The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

1. The Nameless Good

One cannot say of the Godhead that it is good since this sounds as if the “good” were supplementing its Being as something distinct. But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as the Good itself. —Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815 version)1 Wie soll denn der Mensch der gegenwärtigen Weltgeschichte auch nur ernst und streng fragen können, ob der Gott sich nahe oder entziehe, wenn der Mensch unterläßt, allererst in die Dimension hineinzudenken, in der jene Frage allein gefragt werden kann? Das aber ist die Dimension des Heiligen. . . . How should the human of contemporary world history be able to ask at all seriously and rigorously if the god nears or withdraws when the human above all neglects to think into the dimension in which the question alone can be asked? But this is the dimension of the Holy. . . . —Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1946)2 In a striking passage in the Freedom essay, Schelling argued that the human is “formed in the mother’s love” and that “the light of thought first grows out of the darkness of the incomprehensible (out of feeling, Sehnsucht, the sovereign mother of knowledge)” (I/7, 361). In this dark longing, in the paradoxically object-free striving of Sehnsucht, one finds, as the dark, concealed origin of the understanding, the “desire for the unknown, nameless Good” (I/7, 361). We are confronted with two aporias. In the first, the aporia of desire, Sehnsucht 5 1 The Nameless Good strives, but it does not have a specific object towards which it strives. Sehnsucht is a ceaseless striving without a clearly delineated desideratum. In the second, the aporia of naming, in so far as this desire can be spoken of as having an object (which, strictu sensu, it does not), Schelling named this quasi object the “nameless Good.” But what manner of name is the “nameless Good”? On the one hand, this quasi object is named the Good, and on the other hand, this Good is qualified as being nameless. What manner of naming is this that names without naming and, without naming, nonetheless names? Furthermore, the desire for the nameless Good, Sehnsucht as the sovereign mother of knowledge, places the drive towards knowledge as more fundamentally the longing for the Good. The Good precedes the true and it is in such a priority that Schelling agreed with his Munich colleague Franz von Baader that the drive to knowledge is analogous to the procreative drive (I/7, 414). It is the production or birthing of truth as the aporetic longing for the nameless Good. The generation of truth, it must be here emphasized, is born from the primacy of the call of the Good. When Levinas charged occidental philosophy for betraying the primacy of the Good by insisting on the primacy of the True (the Good as resolved or aufgehoben into thinking), thinking was brought back to the site of its founding crisis. In his genealogical critique of the value of values, Nietzsche also had a somewhat similar concern, namely that the reactive mode of thinking sought to make all that is outside a normative community into something compatible with that community and, to the extent that it could not do so, its ressentiment condemned the barbarian remainder to the category of evil. Granted Levinas and Nietzsche’s provocation, is it the case that the nineteenth century did not provide us with other models of articulating the primacy of the Good over the True? Are there other thinkers that might aid us in articulating this Copernican revolution in thinking and ethics? I am arguing , both in this chapter and throughout this book, that Schelling, unduly overshadowed by Hegel, provided one of the first and most extensive (and not simply dialectical) models of the disequilibrium between the Good and the True. In this respect, Schelling emerges, almost a century and a half after his death, as a deeply contemporary figure in continental philosophy, contributing directly to the current debate about the primacy of the Good (beyond good and evil) in the wake of Nietzsche and Levinas. Schelling, like Levinas, puts “forth the Platonic word, Good beyond being. It excludes being from the Good, for how could one understand the conatus of being in the goodness of the Good?”3 In this chapter, I contextualize Schelling’s contribution by situating it in reference to the System fragment, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and...