man is the redeemer of nature: an interpretation of schelling's of human freedom (uncorrected...

© 2012. Idealistic Studies, Volume 42, Issue 1. ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 1–21DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20124211

MAN IS THE REDEEMER OF NATURE: AN INTERPRETATION OF SCHELLING’S

OF HUMAN FREEDOM

Alex Savory-Levine

Abstract: In the era of Romanticism, certain authors sought to rede-fine man’s place in nature as a response to industrialism. The German Natur-philosoph Friedrich Schelling published his treatise Of Human Freedom in 1809 that reveals traces of romantic notions of nature with an existential undercurrent that predated and influenced the philosophi-cal movement known as Existentialism. The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on the treatise at the University of Freiburg in 1936. In his works, Heidegger stresses the importance of being actively involved in the world. His interpretation of the treatise, with its emphasis on the way humans and other creatures are engaged with their environment, calls to mind contemporary thinking in ecology. Through Heidegger’s interpretation, I will show that Schelling’s treatise could be construed as a proto-ecological study, which is to say a study in ecology before the development of the concept or field of study.

IntroductionIn this interpretation of F. W. J. Schelling’s treatise Philosophical Investiga-tions into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, the tools of textual analysis will be used to show that its underlying values are ecologically sound. The perspectives of the disciplines of environmental studies, political science, philosophy, anthropology, and history will all be taken at different points. A historical approach will be taken primarily to underscore the con-temporary relevance of Schelling’s thought to the environmental movement. Ecology was not a word when he wrote the treatise 200 years ago, of course. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology in 1866 and it was not widely used until 100 years later. With the rise of Romanticism in western culture, figures like Schelling, Wordsworth, Goethe, and later Em-erson and Thoreau, sought to redefine the place that humans had in nature. Despite their diverging views about nature, these thinkers shared a fascina-tion with the study of the organic world. In the book Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Donald Worster says “at the very core of this Romantic view of nature was what later generations would come to call an

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ecological perspective: that is, a search for holistic or integrated perception, an emphasis on interdependence and relatedness in nature.”1

Previous interpretations of Schelling’s treatise have failed to emphasize its ecological aspects. Michelle Kosch gives an insightful interpretation of the treatise in Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard but this takes up a negligible portion of the book. Alan White’s Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom was the first book published in English to acknowledge Schelling’s attempt to create a “system of freedom.” White is a self-professed Hegelian so it is not surprising that he considers this attempt a failure. In his book Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Meta-physics, White even defends Hegel’s system against Schelling’s criticisms of it. In this interpretation of the treatise, it will not only be argued that his attempt to construct a system of freedom was a success and that the system is ecological but also that these two things are related.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the treatise is the most thorough analysis of the work. It will be used in this interpretation to show that Schelling’s model of human freedom is compatible with contempo-rary views in ecology. There are certainly similarities between Heidegger and Schelling’s thought, which might explain Heidegger’s interest in Schelling. In Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, Michael Zimmerman remarks that, “from the beginning of his career, Heidegger was centrally concerned with the nature of working and producing—and with its relation to the question of the being of entities.”2 He notes Heidegger’s view that “in the technological age in particular, for something ‘to be’ means for it to be raw material for the self-enhancing technological system.”3 Zimmerman claims, “according to Heidegger, technological humanity, far from being the au-tonomous agent in control of the technological conquest of nature, had itself become the “subject” of the self-directing work process of modern technol-ogy.”4 He adds that “in the totally administered technological world, talk of individual ‘autonomy’ or ‘freedom’ made little sense, for in that world people had become indistinguishable ciphers shaped by the demands of industrial modes of production.”5

Heidegger writes in his Letter on Humanism “it could be that nature, in the face she turns toward man’s technical mastery, is simply concealing her essence.”6 Zimmerman recognizes that “Heidegger’s criticism of the tendency of modern technology to treat the earth as a machine or as raw material for exploitation has led some people to interpret his thinking as being consis-tent with contemporary environmentalism” though he argues against this interpretation.7 Heidegger’s work, however, will not be the subject of this ecological-critical interpretation. His reading of the treatise will simply be used to stress its ecological quality.

Schelling’s system is ecological because it presages the notion of not making humans the center. It opposes early ideas of institutional knowledge

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and presents a model of human freedom within nature. In the system, all hu-man knowledge is related to an outside structure but structure emerges from the unconscious and irrational elements of existence. The system is modern because it incorporates the unknown and even terrifying facts of nature and in this way, it sets up both ecology and existentialism.

I. The System of FreedomHegel writes, “Schelling has made known a single treatise on Freedom. It is of a deep speculative nature, but it stands alone. In philosophy a single piece cannot be developed.”8 It appears that Hegel did not see that this single thing, freedom, was not singular for Schelling. In Of the I as Principle of Philoso-phy, he exclaims, “the beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom.”9 The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom is the product of an entire career of writing philosophy. Schelling’s philosophy of nature in particular was important in its inception. The fact that it stands alone, above his other works, does not illegitimatize its doctrines. Interpretation will start with the treatise itself. It begins by preparing the reader for discussion of the leading question of the essence of freedom.

Philosophical investigations into the nature of human freedom may, in part, concern themselves with the correct conception of the term, for though the feeling of freedom is ingrained in every individual, the fact itself is by no means so near to the surface that merely to express it in words would not require more than the common clarity and depth of perception. In part, such investigations may be concerned with the relation of this concept to a whole scientific world view.10

With these two sentences, Schelling sets himself the tasks of defining the concept of freedom and placing this concept into the closed context of the “whole scientific world view.” To what extent is the definition of the concept of freedom a task at all? He points out that the “feeling” of freedom is given to everyone. However, Schelling emphasizes that to express the “fact” of freedom is to incorporate the concept of freedom into a whole “scientific world view.” Schelling’s expression “scientific world view” does not have the meaning it has today. He does not mean “scientific world view” in the sense that people’s views of the world are founded upon scientific research. Heidegger writes in his series of lectures on the treatise that, “in the age of German Idealism, science (Wissenschaft) means primarily and truly the same as philosophy. . . . [T]his fundamental knowledge presents what is essential in everything knowable in a reasoned-out essential connection.”11 He goes on to mention that Hegel considers The Phenomenology of Spirit a “System of Science” and that the term “world view” was coined by Kant in the Cri-tique of Judgment to mean “the immediate experience of what is given to the senses.”12 It is under the expression “scientific world view” that “a decisive

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task of the philosophy of German Idealism is hidden, a task which is best announced by the key word of that philosophy: the system.”13

Schelling thinks that, “any conception cannot be defined in isolation, and depends for its systematic completion on the demonstration of its connections with the whole. This is especially the case in the conception of freedom, for if it has any reality at all, it cannot be a merely subordinate or incidental conception, but must be one of the dominant central points of the system.”14 The concept of freedom is not merely one concept among others, if it has any reality, it must be central to a system. What does it mean for a concept to have reality? It means that the concept is the central part of a comprehensive system. The system itself is the system of freedom. Freedom and system are, for Schelling, inextricably connected. In the following sentence he ac-knowledges that “the idea of freedom is said to be entirely inconsistent with the idea of system, and every philosophy which makes claim to unity and completeness is said to end in denying freedom.”15 Before it can be assessed whether the concept of freedom is antithetical to the philosophical system, it is important to ask why, in the philosophy of German Idealism, the system is “a battle call and an inmost requirement.”16

A system must be a system of reason but if the system is to be complete, it must be based on a reflection on reason itself. This reflection was basically carried out in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant understands the term reason to mean the faculty of forming concepts from representations. These representations do not show the objects themselves but only point out the direction in which to search for them. Kant claims that the “unity of reason always presupposes . . . the form of a whole of our knowledge and contain[s] the conditions according to which we are to determine a priori the place of every part and its relation to the rest.”17 Reason is itself systematic, at once the faculty and demand of a system. Kant’s philosophy is thus the motive for “system” becoming the decisive goal of German Idealism. According to Kant, the system is to be determined by the highest concepts of God, world, and man. What most people found unsatisfying was that for Kant, these were simply ideas that pointed in the direction of things and not things in themselves. The task of the “system” is, for German Idealism, to resolve this fundamental problem. This should give an idea as to what is at stake when it is asked if freedom is compatible with system. Discussion of this difficulty begins, “if the opinion be advanced that the concept of freedom contradicts the concept of system altogether and inherently, then it is extraordinary that some sort of system must be present and coexist with freedom at least in the divine understanding.”18 If freedom is retained, must not system be denied? System cannot be denied since it is necessarily posited with the fact of freedom. Since freedom of the individual exists, it must in some way exist together with the totality of the world. It does not matter whether freedom is real or just an idea because the highest concepts of world, man, and God


are all posited along with it. These concepts have reality only when they are incorporated into a system.

Even when the inevitability of the system is assured, new difficulties appear. One can admit that there is a system but then state that this system is inaccessible to human knowledge. Schelling says regarding this, “the general statement that this system can never be revealed to human insight again means nothing at all. For it may be true or false according to how it is interpreted, depending on the definition of the principle by virtue of which man can in any wise attain knowledge.”19 Considering the impenetrability of the essence of human freedom, the appeal to what is incomprehensible gives the illusion of being the true relation to the matter but is in effect a flight from it. Schelling recognizes that one can simply not think about the possibility of system, though he points out that this amounts to avoiding the matter. Certain examples of the incompatibility of freedom with system can be cited from previous philosophy but the question of their compatibility must be developed in terms of the matter itself.

Is not Idealism already the system of freedom? According to Idealism, freedom means standing outside of the causal connectedness of nature.20 With Fichte, Idealism became a system but Schelling thinks that causal in-dependence does not get at the essence of freedom.21 Kant locates freedom in man’s pure reason, which is separate from nature, though he only talks about it in the realm of practical reason. Schelling claims that, “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.”22 He is thus compelled to go beyond Idealism, “for Idealism supplies only the most general conception of freedom and merely a formal one. But the real and vital conception of freedom is that it is the possibility of good and evil.”23 This is the point of greatest difficulty in the whole doc-trine of freedom. According to the newly posited concept of human freedom, good and evil are that for which freedom can decide. The difficulty is that freedom here could mean indecision. However, as mere indecisiveness, it is neither freedom for good nor for evil. If freedom is to be taken in a positive sense, as the capability for good and evil, it must be understood in terms of an individual’s will. This positive conception of freedom is only possible on the basis of an explication of what good and evil are. Schelling has a philosophical system and it is one that orients people in a world of nature and of choice.

II. A Philosophy of NatureIt seems that Schelling would turn to ethics for an explanation of what good and evil are. Instead, he turns to the fundamental principles of a philosophy of nature. He does this because the principle of idealism received a living basis in the investigation of nature and out of this grew the philosophy of nature. Schelling goes beyond the human centered system of knowledge and

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puts nature first but the philosophy of nature, with “regard to the whole of philosophy, was only considered as a part, namely the real part that would be capable of rising up into the genuine system of reason only through comple-tion of the ideal part in which freedom rules.”24

He proceeds by giving an account of things in terms of the principles “ground” and “understanding.” These principles are instantiations of will because in the rising up, an empowering act was found through which all of nature transfigured itself in will.25 The will of the ground is a craving or desire and the will of the understanding is a subordination of this will within a larger order.26 Schelling describes the relationship between the two principles with an analogy taken from his philosophy of nature, the opposition between gravity and light.27 Gravity pulls inward whereas light pushes out. This opposition is one of contraction versus expansion. Contraction individuates things, while expansion brings them into connection with one another.

A person always wills something within a totality of other wills. If the totality consisted solely of the desires of individuals then there would be no order. Sometimes an individual uses the existing order merely as a means to will its own desires. The possibility of evil consists in “the fact that man, instead of making his selfhood into a basis, the instrument, instead strives to elevate it to ruling and general will.”28 In this sense, evil can be construed as a rebellion of a part against the whole, which is why Schelling likens it to a physical illness or disharmony. It is not merely a lack of harmony, though, but rather a positive perversion. Evil is the “will that strives to reverse the relation of the principles, to elevate the ground.”29

The good, on the other hand, is the unification of the individual will with the general will. Desire is not the source of evil, nor is the understanding the source of good. The possibility of good and evil depends on the presence of norms that human beings can orient themselves toward or away from. Schelling rejects the Kantian notion that individuals can look to their faculty of reason as a source of norms but he does not actually give an account of their origin. It seems that the good amounts to an individual simply obeying authority.30 Leaving room for evil, then, requires the introduction of some degree of chaos. Schelling claims that “everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order, and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if initial anarchy had been brought to order.”31 That which cannot be understood, the irrational, is the basis of the reality of things. The establishment of authority is necessary to bring order to the chaos that ensues from this latent irrationality.

The tendency towards disorder “to the extent that it comes from the ground and is dark, is the self-will of creatures.”32 This is supported with the claim that there are certain accidental determinations in nature, which are only explicable by appeal to an excitement of the irrational or dark principle.


Heidegger attempts to explain how the possibility of evil in human beings is prefigured by the manifestation of this principle in nature.

Wherever it shows itself, it is indeed not an evil itself which appears but a prefiguration of evil, we find such prefigurations in nature: the strange and chance element of organic formations and deformations, what incites horror, the fact that everything alive is approaching dissolution. Here something appears which has been driven out into selfish exaggeration and is at the same time impotent and repulsive.33

There is selfishness present in creatures that is not yet evil but self-craving stands against the will of the understanding, which strives for rule and unity. The opposition between these two drives creates tension. This tension is necessary to bring things completely to birth and can only be released in a graded evolution.34

In Schelling’s writings on the philosophy of nature, he regarded the products of nature as the result of dynamic evolution. When nature itself is regarded as a product resulting from the organizing capacities of its parts, however, it is thought of as having been generated by mere mechanical processes. Even in such a view, the existence of the whole cannot be seen as the purpose of the interaction of its parts, as that would presuppose the idea of a whole as depending on actions of the parts. As Kant puts it in his Critique of Judgment, there is no way to make an idea the cause of nature “without either making an intelligent being of it, for that would be prepos-terous; or even without presuming to place another intelligent Being above it as its Architect, for that would be presumptuous.”35 If natural formations are not produced in either of these ways then they are only unified in space, which cannot actually generate things. Schelling claims in his First Outline for a System of the Philosophy of Nature that, “something has to come to the fore in experience which, although is not in space, is yet principle of all occupation of space.”36

Schelling’s questioning of nature has been called a romantic philosophy of nature. His speculations certainly cannot yield the same results that modern science can but Heidegger warns against “dismissing the perspectives of the philosophy of nature as impossible as viewed from the illusory superiority of technological possibilities of change.”37 Perhaps the most enduring perspec-tive of the philosophy of nature is that nature cannot be adequately understood by means of the principle of mechanical causation. Nature shows a stabilized order, rule, and form, so it is obvious why one would want to bring this regularity to a higher principle, such as that of mechanism but investigation using this principle leads to its own prejudices. A means of justifying its use is the belief “that when one one day meets up with something which can no longer be explained mechanistically that this something inexplicable is really ascertained.”38 One will never come to such a boundary though because new ways to apply the principle of mechanism can always be found.

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Of course regularities are seen when nature is observed so it seems as if the rules that are thought to be responsible for these regularities have been there from the beginning but “perhaps this regularity is only what has become rigidified of a past stirring . . . behind which lies the original unruliness of the ground.”39 Creatures cannot control their own will, “hence the veil of sadness which is spread over all nature, the deep, unappeasable melancholy of all life.”40 The finitude of creatures is due to the anarchic movement of initial nature, for if nature were not in flux, they would be able to endure indefinitely. Movement is the essence of nature. This seems like a keen insight in light of the harmful tendency of people to objectify nature, using it only as material for production or even just reducing the importance of nature to the beauty of its forms. Circular movement is characteristic of nature. Heidegger clarifies the idea that things arise from circular movement, saying that, “the movement . . . revolves in itself and, revolving, overflows itself, individuates itself and, individuating itself, elevates itself to a higher stage.”41 He even gives a visual representation of this type of graded evolution.42 Since the lowest stage is at the top of the representation and the highest at the bottom, the movement can be thought of as a fall.

Schelling does not explicitly mention spirals in the treatise but in his philoso-phy of nature, he likened the products of nature to vortexes or whirlpools. These formations are characterized by an unceasing contraction and expan-sion. Schelling “attempts to make concrete how the movement of the creation of nature is constructed.”43 This attempt is “oriented to the ongoing task of explicating the possibility of man.”44 It is notable that “creating is not the manufacturing of something which is not there, but the bending of the eternal will.”45 Heidegger, who served as a meteorologist in the First World War, tries to elucidate this idea.

The same thing is meant when we say, at least still in dialect, the weather “takes a turn”; that is, it is getting cold, something is contracting in such a


way that it comes a head and in doing so delimits itself from other things and in this delimitation exposes itself and its opposite out of indecisiveness and thus allows itself to incline in definite directions.46

The movement of nature is exemplified by weather patterns and their movement is due to expansion and contraction. Their movement creates an opposition between light and dark.

Humans have the greatest proportion of will of any creature, “in man there is the whole power of the dark principle and at the same time the whole strength of the light. In him there is the deepest abyss and the loftiest sky.”47 The will must be freely directed towards one principle or the other and this makes up the possibility of good and evil. Relations that humans have with one another are the basis for Schelling’s model of freedom. An individual’s freedom is already social because people must interact with one another but this takes place within nature. Ecologists study living things in their inter-relations as well as their interaction with the environment, which is why Schelling could be considered a proto-ecologist.

III. Good and Evil in the Human SpiritSchelling’s account of the process of the creation of nature begins with the positing of a blind will but there is “nothing that could drive man more to strive for the light with all of his strength than the consciousness of the deep night from which he has been lifted into existence.”48 The account makes way for an inquiry into what comes to light. Heidegger states that “when one makes an enquiry one may do it ‘just casually’ or one may formulate the question explicitly. The latter case is peculiar in that inquiry does not become transparent to itself until all these constitutive factors of the question have themselves become transparent.”49A question is made transparent so that it may be brought to light. Heidegger is describing the phenomenologi-cal method of Being and Time. The word phenomenology is taken from the Greek ta phainomena and o logos. The noun ta phainomena is derived from phainesthai, which is a form of the verb paino, meaning to bring to light. What Schelling is trying to bring to light is the presence of good and evil in the human spirit. It could even be said that he is attempting a phenomenology of freedom. Schelling can, in this regard, be considered an important precursor to the phenomenological school of thought. It is partly for this reason that Heidegger makes a suitable interpreter of Schelling. Although previously employed by Hegel, it is Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl who should be credited with the word phenomenology becoming the designation of a philosophical school.

Schelling begins his phenomenology of freedom by attempting to explain the presence of the evil spirit in humans. He claims that “just as there is an enthusiasm for the good, there is a spiritedness of evil.”50 This consists in the ability of a person to elevate their individual will over the general will. The

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reversal creates chaos and is only possible when what is ordered becomes mutually free to move. This is the possibility of behaving. Schelling claims that, “man is placed on the summit where he himself has the source of self-movement toward good or evil in equal portions.”51 Freedom awakens an individual’s will, “just as he who is seized by dizziness on a high and steep summit seems to be beckoned to plunge downward by a hidden voice.”52 Ki-erkegaard would take up the idea of freedom as dizziness in The Concept of Anxiety.53 For Schelling, the anxiety of life is that the connection of the general will with an individual will in humans is a contradiction, the unification of which is difficult if not impossible. The individual will is an indignant host of desires and appetites and this persists in evil. Passions are not in themselves evil though. It is not so much that an action is evil; rather there is an evil spirit that acts. Evil has a mind, or spirit, of its own. In German, the word is the same for both: geist. Schelling says in his Stuttgart Seminars that, “evil itself proves perhaps the most spiritual [phenomenon] yet.”54

One may not be able to move out of indecision because that is exactly what it is. This is why there must be a temptation to evil. A general inclination to evil precedes any individual decision for good or evil. This evil cannot be that of an individual so it must be evil in general but not yet real. Only after coming to know general evil is it possible to grasp good and evil in humans. General evil arises in the realm of spirit, of history, but not automatically. Heidegger notes that, “what Schelling wants to clarify is . . . the nature of the historical movement in which the spirit of evil makes itself known.”55 The historical reconstruction is the common property of German Idealism but these sketches of world history admittedly have something strange about them. The idea behind the reconstruction is that, “as in nature the original unruly element develops into the separate and ever richer and higher mani-fold of forms.”56

The reconstruction begins with a time of blessed indecision in which there was neither good nor evil, “in the same way . . . nature was active alone perhaps for a long time and attempted a creation for itself . . . a creation, which, however, again and again sank back into chaos.”57 This was the time of the greatest exaltation of nature but then evil came into being and the beautiful body of the world collapsed as if by a terrible sickness. People tried unsuccessfully to use a type of magic “complete with incantations” to mollify the evil spirits.58 The spirit of evil was then aroused by the approach of the spirit of the good. Schelling claims “only in connection with the de-cisive emergence of the good, does evil also emerge quite decisively.”59 A conflict began between the two, in order to make further creation possible. This conflict between good and evil has continued up until the present time.

The common conception of freedom, “according to which freedom is posited as a wholly undetermined capacity to will one or the other of two contradictory opposites . . . has in fact the original undecidedness of human


being . . . in its favor.”60 Free will, though, as the ability to choose one thing over another without any compelling reasons would be only a prerogative to act entirely irrationally. Schelling’s conception of a free action is that it is “necessarily a determined action . . . a good or an evil one.”61 The main issue he has with the notion of freedom of the will is that it introduces a complete contingency of individual actions and contingency contests the unity of the whole. The idea that all parts of a whole are necessarily united is consistent with contemporary views in ecology.

In order to determine itself, a being itself must be determined, not by something merely contingent outside of it but rather by its own essence. If a kind of inner necessity were truly given, though, then responsibility, and freedom would be abolished. People are responsible for their actions but not for the fact that they exist. The question of why a particular individual acts in an evil manner while another acts justly cannot be asked because it presupposes that human beings are not fundamentally their own act. Each individual is by no means arbitrarily or by accident good or evil. An evil in-dividual performs their actions in accordance with and not against their will and it is the same with a good individual. People act willfully and without compulsion but “this sort of free act, which becomes necessary, admittedly cannot appear in consciousness . . . since it precedes consciousness just as it precedes essence.”62

The notion of a free act invisible to consciousness that constitutes one’s essence might seem like an odd idea but it is similar to ideas in the field of psychoanalysis, though Schelling wrote his treatise before there was such a thing. Slavoj Žižek, in the book The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters, says “this is what the predicate ‘unconscious’ designates: a past which, although it never existed, persists as a durable foun-dation of the present.”63 A good or evil action is not necessarily a conscious one but this free act becomes necessary in that subsequent acts flow from it. That a thing’s essence precedes its existence means a thing created in a certain manner serves a definite purpose. People are created in such a manner that they have the capability for good and evil, which is why they can serve good or evil purposes. That humans serve these purposes is constitutive of their existence. People are, in essence, free and not essentially good or evil until they act. A person acts in accordance with their will and without respect to anything else, so the decision to act is not made with regard to time, “as an act that is eternal by nature.”64 If the determining ground for the decision is understood as a cause, which must be the effect of a preceding cause, the decision is forced into a purely mechanical causal context and loses the character of decision. This echoes the perspective of Schelling’s philosophy of nature that things cannot be understood purely by means of the principle of mechanism.

Schelling conceives of movement in terms of a tension between contractive


and expansive forces. Žižek observes that “Schelling, of course, plays upon the double meaning of the term ‘contraction’: to tighten-compress-condense and to catch, to be afflicted with.”65 For Schelling, to contract means to restrict the movement of life just as an illness does. Since life itself is a conflict between opposing forces, it is enough of a struggle without making it one for others. Evil stops creatures from functioning and brings them out of connection with one another. It does not consist in a simple lack or limitation of movement though. Schelling points out, “the devil, according to the Christian point of view, was not the most limited creature, but rather the least limited one.”66 He adds that, “evil often shows itself united with an excellence of individual forces, which far more rarely accompanies the good.”67

Heidegger characterizes the individual as “burdened by its gravity.”68 This is a play on Schelling’s analogy from the philosophy of the nature, which likens gravity to a contractive force. Schelling had employed the idea of a contracting force resisting the work of an expansive force in the philosophy of nature to explain the fact that things do not stay the same. The expansive force was the dominant one in the human spirit due to a determinate devel-opmental progression. What distinguishes Schelling’s treatise on freedom from his other writings is that the contractive force need not be subordinated to the expansive. The outcome of the struggle is not a natural end but is de-termined by a human being’s personality.69 For a personality to be fixed, it must be actively cultivated. One must cultivate a personality because “only in personality is there life.”70

Evil resists the will of the understanding but understanding is part of the process of the creation of nature, not just the ability of a person to under-stand. It is for this reason that evil “is presented correctly as an enemy of all creatures and, above all, of man.”71 Evil is seductive, though, because “as the serpent borrows colors from the light,” it “strives by means of mirrorlike images to bring man to the senselessness in which it alone can be understood and accepted by him.”72 If an individual acts in an evil manner, their evil can be reflected back at them by another’s actions. When this happens, “the human spirit opens itself up to the spirit of lies and falsehood and . . . soon loses its initial freedom.73

A person must be good or evil in the sense of the actual dominance of one over the other. When evil is dominant, it “flares up in the sinner into a consuming fire, just as in a living organism . . . as soon as it has strayed from the whole, perceives . . . [that] to which it is opposed as fire (= fever) and ignites from an inner heat.”74 Heidegger remarks that, “with regard to Schelling’s equation of evil with sin we must say that sin is evil interpreted in a Christian way.”75 Schelling’s idea, however, is that when an individual does not act as a part of a whole, it is they who suffer. For a person to have this capability, there must be individual freedom, “or the turning of man from evil to good, and vice versa.”76


Even as a child an individual shows a propensity to evil so one might ask how an individual can be good instead of evil if they are inclined towards evil since childhood. Schelling points out that “already according to the mean-ing of the word, religiosity does not permit any choice between opposites” and adds, “this severity of disposition is, like the severity of life in nature, the seed from which true grace and divinity first come forth into bloom.”77 It is from an unshakable seriousness of disposition that a moral life arises. There is another path to morality though. By choosing evil, an individual can come to see the importance of choosing the good. Schelling again uses the example of a seed, which must sink into the dark earth so that it may “lift and unfold itself in the radiance of the sun.”78 A moral individual can either have no choice but to decide for the good or can pick the good after becoming intimately familiar with evil.

Up to this point, a number of oppositions have been talked about, such as those between good and evil, light and dark, expansion and contraction, humanity and nature, ground and understanding. The ground is distinguished from God, creating another opposition, one between human beings and God. To avoid a complete dualism, all of these oppositions must be brought into connection. There must be something that precedes all opposites and origi-nates them. It is what Schelling calls the “non-ground” or groundless.79 In the non-ground there are no oppositions, rather principles can be predicated of it as “non-opposites.”80 There is no difference between principles in the non-ground, which is why Schelling characterizes it as “absolute indifference.”81 On account of this, “there is in this system one principle for everything . . . the very same that reigns with the will of love in the good and the will of wrath in the evil.”82

The concept of the non-ground bears similarities to Schelling’s early identity philosophy, which Hegel had criticized for being like the night in which all cows are black. All birth is birth from darkness into light, however. The difficulty is how “duality breaks forth . . . from the Neither-Nor.”83 Ev-erything, including God, was originally unified in the non-ground and the emergence of oppositions from it was just an unfolding of that unity. Since all things are unified with God in this system, it is a kind of pantheism.84 The question of how evil can exist and yet be connected to God is not one that can be asked because in the system, evil is inextricably connected to the good. All oppositions have a certain unity, which is why “transferring an absolute dualism of good and evil to history whereby either one or the other principle prevails in all manifestations and works of the human spirit . . . introduces into history . . . a thoroughly illiberal and highly reductive point of view.”85 An individual’s good and evil actions, which have a certain unity, take place in nature but these acts are social as well as historical.


IV. Nature is a RevelationIt is a question whether or not Schelling’s attempt to unite all oppositions is successful but he intimates that the whole is more important than the way it originated.86 This idea that a system is more important than a part of it is ecological because in ecology, a whole ecosystem is considered to be more important than each part. Schelling appears to be liable to charges of anthro-pocentrism, though, as he gives an account of the process of the creation of nature with the intention of showing how humans are removed from it. He could also be charged with anthropomorphism. To bring things closer, in human terms, he talks about the desires and yearnings of nature and of God, not just of human beings. The distinction between humans, nature, and God is tenuous though. There is such an unfathomable unity between them that Schelling is barely capable of recognizing it.

The distinction between good and evil, though, is a crucial one in Schelling’s system. He thinks that “a system that contradicts the most holy feelings, character and moral consciousness, can never be called, at least in this respect, a system of reason.”87 Still, no one can become a hero or a good human being on the basis of pure reason. Reason is not primary in the system because all cognition rests on the ground of blind cravings and desires. It is the understanding that develops what is contained in this ground. Ground and understanding are opposed to one another but since all opposites have been united, it is time to seek that which lies outside of, and beyond, opposition. However, if the understanding is removed from philosophy then it must ori-ent itself historically. Schelling has tremendous respect for the significance of historical research but there is “an older revelation than any written one-nature.”88 He believes that “if the understanding of this unwritten revelation were made manifest, the only true system . . . would appear not in the poorly assembled state of a few philosophical and critical concepts, but rather at once in the full brilliance of truth and nature.”89 Nature is a gradually occurring unfolding but when experienced all at once, it is a revelation.

Schelling’s system has proven to be a path into nature, the one true system. He begins his Stuttgart Seminars by stating that, “long before man decided to create a system, there already existed one.”90 Humans and nature are distinct from one another because what is “fulfilled in human beings is in nature as a dark, prophetic (not yet fully pronounced) word.”91 Schelling is implicitly referring to evil, which comes from ancient nature but emerges only in human beings. Human freedom makes this possible yet can also stop this and “man is hence the redeemer of nature.”92 Fulfilling Kant’s criteria, the concepts of man, God, and world are all incorporated into the system. In his writings on the philosophy of nature, Schelling uses the word world to mean what comes to the senses. In his treatise he claims that God is the unity of the principles ground and under-standing, although he sometimes associates God with the latter principle. As for his conception of man, humans are beings that have freedom for good and evil.


Schelling directly criticizes Hegel’s system in his lectures on The Ground-ing of Positive Philosophy. The Phenomenology of Spirit culminates with Hegel having the Absolute Idea. Schelling remarks that Hegel “allowed this absolute spirit . . . to externalize itself with freedom into a world.”93 Spirit becomes nature, which means “nature is a fall from the idea.”94 This is an inversion of Schelling’s philosophy of nature in which nature becomes spirit. Hegel states in his Science of Logic, “the transition is . . . here to be grasped as follows: that the Idea freely releases itself, absolutely sure of itself.”95

This absolute freedom can be thought only in this way, up to this point of its logical completion, the Idea or Concept was necessitated to move forward dialectically. To this extent, it was not free. Now that it is finished, it has nothing more to do. While it may not want to stand still, it is in any case not necessitated to move forward any more. Absolute freedom would, according to this expression, be nothing more than the absence of dialectical necessitation. But a mere not-being-necessitated is a far cry from a positively resolute freedom.96

The move from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature is arbitrary. Schelling claims, “Hegel, who in the details is so sharp, was abandoned by this artistic sensibility by nothing so badly as when he moved on into the whole, for otherwise he would have detected the interruption of movement that takes place for him between the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature . . . in which the latter was pieced onto the former.”97 By contrast, there does not seem to be any great distance between the speculative physics, as Schelling was fond of calling it, of his philosophy of nature and the “metaphysics of evil” of the treatise on freedom.98 In his lectures On The History of Modern Phi-losophy, Schelling claims that, “concepts as such do in fact exist nowhere but in consciousness, they are, therefore, taken objectively, after nature, not before it; Hegel took them from their natural position by putting them at the beginning of philosophy.”99

Are not good and evil just concepts though? The historical emergence of evil in the Philosophical Investigations is similar to the Hegel’s concept of the diremption of unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Evil is not simply a concept that can be explained away though. If it can be said that Schelling is attempting a phenomenology of freedom then he must be able to fully explain the phenomenon of evil. Heidegger thinks that, “in the phenomenological conception of ‘phenomenon’ what one has in mind [is] that which shows itself . . . [and] its meaning.”100 The meaning or sense of a phenomenon is what phenomenology seeks to explain. Since the world is what comes to the senses and evil is senseless, evil is a threat to the world.

As long as Schelling’s treatise on freedom is only cited sporadically to document a special view of Schelling’s on evil and freedom, nothing about it has been understood. It now becomes comprehensible how Hegel’s judgment, full of recognition as it is, about this treatise is a mistake: it


only treats an isolated question! The treatise which shatters Hegel’s Logic before it was even published!101

Unlike Schelling’s conceptions of good and evil, Hegel’s concepts do not lead him to the conclusion that nature is the source of the highest knowledge. Hegel attains Absolute Knowledge through negation of his own concepts. For Schelling, evil has a positive reality and “the saying determinatio est negatio (determination is negation) holds in no way for such determinateness.”102

Hegel usually gets the credit for objective idealism while Kierkegaard often gets it for Existentialism. Schelling, however, should be credited with being a proto-ecologist and also a system builder to at least the same extent that Hegel is. Schelling has never been as well known as Hegel but his philosophy has had a widespread influence. Schelling’s evolutionary cosmology influenced the American Transcendentalists to such an extent that philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce remarks that, “Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas they had caught from Schelling.”103 The publication of Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature is often taken to be the moment when transcendentalism became a major cultural move-ment. Emerson closes the essay by calling for a revolution to emerge from the new idealist philosophy.

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, - What is truth? and of the affections, - What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. . . . Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its greatest proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.104

ConclusionIn his philosophy of nature, Schelling described nature turning into the mind and in his early works of transcendental idealism he gave an account of con-sciousness turning back to nature. By the time of the treatise on freedom, he had become more interested in “ethics, which may be fitly called the prac-tice of ideas into life.”105 In the treatise, humans are elevated above animals by means of a graded evolution. This idea can already be applied to ethics. Emerson thinks “the wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature’s.”106 He says that “when simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, -the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, -and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power of nature as an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost.”107

In a system, the interrelation of parts produces an organization that facili-tates the continued interrelation of these parts. Implied in the very concept of the system is its complement, with the boundary of the system serving to


demarcate the two. The system’s parts, namely the concepts of God, man, and world structure the whole but also relate to one another while relating to the system’s complement, nature. It is the human mind that is the boundary between Schelling’s system and nature. Not only does the organization of the system facilitate the interrelation of its parts, it facilitates the continued interrelation of the parts of nature by means of the workings of the mind. It is for this reason that the system is ecological in the strongest sense.

Schelling writes that, “as long as man remains in the realm of nature he is master of nature, in the most proper sense of the word, just as he can be master of himself.”108 Technology is way of revealing nature’s essence but in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger writes, “when man, inves-tigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research.”109 Mastery of technology becomes urgent as it threatens to slip from human control. Schelling should not be regarded as the “heat lightning of a new beginning” for philosophy as Heidegger put it, but rather a full-blown thunderstorm, a force of nature.110 His treatise Philo-sophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom deserves to be read as much as the other great works of European philosophy such as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially in light of mounting concerns about the environment. It is remarkable that Schelling was able to construct a cohesive system with the completion of such a short work, though of course it is not as comprehensive as Hegel’s. Schelling’s system is less human centered than Hegel’s though and ethics is the single most important part of it. One is reminded of Emerson’s words here, “all things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.”111

University of Florida

Notes

1. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 82.

2. Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), xvi.

3. Ibid., xiv.

4. Ibid., xx.

5. Ibid.

6. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977), 205.


7. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, 241.

8. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise: On the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985) (hereafter cited as ST), 13.

9. F. W. J. Schelling, Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, 1794–1796, trans. Fritz Marti (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 13.

10. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Johannes Schmidt and Jeff Love (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009) (hereafter cited as PI), 9.

11. Heidegger, ST, 16.

12. Ibid., 17.

13. Ibid., 19.

14. Schelling, PI, 9.

15. Ibid.


17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1964), A645/B673.


19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 77.

21. Ibid., 49.

22. Ibid., 26.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 21.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 34.

27. Ibid., 27.

28. Ibid., 52.

29. Ibid., 34.

30. Although civil disobedience is not a part of Schelling’s philosophy, it is a part of his legacy because he had at least an indirect influence on Throeau. Schelling’s work influenced Emerson a great deal and Emerson’s influence on Throeau is well documented.


32. Ibid., 32.


34. Ibid., 129.

35. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 171.


36. F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 20.


38. Ibid., ST, 138.

39. Ibid., 139.



42. Ibid., 136.

43. Ibid., 131.

44. Ibid., 140.

45. Ibid., 130.

46. Ibid., 151.


48. Ibid., 29.

49. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 24–25.


51. Ibid., 41.

52. Ibid., 47.

53. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), 55.

54. F. W. J. Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F. W. J. Schelling, ed. and trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 232.


56. Ibid.


58. Ibid., 46.

59. Ibid., 47.

60. Ibid., 48.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., 51–52.

63. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996), 22.


65. Žižek, The Indivisible Reaminder, 22.


67. Ibid., 36–37.




70. Ibid., 75.

71. Ibid., 55.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid., 56.


76. Schelling, PI, 53–54.

77. Ibid., 57.

78. Ibid., 29.

79. Ibid., 68.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid., 70–71.

83. Ibid., 69.

84. Ibid., 71.

85. Ibid., 74.

86. Ibid., 73.

87. Ibid., 74.

88. Ibid., 77.

89. Ibid.

90. Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, 197.


92. Ibid., 72.

93. F. W. J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures, trans. Bruce Matthews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 153.

94. Ibid., 151.

95. Alan White’s translation of a passage from Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik. Alan White, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983), 69.

96. Alan White’s translation of a passage from Schelling’s Grundlegung der Positiven Philosophie: Münchener Vorlesung. Alan White, Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983), 70.

97. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 150.


99. F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 145.


100. Heidegger, Being and Time, 60.



103. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 312.

104. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, VIII, in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1940). Quotes from Emerson’s Nature will be cited simply with the roman numerals that he uses to divide the sections of the essay, since pagination differs in the various publications.

105. Ibid., VI.

106. Ibid., V.

107. Ibid., IV.

108. Schelling, Of the I, 193.

109. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 300.


111. Emerson, Nature, VI.

man is the redeemer of nature: an interpretation of schelling's of human freedom (uncorrected...

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