1

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.

2

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).

4

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).

6

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.

7

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

8

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).

9

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

Works Cited

Beiser, F. C. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bowie, A. 1993. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London:

Routledge.

Brown, R. F. 1996. “Is Much of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift Already Present in His

Philosophie und Religion?” In H. M. Baumgartner and W. G. Jacobs (eds), Schellings

Weg zur Freiheitsschrift: Legende und Wirklichkeit. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboorg.

110-31.

Cahnman, Werner J. 1994. “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism.” In E. Goodman-

Thau, G. Mattenklott, and C. Schulte (eds), Kabbala und Romantik. Tübigen:

Niemeyer . 167-206

Courtine, Jean-François (1990). Extase de la Raison. Paris: Éditions Galilé.

Franks, P. 2005. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in

German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Franks, P. 2013. “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism

and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism.” In N. Adams (ed), The Impact of Idealism: The

Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

219-245.

Gardner, S. 2007. “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism.” In E.

Hammer (ed.), German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Routledge.

19-49.

Grant, I. H. 2006. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London: Continuum.

22

Habermas, J. 1971. Theorie und Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Hegel, G.W.F. 1896. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 volumes. Translated by E.S.

Haldane and F. H. Simson. London: Routledge.

Heidegger, M. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by

J. Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Kant, I. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Kosch, M. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Kreines, J. 2008. “The Logic of Life: Hegel’s Philosophical Defense of Teleological

Explanation of Living Beings.” In Kreines (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel

and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 344-

377.

Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J. L. Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature

in German Romanticism. Translated by P. Bernard and C. Lester. Albany: SUNY

Press.

Lukács, G. 1980. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by P. Palmer. London: Merlin.

Maesschalck, M. 1989. Philosophie et révélation dans l’itinéraire de Schelling. Paris: Vrin.

Oetinger, F. C. 1977. Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia. Herausgegeben von Reinhard

Breymayer und Friedrich Häusserman. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Pareyson, L (ed). 1977. Schellingiana Rariora. Torino: Erasmo.

Plantinga, A. 2012. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richards, R. J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of

Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

23

Rosenzweig, F. (2000). “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption. In Franks and Morgan (eds),

Philosophical and Theological Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett. 48-72.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1856. Werke. 14 vols. Edited by K.F.A. Schelling. Stuttgart: Cotta.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1936. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom.

Translated by J. Gutmann. La Salle: Open Court.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1962. Briefe und Dokumente. 3 vols. Edited by H. Fuhrmans. Bonn:

Grundmann.

Schelling. F.W.J. 1966. On University Studies. Edited by N. Guterman. Translated by E.S.

Morgan. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Schelling, F.W.J.1976. Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. 3 Reihe, ongoing. Edited by

H.M Baumgartner et al. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1980. Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. In The

Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, edited and translated by F.

Marti. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. 156-96.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1989. Philosophy of Art. Translated by D. W. Stott. Minneapolis:

Minnesota University Press.

Schelling, F.W.J. 1994. Stuttgart Seminars. In Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, edited

and translated by Thomas Pfau. Albany: SUNY Press. 195-243.

Schelling, F.W.J. 2000. The Ages of the World. Translated by J. M. Wirth. Albany: SUNY

Press.

Schelling, F.W.J. 2004. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Translated by

K. R. Peterson. Albany: SUNY Press.

Schelling. F.W.J. Two Poems: Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith and The

Heavenly Image. Translated by J. Kahl and D. Whistler. Clio 43.2, forthcoming.

Schochet, J. I. 1988. Mystical Concepts in Chassidism. Brooklyn: Kehot.

24

Schulte, C. 1994. “Zimzum bei Schelling.” In E. Goodman-Thau, G. Mattenklott, and C.

Schulte (eds), Kabbala und Romantik. Tübigen: Niemeyer Verlag. 97-118.

Schulze, W. A. 1957. “Schelling und die Kabbala.” Judaica 13: 65–232.

Strawson, P.F. 1958. Skepticism and Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whistler, D. 2010. “Language after Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine

Names.” In A. P. Smith and Whistler (eds), After the Postsecular and the

Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Newcastle:

Cambridge Scholars Press. 335-59.

Whistler, D. 2013. Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Whistler, D. 2014. “Schelling’s Poetry.” Clio 43.2, forthcoming.

White, A. 1983. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven: Yale

University Press.