely necessary.) Or, as Schelling puts the matter, our question is how evil was “able to break out of creation as an unmistakably general principle everywhere locked in struggle with the good.”[8] As we have seen, the dark principle, the basis for evil, is necessary to the being of both God and nature. Schelling writes that “this dark principle is active in animals as well as in all other natural beings” and that in them it is “blind craving and desire.”[9] So is evil necessary simply because the dark principle is necessary to the being of all things?

No, because the dark principle is not evil; evil in the true sense, for Schelling, is the choice of the dark principle over the light, or the choice to sunder the dark principle from the light. Animals contain the dark principle within them, but they cannot choose it. In lower animals, the darkness is always subordinated to the “will of the species” – in other words, the animal cannot deliberately reject its form, or its place within nature. This is precisely why Schelling says that in them the dark principle is manifest merely as “blind craving and desire” (e.g., the instinct to feed).

No, evil is necessary, Schelling tells us, because it is required for the revelation of God.[10] Why? He answers this question in an unusually clear passage:

[If] God as spirit is the inseverable unity of [the dark and light] principles, and this same unity is only real in the spirit of man, then, if the principles were just as indissoluble in him as in God, man would not be distinguishable from God at all; he would disappear in God, and there would be no revelation and motility of love. For every essence can only reveal itself in its opposite, love only in hate, unity in conflict. Were there no severing of principles, unity could not prove its omnipotence; were there no discord, love could not become real.[11]

In God, as we have already discussed, the two principles are wedded and inseverable. Note that Schelling states “this same unity is only real in the spirit of man.” God, as unity of the dark and light principles – God within what we have called the Godhead – is not yet God, is not yet real. To become God, to become real, God must express himself in nature (or as nature). It is God’s being, in short, to be revelatory. An unrevealed God is merely an inchoate and potential God. This basic claim, which is also to be found in Boehme, is fundamental to the Schellingian-Hegelian form of idealism. We find it in Hegel when he insists that his Logic gives us “God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit.”<[12] Nature and human spirit are the revelation of God, with humanity constituting the most adequate spatio-temporal expression of the divine nature.

But, of necessity, nature and humanity are an other to God’s eternal essence, or the Godhead. If the divine wedding of the light and dark principles were expressed just as it is in God, as indissoluble, then there would be no difference between God and man (man would “disappear in God”), and thus no revelation of God in an other. Schelling tells us that “every essence can only reveal itself in its opposite,” clearly echoing Boehme, who wrote “Nothing may be revealed to itself without opposition.”[13] Consequently, in man the two principles must be severable. Heidegger comments:

Now every being, however, can only be revealed in its opposite. There must be an other for him which is not God as he is himself and which yet includes the possibility of revealing himself in it. Thus, there must be something which, although it originates from the inmost center of the God and is spirit in its way, yet still remains separated from him in everything and is something individual. But this being is man. Man must be in order for the God to be revealed. . . . Man must be in order for the God to “exist.” Fundamentally and generally expressed, this means that certain conditions . . . must be fulfilled to make God possible as the existing spirit, that is, to make man possible. But then this means that the conditions of the possibility of the revelation of the existing God are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the faculty for good and evil, that is, of that freedom in which and as which man has his being.[14]

What makes evil possible is precisely the human ability to sever the two principles and to freely choose the dark principle over the light, in separation from the light. Therefore, the divine revelation – the being or life of God himself – makes evil possible and, indeed, necessary. Late in the Freiheitsschrift, Schelling writes that “in order that there be no evil, there would have to be no God himself.”[15]

Schelling says that man can choose either good or evil – but he must choose one or the other. He cannot remain undecided “because God must necessarily reveal himself.”[16] But how does one make the choice? Christianity also holds that man can choose good or evil, and that he does so freely. But it also teaches that men are tempted to evil, as in the story of Eve and the serpent in Genesis. Is there something that inclines us towards evil; that pushes (or pulls) us in that direction?

All Evil Strives Back into Chaos

Schelling briefly entertains the idea that there might exist an “evil fundamental being” (böses Grundwesen). He rejects this idea, however, for he insists that evil is only possible through the severing of the dark and light principles, which first occurs in man. He also states that we cannot “presuppose something like a created spirit which, having fallen itself, tempted man to fall, for the question here is exactly how evil first arose in creatures.”[17] In other words, the introduction of a Satan figure would simply push the problem of evil further back: if men are tempted to evil by an evil, “fallen” creature, how then did that creature fall? How did it become evil in the first place?

Instead of a Satan figure tempting men to evil, Schelling signals that he inclines instead towards a conception of “Platonic matter” (platonische Materie) as an evil being, and as exercising a kind of “pull” that draws creatures towards evil. Here Schelling is, of course, drawing once more on the Timaeus. He writes that matter is “originally a kind of being that resists God and for that reason is an evil being in itself.”[18] However, Schelling is not endorsing a literal conception of “evil matter.” Rather, he likens the Platonic position to his own conception of evil as made possible by the ground.

“In this way,” Schelling writes, “one is likely able to explain the Platonic phrase that evil comes from ancient nature.”[19] Schelling is likely referring here, once again, to the Timaeus. But the direct source of this statement may be Plotinus. In a passage in the Enneads, Plotinus quotes the Timaeus and then comments that evil comes from the “ancient nature,” meaning a primordial matter not yet ordered.[20] “Matter” refers to the hupodochē, or receptacle, as we saw in an earlier installment. But, as also noted before, the hupodochē is not matter in the sense of “stuff” but rather a kind of unintelligible void, akin to the chaos of Greek mythology, a parallel of which Schelling is entirely aware.

Accordingly, he now says the following: “For all evil strives back into chaos, that is, back into that state in which the initial centrum [i.e., the ground] had not yet been subordinated to the light and is a welling up in the centrum of a yearning still without understanding.”[21] Schelling is saying that evil can be understood to be a kind of return to the anarchic principle of the indrawing, autistic ground, “prior” to its subordination to the light. But he expresses this in very strong terms: “all evil strives [strebt] back into chaos.”

Thus, while men freely choose evil, there is nonetheless a sense in which we can understand evil – or, putting things more precisely, the dark will of the ground – as exercising a kind of pull on man. The dark will is therefore a kind of “proto-evil.” True evil is freely chosen, but it is a choice to give way to the attraction posed by the ground. Recall that earlier Schelling told us that chaos abides eternally as a power which can still frequently “break through [durchbrechen]” once order is established (i.e., even when the light principle has gained ascendency).

Schelling states that there exists a “general [allgemeines] evil” which “though it never becomes real, yet continually strives toward that end [i.e., strives to be real],” and that only after coming to understand this general evil “is it possible to grasp good and evil in man.”[22] A natural propensity of man to do evil is, he says, “explicable on that basis because the disorder of forces engaged by the awakening of self-will in creatures already communicates itself to them at birth.” Schelling then offers two fascinating metaphors to illustrate this “pull” of general evil toward the “creaturely.” First, he says that it is like a man on a high summit who feels tempted by a hidden voice to hurl himself off. And he says that it is like the siren’s song, leading sailors off course.[23]

Schelling goes on to speak tantalizingly of a kind of prefiguration of evil in nature. Bear in mind that true evil only emerges in man’s free choice of the dark principle over the light. However, given that the basis for evil is the dark principle, and that this principle is operative at all levels of nature, we can expect to see something analogous to evil prefigured in natural forms that precede the human. In nature, Schelling tells us, there are “contingent determinations” that only make sense in terms of “an arousal of the irrational or dark principle in creatures – in terms of activated selfhood – having occurred already in the first creation.”[24] By “contingent determinations” Schelling likely means deformities or mutations of various kinds; natural things “gone wrong,” in other words. He could also simply mean natural forms that arouse in us foreboding and disgust.

Heidegger comments on these ideas:

The will of the ground is everywhere what arouses self-will and drives it beyond itself. Wherever it shows itself, it is indeed not an evil itself which appears, but a prefiguration of evil. We find such prefigurations in nature: the strange and chance element of organic formations and deformations, what incites horror, the fact that everything alive is approaching dissolution. Here something appears which has been driven out into selfish exaggeration and is at the same time impotent and repulsive. But since it is not yet something spiritual, it can only be a prefiguration of evil as something self-like dominant in nature.[25]

Schelling writes of “unmistakable signs of evil in nature” whose appearance arouses “a general, natural abhorrence.”[26] In a footnote, he uses as an example the connection that has traditionally been made between the snake and evil, as in Genesis. He says that the development of “auxiliary organs” (i.e., limbs or appendages) in other creatures, especially man, suggests an increasing “independence from desires” or, as he puts it in the peculiar language of the Freiheitsschrift, “a relation of centrum and periphery that is really the only healthy one.” By contrast, where the auxiliary organs are not developed or are absent, “there the centrum has walked into the periphery.”[27] What Schelling seems to mean is that the snake suggests to us a being that is simply nothing but consuming self-will; nothing more, in essence, than a devouring mouth that slithers over the earth.

To what extent do we see something that corresponds to human evil in lower nature? To the extent that form, unfolding, and growth are somehow dammed up, misdirected, or perverted – as in the case of deformity. I have already noted that, mythologically, the 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). Both represent the permanent possibility of chaos to “break through” at any point, even after order has been established by the gods. However, this point is actually much clearer in the Norse system.

According to Greek myth the Titans are defeated by the gods and most of them are imprisoned in Tartarus. In Norse myth, while Odin and his brothers murder the primal frost giant, Ymir, and build the cosmos from his body, the race of giants still roams free. While this is a subject for an essay unto itself, I will simply note here that throughout Norse myth the giants represent, in one way or another, disorder, or all that which stymies order, growth, form, and flourishing.[28] This is essentially identical to how Schelling conceives of an “evil” that exists in nature, prefiguring human evil.

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), 35.

[2] Schelling, 36. When Schelling’s son, Karl, edited this text he divided it into titled sections. The present section he entitled “Deduction of the Reality of Evil.”

[3] Schelling, 40. Earlier, Schelling credits Franz von Baader with having “in more recent times” emphasized the concept of evil expounded in the Freiheitsschrift. Schelling refers to this as “the only correct [theory of evil],” according to which “evil resides in a positive perversion or reversal of the principles” and states that Baader has explained this theory “through profound analogies, in particular, that of disease.” Schelling states that Baader has expounded this concept of evil in “more recent times” because it was first put forward by Jacob Boehme, with whom the theory seems to be original. Baader (1765-1841) was known in Schelling’s time as Boehme’s principal interpreter. Schelling then devotes a long footnote to Baader’s ideas, making clear how freely he is drawing upon Baader’s Boehmean concepts and terminology. The footnote is extremely obscure and employs some of Baader’s alchemical-astrological symbolism. See Schelling, 35-36.

[4] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 144. Henceforth, “ST.”

[5] Schelling, 40.

[6] See Schelling, p. 39, on why incontinence is not evil.

[7] Heidegger, ST, 101.

[8] Schelling, 40.

[9] Schelling, 38.

[10] Schelling, 41.

[11] Schelling, 41.

[12] Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 50.

[13] The Way to Christ, Seventh Treatise, “On Divine Contemplation,” i. 8.

[14] Heidegger, ST, 119.

[15] Schelling, 66.

[16] Schelling, 41.

[17] Schelling, 42.

[18] Schelling, 41

[19] Schelling, 41-41. Italics in original.

[20] Enneads I.8.7.

[21] Schelling, 42.

[22] Schelling, 47, italics in original.

[23] Schelling, 47.

[24] Schelling, 43.

[25] Heidegger, ST, 149.

[26] Schelling, 43.

[27] Schelling, 43.

[28] See my essay “The Ninefold” in Collin Cleary, What is a Rune? And Other Essays, Greg Johnson, Ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2015).