The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

7. The Haunting

Schmerz ist etwas Allgemeines und Notwendiges in allem Leben, der unvermeidliche Durchgangspunkt zur Freiheit. Pain is something common to and necessary in all life, the unavoidable point of passage to freedom. —The Ages of the World (AW, 335)1 Alles Werden und Wachsen, alles Zukunft-Verbürgende bedingt den Schmerz . . . Damit es die ewige Lust des Schaffens gibt, damit der Wille zum Leben sich ewig selbst bejaht, muß es auch ewig die ‘Qual der Gebärin’ geben. All becoming and growing, everything that guarantees the future, requires pain. . . . When there is the eternal desire for creation, when the will to life eternally affirms itself, there must also be the ‘agony of the mother giving birth.’ —Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung Under what conditions do you dream of the dead? Do you often think of them before you fall asleep? Who appears first? Is it always the same one? First name? Surname? Cemetery? Date deceased? To what do they refer? Old friendship? Kinship? Fatherland? Do they say where they come from? And who’s behind them? And who besides you sees them in his dreams? —Wis¬awa Szymborska, Plotting with the Dead2 191 7 The Haunting When one reads the Freedom essay, with its analogy between sickness and evil, it is sometimes hard not to think of Schelling’s wife, Caroline, who died shortly after the essay appeared. As we saw briefly in the first chapter, Schelling was utterly devastated. In Schelling’s diary for the year 1810, one finds a moving entry written on Schelling’s birthday, “the first without Caroline .” In this short passage, Schelling wondered if one can mourn to such a degree that one becomes utterly lost in interiority, unable to sense external provocations. Lost in the unfathomable depths of oneself, the gods flee. Melancholy and depression plummet one into the dark reaches of interiority and one becomes inattentive to any external stimuli. Any passion per se can be overcome. The most wrathful can suppress their wrath before the presence of the king. . . . To become master of one’s passion, the human always needs something exterior that rattles one, occupies one, tenses one.—Will it always do this for one? . . . Who here wants to give it over to Providence—who can become free of madness and blindness? Therefore we remain unmoved by the most excellent warning of Providence. Or these exterior counterforces are lacking. We languished in the most forlorn loneliness. Nothing comes to us that rattles us. . . . No friend . . . no exterior help or hope is useful to us. We no longer sense the power present in us.3 Schelling knew this “most forlorn loneliness,” as if the sheer opacity of the exteriority of death drove one into the depths of an imperturbable interiority . As Shelling wrote in a letter from the 2nd of October, 1809, not longer after Caroline’s death (September 7, 1809), “the unspeakable pain of the severance of so loved a being whose life shared with mine a thousand roots, overwhelmed my powers. Only complete internal and external loneliness, the exclusive contact with her and with things of another world could preserve me in that moment.”4 As we saw in the Freedom essay, there is a “profound and indestructible melancholy of all life” because “the human never receives the condition under their power, although one strives to do so in evil; it is only lent to one and remains independent of one” (I/7, 399). We own nothing except our own death (we cannot give our death away, nobody can die our death for us) and we own that as that which violently reminds us that we fundamentally own nothing else. We do not own our lives, our predicates, our things, any more so than we own the lives and the things of those we love and cherish. Amidst this period of “forlorn loneliness” and “unspeakable pain” and “complete internal and external loneliness” appears a remarkable document, the dialogue Clara.5 As we have seen, Schelling had claimed in the Freedom essay that his future writings would be explicitly dialogical. As we also saw in the same essay, mere idealism was too general to think the specificity of human 192 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE freedom. “If freedom is the positive concept of the In-itself over all, then the investigation of human freedom is again thrown back into the general, since the intelligible, upon which freedom alone was grounded, is...