In his Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom Schelling's aim is not the general one of "setting out to explicate a new concept of human freedom." Rather, his aim is much more precise: Schelling aims to ground such a concept with a natural philosophy adequate and appropriate to this concept. Incidentally, and as a sidenote, it is inappropriate to designate Schelling's thought here with the word "concept" - the word "movement" or "being" might be more to-the-point. However, the Investigations is ambiguous even on this basic point. Schelling starts out by considering freedom and its "ground" - an important term in the entire essay - as beings or as movements, but then, in the middle of the essay, turns to a different kind of investigation. The latter is transcendental, and it is also negative in the Schellingian sense. Schelling writes:
In so far as the soul is now the living identity of both principles [of good and evil], it is spirit; and spirit is in God. Were now the identity of both principles in the spirit of man exactly as indissoluble as in God, then there would be no distinction, that is, God as spirit would not be revealed. The same unity that is inseverable in God must therefore be severable in man - and this is the possibility of good and evil.
We say expressly: the possibility of evil. And we are seeking at the moment to make intelligible only the severability of the principles (loc. 729, emphasis added).
This is the transition point. Since the present Memo is concerned primarily with the relationship between the positive and negative philosophies, and since the step here taken is to understand what Schelling meant by "being" and "remainder" in the Berlin Lectures, it seems reasonable to focus on the first part of the Investigations, the part prior to the point quoted above.
Schelling opens his essay with an extensive development of different versions of pantheism. This seems surprising and abrupt, even arbitrary, at first sight. This beginning, however, is necessary and suitable for the topic of the essay, human freedom. In line with the classical philosophical method, Schelling takes for granted the minimal dilemma which freedom as such presents, namely, the conflict between determination and freedom. Freedom is, moreover, what Schelling calls the prius, or the primal movement which comes out of itself, self-movement or self-origination (but not necessarily a self-creation; this distinction becomes important once we move to a detailed consideration of the relationship between "God" and "ground.") As such, freedom is essentially will. Now in current philosophy, the antagonist of the will is determination. This intuition sustains a well-known debate, that of determinism. Schelling, by contrast, focuses on pantheism and its various fatalisms. Which, then, is the right framing of the issue?
Properly speaking, determinism cannot be the antagonist of freedom. The forces which determine everything in determinism are essentially mechanical, and yet mechanical forces are totally irrelavant when we come to consider the being or concept of freedom. Another way of putting this point is this: mechanism and mechanical forces appear when we observe everything from an external, figurative, and spatio-temporal (that is, the flow of time strictly confined within the boundaries of space) perspective, which leads to the feeling that everything is following a necessary course. On the other hand, freedom is an inner concept, something antecedent to the external manifestation of things. Thus, mechanical forces leave freedom untouched on this dichotomy, and vice versa. It is this rigid separation between the two force fields that makes this way of framing the issue problematic. There is no genuine conflict here, and thus there is no genuine solution, since there is no problem in the first place. Against determinism, therefore, the proper solution is to dissolve the very problem which determinists seek to pose.
Pantheism and fatalism, on the other hand, seeks to explain the movement of the world by positing a will, more precisely a primal will or the will of God. This "will" is properly an inner force behind the appearance of things which nonetheless is also part of appearance. The particular wills of creatures are only species of or differentiations from this primal will. As such, if the primal will has the power to move the world on its own, then the particular wills must obey its command, and thus the result is fatalism. This is a much more threatening idea to freedom: if the inner principles which governs the appearance of things in the world are subject to the decision made by a fundamental willing being, then the particular will which motivates a particular action or any other outer appearance might also be merely a part of something higher than itself. The truth of a particular will is that it is subordinate to and controlled by a higher power, and so freedom only belongs to this higher being and nothing else.
According to pantheism, freedom still has a place in the world, but it is no longer human freedom. It is precisely for this reason that Schelling's main target in the Investigations is not determinism but rather pantheism. Moreover, this is why Schelling expresses the need to develop a new realism or a natural philosophy which will support human freedom. Without such a new foundation, any particular conception of human freedom will ultimately be nullified by being included into the great movement of pantheism.
The first step out of pantheistic fatalism is to recognize that the particular wills or particular beings which become distinguished from God are not simply contained within God. This will make God and these beings indistinguishable from one another, which means that the talk of a being being determined by another being becomes completely unintelligible. With this insight, Schelling already is able to formulate a positive position contra fatalism: in order for the particular will to claim its own portion of the world, as it were, it must have already distinguished itself from the world; thus, the particular will, as a container of its own portion of the world, is something outside God. Yet, at the same time, the content of this particular will is something taken from God's will. In this sense, the particular will is also inside God, within the divine order.
In order to clearly sketch this paradox and its movement, Schelling introduces the distinction between "God proper" and "ground." God is the prius, the absolute origin of all differences. However, in order for God to be such a stable and unified being, he must at the same time have a ground which sustains such a unity. This ground, however, cannot be external to God, for God is all things. Therefore, the absolute origin, qua God, already contains the difference between God proper (the unity of clearly distinguished forces and wills) and his ground (the undifferentiated yet non-simplistic soup of stirring.) The boundary of things (from spatio-temporal objects to the differences of particular wills) are not originally in God. God is simultaneously the actuality of such a boundary (God proper) and the possibility of this (which is his ground.) The latter, since it lack all boundary and clear differences, is given the metaphorical name "darkness" by Schelling. Moreover, the movement within the ground = darkness is, in "human terms" (i.e. in human metaphor), what Schelling calls "yearning." In comparison, the act of differentiating the forces within the ground and thus at the same time making their unity clear, this act is the "understanding," and its realm is called "light."
Schelling here makes a curious move: he claims that the ground of and within God is nature. This implies that natural philosophy, or the positive philosophy, must be the philosophy of the ground, speculations concerning what is going on in the ground.
At this point, again, the reader might be surprised by Schelling's identification of being with God. When the topic is nature and human freedom, why speculate on God? The answer seems to be this: nature and freedom are both already invested with certain laws. These laws are regulated by the categories of the understanding (in the Kantian sense.) Kant has already thus given an account of how these domains are to be understood. God, however, is something which Kant failed to grasp positively; while he postulated God through a practical necessity, the being of God is that of an idea, not of being. God is transcendent, and so he cannot be subjected to the stable laws which the categories make possible. But the question for Schelling is precisely how and from what these categories arise. How can the world be, such that something like the categories and the understanding and consequently human cognition can be made actual? This question aims at an object which is beyond the categories, and thus beyond both nature and freedom. The object which satisfies the demands of this question is God, and hence the necessity of focusing on him rather than on freedom as such. To put it in Schelling's own terms, the challenge is to give an account of the creation of the human soul.
Schelling argues that the creation of the human soul was necessary for God to achieve self-revelation. This claim, again, has a very precise meaning within the context laid out thus far. God is both ground and God proper. God proper, however, as light and its founding understanding, is something which has come to light, captured as unified and distinguished. The ground must have preceded it. Yet at the same time God cannot distinguish himself from his own ground, since both are within God himself. The only way for God to reveal himself to himself is thus to create a being who is capable of severing himself from his own ground. This is a human being, or more precisely the human soul. The human soul, Schelling concludes, is thus necessary for God's self-revelation from the point of view of God himself.
However, Schelling also notes that the mere existence of humans by itself does not entail the existence of the human soul. The soul, as the instrument for the self-revelation of God, is something distinct from God himself, and is thus not really part of nature. A human body as such is, on the other hand, a natural object, which may or may not be imbued with a soul. How does the soul arise?
Here, once again, Schelling describes a movement which is outside the province of the Kantian categories. Nature is initially yearning; but as yearning, it has a "glimpse" of its desired object, i.e. its own unity. This "glimpse" is already the understanding. The understanding thus isolates, fixes, and extracts a particular force or will out of the pool of the ground which is in yearning. The same will is thus both ground and God, yearning and the understanding. With each "glimpse," the understanding progressively accumulates the parts out of the ground. This does not mean that yearning is reduced in proportion to the development of the understanding, since one will grounds both ways of being. Now the understanding properly reveals the ground to God when the totality of forces or wills within the ground are made manifest in light, in what Schelling calls "luminous thoughts." Luminous thoughts do not occur for creatures who are still immersed in the darkness of the ground which has not yet become understood for these creatures. A complete self-consciousness of forces or wills is achieved in the human soul. This does not mean that Schelling first assumes or posits something called a "soul" and then attributes to its the property of having complete self-consciousness. The argument here goes the other way round: since the soul requires complete self-consciousness of the understanding in relation to yearning, only in such a state of self-consciousness can a soul exist in the first place. But since the soul is necessary for God's being-for-himself (to use a Hegelian term) the above complete self-consciousness is also necessary; thus, the human soul is a necessary being, and necessarily so.
After the eternal act of self-revelation, 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. This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground. The understanding is born in the genuine sense from that which is without understanding. Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance (loc. 673, emphasis added)
With this account of the necessary creation of the human soul, Schelling has illuminated a being who is capable of acting outside God as God's own representer and representative. God feels himself in the human soul. But this feeling requires the severance of ground from its existence, which is impossible in God himself. This severance is, according to Schelling, the origin of the distinction between good and evil. The movements of the understanding and of yearning make such a distinction immanent within human beings. It is, moreover, this distinction which is the essence of human freedom as opposed to freedom in general or the self-formation of natural beings in general.
At this point, the first part of the Investigations comes to an end, and the transition to the transcendental development of the concepts of good and evil is announced.
The consequences of Schelling's discussions here for the positive philosophy are many, but one in particular seems to stand out, namely, that the ground is the proper object of the positive philosophy. Moreover, it is the becoming of things not in the understanding (which, by implication, ought to also include dialectics, since the latter is also a way of grasping the movement of thought through thought's own division and unification) alone but rather in the interplay between the understanding and yearning that is the object of investigation. This is to be accomplished by natural philosophy. It is not a naturalistic philosophy, nor is it an occult physics. Exactly what this new discipline might be is very difficult to imagine out of the blue. One place to start is perhaps Schelling's own Naturphilosophie. This will be the focus of the next Memo.
