The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

6. Evil

Le mal n’est pas une histoire, c’est une puissance. —Franz von Baader1 Wurzel alles Übels Einig zu sein, ist göttlich und gut; woher ist die Sucht denn Unter den Menschen, daß nur Einer und Eines nur sei? Root of All Evil To be united is divine and good; from where then is the addiction Among humans that there are only just units and single things? —Friedrich Hölderlin2 Mit dem Heilen zumal erscheint in der Lichtung des Seins das Böse. Dessen Wesen besteht nicht in der bloßen Schlechtigkeit des menschlichen Handelns, sondern es beruht im Bösartigen des Grimmes. Evil appears in the clearing of Being at the same time with healing. Its essence does not consist of the mere badness of human action but rather in the malice and malignancy of fury.3 —Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism4 And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil. —Hannah Arendt5 155 6 Evil Rumor has it that in 1791, while Schelling was a precocious sixteen-year-old student at the Stift, the Swabian despot Duke Karl Eugen accused him of being a clandestine translator of the Marseillaise.6 Indeed, the young Schelling and his comrades were almost drunk on a kind of Dionysian intimation of freedom. The French Revolution and its promise of Republicanism was in the air. Goethe and Kant had assured that philosophy would no longer be business as usual. In a letter to Hegel after Hegel had left the Stift (February 4, 1795), Schelling announced that “Freedom was the alpha and the omega of all philosophy” (M, 127). So perhaps it should come as no surprise that when Schelling published the first volume of his collected works eighteen years later,7 he should have included as a culminating piece the tremulous essay Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände. This would be the last major work published in his lifetime . In the foreword he announced that, with the exception of his 1804 essay Philosophie und Religion, he had so far limited himself to “investigations in the philosophy of nature.” His published works, it could be inferred, had, with the aforementioned exception, concerned themselves with the implication of the real in the ideal. To use a classical analogy, Schelling’s earlier investigations were like the Platonic dialogues, raising the concrete up to the level of the Good, just as the bewildered philosopher emerges out of the cave and confronts the glory of the sun of the Good. But what if, like Plotinus, one were to begin with the One, with the blazing sublimity of the Good, and move in the reverse direction? Rather than asking how the ideas lead to the Good, one would ask how the Good produces ideas. This is the turning point that the Freedom essay occasions. How does the ideal give rise to the real? How does the Good give rise to the True? How does such an origin claim the human Wesen? The negative philosophy always concludes with generalities about freedom. If philosophy were only to produce generalities, it could not think what was unique to human freedom, to the specific difference that the “human” makes to freedom. It is not simply that all things are generally free. When one reverses the direction of the analysis, freedom gives itself in nongeneralizable , singular, ways. Humans, like all things, have a unique kind of freedom. “The present treatise is the first in which the author presents his concept of the ideal part of philosophy with full certainty” (I/7, 333). I Freedom is not an empty abstraction. Rather, the interplay of freedom and necessity complicate themselves in the living and freely developing “personality ” of Being. Responding to the “often heard reproach” that his philosophy denied freedom its “personality” (that is, its historical particularity), Schelling 156 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE claimed that “in the Non-Ground (Ungrund) or indifference there is certainly no personality. But is the starting point therefore the Whole” (I/7, 412)? The “inquiries” referred to in the title (Untersuchungen) are not investigations into freedom per se but into a particular kind of intermediary circulation of freedom and necessity: human freedom...