Errancy is nothing indifferent [Gleichgültiges], not a pure privation, but a perversion of cognition [Verkehrtheit der Erkenntniβ] (—it belongs in the category of evil, sickness). (S 9: 241)
These lines, delivered in Erlangen 12 or 13 years after the appearance of Schelling’s last major published work, Philosophical Investigations on the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, show Schelling still struggling to find an adequate expression for the perversion Hegel identified in the Phenomenology as inseparable from the movement of reason. Far from being identical with the indifferent ground of all things (as the Identity Philosophy had assumed), the errancy in which reason separates itself from its ground can have nothing to do with it. Rather than a form of organic striving (as the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature had postulated), reason is closer to the sickness that threatens to suspend this striving. Like a congenital disease, reason manifests itself as a permanent disruption of wholeness which carries with it the imperative of its own suspension but can never be excised without destroying its host. By presenting an alternative to the spatiality of Hegel’s absolute knowing, Schelling’s Freedom essay enacts this suspension and seeks to explain what it means to suspend the perversity of reason.
In the essay’s Foreword, Schelling boldly announces that it is his intention to remove ‘reason, thinking, and knowledge’ from their established place at the core of philosophical inquiry (S 7: 333). In its obsession with a particularly human knowledge, philosophy has elevated these cognitive activities above all others in establishing a division between rational spirit and mechanical nature. But now that ‘that root of opposition has been torn up’ and its humanistic vision proved an effete fantasy, ‘it is time for the higher, or rather the actual [eigentliche] opposition to come to the fore: the opposition of necessity and freedom, with which the innermost center of philosophy first comes into view’ (S 7: 333). Reason has thus ceased for Schelling not only to be the absolute, but even to be philosophy’s central concern.1 By recentering philosophy around freedom’s original emergence from nonfreedom, Schelling in effect announces a departure from both the System of Transcendental Idealism’s emphasis on human feeling and the Identity Philosophy’s elevation of reason.
He begins the body of the essay by contrasting Leibniz’s notion of the divine understanding with Fichte’s conception of human reason. According to Schelling, many have been seduced by Fichte’s philosophy not because of its reawakening of the question of freedom, but by the fact that it places human reason at the beginning of philosophy (S 7: 337). It is much easier, Schelling agrees, to avoid inquiring into the nature of human freedom altogether if we can simply take a free act of the will as our starting point. But this elevation of a uniquely human reason has no systematic basis and presents human freedom only insofar as it falls into the sin that is alone possible in human beings. The essence of freedom can only be sought when we allow it to put us into question, when we do not seek our original wholeness in the origin of all being, but observe our distance from the center.
To avoid locking ourselves into sin from the very beginning and thus give ourselves a choice between good and evil, Schelling suggests we take Leibniz’s metaphysics as a starting point for our investigations. In his 1710 Essays on Theodicy (as in most of his major works), Leibniz draws a distinction between the human and the divine understanding. Whereas the former looks on the world from a particular perspective and thus with limited and skewed knowledge, the latter immediately knows every aspect of this and every other possible universe (Leibniz 1875-90 6: 50). Because God in his infinite goodness can only will what is best, the structure of the actual universe matches that of the best of all worlds conceivable in the divine understanding. While God has complete freedom to will any of these possible worlds, his understanding outstrips his will, such that he could not will a world that contradicts the laws of his understanding. One of the major tasks of the Theodicy is thus to show how individual freedom is possible within such a world preselected by God. Schelling finds it completely confounding how anyone could deny the possibility of systematic knowledge of freedom a priori; ‘since individual freedom must in some way be connected with the universe (no matter if the latter is thought of realistically or idealistically), some system must be present at least in the divine understanding with which freedom coexists’ (S 7: 336-7). Yet some fail to see this necessity by falling into the Fichtean trap of conceiving the individual’s reason as absolute and refusing to admit the existence of any absolute or original being. In casting his lot with Leibniz (and later Spinoza) over Fichte, Schelling shows why the Freiheitsschrift represents a continuation of the work of the Darstellung. The task of system is not at all the System of Transcendental Idealism’s attempt to bring individual reason and feeling to the absolute, but to show the possibility of individuality and freedom within the absolute. Schelling takes the STI to have shown that though (individual) reason and feeling demand proof of their own freedom in their encounters with what they (provisionally) take to be their others, they are never able to find it in experience and must instead settle for the mere recognition (Anerkennung) of the other (S 7: 337-8). As the Identity Philosophy already begins to acknowledge, freedom is not to be found in the relation of the internal to the external, but in the possibility of a choice preceding all externality.
But far from renouncing the Fichtean project of bringing reason to a recognition of its own freedom, Schelling wants to resuscitate reason so far as possible from the methodological stupor of dogmatism, even as he removes it from the center of philosophy. In placing freedom at the center of philosophy, we cannot ignore reason entirely, for ‘to withdraw from the dispute by swearing off reason looks more like flight than victory’ (S 7: 338). In Kant’s first Critique, reason stood at the beginning of philosophy; in the Naturphilosophie, at its end; in the Identity Philosophy, at its center; and in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at its midpoint. In the Freiheitsschrift Schelling proposes to save reason by placing it at the periphery of philosophy. Philosophy is to provide the centripetal force that holds back the flight of a reason no longer tied to its center.
Or more precisely, system is to provide this force. If the opposition of necessity and freedom is to form the core of philosophy, philosophy’s first task is to refute the defeatism of the statement ‘the only possible system of reason is pantheism; but pantheism is inevitably fatalism’ (S 7: 338). But if a system can make a place for reason only if it finds a way to combine pantheism and freedom, then the precise meaning of this pantheism must be further determined. There are three ways, Schelling states, to take the claim that God is everything (S 7: 339-40; Baumgartner 1995: 46). First, we could say that things are immanent in God. Though insufficiently developed, this is an uncontroversial position, since God is generally defined as the being who admits of nothing outside of himself. Second, we could say that each individual thing is identical with God, that each is (a) God. And finally, we could interpret pantheism to claim that individual things are nothing. While Spinoza is usually taken to hold the first or second view (depending on whether one emphasizes the infinitude of God’s attributes or finitude of his modes), Schelling argues that his system is compatible only with the third. Far from asserting the divinity of individual modes of God, he gives us no way to conceive the connection of the finite and the infinite. Since they are by definition known only through another, the sum of God’s modes could not possibly be identical with God himself, ‘for whatever is derived according to its nature cannot, through any kind of summation, pass over to what is by nature original, just as little as the individual points of a periphery taken together can constitute it, since the periphery as a whole is necessarily prior to the points in terms of the concept’ (S 7: 340-1). Revealingly, with this metaphor Schelling places God at the periphery alongside reason and the concept. Both reason and God (unlike the mental faculties posited by the understanding and the finite modes of God) are indissoluble into atomic components and thus resist the lifeless force of Spinozism, and yet the being of each is determined by another center (freedom). Spinoza can help us analyze this periphery but offers no resources for presenting it as the periphery or measuring its distance from the center.
Schelling’s earlier criticism of the understanding thus remains in effect even as it ceases to have the same centrality that it once did. In all the other works we have examined, reason’s priority was based primarily on a developmental model, even as this model and the priority of the organic it assumed were suspended. In the Ideas, for instance, reason and the understanding were conceived as parallel forms of striving, reason striving for unity from out of an original separation and the understanding for continuity across a totalized field. Reason was given priority because it was more organic and more resistant to the dissecting impulses of the ‘dead faculty’ of the understanding. Whereas the understanding (according to the Ideas) strives merely to bring polemical forces in continuity with each other, reason strives to expand itself by adapting its self-conception to incorporate those external things from which it has been separated. Later, in On the World-Soul, the First Projection, and the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling allows reason’s striving to incorporate even the striving of the understanding, so that reason is, if not its predator, at least a greater and more fully self-subsistent organism than the understanding. In the Differenzschrift and the Identity Philosophy, this hierarchy is presented instead as a devolution or depotentiation (Depotenzierung) of the understanding from reason. Mere understanding is a privative form of cognition in that it allows reason’s need to return to itself to dissipate. And in the Phenomenology of Spirit, reason is given priority because of its more complete self-knowledge, its ability not just to understand and shape the world, but to know itself as a theoretician and shaper of the world.
Now that reason is neither the understanding’s destination nor the source of its emanation but already itself on the periphery, Schelling must replace these developmental models with another that can present reason’s superiority to the understanding without relying on a narrative of evolution or devolution. His strategy is to reaffirm that reason has unique access to nature’s self-overcoming, self-denying structure even as he admits that this structure is not all philosophy has to account for. To this end Schelling argues that Spinoza fails to account for freedom not because of his pantheism, but because of his mechanism (S 7: 346-7). If pantheism is the only possible system of reason (an assumption that Schelling is not yet willing to concede, since he wants to explore the essence of freedom before fixing on a definition of reason), then Spinoza’s efforts to build his philosophy using concepts of the understanding prevent him from presenting the system in its full rationality. Or as Schelling bluntly puts it, ‘The error of his system lies by no means in the positing of things in God, but rather in that there are things in the abstract concept of the world’s beings [Weltwesen], instead of infinite substance itself, which in fact is also a thing for him’ (S 7: 349). A true pantheism would not only be able to connect individuals to their ground (or the periphery to its center), but would also express the freedom of these individuals (by refusing to break them apart into mechanically related things).
To make sense of this true form of pantheism, we need a reworked conception of identity, such as the one the Identity Philosophy tried to develop. Whereas the understanding takes statements like ‘This body is blue’ or ‘God is evil’ to indicate a simple uniformity (Einerleiheit) of subject and predicate, such that ‘this body’ is taken to mean nothing other than ‘blue’ and ‘God’ to mean nothing other than ‘evil,’ ‘ancient, profound logic differentiated between subject and predicate according to what preceded and what followed (antecedens et consequens), and thereby expressed the real sense of the law of identity’ (S 7: 342). By distinguishing between ground and consequence or existence, we can understand the copula in the above statements to mean not a simple uniformity, but rather a relation of ground. This existing body is also something blue, though not in the same sense that it is a body. And God is not evil by being God, but rather by being everything, he shares a common ground with evil. When God’s identity with the world is conceived adequately, the unity of all things in God shows itself to be creative [schöpferische] rather than uniform and totalitarian (S 7: 345). By conceiving the immanence of all things in God as a relation of existence to its ground, Schelling hopes to avoid both the determinism of Spinozism and the crude ontology of identity that underlies it.
In locating the ground of all things in God, Schelling is careful to observe that ‘dependence does not annul [aufheben] autonomy [Selbständigkeit] or even freedom. It does not determine essence, but merely says that the dependent, whatever it might be, can only be as a consequent of that upon which it is dependent’ (S 7: 346). If we take the statement that God is identical with all reality in its true sense, that God is the ground of reality, then we do not thereby necessarily assume that individuals are unfree in their relation to God. Even if they cannot be their own grounds, they can nevertheless determine their own essences. Schelling cites Leibniz in noting that it is no more contradictory to state that the infinitely powerful God has a ground than it is to say that the son of a man is also a man, as God’s very existence implies a ground from which it has arisen (S 7: 346). Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of an autonomous being without an external ground, for autonomy would be meaningless if it were not first predicated on a dependence that could subsequently be suspended. Moreover, ‘the same holds true for the comprehension of one thing in another. The individual member, such as the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism; nevertheless it has a life for itself, indeed a kind of freedom, the obvious proof of which is disease, which lies in the eye’s capability’ (S 7: 346). Being in another or even dependent on another does not rule out the possibility of free action, or even action contrary to the individual’s ground of existence. The presence of evil and disease in the world are testaments to the essential freedom of individual moments, for they indicate a real possibility of the ground’s perversion.
A system of reason can only be raised to this cognition of freedom once it has passed through the essential insights of (Schelling’s) German idealism. Spinoza’s mechanical model of nature must be replaced with a dynamic one, which allows us to raise ourselves to the cognition of freedom. Once theoretical reason has come to know itself as both organic and practical, it realizes that ‘In the final and highest instance there is no other being [Seyn] than will. Will is original being [Ursein], and to it alone all predicates apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence of time, self-affirmation. All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression’ (S 7: 350). Such an enlarged idealism not only grants the Fichtean maxim that ‘Activity, life, and freedom alone are the true reality,’ but also seeks to show the converse, that everything real, all of nature is permeated by will and therefore freedom (S 7: 351). It would seem, then, that philosophy must go through reason—or more specifically, through a specific conception of reason resembling that in the System of Transcendental Idealism—in order to think the essence of being as will. But such a will, which forms the real basis of philosophy, is ontologically prior to any employment of reason. Will thus usurps reason’s place in the Identity Philosophy as the self-affirming core of systematic philosophy and pushes it back to the periphery.
Whereas Schelling dispenses rather easily with the claim that pantheism implies determinism, he admits that it is much more difficult to reconcile an individual’s actual capacity for good and evil with the omnipotence and beneficence of God. Prior to Schelling, there had been three approaches to this problem. One could, like Spinoza and the Stoics, deny that evil is a real predicate. Nothing is evil in itself, this view holds; things are evil merely with respect to particular finite purposes. But by denying that an individual could choose evil, this view reduces the will to mere inclination. At the bottom of every action, this view presupposes, is a decision based not upon a pure act of will, but on some sort of calculation weighing risks and benefits.
If, on the other hand, there is such a thing as evil, then it must be either something real in itself or a mere privation of good. Those taking evil to be something real in itself have generally subscribed to a Manichean dualism, according to which individuals are simultaneously compelled by both good and evil forces irreducible to each other. ‘But this system,’ Schelling argues, ‘if it actually is thought to be the doctrine of two absolutely different and mutually independent principles, is only a system of the self-laceration and despair of reason’ (S 7: 354). Not only does it fail to show how the universe could be composed of two fundamentally different principles, but it fails to show how they could be united in a single practical reason able to choose between them.
But if with Leibniz we take the Augustinian route and view evil as merely a privation of God’s goodness, such that evil appears only where God lacks the power to engender his infinite beneficence, then we must still explain how such privation is possible within an infinite being. Leibniz’s answer, as we already saw, was that the laws of God’s understanding circumscribe the possible worlds he can realize. While he is incapable of generating pure goodness in the world (since then he would merely be creating another God, which would mean there would be two beings with exactly the same attributes, thus violating what has come to be called Leibniz’s law), God spreads his goodness throughout the universe so far as possible (Leibniz 1875-90 6: 382). But then evil is still a nonbeing with no ground independent of God. Without a positive account of evil, the Augustinian-Leibnizian privation theory risks falling into the Spinozistic denial of evil. And even more importantly, this view does not allow for the possibility of a real choice between good and evil. If evil is merely a by-product of God’s good will, then it is not something that can be chosen and thus fails to account for real freedom.2 Various parallel doctrines, such as the one that holds evil to express a degree of emanation from God or a mysterious ‘superfluity of being [Ueberfluß des Wesens]’ that escapes his beneficent guiding hand merely push back the problem, as they still need to explain how something that was originally in accord with God’s will could come to differ from it (S 7: 355).
Schelling’s new insight, the basis for his renewed ontology of identity, is his effort to work out ‘the distinction … between a being [dem Wesen] insofar as it exists and a being insofar as it is merely the ground of existence’ (S 7: 357). More specifically, he argues that evil, defined as departure from God’s will, can only be thought systematically if we allow that God’s ground is distinct from his existing. Though evil is indeed something real and thus must be accounted for in any complete system, it arises prior to God’s will, in the being (Wesen) that grounds his existence. Being or essence (Wesen) thus has two sides: its appearance as existence and its longing to appear as ground.3
In a letter to Schelling (written in 1810 and published with Schelling’s 1812 reply in the first edition of the Allgemeine Zeitzschrift von Deutschen für Deutsche), Karl Eschenmayer charges that the distinction between ground and existence is meaningless in God: ‘Since God has the ground of his existence in himself, this ground immediately ceases to be a ground and collapses into one with his existence’ (S 8: 145). While such a distinction is possible in nature, ‘for God the distinction is invalid precisely because you [Schelling] assume that ground and consequence, form and essence [Wesen], being [Seyn] and becoming collapse into one and the same point’ (S 8: 145-6). Schelling is willing to concede the identity of God and his being, but he counters that Eschenmayer has misread the Freedom essay’s most important distinction. While God’s existence (Existenz) and the ground of this existence (Grund zur Existenz) do coincide, God as existing (existierend) is something different entirely from his ground (S 8: 164). In order to conceive God as existing, we must take him as subject. God is not simply a (self-)posited existence, but exists insofar as he freely wills creation. Thus a full grasp of the difference between essence as ground and essence as existing requires a prior understanding of both human and divine subjectivity, each of which the Freiheitsschrift aims to conceive anew.
Still, in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling does equip his readers with some resources for conceiving the distinction between ground and existing.4 He explains that God’s existence is not simply caused by its ground, but actively distinguishes itself from this ground, that is, from nature, in a way similar to how light in the Naturphilosophie distinguishes itself from gravity:
Gravity precedes light as its eternally dark ground; it is not actu itself, and flees into the night when light (that which exists [das Existierende]) dawns. Even light does not fully break the seal beneath which gravity lies enclosed. Therefore gravity is neither pure essence [Wesen] nor the actual being[Seyn] of absolute identity, but is only a consequence of the nature of absolute identity; or it is absolute identity viewed in a specific potential. (S 7: 358)
Essence as existing is thus unable to ‘break the seal’ of its ground, which must lie, at least to some extent, in permanent darkness. Since Schelling calls this ground of God nature, we may say that ‘nature in general is everything that lies beyond the absolute being [Seyn] of absolute identity’ (S 7: 358). Though this beyond is equally a before, since it indicates not only the ground’s incomprehensibility but also its precedence, the latter ‘is to be thought neither as precedence in time, nor as priority of being [Seyn].… God has within himself an inner ground of his existence which to this extent precedes him in his existence; yet God is just as much prior to the ground insofar as the ground, also as such, could not be if God did not exist actu (S 7: 358). With this reciprocity, Schelling wants to abandon the doctrine of immanence that takes pantheism ‘to express a dead comprehension of things in God’ (S 7: 358). In its place, Schelling’s new doctrine takes the finite things of nature to come into being independently of God. But this does not imply that nature is therefore outside of God, for such a conception would once again assume that nature is an inert thing whose meaning derives solely from God’s will. Thus the only alternative is to place the becoming of things in that which is God and yet simultaneously exceeds his conscious will (S 7: 359).
In an explicit effort to anthropomorphize5 this ground, Schelling describes it as ‘the longing [Sehnsucht]6 the eternal one feels to give birth to himself’ (S 7: 359). Since it is not yet the unity that God gives to the universe, but a mere longing for or addiction to being, ‘it is also (viewed for itself) will, but will in which there is no understanding, and which therefore is not autonomous and perfect will, since understanding is the true will in willing. Nevertheless it is a willing of the understanding, namely its longing and desire; it is not a conscious but a presentient [ahndender] will, whose presentiment [Ahndung] is the understanding’ (S 7: 359). Whereas for Leibniz the divine will is complete and autonomous, grounded as it was in a perfect understanding of all possible worlds, for Schelling the protowill expressed in nature’s longing precedes the intelligence that God brings to bear on the world and thus carries a merely partial understanding.7 Rather than the full consciousness (Bewuβtsein) of Leibniz’s God, this longing has only a vague presentiment (Ahndung) of what is to come to be in its actualization.
Thus the challenge for a philosophy that seeks to think not only the order of divine goodness but the ground from which it arises is to make sense of a longing that is not even fully intelligible for itself. However this apprehension is to occur, it is clear that it must consist of something other than the understanding and will always be at risk of an eruption of meaninglessness, for
Following the eternal act of self-revelation, all is rule, order, and form in the world as we now see it. But the ruleless still lies in the ground as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as though order and form were original, but rather as if something initially ruleless had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis [Basis] of reality in things, the irreducible remainder [der nie aufgehende Rest], that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in the understanding, but rather remains eternally in the ground. (S 7: 359)
It has been far too little recognized in Schelling research that Schelling uses the term ‘irreducible remainder’ only with regard to the understanding. In this particular respect, the Freiheitsschrift says nothing that Schelling had not already said as early as 1795 (Of the I, S 1: 157-8). So long as it takes its ground as something extant, as something to be analyzed as one of many worldly beings, the understanding will lose itself in infinite striving for an origin it can never find. This was no new insight in philosophy even when Kant argued that reason must serve as a corrective for the groundless wandering of the understanding. Despite the elegance of Schelling’s formulation of this passage, it betrays nothing of the central insight of the Freedom essay, that reason itself is abyssal.
This is why another one of Eschenmayer’s less-discussed criticisms (from the same letter in which he criticizes Schelling’s division of ground and existence in God) simultaneously goes to the core of the problem of the Freiheitsschrift and completely misses its point. Given that Schelling purports to base his system on an analysis of God into ground and existence, Eschenmayer reasonably asks if this does not reduce God himself to an object of the understanding (Verstandeswesen) (S 8: 146). To this end, Eschenmayer recalls Schelling’s distinction in the Darstellung between the analytic understanding on the one hand and reason on the other, ‘which does not have the idea of God, but is this idea itself and nothing else besides’ (S 8: 146). In order to think God’s separation into ground and existence, he argues, we would have to abandon reason’s most basic knowledge of God’s unity, releasing the understanding from the only moorings that could possibly ground it.
Schelling agrees fully, but counters that these moorings are themselves unthinkable. In elevating reason over the understanding, the prior works of German idealism—including, I have argued, Schelling’s own systematic efforts from Of the I to the Identity Philosophy—hold that the understanding can have no access to the will’s (including God’s will’s) tendency to return to itself, which the understanding can view only as part of an abyss of ungrounded desires. Whereas reason—be it Kant’s essentially problematic criticism, Fichte’s self-grounding striving, the Naturphilosophie’s self-completing development, or the Phenomenology’s perverted self-certainty—finds its truth in willing, the understanding obsessively dissects all desires in the vain hope of finding some truth beneath them. Thus it can only be regarded as a deep betrayal of Schelling’s idealistic roots when he responds to Eschenmayer’s criticisms by asking, ‘Can a being [Wesen] acting in accord with a purpose and intention even be thought that is not eo ipso also an object of the understanding?’ (S 8: 166). Here Schelling is questioning not only the absolute priority of reason over the understanding, but also the privileging of the intelligibility given by reason. The early Schelling and Hegel both argued that it was reason, and not the understanding, that was key to conceiving both the teleological and self-organizing structure of organic nature and the freedom of thought. Accordingly, they thought self-sufficient beings were inaccessible to the understanding, which ceaselessly analyzed any object it encountered, ignoring the wholeness that living beings (Lebewesen) can give themselves. For Schelling to grant the understanding a place in cognizing willing and to think of it as itself a self-subsistent form of striving is to deny reason the right to distinguish itself absolutely from the understanding. By locating reason in relation to its ground rather than to its self-production, Schelling allows the understanding to draw reason out to join it on the periphery of philosophy.
The distinction between reason and the understanding is thus not to be conceived solely by reason, but instead by the freedom that makes both possible. What Eschenmayer proposes in place of such a living understanding Schelling calls ‘cold reason, immediately the dead concept of truth’ (S 8: 178). ‘I find,’ Schelling intones (in apparent disregard of his entire Identity Philosophy), ‘this type of idealism the most complacent [bequemste] of all. It throws out all questions of origin, of becoming, which are always the most difficult’ (S 8: 178). If philosophy is to provide any clue regarding the freedom of human subjectivity, it must not dissolve the universe into a simple identity. For under such a totalized reason, the individual human being could only be a reflection (Reflex) of the idea and would have no ability to depart from divine providence through sin (S 8: 178).
But rather than working out the precise place of the understanding in a new philosophy with reason at the periphery, Schelling offers a mere glimpse. The original longing at the ground of God ‘directs itself towards the understanding, which it does not yet know, as we in our longing yearn for [in der Sehnsucht … verlangen] an unknown, nameless good, and it moves presentiently like an undulating, surging sea, similar to Plato’s matter, following a dark, uncertain law, incapable of forming something lasting by itself’ (S 7: 360). The possibility of something lasting, of a constant presence, only arrives on the scene when God, roused to existence, beholds himself in an image. This image, which Schelling also calls a representation (Vorstellung), is the word of God’s longing, ‘in the sense that we say the word of [i.e., the solution to] a riddle’ (S 7: 361n). In this word or answer, we find the wholeness of reason’s ability to return to itself through self-reflection. Through this wholeness, the divine understanding is finally born and begins to impose its will on previously ruleless nature: ‘The first effect of the understanding in nature is the division of forces, since only thereby is the understanding able to unfold the unity which is contained unconsciously but necessarily in nature as in a seed’ (S 7: 361). Organic life comes into being when the pure light of the understanding reaches into its dark ground and violently disrupts its undulating repose, giving it the powers of self-formation, disease, and death. Such quickening is possible because ‘this essence (initial nature) is nothing other than the eternal ground of God’s existence, and therefore it must contain within itself, although locked up, the essence of God as a gleaming spark of life in the darkness of the deep’ (S 7: 361). In the same way that sickness is only possible in health and health only apprehensible in relation to sickness, it is only with the light of divine revelation that the dark ground’s potential begins to appear and only over against this ground that light is intelligible.
Yet there are limits to this illumination and intelligibility. For evil (and therefore freedom) is conceivable within a system only so long as the divine understanding is not absolute, only so long as it fails to spread the light of divine goodness throughout the universe. The understanding thus plays a vital, yet nevertheless secondary and only partially defined role in the Freiheitsschrift. While it helps to mark the distance between divine goodness and the ground that makes this goodness as well as evil possible, it yields no firm determinations that would allow human freedom to be understood.
Still, Schelling may be forgiven for this vagueness, since, as in the Identity Philosophy, his aim is not to analyze the structures that stand at the periphery of philosophy, but to present the freedom at its center. Rather than piecing together how the divine understanding gives shape to its ground, he wants to show how God and the human being enact their freedom as existing subjects. The crucial difference, he notes, is that what is in God an indivisible unity of spirit and ground is separable in the human being.8 Humans’ capacity for evil stems from their ability to suspend the universal love of spirit and allow the ground’s dark drive of selfhood to predominate (S 7: 364). By placing reason to the side, Schelling is able to explore how the freedom of subjectivity is grounded not in its self-positing, but in its divisibility. Because it can separate the light and dark principles in itself, spirit can will either to unify its particular will with the universal will and hence to remain at the center of God’s love or to separate its particularity from the universal and hence exile itself to the periphery (S 7: 364-5).
This should not be taken as a demonic inversion of the Kantian doctrine that only action in accord with the moral law is free (K 4: 447). Schelling is not claiming that human beings demonstrate their freedom only when they choose to elevate their particular wills. Rather, even the affirmation of the universal will—that is, of the divine—shows the individual’s freedom and potential for evil, as it has the audacity to place into the center what is merely particular, what arises from the dark ground and resists the light (S 7: 365). Spirit is a form of existence above both the dark ground and the understanding and gains its freedom from its ability to distinguish between them rather than from its ability to deviate from divine providence. When, however, the human spirit uses this ability to raise its self-will to the highest principle or takes it as the basis of all universal will—for example, when Spinoza makes pursuit of individual power the basis for all charity—then its every action becomes infected with evil. Just as disease can make even the most ordinary of organic processes malignant, so does an evil will use the understanding’s power of transformation to pervert its amoral dark ground into ’a false life, a life of lies, a growth of unrest and corruption [Verderbniß]’ (S 7: 366). In contrast both to those who place too much distance between good and evil (by making them distinct principles fighting over the soul) and those who place too little distance (by denying evil as in itself different from the good), this ‘solely correct concept of evil, according to which evil is rooted in a positive perversion [Verkehrtheit] or reversal [Umkehrung] of principles’ shows how evil is neither something real in itself independently of the good nor a mere privation of the good (S 7: 366). Instead, evil is a corruption of the spiritual power to raise itself above both nature’s amorality and God’s goodness. And so, ‘Just as disease certainly is nothing essential, and is truly only a phantasm [Scheinbild] of life, a mere meteoric appearance of it—a hovering [Schwanken] between being and nonbeing—even though it announces itself to one’s feelings as something very real, so it is with evil’ (S 7: 366).
To show the novelty of this position, Schelling again contrasts it with the Leibnizian conception of evil. According to Leibniz, evil can be felt as something positive despite being a mere privation in much the same way that freezing water can burst even the most solid of pipes despite the fact that it consists in an absolute decrease of motion (S 7: 369). Or better, individual souls can, according to this Leibnizian view, be likened to inert bodies. When the same force is applied to two bodies of different masses, the more inert (i.e., more massive) one will reach a slower speed. Yet this slower speed, Leibniz would maintain, is not something positive in itself, but merely a greater privation of motion (S 7: 370). Schelling counters that such an analogy cannot explain what is truly positive in evil and ‘in fact arises from a lifeless concept of the positive, according to which privation alone can oppose it’ (S 7: 370). If we are to have any hope of avoiding the contradictions and trivialities of privation theories of evil, we need to frame both evil’s negativity and its positivity in terms of an organic whole. Positivity must be viewed as wholeness or unity and negativity as the division that always threatens it. The very conservativeness of the longing to grasp hold of one’s original ground leads to the revolutionary assumption that this ground can be manipulated by a human will.9 Evil and good do not differ materially, since they are both modifications of the same whole, but rather in their form, in that evil is the separation of what is unified in the good.
With this nod to a formalist conception of evil, Schelling shows why the Identity Philosophy was necessary to overcome the organicism of the Nature Philosophy. In order to conceive the possibility of freedom, the organic had to be decoupled from reason and shown to be the ground of the possibility of perversity. The irreducible remainder at the ground of understanding exercises its own sort of force that never manages to return to itself. In the language of the Freedom essay, this means that the essence of personality had to be discovered so that evil could be seen as more than a mere opposition or separation of forces (S 7: 370). The individual freedom on which human reason depends rests neither on its substantial conditions (which Kant, Fichte, and Hegel all also denied) nor on the mere fact that its unity could be perverted, but rather on a prerational tendency to perversion and corruption (S 7: 370-1). Though reason will always strive to recover this ground, the fact that it can only exist in a personality, in an existence emerging from its ground, forever leaves open the possibility of corruption.
But even here Schelling admits that he has not yet distinguished between ground and existence sharply enough. While he has shown the ground of human evil in the ground of God, he has not yet sufficiently described the divine and human existences through which evil becomes actual. To complete his account of the origins of freedom, Schelling will need to show both its causes in the human personality and its possibility in the divine personality (S 7: 373). He begins with the latter task, examining not only ‘how evil becomes actual in the individual human being alone, but also its universal effectiveness, or how it was able to burst forth from creation as an unmistakable general principle, battling everywhere against the good’ (S 7: 373). Schelling has already noted that the uniqueness of human freedom consists in the spirit’s ability to separate the nature and understanding that are inseparable in God’s revelation (S 7: 364). But since everything that is is in God, the structure of God’s revelation must somehow allow for this division in humanity. The solution depends first on grasping God’s light and dark principles not merely as forces, but as wills: ‘The will of love and the will of the ground are two different wills, each of which is for itself; but the will of love cannot oppose, nor can it suspend [aufheben] the will of the ground, since it would then have to strive [widerstreben] against itself’ (S 7: 375). The will of love must be more than a mere counterforce to the ground, for it would otherwise be a reactionary and self-hating will. But nature or the will of ground also cannot be merely reactionary to the will of love, for its very effectiveness depends on love (S 7: 375). The two can only be independent and reciprocal drives if ‘the will of love and the will of the ground become one precisely by being divided and by each acting for itself from the very beginning. Thus the will of the ground arouses the self-will of the creature right in the first creation, so that when spirit then arises as the will of love, it may find something resistant [Widerstrebendes] in which it can realize itself’ (S 7: 375-6). Conceived in terms of God’s existence, the ground of evil and hence of freedom is present at the very beginning of creation. In order for the divisive power of spirit to appear in an intelligible system of pantheism, it must be linked to the essential duality of the respective wills of God’s ground and understanding. What Schelling saw in the Nature Philosophy as nature’s enigmatic withdrawal is here taken to be a kind of irrational freedom. Because the (proto)will of nature cannot be brought into even a perverted unity of reason’s willing, reason cannot get beyond a despair at the duality of God’s willing.
This primal willing is no mere privation of goodness or retreat from God’s will, but announces itself continually in nature (S 7: 376-7). Nature is full of sickness and objects that arouse our disgust completely independently of their relation to God’s will. While some might argue that monstrosities and moral perversions are contemptible only because they fail to live up to a divine plan, Leibniz’s Theodicy demonstrates that even when such objects are found in conformity with a plan our disgust does not lessen. Such instances indicate that the dark will can be raised above the original appearance of nature just as much as spirit is raised above the principle of light (S 7: 377). Schelling calls this elevation of the dark ground the ’general evil which, even if not present in the very beginning, did begin in God’s revelation, having been awakened by the reaction of the ground. While this evil never comes to actualization, it continually strives in that direction’ (S 7: 380-1). In the longing that lies in the basis of all of nature, there is an impulse to evil which nevertheless is not actualized until it is paired with the impulse to universality in the human spirit.10
This generality (or universality, as Allgemeinheit could also be rendered) of evil does not compel the human being to sin, but it does call her out from the simple self-sameness of the center, ‘just as a mysterious voice seems to call someone seized by vertigo on a high and precipitous summit to plunge down, or as in the ancient myth the irresistible song of the sirens rang out from the depths in order to draw mariners sailing through down into the whirlpool’ (S 7: 381). The very tendency that allows the human being to love becomes the possibility of evil when the drive to unify oneself with all being is inverted to a drive to submit all being to oneself. The relation between the human being and nature’s generalized solicitation to evil can only be properly conceived as a relation of existent to ground: ‘Fear [Angst] of life drives the human being out of the center in which he was created; for this center is, as the purest essence of all will, a consuming fire for every particular will; in order to be able to live in it the human being must die off [absterben] in all his ownhood, for which reason he must almost necessarily attempt to step out of it and into the periphery, in order to seek his selfhood there’ (S 7: 381). Human freedom, Schelling paradoxically suggests, consists in the ‘almost necessary’ dying off of everything that makes the human being an individual.
That necessity is a vital component of freedom poses no significant difficulty for Schelling. If human freedom consisted simply in the ability to arbitrarily decide between two alternatives—to make the decision that Buridan’s ass could not—then freedom would be indistinguishable from the nonfreedom of having the choice made externally. Thus it should be clear, Schelling maintains, that ‘accident [Zufall] is impossible and conflicts with reason as with the necessary unity of the whole, and if freedom is to be saved by the complete accidentalness [Zufälligkeit] of actions, then there is no saving it at all’ (S 7: 383). Genuine freedom is not a total lack of determination, but pulls itself from out of its ground in a determinate manner and hence consists of nothing but determination. And since a free being cannot be determined from without, the human being must always already have determined herself in her essence (Wesen) (S 7: 384).
Thus in the human being freedom and necessity are identical. Recalling Fichte’s famous formulation, Schelling notes that ‘the essence [Wesen] of the human being is essentially his own deed [That]; necessity and freedom stand together11 as one being [Wesen] which appears as one or the other when viewed from different aspects. In itself, it is freedom; formally, it is necessity’ (S 7: 385). The human being, that is, cannot be subjected to the opposition of necessity and freedom, for human freedom is inseparable from a formal necessity. Fichte had already realized that since the human being is essentially her own deed, she could not be constituted by anything other than this deed. Yet Schelling distances himself from Fichte by arguing that ‘consciousness, insofar as it is thought of merely as apprehending the self or knowing the I, does not come first, but presupposes true being as does all mere cognition’ (S 7: 385). In saying that the human being is her own deed, Schelling does not mean that we can consciously will ourselves into being. Rather, cognition is always indebted to something prior, which, if it is not fully being, nevertheless serves as its ground. What is usually taken as a conscious decision to act in a determinate way, either in accord with or contrary to the good, is epiphenomenal, for it is the deed itself that produces everything determinate about the self, including consciousness (S 7: 386).
Since spirit’s act of raising itself from this ground, of distinguishing between the light and dark principles, cannot be determined by anything else in time, it must be co-original with the creation of the universe—though as a free action it is separate from God’s act of creation (S 7: 385). The human being’s decision (Entscheidung) for good or evil thus occurs independently not only of anything temporal, but of time itself. The human capacity to will must stretch back to a point before the world’s temporal unfolding (S 7: 385-6). This atemporality is what distinguishes evil from the mere sickness of nature. Though the human being is doubtlessly exposed to passions and all other manner of contagion [Contagium] by which the forces of nature attempt to push her from the center, the radical evil of humanity precedes all such sickness (S 7: 388). More than a mere perversion of the human being’s natural drives, this evil is constitutive of reason itself.
Having thus shown how it is possible for evil to arise in the individual human being without denying the importance and power of reason, Schelling concludes that the only task remaining is to describe evil in the existing person. As we have seen, evil is possible because human beings can raise their dark, selfish principles from the mere means of the good to a higher principle that dominates the universal will (S 7: 389). When the light principle completely infuses the dark one, ‘then God as eternal love, or as he who actually exists, is the bond of the forces in the human being. If both of these principles are in discord, however, then another spirit assumes the place where God should be, namely, the inverted [umgekehrte] God’ (S 7: 389-90). Such a presumptuous spirit is not only sinful, but completely inaccessible to the understanding. Schelling compares it to ‘matter in the mind of the ancients, which cannot be grasped as actual (actualized) by the perfect understanding, but only by false imagination 
, which is identical with sin’12 (S 7: 390). In tempting the human being to selfishness or self-addiction (Selbstsucht), evil resists the forces of reason and the understanding and privileges the darkness and mendacity of the imagination.13 In order to conceive freedom as not merely a perversity within reason but as the potential for good and evil, reason must be suspended in favor of a kind of imagination that is itself sinful.
With this we are finally in a position to see the significance of Schelling’s recentering of philosophy around existence rather than reason. ‘In the divine understanding,’ Schelling writes, ‘there is a system; however, God himself is not a system, but a life’ (S 7: 399). God is just as unable to comprehend evil as he is to will it—and indeed, contrary to Leibniz’s assertion, will and understanding are inseparable in divine revelation. The reality of evil subsists not in the divine understanding, but in God’s existence. When properly distinguished from its ground, ‘All existence requires a condition in order for it to become actual, i.e. personal, existence. God’s existence, too, could not be personal without such a condition, except that he has this condition within himself, not outside himself. He cannot annul this condition, for in that case he would have to annul himself; he can only overpower it through love and subordinate it to himself for his glorification’ (S 7: 399). Thus while God does not will or participate in evil, its condition is eternally present in his existence. But unlike the human being who allows the dark principle of self-addiction to dominate the principle of light, God overpowers the dark ground of nature through universal love, and hence the dark ground so obtrusively present in human beings never appears in God. In contrast,
the human being never gains control of this condition, although in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him, independent of him; thus his personality and selfhood can never rise to a perfect act. This is the sadness [Traurigkeit] clinging to all finite life, and if in God, too, there is a condition which is at least relatively independent, then within him there is a well of sadness, which, however, never comes to actuality, but serves only for the eternal joy of overcoming. Hence the veil of despondency [Schwermuth] spread over all of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy [Melancholie] of all life. (S 7: 399)
The counterpart to the utter lack of perversity in God’s will to revelation is an eternal sadness in the lives of human beings. That which gives God his power and infinite goodness—the overpowering of the dark ground in nature—merely serves to emphasize the human being’s fallenness and inability to get behind the conditions that make reason’s perversion an always outstanding possibility.
A philosophy of freedom, one that seeks to place this sadness at the periphery rather than dwell in it, is thus not only beyond good and evil but beyond humanity and so beyond reason—beyond humanity because the suspension of the opposition of good and evil raises philosophy beyond the uniquely human condition of an unbridgeable gulf between ground and existence, and beyond reason because this gulf is constitutive of reason’s grounding urge for separation. At the same time, we miss the radical metaphysical humility of the Freiheitsschrift if we take Schelling to have discovered a superhuman or superrational unity of ground and existence in God. Such a fantasy in fact falls into what Schelling calls evil: placing oneself where God should be, or in other words, positing a unity of oneself and the world from out of self-regard. Whereas a philosophy that places reason at its center (like the first five parts of the System of Transcendental Idealism) will confront all separation by renouncing the limitations of its self-conception and expanding itself indefinitely through the spirit of universal love, the Freiheitsschrift investigates the limitations the division of ground and existence places on such an indefinite expansion.
More specifically, Schelling denies that there is either a unity or a disunity of ground and existence (S 7: 406). If there is a unity, then thinking falls once again into the night in which all cows are black. Or rather, we would not even be able to say, with the consciousness of Hegel’s sense-certainty, that ‘now is night’ (H 9: 64, §95), as we could no longer distinguish between the light and dark principles. If, on the other hand, we assume an eternal dualism of ground and existence, then we remain within the orbit of reason, but now as the despair of a reason unable to unify its two basic principles. To escape this orbit, Schelling instead looks to the indifference of the distinction between ground and existence, or what he calls the unground (Ungrund):
there must be a being [Wesen] before all ground and before all existence, thus before any duality at all; how can we call this anything but the original ground [Urgrund], or rather the unground [Ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be differentiated within it or be in any way present within it. Thus it cannot be designated as the identity of opposites, but only as their absolute indifference. (S 7: 406)
Since it precedes the opposition of ground and existence, the unground is not a product of this or any other pair of opposites, ‘nor are they contained in it implicitly; rather, it is a being [Wesen] of its own, separated from all opposition, on which all opposites are broken, which is nothing other than their very non-being, and which therefore has no predicate except predicatelesness, without therefore being a nothing [Nichts] or an absurdity [Unding]’ (S 7: 406). In order to think the freedom contained in the ground of all being, we need to suspend reason’s urge to overcome separation in a higher unity, for to attempt to smuggle the conceptual oppositions of existence and ground or good and evil back into this indifference would reject its very indifference and make it just another product of rational synthesis. ‘However,’ Schelling observes, ‘nothing hinders their being predicated of it as non-opposites, i.e., in disjunction [Disjunktion] and each for itself whereby, however, this very duality (the actual twofoldness [Zweiheit] of the principles) is posited’ (S 7: 407). Unlike opposition, disjunction or twofoldness grants the reality of the light and dark principles without forcing them to be defined in terms of one another. Prior to the opposition of good and evil is the spirit of love, in which good and evil are completely undifferentiated (S 7: 408). Ground and existence are together indifferently in love, and it is only through this loving indifference that there can be such a thing as the spirit that strives to incorporate its ground into its existence. The incorporative drive of reason is thus grounded not in a desire to cancel an original separation (as, for instance, in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium), but in an original indifference that was neither a union nor a separation, but simply a disjunction of all principles. Love, the nonbinding bond of ground and existence, allows ground and existence to be alongside one another in a mutually dependent nonnecessitation. Beyond this, the unground cannot be further analyzed, for ‘this is the mystery of love, that it combines what could be for itself [für sich] and yet is not and cannot be without the other’ (S 7: 408). To attempt to specify a further generality under which indifferent love is possible would distort the Freedom essay’s discovery that God is not merely the immanence of reason in all things, but a living personality (S 7: 411-12).
But unlike the indifference at which the Identity Philosophy arrives, the Freiheitsschrift’s prioritization of indifference does not force philosophy back into the night in which all cows are black. Whereas in the Identity Philosophy Schelling placed both existence and its ground together in the absolute identity of reason, the Freiheitsschrift forestalls from the very beginning the possibility that ground and existence could form an identity. As the ground of God’s existence, ‘nature in general is everything that lies beyond the absolute being [Seyn] of absolute identity’ (S 7: 458). Though Schelling describes nature as a longing for identity, he does not for this reason define it in terms of identity. Whereas a philosophy that places reason at the center would seek to describe the inchoate ground in terms of what it gives birth to, the Freedom essay aims to show the distance of intelligibility from its ground in nature. The ground of God is beyond any system of identity in the sense that the divine understanding can never hope to incorporate it. But even more, the philosophy Schelling inaugurates with the Freiheitsschrift is beyond all system because it remains indifferent to the closure of the system. By placing reason at the periphery of his investigations, Schelling is able to speak meaningfully of the absolute without dissolving everything into an undifferentiated reason. He shows that the essence of human freedom consists in the real possibility for both good and evil and in what this possibility consists without placing this possibility in a system of the divine understanding or allowing reason to find itself in its origin. For this reason, I believe we can be more decisive than Sallis lets on at the end of the second edition of his Delimitations:
Does the return to the indifferent origin not risk merely replacing the ground that remains ever secluded with another ground in which all seclusion would be prohibited in the interest of indifferent unity, posing here, in the text in which one would least have expected such a move, its indifferent absolute as the night in which, as one tends to say, all cows are black? Summoning up the specter of metaphysics at the end of metaphysics. (Sallis 1995: 232)
If the Freiheitsschrift were structured around such a return to the unground that serves as the condition for the possibility of intelligibile differences, then Schelling would indeed again be faced with the ‘night in which all cows are black’ problem. The difference between ground and existence that Schelling labors so hard to specify would dissolve into the same lack of differentiation with which all inquiry begins. But such a homecoming is neither the aim nor the result of the essay. Instead, Schelling ends the essay by leaving identity and difference on the periphery of his inquiry into human freedom. Rather than oscillating between determination and indeterminacy, the Freiheitsschrift aims to hold onto each, but only by recognizing that neither is the center.
Yet this manner of preservation should not be confused with the sacrificial suspension Hegel describes as absolute knowing, for it calls into question the very gallery in which spirit’s contradictory moments are to be preserved. At the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, reason, as one moment in spirit’s dialectic, reappears as spatialized in the gallery of images that constitutes absolute knowing. As such, reason is not only indebted to the freedom that allows all spirit’s moments to appear alongside one another, but helps constitute this freedom. And as we saw in Chapter 5, spirit’s ability to progress through the dialectic and recollect its progress is in large part determined through reason’s experience as negater and preserver of finite conceptions of reality. But with the Freiheitsschrift, finitude is placed to the side. Like the Identity Philosophy, the Freiheitsschrift suspends not only the oppositions that keep spirit finite, but reason’s very drive for preserving its past and incomplete forms of cognition. When reason is placed at the periphery of philosophy, philosophy’s central line of inquiry concerns an unground in which all distinctions not only dissolve, but are annihilated. In the effort to solve the Spinozistic riddle of how the infinite is related to the finite, Schelling suspends all striving for an adequate concept of the connection and instead points to the conceptually indeterminable indifference in the unground of ground and existence.
Oddly enough, then, Schelling’s emphasis on indifference in the fundamental oppositions governing thought, spirit, and life leaves his vision of philosophy’s task less indifferent than Hegel’s in the Absolute Knowing section of the Phenomenology. Whereas for Hegel the suspension of reason means recognizing its essential incompleteness and placing it alongside other moments of spirit, for Schelling it means returning it to the periphery of philosophical inquiry so as to hinder its inevitable urge to make itself the center. In confronting reason’s sinfulness, Schelling replaces the flattened spatiality of Hegel’s absolute knowing with a planetary spatiality that is anything but indifferent to reason’s place in knowing.14 Reason’s place is at risk, and if there is a Hegelian gallery where reason is to be preserved, then it stands unguarded at the periphery of the absolute.