Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 11

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Part 11 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Heidegger’s Critique of Schelling in 1936

Having now given a detailed exposition of the Freiheitsschrift, while simultaneously considering elements of Heidegger’s own exposition, we must turn to certain crucial issues. The first is how Heidegger critiques Schelling’s position. We will find that there are significant differences between Heidegger’s criticisms in the 1936 lectures, and those he offered in the lectures of 1941. These criticisms are important and interesting, not purely for Schelling scholarship, but for the larger lessons they impart.

Second, we must confront the issue of whether Heidegger was positively influenced by the Freiheitsschrift. I will argue that he was, and in ways that ought to matter to us.

Third, we must consider how Schelling’s ideas, as appropriated and transformed by Heidegger, can provide important tools for understanding the decline of the West, what might reverse or arrest that decline, and, finally, the nature of the opposition faced by defenders of the West within our own culture. As should be obvious, these issues are not raised for their own sake – i.e., as issues purely of interest to scholars.

One of the reasons the Freiheitsschrift was so important for Heidegger is that it is the first Western philosophical work to explicitly articulate a metaphysics of the will. This makes Schelling crucial for Heidegger’s “history of metaphysics” (or “history of being”). Actually, two other nineteenth-century German philosophers are more famously associated with putting forth a metaphysics of the will: Schopenhauer – whom Heidegger does not take very seriously – and Nietzsche, who was a major influence on him. I will deal with Heidegger’s thoughts on Nietzsche in a later essay, or series of essays. The nature of the will was an extraordinarily important issue for Heidegger, throughout his career.

Recently, scholar Bret W. Davis has published a masterful account of Heidegger’s treatment of the will, demonstrating that it is a central issue for Heidegger’s thought, and that he significantly changed his mind about the will over the course of his philosophical development. In what follows, I will make extensive use of Davis’s book Heidegger and the Will.^[1] Davis argues that the so-called “early Heidegger” of Being and Time seemed to implicitly buy into a kind of anthropocentrism: beings reveal themselves, Heidegger makes clear, as ready-to-hand “equipment” subject to the will of Dasein. Davis comments on the irony of this position: “Is this primacy given to human projects, to a world disclosed most primordially as a ‘workshop’ for our tasks of ‘production,’ not precisely what the later Heidegger criticizes as the decline of the modern West into the epoch of technological manipulation?”^[2]

In the few years after Being and Time – and especially in the period 1933-1934, when Heidegger was a committed National Socialist – the philosopher seemed to wholeheartedly embrace the will. He construes “authenticity” as a willing which “actually wills willing and nothing else besides.”^[3] These words yet again call to mind Heidegger’s later critique of the modern, technological “world of exploitation,” wherein the will is willed for its own sake. For the Heidegger of this transitional period, inauthenticity involves acquiescing to the will of “the they” (Das Man), rather than, as Heidegger puts it in the infamous “Rectoral Address” of 1933, “to give law to oneself,” which he calls “the highest freedom.”^[4]

Beginning in 1936, the same year Heidegger gave his first course of lectures on Schelling, he began writing what he projected as his second major work, after Being and Time: Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)). In that text, which was not published until years after Heidegger’s death, he begins to overcome the “anthropocentrism” which arguably characterized his earlier phase.

Being and Time had focused on Dasein, the being for whom being is an issue, and thus adopted what we can loosely characterize as a “subjective” orientation (so long as we do not make the mistake of attributing outright “subjectivism” to Heidegger). By the time of Contributions, however, Heidegger was realizing that what constitutes being for Dasein changes over the course of history. For example, to be in the Middle Ages means essentially to be an artifact of an omnipotent creator. In modern technological civilization, by contrast, to be means to be raw material for human manipulation and consumption.

By the time of Contributions, furthermore, Heidegger had come to realize that these historical shifts in the meaning of being were not Dasein’s conscious creation. We do not create meaning; meaning essentially creates us, in the sense of making us who we are. But we are not in conscious control of this process – a point to which we will return a little later. What thus emerges in Contributions and the other writings of the “later Heidegger” is not only an historicized being, but an uncompromising anti-humanism – and thus a shift away from the earlier orientation that makes subjectivity central.

If it is some conception of being that shapes how we view the world, and if we are not in control of how these different conceptions come about, then, ultimately, we are not masters of our own destiny. Needless to say, this constitutes a complete repudiation of Heidegger’s earlier celebration of the power of human will, of willing for willing’s sake.

In just a moment, we will examine in more detail how the later Heidegger conceives of will, but here we may pose a fascinating question: is it possible that Schelling influenced Heidegger, whether positively or negatively, in his turn away from the will and from an approach that made subjectivity central? Davis certainly thinks that this may be the case. He writes, “through his 1936 reading of Schelling, we may surmise, Heidegger gained an insight into the highly spiritual possibility of evil, the rebellious self-will that posits itself as the center of the world, and that represents beings from this egocentric perspective.”^[5]

Accounting for Finitude

However, the 1936 lectures on Schelling do not repudiate the will. Following Schelling, Heidegger merely seeks to distinguish between positive and negative willing.^[6] Indeed, Heidegger offers only fairly muted criticisms of Schelling in 1936, with much of the lecture text being devoted to pure exposition. The criticisms he does offer center mainly on Schelling’s failure to see the implications of founding his “system” on an irrational ground which transcends order, universality, identity, unity, good, love, and the ideal.

This irrational ground simply cannot be absorbed into the system, for the system itself is rational. It is a conceptual structure articulated by reason. Thus, given the very nature of the system, it cannot comprehend the ground. Yet Schelling accords the ground a massive significance: the ground is “primal being”; it is the basis of the being of all things, even God. Thus, if the system is offered as a rational account of the whole, then the system fails. Heidegger writes, “But when the system is only in the understanding, the ground and the whole opposition of ground and understanding are excluded from system as its other, and system is no longer system with regard to beings as a whole.”^[7]

Heidegger characterizes this problem as an “impasse” (Scheitern) that permeates all of Schelling’s later philosophy. Instead of recognizing the gravity of this difficulty and radically rethinking his approach, Heidegger accuses Schelling of falling back “into the rigidified tradition of Western thought without creatively transforming it.” He also makes the following highly significant statement: “But what makes this failure so significant is that Schelling thus only brings out difficulties which were already posited in the beginning of Western philosophy, and because of the direction which this beginning took were posited by it as insurmountable.”^[8]

Heidegger is referring to the difficulty, running throughout all of Western philosophy, of accounting for, or making intelligible, the finite, the particular, and the individual. In its paradigmatic form, this is first articulated by Platonism, which construes the universal or ideal as the only intelligible reality (though the roots of this position are to be found in Pre-Socratic philosophy, especially Parmenides and Pythagoras). The finite and changing is not considered to be imaginary, but it is nonetheless declared to have only a derived being. Finite particulars are said to “partake of” the eternal forms, or to “imitate” them.

Plato never really gets beyond this figurative language in order to offer a rational account of how finitude comes to be. In other words, he never really accounts – in a way that eschews figurative language or mythologizing – for how “manness” comes to be, as it were, “finitized” into individual men. In one guise or another, this problem, the problem of “accounting for the finite,” is found throughout the Western philosophical tradition and is a key difficulty for the German idealists.

Heidegger continues, “For us, that means that a second beginning [of philosophy] becomes necessary through the first, but is possible only in the complete transformation of the first beginning, never by just letting it stand.”^[9] As I noted in the very first installment of this series, the “second beginning” refers, in fact, to Heidegger’s own attempt to develop a philosophy of finitude, unburdened by the metaphysical presuppositions of the tradition (presuppositions from which Schelling, apparently, could not free himself). These ideas of a “first beginning” and a “second beginning” were being worked out by Heidegger in Contributions, during the same period in which he lectured on the Freiheitsschrift.

What constitutes this “second beginning,” for Heidegger? To ask this question is, essentially, to ask about the entirety of what the “later Heidegger” has to contribute to Western philosophy. It is not, therefore, a question that we can address here in exhaustive detail. As a first attempt, we can certainly say that the second beginning will involve a radical coming-to-terms with the finitude of being, such as we have not seen before in the tradition.

Heidegger takes very seriously Schelling’s claim that there is an “irrational ground” which, as I put it earlier, “transcends order, universality, identity, unity, good, love, and the ideal.” More succinctly, we can say that Heidegger takes very seriously the idea that there is an irrational ground which transcends human concepts and human designs. Unlike Schelling, however, Heidegger thinks that the existence of this ground constitutes a rebuke to the modern philosophical “will to system.”

Does Heidegger, then, endorse the idea of a “ground of being”? In a heavily qualified sense, yes. Consider the following remark by Bret Davis:

Heidegger’s step beyond Schelling entails an abandonment of the system of the infinite Absolute for a thinking of the always finitely occurring event of being. . . . Heidegger’s path of thought ultimately leads to an attempt to think the Seynsfuge [“the jointure of being”; the distinction between ground and existence] as the non-willing event of appropriation.^[10]

Das Ereignis

By “event of being” and “event of appropriation,” Davis is referring to one of Heidegger’s most difficult concepts, das Ereignis. This term literally means “the event” but in characteristic fashion Heidegger insists that it should not be understood in the usual way. “Event” is not, in other words, “an event.” Instead, he draws on the word’s complex etymology to understand it as meaning, oddly enough, “appropriation” (the term Heidegger translators now often use to render Ereignis in English, hence Davis’s word choice). I will not go into detail concerning this etymology, and instead focus just on what Heidegger means by the term.^[11] And I will try to express things as simply as possible.

Heidegger scholars would be scandalized by this, but I do think that it is possible to understand Ereignis as an “event,” though of a very unusual sort. To see this, however, we must first introduce and explain yet another cryptic Heideggerean term, “the clearing” (die Lichtung). This metaphorical expression refers to a clearing in a forest, which allows light to enter in and illuminate what stands within the clearing. Thomas Sheehan describes Heidegger’s clearing as “the always already opened-up ‘space’ that makes the being of things (phenomenologically: the intelligibility of things) possible and necessary.”^[12] The clearing is what “gives” being.

Heidegger writes in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964):

The forest clearing is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive “opening” [Lichtung] goes back to the verb “open” [lichten]. The adjective licht “open” is the same word as “light.” To open something means: to make something light, free and open, e.g., to make the forest free of trees at one place. The openness thus originating is the clearing. . . . Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the opening, is not only free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance and echo, for sounding and the diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open region for everything that becomes present and absent. . . . What the word [opening] designates in the connection we are now thinking, free openness, is a “primal phenomenon” [Urphänomenon], to use a word of Goethe’s.^[13]

Consider a simple example. I approach an unfamiliar object sitting on my doorstep. It seems to be a living thing. Is it a cat? From a distance I cannot tell for sure. For a moment, it is a complete mystery. But as I approach closer, all is revealed: I see now that it is a raccoon. In this moment, what has occurred is that the being of the object – what it is, what its meaning is – becomes present to me. In order for this to be possible at all, there must exist for me a certain special sort of “openness,” within which the being of something makes itself known, or makes itself present. (Where is this openness? Is it within me – is it “subjective” – or is it somehow in the world? I will defer discussion of this point until part thirteen.^[14])

The upshot of this is that, for Heidegger, it is possible to speak of something deeper or more ultimate than being itself (hence, an Urphänomenon): that which allows our encounter with the being of beings in the first place; the open clearing. When Heidegger famously refers to “the forgottenness of being” (Vergessenheit des Seins) he is actually referring to the forgottenness of the clearing.^[15] The clearing is forgotten in the sense that we have forgotten that in virtue of which being is given to us. As I will discuss later, Heidegger holds that the Western metaphysical tradition, beginning with the Pre-Socratics, systematically forgets the clearing. He writes: “In fact, the history of Western thought begins, not by thinking what is most thought-provoking, but by letting it remain forgotten.”^[16]

Very simply, Ereignis involves a fundamental change in the clearing: a fundamental change in how we understand being – in other words, how we understand what things are. Thomas Sheehan, in his book Making Sense of Heidegger, argues that “being,” for Heidegger, is equivalent to “meaning.” If this is correct, then we can say that Ereignis is a fundamental change in meaning. The meanings things have for us within the clearing are thus always culturally and historically conditioned; the clearing seems to change through time, and this change, or what gives this change, is Ereignis. Now, we have always known that such changes in meaning take place in history. For example, how most Westerners view the world today is radically different from how they viewed it in the “Age of Reason” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – which is radically different from the “worldview” of the Middle Ages.^[17]

However, in the modern world we tend to believe that these “shifts in meaning” have resulted from conscious choices made by human beings. We believe that they have resulted from “advances” in human thinking. Meaning is really destiny: how we view the world – how we conceptualize what things are and what we are – determines the sorts of actions we believe are possible to us. In other words, meaning determines our beliefs about what we can and cannot change. The idea that human beings themselves create meaning, through their conscious choices and acquisition of knowledge, is thus equivalent to the idea that we are the masters of our own fate. Heidegger refers to this standpoint as “humanism,” and he is sharply critical of it.

The trouble with this humanistic position is that it is effectively mythology, for it stands completely at odds with our actual experience of history. As Greg Johnson notes:

When individuals reflect upon language, culture, and history, we experience them as things that existed before our consciousness emerged, as things that will continue to exist after our consciousness has ended, and as external forces that envelop and enthrall us. They do stand over against us as objects – and also behind us as conditions of our subjectivity.^[18]

We do not experience ourselves as creating or controlling these conditions; indeed, it would be much more accurate to say that we experience them as creating and controlling us. To claim that “in reality” we do control and shape these conditions is a theory – or, as I have suggested, a myth – which is not supported by our actual experience of historical and cultural situatedness. And, as a phenomenologist, Heidegger’s task is to faithfully describe that experience, rather than spinning yarns about how things “really are” behind the scenes.

One might protest by insisting that there are certain men who do effect major cultural change through innovating new ways of looking at the world. Heidegger certainly does not wish to diminish the importance of thinkers like Plato, Bacon, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche – all of whom, one could very plausibly argue, “changed the world.” At the same time, however, he argues that each of these men was giving voice to a cultural shift that was already taking place before they wrote their major works.

Indeed, this is the reason why each of them “caught on.” We reveal the fact that we secretly agree with Heidegger’s position when we sometimes say that a certain thinker came along “before his time” – for it is the case that sometimes thinkers anticipate cultural and intellectual shifts that they may not live to see. They are like prophets heralding these shifts, the seeds for which have already been planted. But other men are not yet ready to hear them (Nietzsche would be an example of such a figure).

Has Heidegger Rediscovered the Fates?

Now, all of the above seems to lead to the inescapable position that there is some kind of “agency” in history that we do not directly experience, do not understand, and cannot control – an agency that seems to “send” us, periodically, new meaning (what Heidegger calls “dispensations of being,” Seinsgeschicke). Indeed, Heidegger argues that the clearing is in principle unknowable to human beings. Since the clearing provides the “horizon” within which things become meaningful or intelligible to us, the clearing itself remains forever mysterious and unknowable to us. Within the clearing, beings display themselves to us in their being – but this means that the clearing, as the condition for such display, can never reveal its being to us. And, further, Ereignis, that which “gives” changes to the clearing, and thus “epochs of being,” likewise remains forever mysterious.

In his otherwise superb commentary, Thomas Sheehan takes Heidegger to task for these claims and winds up fundamentally missing the point. He objects to what he sees as Heidegger’s “reification” of Ereignis as follows:

Heidegger’s key term Ereignis – especially when English scholarship leaves it in the German – risks becoming a reified thing in its own right, a supra-human Cosmic Something that enters into relations with ex-sistence, dominates it, and sends [being] to it while withholding itself in a preternatural realm of mystery. To avoid such traps and to appreciate what Heidegger means by Ereignis, we must always remember that the term bespeaks our thrown-openness as the groundless no-thing of being-in-the-world, which we can experience in dread or wonder.^[19]

What Sheehan fails to perceive is that Heidegger is not “reifying” anything, but instead being true to our experience – in other words, being a good phenomenologist. Is there some mysterious agency at work in history that “sends” us new dispensations of being? This is a metaphysical question – a question about what really exists – and phenomenology does not make metaphysical commitments, it merely describes how matters appear to us. If we restrict ourselves just to that consideration, then we must admit that it certainly feels as if such an extra-human agency exists. In a more honest age, human beings acknowledged this fact – and most definitely reified that agency as the Fates, the gods, or Divine Providence. Were they wrong? Perhaps not.

Greg Johnson responds to Sheehan as follows:

Ereignis is not a “supra-human Cosmic Something” but a supra-individual Cultural-Linguistic-Historical Something. This something does enter into a relation with each individual Dasein. It does dominate us. It does send worlds of meaning to us while withholding itself in a realm of mystery, a mystery that is not “preternatural” but historical and thus “preterindividual.” This is not, in short, the “reification” of ideas but simply good, honest phenomenology: characterizing the experience of appropriation . . . as it actually occurs to us.^[20]

Now, let us circle back to Schelling and consider some crucial lines in which he discusses the nature of the ground:

This 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.

As I stated already in discussing this passage, the key idea 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. Now, there is a great deal here with which Heidegger would agree. Heidegger, however, eschews Schelling’s characterization of the ground of being as will.

Instead, for him, the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, is effectively Ereignis, that seeming agency that “sends” us dispensations of being and remains forever mysterious. To reiterate, things become meaningful or intelligible only within the horizon of meaning bestowed by Ereignis. Ereignis itself thus lies forever outside that horizon of meaning and is thus forever mysterious and unintelligible. Arguably, Heidegger has reinvented or rediscovered the concept of “fate,” sans its personification as the Moirai, or the Norns.

In support of the claim that Heidegger is re-conceiving Schelling’s conception of the ground of being as Ereignis, we might consider a passage from Heidegger’s 1936 lectures. The context of this passage is Heidegger’s discussion of a major historical shift, the birth of modernity and the overcoming of the dominance of the medieval Christian worldview. “The shattering of the sole dominance of the church in legislating knowledge and action is understood as a liberation of man to himself,” he says.^[21] Heidegger then remarks,

In everything recounted just now, an inner context is betrayed, a change of European existence in terms of a ground which remains in the dark for us up until today. Perhaps our century, too, is today still too close to all this – too close especially also in its will to overcome – to be able to appraise what really happened. Perhaps we can never know this “in itself” at all because past history becomes new again and again as past through its future.^[22]

Note here Heidegger’s appropriation of Schelling’s language to characterize his own position: “ground” and “dark,” both of which he italicizes. What changes “European existence” – in other words, what explains this historical transition – is a “ground” that “remains in the dark for us. . . .” He adds “. . . up until today.” Why up until today? Because it is Heidegger’s unique contribution to call our attention to the mystery of this ground, of Ereignis. But perhaps, he adds, this will be a bit too much for men of the present, who are possibly “too close to all this.” To what? Perhaps to modernity’s self-serving self-understanding as the age in which everything will be brought into the light, and all mystery cancelled.

“Perhaps we can never know this ‘in itself’ at all,” he says. Note here the use of Kantian language: the thing-in-itself, for Kant, completely transcends understanding – just as does Heidegger’s Ereignis. Why can we never know this “in itself”? Because “past history becomes new again and again as past through its future.” What Heidegger clearly means here is that the past continually changes (“becomes new and new again”) in light of what comes later. The past is continually being reborn and reconceived in terms of what comes next; in terms of the story men tell in later ages about what earlier ages “meant,” and how the later age arose from the earlier. This gives us the illusion that history is intelligible. The most important example of this, for Heidegger, is modernity’s myth of “progress.”

In the next installment, we will consider Heidegger’s critique of Schelling in 1941, and explore Heidegger’s own understanding of “will,” which turns out to be more or less equivalent to what we have referred to in these essays as the “metaphysics of presence.”

Notes

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

[2] Davis, 33.

[3] Quoted in Davis, 110.

[4] See Davis, 72; see also 110. This language of “giving a law to oneself” is, of course, drawn from Kant, which Davis points out.

[5] Davis, 111.

[6] See Davis, 111.

[7] Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985) (henceforth, ST), 161.

[8] Heidegger, ST, 161.

[9] Heidegger, ST, 161.

[10] Davis, 116.

[11] Thomas Sheehan summarizes the etymology of Ereignis as follows: “Heidegger understands Ereignis in terms of its etymological roots, which go back to the German word for ‘eye.’ The brothers Grimm had demonstrated that the original etymon of Ereignis is the Old High German ouga, ‘eye’ (see the modern German Auge). Ouga underlies the Old High German verb ir-ougen and the Middle High German er-öugen and er-äugen, as well as the obsolete High German verb er-eigen, all of which mean ‘to place before the eyes, to show,’ parallel to the Latin verbs monstrare and ostendere. Over the centuries, however, the etymology shifted significantly as the entirely unrelated adjective eigen (‘one’s own’) and its cognate verb an-eigen (‘to appropriate’) came to be associated with sich er-eigen. Eventually the two meanings—on the one hand, ‘to eye something,’ and on the other, ‘to own it’—got commingled. Furthermore, by the early 1600s the letter n crept in (as in sich er-eignen).” Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 232.

[12] Sheehan, 20.

[13] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 384-385. This essay was translated by Joan Stambaugh; italics added.

[14] For those who cannot wait for the answer, I will say the following. We want to leap to the conclusion that this openness is “within me,” that it is “subjective,” because it does not show up as an “object” in the world. But Heidegger wants to entirely avoid a “subjective” treatment of the clearing as some sort of “faculty” or Kantian a priori structure that I bear “within me.” The reason is that this treatment of the clearing is phenomenologically untrue. I do not, in fact, experience the clearing as something “in me” that is “mine.” Still less do I experience it as something over which I have any kind of influence or control. There is thus no real basis for “subjectivizing” the clearing; for locating it “within the subject.” Indeed, Heidegger critiques the subject/object distinction prevailing in philosophy since Descartes, which locates certain “properties” as “within” a subject, as if this subject is a kind of cabinet in which we dwell, removed from an “external world.” See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 60-61.

[15] Generally speaking, this is correct. Unfortunately, Heidegger is inconsistent with his use of Sein/Seyn, sometimes referring to being, sometimes to the clearing that gives being.

[16] Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968), 152.

[17] I have placed “worldview” in scare quotes because Heidegger cautions us about the use of this term. See my essay “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Five: The Age of the World Picture.”

[18] Greg Johnson, “Making Sense of Heidegger,” Counter-Currents, December 12, 2014.

[19] Sheehan, 234-235.

[20] Greg Johnson, “Making Sense of Heidegger,” Counter-Currents, December 12, 2014.

[21] Heidegger, ST, 31. Italics in original.

[22] Heidegger, ST, 32.