Post on 28-Jan-2023
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F.W.J. Schelling
Karin Nisenbaum and Daniel Whistler
1.
Schelling never stopped returning to religion, despite the very different intellectual contexts
that separate his earliest writings of 1795 from his last lectures in 1850.1 At the Tübingen
Stift in the mid-1790s, Schelling received the best theological education in Germany,
submitting theses on original sin and Marcion, as well as a final oral examination on the
Letter to the Philippians. And yet his time there was spent in a febrile, anti-theological
atmosphere where religion was thought “empty twaddle”.2 It is little wonder that Goethe was
initially wary of appointing Schelling to the University of Jena because of his reputation as a
Jacobin (Schelling 1962: 1:131-2). In Jena, Schelling was at the heart of the Romantic
movement as its members became increasingly interested in the potential of religion, and
then, with Hegel, played midwife to the birth of absolute idealism. In 1804, Schelling moved
to Bavaria, working alongside Baader and others, like Windischmann, attempting to
resuscitate neoplatonic and mystical writings. Böhme, Eckhart, Swedenborg and Plotinus,
among others, become key thinkers for Schelling from this point onwards. Schelling’s middle
period (including the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom3
and the drafts of The Ages of the World from 1811-5) is permeated by this Bavarian interest
in mysticism. Moreover, the engagement with theological and religious themes that resulted
and were developed over the next 30 years were finally put to the test in another very
1 It is worth noting from the start that “religion” for Schelling is primarily a matter of the doctrine of God and
divine transcendence in particular; however, as we shall see in the discussion of Heinz Widerporst below (and
this is true elsewhere), Schelling is frequently interested in other elements of religion, such as ecclesiology, the
sacraments, the Incarnation and even, in later years, the exegesis of sacred texts. 2 J.G. Phahl (a contemporary of Schelling’s at the Tübingen Stift), quoted in Richards (2002: 119).
3 Henceforth, Investigations.
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different intellectual context: post-Hegelian Berlin, where Schelling lectured on his
philosophy of revelation in front of Engels, Bakunin, and Kierkegaard in 1841.
The question for this chapter is whether, out of this diversity, a common thread can be
discerned in Schelling’s engagement with religion. Such is of course a version of the question
that has forever haunted Schelling scholarship: is Schelling, as Hegel famously taunted, the
“Proteus of philosophy” (1896 3:513), or is there a fundamental continuity to his trajectory?
In what follows, we argue that, in relation to religion at least, there is one problematic to
which Schelling always returns, if not one answer: the compatibility of naturalism with
religion. That is, Schelling is always interested in the reconciliation of religious explanations
with naturalistic ones, implicitly asking whether a commitment to naturalism threatens
religious belief. What results is a continuing attempt to incorporate religious phenomena into
a thoroughgoing philosophy of nature, to find continuity between nature and the divine.4
We will argue that before 1809, Schelling is initially uneasy with the idea of
reconciling the competing claims of nature and religion. However, in the Investigations he
begins to sketch out a model for a successfully naturalistic account of religious phenomena
by adopting some of the central concepts from the Kabbalistic tradition.
2.
I don’t worry about the invisible too much,
Instead I remain with what I can see and touch:
What I can smell, taste and feel,
4 We are thus proposing a weak version of “the continuity thesis” recently proposed by Grant (2006), in which
philosophy of nature acts as the constant thread throughout Schelling’s philosophical works. We agree that the
categories of nature remain always primary for Schelling, yet, contra Grant’s emphasis (at least), he remains
obsessively interested in accounting for freedom and religion in these terms. See further Section 3.
3
So all my senses grasp what’s real.
Let my one religion be
To love a pretty knee
And breasts so full and hips so slim,
Flowers from which sweet smells overbrim. (Schelling 2014: lines 73-80)
Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith, from which the above is extracted, was
written in winter 1799, as Schelling, in Friedrich Schlegel’s words, “suffered a new attack of
his old enthusiasm for irreligion”.5 Widerporst’s diatribe against religion is founded upon a
hedonistic affirmation of worldly pleasures, and so the poem issues in a raucous declaration
of the joys of this life, of immanence over transcendence. Widerporst repeatedly sets himself
against “those high, otherworldly screechings” (line 5) of the theologians and preachers:
I just don’t know how they can compose
All these endless pieces of religious prose…
In response, at this very moment I insist
That the only real and true things to exist
Are what one can feel with one’s hand,
Not things you can only understand
Through mortification, suffering and fasts
‘Till you wish for release from your body at last. (lines 9-10, 15-20)
Apotheosis and the emasculatory practices needed to effect it are here rejected. Widerporst
continues, the “hallucination” of the theologians is a phantom used to scare humanity into
5 Friedrich Schlegel, “Letter to Schleiermacher, 1799”, quoted in Pareyson (1977: 86-7). For a full discussion of
the context and content of the poem, see Whistler (2014).
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behaving with propriety (lines 56-7). On the contrary, Widerporst “disdain[s] all smoke and
shimmer”, preferring instead thoughts with “nerves, flesh, blood and marrow” (lines 307-10).
Schelling is here taking particular aim at “the religious turn” in early German
Romanticism that had been launched in the spring of 1799 with the publication of
Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion and continued by Novalis in his Europa, or
Christendom (lines 24, 30-2, 83-105). As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, the poem
“represented a reaction . . . to the climate of religiosity that had become dominant within the
Jena group” (1988: 79). Yet, Schelling’s rejection of this return to religion is not merely ad
hominem; he also combats it by means of a naturalistic account of consciousness. Hence, he
repeats in poetic form the basic tenets of his contemporaneous philosophy of nature, in which
a dynamic force of productivity surges forward incessantly, or potentiates itself, to bring
about products of ever-increasing complexity.6 The productive force
…extend[s] and move[s] onwards with might.
In what is living and even what has died
It struggles towards consciousness with active strides.
This explains how all things appear,
For it swells up and makes them persevere. (Schelling 2014: lines 195-9)
Ultimately, consciousness emerges out of this series of potentiations of the productive force,
and at this point the construction of the world is repeated in thought, as the productive force
comes to know itself (this is Schelling’s naturalistic variant of the struggle for self-
consciousness) (lines 219-29). And yet, according to Schelling, consciousness for the most
part fails to acknowledge its own natural genesis:
6 The clearest statement of this metaphysical model at work in Schelling’s philosophy of nature occurs in the
opening to the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (2004: 13-6).
5
He has forgotten his previous names,
And torments himself with ghosts of the dead. (lines 233-4)
That is, consciousness makes appeal to fictitious religious explanations that mask its
emergence from nature. So, to torment oneself with ghosts is precisely what Schleiermacher
and Novalis end up doing, because they fail to realise that man is nature. Schelling thus
identifies religious thinking with alienation from nature: it is a deceitful by-product of
nature's potentiation, a ghost that does not result from a genuine moment in nature’s process
of production, but from an illusion produced by a lack of self-recognition.
Such a critique of religion is, moreover, frequent in Schelling’s works up until 1809.
From his days at the Tübingen Stift onwards, Schelling is suspicious of the “mischief of the
theologians”, as he puts it in a 1795 letter to Hegel (1976: III/1:21). During the mid-1790s, he
is concerned with safeguarding the findings of Kantianism from being “perverted into
conventional phrases and preacher’s litanies” (1980: 160). With Hegel he forcefully insists,
“For us the orthodox concepts of God are no more . . . We reach further than a personal
being” (1976 III/1:22). This is in part a continuation of the Enlightenment attack on positive
religions. Hence, in good eighteenth-century fashion Schelling is quick to damn priestcraft
(Schelling 1856: 1:480),7 the promise of heaven and hell (Schelling 1856: 6:565-60), miracles
(Schelling 1989: 228) and the way in which divine revelation is deployed to constrain human
autonomy (Schelling 1856: 1:476-7).8 And yet Schelling is no less critical of Enlightenment
attitudes towards religion: he claims that during the eighteenth century theology “sunk to its
lowest ebb”, becoming “a theology totally divorced from speculative thought” (1966: 99). In
other words, Schelling bemoans theology’s capitulation to empiricism in modernity, its
7 He writes in this vein, “All of society is fully alike in respect to religion. There are in fact… no teachers and no
pupils” (1856: 1:480; original emphasis). 8 The 1798 essay, On Revelation and the Teaching of the People, provides a wholesale critique of orthodox
concepts of revelation that “presuppose a receptivity in human spirit which is contrary to its whole nature” (1856
1:476-7).
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interpretation of central religious dogmas (such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection)
through the framework of the mechanistic sciences (Schelling 1966: 92).
In consequence, theology should learn a lesson from speculative philosophy and
return to its non-empiricist roots, thereby becoming a “Gospel of the absolute” (1966: 102).
In particular, Schelling’s point is the self-serving one that theology needs to model itself on
Schellingian philosophy and interpret dogmas through its categories (such as the absolute).
“Philosophy,” Schelling writes, “is the true organ of theology” (1966: 95).9 The privilege
here accorded to philosophy over theology is most evident in Schelling’s 1804 treatise,
Philosophy and Religion, even though one of the ironies of Schelling scholarship is that it is
typically taken to prefigure what is seen as Schelling’s later turn towards theological
categories.10
Even Beiser claims that Philosophy and Religion is testament to the fact that
Schelling’s commitment to immanence “was giving way, slowly but surely, to a Christian
theism” (2002: 576). On the contrary, the text is (in some ways)11
one last “attack” of
Schelling’s “old enthusiasm for irreligion”. Specifically, Philosophy and Religion is a
response to K.A. Eschenmayer’s contention that Schelling’s philosophy remains incomplete
without a transcendent deity. Eschenmayer writes,
As far as knowledge reaches, speculation reaches also, [and this is] the
absolute . . . Hence what lies beyond this point can no longer be an act of
intuition, but a faith. What lies beyond all imagining, all concepts and ideas,
and indeed beyond speculation is something which faith apprehends – namely
the divinity. (Eschenmayer, quoted in Lukács 1980: 156-7; original emphasis)
9 For Schelling’s own early attempt at such a reinterpretation of theological dogmas, see Schelling (1989: 57-
82). On the above, see Whistler (2013: 209-21). 10
For example, Bowie (1993: 87-90) and White (1983: 93-101) both give problematic accounts of this text. For
a detailed discussion of the place of Philosophy and Religion in Schelling’s thinking, see Brown (1996: 110-31). 11
Nevertheless, it is still important to note that Philosophy and Religion does speak to some of Schelling’s
concerns in his later work on the question of the origin of the finite, and particularly how to conceive a real
difference between the finite and the infinite while upholding the unconditional nature of the absolute. We
return at length to this question in Section 5.
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In other words, for Eschenmayer, the absolute is not enough: Schellingian philosophy is
incomplete without recourse to a transcendent God and faith.
Schelling’s response is simple: any appeal to such theological concepts is illegitimate.
He writes,
I do not situate the faith described by Eschenmayer above philosophy (as one
must not), but rather below it. I thus return to my project of reclaiming, in the
name of reason and philosophy, those problems which have been appropriated
by religious dogmatism and the non-philosophy of faith. (1856: 6:20)
Schelling’s argument is twofold. First, to conceive of God as transcending the absolute is to
completely misconceive the latter’s unconditional nature, for “nothing higher can remain
above the absolute, the idea of which excludes all limitation, not just contingently, but by
nature” (1856: 6:21). There is nothing beyond the absolute. Secondly and likewise, to posit
faith above knowledge is to limit the latter; as Schelling wrote to Fichte in 1801, “To speak of
faith in philosophy is, in my opinion, as unacceptable as it is in geometry” (1962 2:350).
In 1804, Schelling is thus once again repeating the very same claim that animated his
polemics in Heinz Widerporst: transcendence and the forms of religious life that it gives rise
to are pernicious illusions or contradictions. Those who tout belief in an orthodox God fail to
see the world for what it is: productive nature or immanence. Before 1809, religion and
nature sit uneasily together.
3.
Schelling’s struggle to reconcile religion with naturalism rehearsed above is one that is
played out even more forcefully today, not least in the culture wars between dogmatic
Darwinism and fundamentalist religions. At bottom one finds the same recurrent question:
should religious phenomena be excluded from a naturalistic worldview, reduced to more
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basic non-religious elements, or preserved whole as integral components of human
existence?12
As we have seen, prior to 1809 Schelling is committed to the first response (with
occasional nods towards the second): religious phenomena, particularly a transcendent
personal God, have no place in the philosophy of nature. However, we want to argue that
from 1809 onwards Schelling provides a different account, and indeed it is one that is still
relevant to contemporary issues in religious studies and theology. Beginning in the
Investigations, Schelling offers an alternative to the two varieties of naturalism that dominate
contemporary philosophical debates about the compatibility of religion with the modern
commitment to naturalism. Before turning to the Investigations themselves, we wish to set
out Schelling’s solution in terms of this contemporary context.
In his 1983 Woodbridge Lectures, Skepticism and Naturalism, P.F. Strawson makes
an influential distinction between what he called “strict”, “reductive”, or “hard” naturalism,
and “catholic”, “liberal”, or “soft” naturalism (1985: 1). The hard naturalist is committed to
the view that nature consists of nothing but the physical bare-bones of things.13
This austere
conception of nature goes together with a commitment to the view that the reality of
phenomena in our shared lived world, including our experience of meaning, purpose, and
value, and including our moral attitudes and feelings towards ourselves and others, can and
should be eventually reduced to biological and physical processes, to facts that have no
bearing on our value-orientation. In this way, hard naturalism undermines a central aspect of
a religious outlook: it undermines our conception of ourselves as beings endowed with ethical
value, inhabiting a world where our purposes can be realized. Soft naturalism generally
develops in response to hard naturalism’s austere conception of the natural order. By
employing anti-reductionist arguments, the soft naturalist tries to show that the natural order
can encompass both the physical bare-bones of things and our shared lived world. Thus, soft
12
On a contemporary rendition of this question, see Plantinga (2012). 13
In what follows we draw extensively on Gardner (2007). For further discussion of naturalism and German
Idealism, see Franks (2005: 385–393).
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naturalism presents itself as the only outlook that makes possible a commitment to explain all
phenomena naturalistically without abandoning our purposeful orientation.
Yet as Sebastian Gardner has pointed out, even if our value-interests give us reason to
be soft naturalists, soft naturalism fares badly when it comes to “basic philosophical
plausibility” for two main reasons (2007: 29). First, it is difficult to see how the soft and hard
naturalists could agree on the very criteria for deciding whether or not a given phenomenon is
reducible to the “bald natural facts privileged by the hard naturalist” (29). If such agreement
fails, so too do the soft naturalist’s anti-reductionist arguments against the hard naturalist.
More importantly, while hard naturalism is a philosophical position that secures, or aims to
secure, completeness of explanation, soft naturalism fails to meet traditional standards of
philosophical explanation. Hard naturalism answers the metaphysical question concerning
what gives the phenomena of our lived world their reality: “The hard naturalist holds that the
reality of the phenomena in the Lebenswelt—those that do have genuine reality—derives
from the hard natural facts to which they reduce, while these facts derive their reality in turn
from the nature of the basic stuff or structure that exhausts reality” (29). Because hard
naturalism secures completeness of explanation, it “enjoys the formal advantages of a
monistic metaphysical system, exemplifying . . . the virtues of Spinozism” (30). By contrast,
soft naturalism leaves these phenomena bereft of explanation: it insists on the reality of the
phenomena of our lived world, but fails to legitimate the reality of these phenomena by
revealing their ontological grounding. In other words, soft naturalism merely reaffirms “that
the phenomenon stands in need of metaphysical explanation” (30). If these are the only two
philosophical positions available to those who wish to reconcile commitments to naturalism
and religion, both are unsatisfactory.
10
Schelling’s philosophy of nature from 1809 onwards enables us to move beyond this
impasse. And this is because philosophy of nature as Schelling conceives it has two pertinent
characteristics:
(1) It provides a full account of the “basic stuff or structure that exhausts
reality”, as well as the way in which religious phenomena emerge out of it.
(2) It nevertheless refuses merely to reduce religious phenomena to this “basic
stuff”: God and human beings maintain fundamental autonomy in the
Schellingian cosmos, and our experience of meaning and value is thereby
preserved.
It is Schelling’s insistence on this second point that marks a new departure in his treatment of
religion from 1809 onwards. We will return to these two claims in detail in the next section;
for the rest of this section, we wish initially to point to the seeds of the above in terms of
Schelling’s relation to Kant prior to 1809, particularly the former’s redeployment of the
concept of purposiveness as constitutive. That is, Schelling here begins to incorporate a weak
form of meaning or value into his naturalistic description of the basic stuff of reality.
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant had proposed that the gulf between the
domains of nature and freedom could be bridged if we conceived an overall teleology or
inner purposiveness of nature (1987 5:373).14
Yet for a variety of reasons, Kant held that we
could not know whether anything real satisfied the concept of inner purposiveness (Kant
1987: 5:373; Kreines 2008). On Kant’s view, both the principle of purposiveness and the
concept of a natural end serve only as regulative principles, when we reflect on nature. As
Kant claims, “the concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive
concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the
reflecting power of judgment” (1987: 5:376). However, if the principle of purposiveness were
to be conceived as a constitutive principle, then nature as a whole could in fact be considered
as an organism, and all the different forms of matter, all the species of minerals, plants, and
14
All references to Kant cite the Akademie edition page numbers.
11
animals, as expressions of a single living force that is the cause and effect of itself. On
Schelling’s view, every organic and inorganic entity strives to produce itself according to its
own concept, so the effect of its activity can also be understood as its cause (Beiser 202: 517;
Kosch 2006: 66) – . In the Introduction to the Investigations Schelling claims that this idea
ultimately implies that “there is no other Being than will,” or that “freedom [is] the one and
all of philosophy” (1936: 24). On Schelling’s view, this is the greatest achievement of
idealism. In other words, Schelling equates the idea that every organic and inorganic entity
strives to produce itself according to its own concept with the idea that “freedom [is] the one
and all of philosophy,” because he understands what he calls the “formal” concept of freedom
in Kantian terms, as autonomy or rational self-determination (1936: 24-6). Since now there is
no longer a split between the domains of nature and freedom—both are governed by the
principle of teleology—, Schelling calls this form of idealism a “higher realism” (1936: 26).
It is to the “higher realism” identified in 1809 that we now turn.
4.
Schelling famously writes in a passage from the Investigations, which is central to our
purposes:
Nothing can be achieved at all by such attenuated conceptions of God [which]
separate God as far as possible from all of nature. God is more of a reality than he is a
mere moral world-order, and he has in him quite other and more vital activating
powers than the barren subtlety abstract idealists ascribe to him. The abhorrence of all
reality, which might sully the spiritual through any contact with it, must naturally
blind the eye to the origin of evil too. Idealism, if it is not grounded in a vital realism,
will become just as empty and attenuated a system as the Leibnizian, Spinozistic or
any other dogmatic philosophy. The whole of modern European philosophy since its
inception (through Descartes) has this common deficiency – that nature does not exist
for it and that it lacks a living basis . . . [Realism] must be the basis and the instrument
by which idealism realizes itself and takes on flesh and blood. (1936: 30)
12
The intent of this passage is clear: to explain the divine one must make recourse to nature
and, in particular, the categories of philosophy of nature. God falls within the remit of a
Schellingian philosophy of nature, and must be explained by means of it. Otherwise, his
“vital activating powers” become lost in a fog of idealist abstraction and ascetism. As
Schelling goes on to write, a merely ideal conception of the divine, separated from the
“higher realism” developed in the Investigations, “gives birth to a dreary and fanatic
enthusiasm which breaks forth in self-mutilation or—as in the case of the priests of the
Phygian goddess—in self-emasculation, which in philosophy is accomplished by the
renunciation of reason and science” (1936: 30-1). The only means, according to the Schelling
of 1809, to prevent such intellectual self-harm is by incorporating religious phenomena into
one’s philosophy of nature, a change from his pre-1809 position.
Thus, rather than being the pernicious “hallucination” of an alienated consciousness
falsifying its own natural origins (as narrated in Heinz Widerporst), God is now seen as a
“vital” product of nature’s process of potentiation. Like everything else in Schelling’s
naturalistic universe, God is an assemblage of natural forces, and it is only philosophy’s
disdain for nature (its “abhorrence of all reality”) that has blinded it to the fact that nature
reproduces itself in God. A doctrine of God, Schelling insists, “could only be developed from
the fundamental principles of a genuine philosophy of nature” that “sought out the vital basis
of nature” (1936: 32). Indeed, when setting out his concept of God in detail, Schelling’s first
recourse is to what “the philosophy of nature of our time first established” (1936: 31)—the
distinction between ground and existence—and his second recourse is to an “analogy” from
nature, the relation between gravity and light (32).15
Schelling never leaves off practising
philosophy of nature throughout the treatise, and in consequence, he is somewhat disdainful
(within the Investigations at least) of attempts to know God through written texts or mystical
15
Below we clarify further the philosophical significance of Schelling’s distinction between ground and
existence.
13
experience. That is, the Investigations ends by insisting that there is no need to rely on the
Bible or historical faith in order to understand religion; nature is a sufficient key to any theory
of the divine: “We have an earlier revelation than any written one—nature. If the
understanding of that unwritten revelation were inaugurated, the only true system of religion
and science would appear” (1936: 98).
In order to make sense of Schelling’s new position, it is worth returning to the two
basic claims of this reformed philosophy of nature introduced in the previous section: (1) that
such a philosophy of nature provides a full account of the “basic stuff or structure that
exhausts reality”, as well as the way in which religious phenomena emerge out of it; and (2)
that it nevertheless refuses merely to reduce religious phenomena to this “basic stuff”. We
will treat these two claims in turn.
In respect to the first claim, it is evident that Schelling now includes religious
phenomena within his naturalistic worldview and attempts to provide some account of how
God is an assemblage of natural forces or “vital activating powers”.16
This is, moreover, a
necessary part of his overall project in philosophy of nature, as it had been developing since
the late 1790s: the inclusion of all phenomena within its purview. Grant labels this
fundamental motivation “the extensity test”. Quoting Schelling17
, Grant writes,
[Philosophy] is “the infinite science”, and cannot therefore be “conditioned” by
eliminating anything a priori from its remit . . . The infinite science must test itself
against the All, which lacks neither nature nor Idea. It is the extensity therefore, the
range and capacity of philosophical systems that is being tested… [Schelling]
challenges systems to reveal what they eliminate. Insofar as philosophy still leaves
nature to the sciences, it continues to fail Schelling’s test, and becomes a
conditioned, that is, a compromised antiphysics. (2006: 19-21; see Schelling 1856;
2:56)
Everything—God and religion included—needs to be incorporated into Schelling’s
philosophy of nature for it to count as absolute and infinite. It requires maximum extensity.
16
Below we clarify the Kabbalistic lineage of this idea. 17
In particular, Schelling 1856 2:56.
14
The Investigations is therefore a significant moment in this process of becoming-extensive:
here Schelling explicitly turns his attention to the “ideal” phenomena of freedom, religion and
morality and accounts for them naturalistically. The result is, to quote Grant once more, “an
uninterrupted physicalism leading from ‘the real to the ideal’” (2006: 11) in which religion is
just one more regional object of inquiry for a philosopher of nature (see Whistler 2010).
Schelling’s solution to the second claim is less evident from the above, for it in fact
seems as if these “ideal” phenomena—freedom, religion and morality—have been merely
reduced to natural forces. It is here that the discussion of Spinozism in the Investigations and,
in particular, Schelling’s reinterpretation of “the meaning of the copula in judgment” (1936:
12) become central. Schelling is interested in how one might understand the principle, “The
essence of the moral world is also the essence of the world of nature” (1936: 13) or, to
rephrase it for our purposes, that the essence of the natural world is also the essence of God.
Schelling reacts against the traditional readings of pantheism in German Idealism, which
conceive such statements as expressions of absolute sameness, thereby merely reducing God
or morality to nature, or nature to God.18
For him, such reductivism is grounded on a “general
misunderstanding of the law of identity” that erroneously insists on absolute sameness
between the subject and predicate (1936: 13). Instead, he claims forcefully, “The unity of this
law [of identity] is of an intrinsically creative kind . . . Dependence does not exclude
autonomy or even freedom. Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent”
(1936: 18). In other words, the divine (or the moral) may be dependent upon nature, but it can
nevertheless remain free from it. As Schelling points out by drawing an analogy with the
causality of organic life, the fact that every organism depends on another organism for its
genesis does not mean that it remains in the other’s thrall: “A single organ, like the eye, is
18
Schelling calls this interpretation, “a total identification of God with all things, a confusion of creature and
creator” (1936: 11).
15
possible only in the organism as a whole; nevertheless it has a life of its own, indeed a kind of
freedom, as is manifestly proved through those diseases to which it is subject” (1936: 19).
Yet, by using the analogy of disease to clarify the form of freedom or independence
that he has in mind, Schelling makes it clear that he no longer understands freedom merely as
autonomy or rational self-determination. As we saw above, Schelling equates the idea that
every organic and inorganic entity strives to produce itself according to its own concept or
end with the idea that “freedom [is] the one and all of philosophy” (1936: 24), because he
understands what he calls the “formal” (1936: 26) concept of freedom in Kantian terms, as
autonomy or rational self-determination. If Schelling uses the analogy of disease to clarify his
new conception of freedom—the form of freedom or independence that God and human
beings must possess if we do not wish to reduce ideal phenomena to natural forces—then
freedom must be closer to something like defiance: an entity’s capacity to choose not to fulfil
its own natural end. On Schelling’s view, this capacity is what sets human freedom apart
from the freedom of all other natural entities. For this reason, the Investigations moves from
the “formal” concept of freedom as rational-self determination to the concept of human
freedom as “the capacity for good and evil” (1936: 26).
We can see, then, that Schelling makes good on the second claim, and so successfully
manages to steer a path between soft and hard naturalism, only if he can explain the
possibility of moral evil. Heidegger phrases the central question that the Investigations seeks
to answer as follows: “How can the reality of evil be brought into harmony with the system?
The previous system has become impossible. How is the reality of evil to be thought?” (1985:
99). In other words, Schelling’s question concerns the reality—the ontological foundation—
of evil. The previous, idealistic system has become impossible, because it identifies Being
with the will, understood as rational self-determination. Thus, if an ontological foundation for
evil is to be found, Schelling must move beyond the idealist attempt to make freedom “the
16
one and all of philosophy (Schelling 1936: 24)”, and he must reconsider the nature of Being
and the ground of all beings, God. This is one more reason reason why “the question of God
and the totality of the world, the question of ‘theism’ in the broadest sense” appears anew in
Schelling’s late works (Heidegger 1985: 61).
One might think that the only way to provide an ontological foundation for evil, while
retaining the traditional view that evil cannot arise from God as pure goodness, is to adopt a
Manichean or dualistic philosophy, and posit evil as a second equipotent power alongside
God. Yet, that would mean renouncing the systematic task of philosophy, for as we saw
above, that task consists in the attempt to meet reason’s demand for a total explanation of
reality. Thus, Schelling must show how evil can have a root independent of God, while at the
same time retaining the thought that God is the sole root or ground of all beings. As we shall
see in the next section, Schelling solves this problem by adopting the Kabbalistic idea that
Creation is an act of divine withdrawal or contraction (tsimtsum).
5.
Schelling begins to solve the problem concerning how to provide an ontological foundation
for evil, while retaining the traditional view that evil cannot arise from God as pure goodness,
by proposing that there is something in God, which God Himself “is” not. As he observes in
the Investigations,
Since there can be nothing outside God, this contradiction can only be solved by
things having their basis in that within God which is not God himself, i.e. in that
which is the ground of his existence. If we wish to bring this Being nearer to us from
a human standpoint, we may say: It is the longing which the eternal One feels to give
birth to itself. (1936: 33-4)
17
Schelling here entertains the idea that God is in some sense incomplete or does not fully
exist. That is, God becomes or produces Himself by making explicit what is implicit in His
nature (cf. Schelling 1994: 206-7). As Schelling has just remarked in the Investigations, “The
philosophy of nature of our time first established the distinction in science between Being
insofar as it exists, and being insofar as it is the mere ground of existence” (1936: 31; see
Heidegger 1985: 108 and Schulte 1994: 111).19
In the Investigations and in the drafts of The
Ages of the World, Schelling first shows how this distinction of ground and existence is
configured in God; then he shows how it is configured in all natural entities, and finally in
human beings. Below we shall see why, in so doing, Schelling develops the view that human
reason is the vehicle for God’s self-disclosure. For now, it is important to note that this view
of human reason forces Schelling to reconceive the nature of human freedom and moral
agency. As Heidegger remarks, “freedom can no longer be understood as independence of
nature, but must be understood as independence in opposition to God” (1985: 62). That is,
moral evil is conceived as the defiant refusal to participate in God’s disclosure by turning
away from or denying the absolute source of moral knowledge. In other words, only if we
believe that human reason is the vehicle for God’s disclosure do we understand evil as a form
of defiance, and only then do we understand goodness as a form of love. On Schelling’s
view, both defiance and love are forms of opposition: the first, against the summons to take
up one’s proper place, the second, against the temptation to break away from it (see
Habermas 1971: 93). Defiance and love are in Schelling’s view the two forms of human
individuation.
19
Although the concept of divine contraction is implicit in Schelling’s discussion of the distinction between
ground and existence in the Investigations, it is first explicitly developed in his 1810 Stuttgart Lectures: “A
passive limitation is indeed a mere insufficiency or a relative lack of power; however, to limit oneself, to
concentrate oneself in one point, yet also to hold on to the latter with all one’s might and not to let go until it has
been expanded into a world, such constitutes the greatest power and perfection… Concentration [Contraktion],
then, marks the beginning of all reality“ (1994: 203).
18
The Kabbalistic lineage of some of these ideas throws further light on Schelling’s
intention here. In his 1917 “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption, the German-Jewish
philosopher Franz Rosenzweig first observed the parallels between Schelling’s idea that God
gives birth to Himself from a “dark ground” and the Lurianic doctrine of tsimtsum
(contraction):
Just as there ‘is’ a God before all relation, whether to the world or to Himself, and this
being of God, which is wholly unhypothetical, is the seed-point of the actuality of
God, which Schelling … calls the ‘dark ground,’ etc., an interiorization of God, which
precedes not merely His self-externalization, but rather even His self (as the Lurianic
kabbalah teaches). (2000: 56–57).20
The doctrine of tsimtsum, or God’s contraction, consists in the idea that every act of divine
creation requires an act of divine self-limitation. God, who is All, withdraws into Himself and
limits Himself in order to create a space for something else to arise (see Schochet 1988: 52;
Habermas 1971: 189–193; and Schulte 1994: 97).21
Moreover, in Lurianic kabbalah, since
the En Sof or divinity in itself is conceived as an overwhelming force to create and destroy,
the act of creation must itself be preceded by the “negation” of divine negativity, or in
Schelling’s own words, “The subordination of divine egoism under the divine love marks the
beginning of all creation” (1994: 211; see Franks 2013:8).
Schelling depicts this “negation” of divine negativity in the first book of The Ages of
the World, “The Past.” Here, he narrates a myth about what precedes Creation in order to
construct the concept of a living God. The concept of God includes both unity and duality.
Before Creation or God’s self-revelation, there is a distinction between God’s nature and
20
Schelling knew of this doctrine though the works of the Swabian Pietist and Kabbalist Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger, and he was also influenced by kabbalistic teachings through his reading of Jakob Böhme. In a letter
from 1802, Schelling asks his parents to send him the works of Oetinger (Schelling 1962: 408–409). Oetinger
knew well Ez Chaim by the foremost disciple of Isaac Luria, Chaim Vital (see Oetinger 1977: 133–135). For
illuminating recent discussion of the concept of tsimtsum in Schelling’s works, see Franks (2013) and Schulte
(1994); see also Cahnman (1994: 189–193), Schulze (1957: 65–99, 143–170, 210–232) and Habermas (1971:
184–200). 21
In his Stuttgart lectures, Schelling observes that moral action requires the same form of self-restraint that
God’s contraction of being requires; see Schelling (1994: 208-9), and, for a discussion of this passage, Courtine
(1990: 230).
19
God’s freedom. God is not in harmony with Himself. He is involved in a contradiction
between an anarchic, negating, force of selfhood and a rational, self-giving force of love
(2000: 6). This internal contradiction comes to an end through the subordination of God’s
nature to God’s freedom and, ultimately, by accepting this relationship of subordination,
nature becomes Being for the pure Godhead, and God recognizes in nature His own eternal
nature (2000: 38). This unity in duality and duality in unity is what on Schelling’s view
constitutes divine individuality, for as he says: “Were God one and the same with its eternal
nature or bound to it, then there would only be unity. Were both outside of and separated
from one another, then there would only be duality” (2000: 49).
Moreover, in the Investigations and in the drafts of The Ages of the World, Schelling
also traces the movement from Creation through Revelation to Redemption. Creation is a
free divine decision: in Creation God severs the relationship between His nature and
freedom—the relationship that constituted divine individuality—and resolves to reveal His
highest Self in time (2000: 80). This means that after Creation God is partly absent from, not
fully immanent in nature. His presence now depends on human participation. That is, nature
as an ordered cosmos only comes into being when the self-will of each creature endowed
with understanding is one with the primal will, and, according to Schelling, this can only take
place through the redemptive activity of human beings. God first reveals Himself through his
proclaimed word, and the human being through his or her proclaimed word proclaims unity
to nature. This activity restores the natural world, God, and each human being to wholeness.
Only through this completed morality—which is what Schelling understands by
“religiosity”—can God again “accept nature” and “make it into himself.” (1936: 92)22
Only
then could we say with Spinoza that all things are immanent in God, or with Paul in I
Corinthians that God is “all in all.” (84) Yet we have seen that for Schelling moral evil is
22
On Schelling’s similar deployment of religiosity in his earlier work, see Whistler 2013 217.
20
precisely the defiant refusal to take one’s place in this cosmic order and participate in the
divine-human covenant. Because moral goodness requires the negation of this form of
defiance, it repeats the overcoming of divine egoism by divine love that expresses itself in the
existence of the finite world (see Habermas 1971: 193).
Towards the end of the Investigations, Schelling reconsiders the question concerning
the relationship between his system and pantheism. He holds that if we understand the
dynamic relationship between God, human beings, and the natural world, it is not exactly
“untrue” to say that his system amounts to pantheism, for human freedom depends on God,
and through our redemptive activity God again accepts nature into his own being. Yet, we
must understand Schelling’s pantheism precisely in this sense: “Only man is in God and
through this very being-in-God is capable of freedom. He alone is a central being and
therefore should also remain in the center. In him all things are created, just as it is also only
through man that God accepts nature and ties it to him” (1936: 92). This form of pantheism
leaves room for human and divine freedom; it fulfils therefore the task set by a naturalistic
account of religion: to explain the emergence of religious phenomena from the basic stuff of
reality while simultaneously maintaining the fundamental autonomy of God and our
experience of value.
21
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