The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

2. Theos Kai Pan

Right from the beginning, Spinoza was a decisive philosopher for Schelling.This may now sound like yet another dusty little truth in the museums and archives of philosophy, but in Schelling’s day, to embrace Spinoza was to dance with the devil and pantheism was the witches’ brew served at this demonic party. Deleuze once wrote of Spinoza that “No philosopher was ever more worthy , but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated.”1 Now as bored college students sleep through class lectures and discussions on Continental Rationalism, it seems hard to imagine why Spinoza feared for his life were he to publish his Ethics, or why people were punished for reading it, or why records were kept of those who had read it in a way not altogether dissimilar to the way the FBI now keeps records on terrorists or even its own citizens . In the late eighteenth century, the German philosophical community was so galvanized by the so-called Pantheismusstreit, the Pantheism Controversy , and its scandalous claim that the theologically liberal Enlightenment star Lessing had been a dreaded Spinozist, that some of its participants eventually became so worked up that they died. What is it about the very notion of pantheism, or some version of it, which was so exciting and so dangerous then and so dull now? As for now, the lassitude that these questions breed is more a function of our inability to read well. The inert prophylactic force in our philosophical habits keeps these questions from emerging with any force as questions. As for the late eighteenth century, pantheism was a difficult question, and not just in terms of the cerebral demands of the problematic. Spinozism, despite its frequent talk of Deus sive natura (God or nature), bore the specter 33 2 Theos Kai Pan of atheism, fatalism, nihilism, and moral decadence. If God is the same thing as nature, then God is material, and hence without a principle of transcendence , it makes no sense to speak of a God. If everything follows from the ineluctable nature of God, from what Leibniz once called “monopsychism,” or a single all-encompassing spirit or substance, then all things are fated. If there is nothing but fate, there is no freedom, and if there is no freedom, there is no free will, and without the assumption of free will, there can be no coherent doctrine of moral responsibility. This anxiety is not allayed when one simply substitutes an incomprehensible darkness or emptiness for substance. If all things are swallowed up by this dark night, if the clarity of day simply hides its foundational darkness and if light is led back into the darkness in which the concrete is no longer discrete, then the dark, incomprehensible specter of substance leads to what Hegel rightly called a “monochromatic formalism,” a dark night when all cows are black. This dark night, this hippy heaven in which one has escaped the facta bruta of the quotidian, is not unlike the common misperception that Buddhism counsels escape from the concrete into the free and detached night when all Buddhas are black and nirvana is just another narcotic by which one simply drops out of a life that one can no longer bear. In fact the word einerlei, the sameness of things, a word that Schelling’s own Identity Philosophy most wanted to stay away from, also denotes “monotony.” (Nietzsche, for his part, called this death of the camel, of the capacity to bear life, European Buddhism.) To the anxious, either substance is something and hence everything is swallowed up in the implacable movement of fate, or it is nothing and everything is lost in this nothingness. As Hegel reflected in the Preface to the Phenomenology : “If the conception of God as the one Substance shocked the age in which it was proclaimed, the reason for this was on the one hand an instinctive awareness that, in this definition, self-consciousness was only submerged and not preserved. On the other hand, the opposite view, which clings to thinking qua thinking, to universality as such, is the very same simplicity, is undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality” (PG, Vorrede, §17). The anxieties now start to mount. If there are no independent, transcendent values, then there is no morality. As Father Copleston famously argued on the radio with Bertrand Russell against Russell’s ethical emotivism: “But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, that there is an ideal moral order...