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Schelling’s 1809 Phi losophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom is rooted in notes he took for a philosophy of nature. These notes first appeared in 1797 as preparation for On the World Soul and for a full-blown philosophy of nature. What we should keep in mind from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is its approach to existence, which starts from a thinking of the Absolute, instead of working up toward it. Further, the Absolute must be thought beyond antinomies and dialectics, which means that no dialectical method could claim to reach it without the petitio presupposing the Absolute even before the system unfolds. Schelling understood that teleological dialectical logics, like Hegel’s, begin with a knowledge that they claim to reach, as a whole, at the end of their unfolding. I argue here that mood thus arises rather unexpectedly, in Schelling’s idealism, as part of his rejection of teleological dialectics and his attempt to think life as immanence. Mood will be understood less as an emotion than as a kind of trembling, a tension that typifies absolute life, or the living Absolute. Schelling showed that a living Absolute—Nature or God—begins as the coexistence of two contraries, which cannot and do not pass over into each other. As a complex, almost unthinkable origin, Schelling referred to the tensed coexistence of contraries in “indifference.” Although this coexistence resembles Aristotle’s distinction between dynamis and energeia, in the Absolute it must be thought as proto-nature in which life is born out of itself. There would thus be no separation, of causality or temporality, between the constituent terms. Moreover, Schelling’s Absolute is not ultimately a dualism, and nothing “contains” its two terms. In an effort to think something like absolute life—or a world soul, or again the ground of what-is, in terms of immanent emergence, Schelling argued for a twofold first principle whose existence is characterized by an imperceptible striving called Sehnsucht.

Placing the term “God” in the place of the Absolute makes this logic appear uncanny. It is motivated by the just intuition that what is non-relative must be alive in and for itself. It would be alive before the phenomenal universe is alive, because out of it arises every process of generation and destruction. Alive, and giving birth to itself—nothing gives birth to God other than God—all things flow out of the Absolute, including the contraction necessary for “God” to “become” a being. From there, we begin to understand the origin of beings. In fine, the Absolute is absolute and relative; it is relative to itself and might be conceived as analogous to a cell that comes to divide through immanent forces existing in indifference to one another up to a certain point, until, for mysterious reasons, they enact and undergo fission.

The complexity of Schelling’s system lies in his struggle to correct idealist philosophy by forcing it to think life according to a logic proper to life itself. Schelling found even Hegel’s Naturphilosophie overly formalist on this point. That is why Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries turns on a principle already found in his philosophy of nature. He recognized that idealist dialectics had failed to grasp the becoming of nature from their starting point. Conceptualizing proto-forces coexisting in pure immanence without mediation or contamination, his path to a living Absolute—and one that exceeded Kant’s formal temporality and categories—Schelling had recourse to a language of affects, despite their inevitable anthropomorphism: absolute life is affection and self-affection, simultaneously passive and active. Schelling deemed the inaugural indifference Sehnsucht, a sort anxious longing and striving. The activity-passivity of emotions and passions proved appropriate to the effort as it avoided more paltry anthropomorphisms implicit in the image of creation as ratio.

What, however, is the affect of Sehnsucht, and how does it serve Schelling’s logic? The term itself belongs to the Suchte or passions, which eighteenth century German expressed as Leidenschafte, states of undergoing or suffering. As such, Sehnsucht is more than the “longing” of which English translators speak. Although “longing” is anthropomorphic, Sehnsucht denotes a striving alternately inertial, as in Goethe’s “dreaming yearning (träumende Sehnsucht),” and intentional, as in Kant’s observation that this yearning can have a distinct object (“[es] kann die Richtung auf ein bestimmtes Objekt sehr scharf hervortreten”).Footnote 1

In this context, Sehnsucht appears less anthropomorphic than would figures of reason, calculation or psychological motivation. We should note that Kierkegaard will later present a similar concept in his Fear and Trembling, when speaking of the “movement of infinity.”Footnote 2 We may assume that he borrowed this from Schelling. In the Philosophical Inquiries, Sehnsucht is, in any event, a restless yearning without an object, an anxiousness lying between an embodied sensation of disquiet and an affect that strives toward what it does not yet know. Sehnsucht bestrides sensation and sentiment, sensibility and affectivity. It is appropriate to understand it as desiderium quo quis quasi morbo laborat,Footnote 3 the unnamable process of desire “by or for which something strives, quasi morbo,” almost morbidly. Sehnsucht permits Schelling to present, in their reciprocal contrast, power and suffering, against a horizon of unknowing. This passion describes pains of birth, the possibility of a proto-matter coexisting in place and time with an uncertain factor that initiates its own self-organization, the way a genetic code first ‘manifests’ itself in the movement of proteins.

In this figural depiction of incipient becoming, which is likely inspired by Luther’s translation, among others, of Psalm 63 “Sehnsucht nach Gott,” it is the indefiniteness of condition and tone that prevails.Footnote 4

In developing his philosophy of life, Schelling proposed a mediation that combined the vis inertiae of mechanics and the virtuality of simple organization in the common form of a mood. As indicated, Sehnsucht was the tonality of the conjoined dualism, denoting a coexistence-in-tension of force and resistance, with neither conflict nor dialectic. This actually typified romantic biology’s conception of life which invariably set out, as did Schelling, from the concept of a general organism and envisaged individual beings as so many halting-points in its universal unfolding. Unlike his contemporaries in zoology and embryology, notably Friedrich Tiedemann, Schelling carried the unity and parallelism of the living world into the Absolute.Footnote 5 It was to quite different ends that Kierkegaard—once profoundly influenced by Schelling—would extend the cosmological speculations of his erstwhile mentor, adapting them to an existential anxiety in his 1844 The Concept of Anxiety (Angest). Therein anxiety, again as tension and striving, argued in favor of a spiritual evolution for humans and nature. In the former, anxiety was the symptom of self-consciousness in light of the sinfulness “of the race,” even as anxiety could motivate the overcoming of sin. Kierkegaard wrote, “Because in innocence [a state of nature] spirit is qualified only as dreaming spirit, the eternal appears as the future, for this is…the first expression of the eternal, and its incognito. Just as…the spirit, when it is about to be posited in the synthesis [of body and psyche], or—–when it is about to posit the synthesis as the spirit’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individual, expresses itself as anxiety, so here the future in turn is the eternal’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individual expressed as anxiety. As freedom’s possibility manifests itself for freedom, freedom succumbs, and temporality emerges in the same way as sensuousness in its significance as sinfulness” (COA: 91).

For Kierkegaard, humans are the synthesis of two incompatible principles, provided what effectuates the synthesis—“spirit”—is not repelled by excesses on the material or sensuous side. The work of spirit, whose “translation” as freedom echoes both Hegel and Schelling here, is expressed as a two-sided anxiety that drives humans forward and exhausts them. Kierkegaard’s adaptation of Schelling is evident in his insistence on a subjective, psychological anxiety and a natural or objective anxiety, both of which denote the tensions and possibilities of mortal life.

Before proceeding to examine Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries more closely, I want to cast light on mood in Schelling as opposed to mood in relation to Hegel’s concept. Without this, it is difficult to understand Schelling’s innovation. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, which appeared 2 years before the publication of the Philosophical Inquiries (1809), Hegel argued that absolute knowledge culminates in the spirit assuming all the various shapes and modes of its historical unfolding. As a “self” (Selbst), spirit has fully externalized itself in the world and its Gestalten can be known thanks to the history of culture. Through philosophical science, spirit is aware both of its evolving forms and it “philosophizes” with them in ascending orders of self-consciousness. The evolution of these forms will be called a “restless activity” that “consists in cancelling and superseding itself,” or again, a “negativity.”Footnote 6 Spirit as negativity is the accompaniment and the end of a process of temporal unfolding: “in thus concentrating on itself, spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness….Here it has to begin all over again at its immediacy, as freshly as before” (PM: 807). Nevertheless, “the goal of the process is the revelation of the depth of the spiritual life…the Absolute notion” (PM: 808). In Hegel, the quality characteristic of the movement of reason into spirit—through its various formations in self-consciousness—is restless activity. The ambiguity of a mood like Sehnsucht is not evident here. Restless activity, or negativity, represents a telos, or fragile culmination, which presumably begins again repeatedly, but which is nevertheless a logical terminus. For Schelling, who begins with the Absolute and thinks it physiologically, mood bespeaks the Gemütszustand Footnote 7 or ‘state’ of a pre-spiritual duality able to give birth to itself. The birth or self-generation strikingly resembles the path of Hegel. Both philosophers employ distinctly Lutheran concepts of restless immanentization or Insichgehen, and kenosis, or externalization in the world. For all that, the Philosophical Inquiries—whose general arguments Hegel certainly knew from his collaboration with Schelling, and which Hegel had anticipatively stood on their head—place a particular emphasis on mood and desire. Straightaway equated with negativity, Hegel’s restlessness appeared formalist (and anti-romantic) by comparison. Now, because he strove to surpass Fichte and Kant, Schelling’s Lutheran Sehnsucht found itself playing the uncanny role of expressing a logic as old as Gnosticism and Kabbalah,Footnote 8 reviving a (Christianized) version of Tsim-tsum, the kabbalistic self-contraction of Absolute to make way for creation. Here, however, the contraction of the Absolute is a birth, and in no way the product of Hegel’s dialectical, and historical, unfolding. In Schelling, the first creation is God as One. That means that the first creation is the same as that from which it arose, distinguishable only as a sort of intensification relative to its ground or base.

In this metaphysics of life, whose influence on Nietzsche and later strains of vitalism should not be underestimated,Footnote 9 Schelling merged mystical speculation on a living divinity with a physiology of forces in conflict and balance. Nineteenth century German biology engulfed French materialism, setting it into vitalisms that conceived life force as overarching characteristic. But Schelling will reject the notion of ‘life-force’ itself as contradictory: in a logic of immanence, forces come from forces and produce concrescences, or intensifications. All forces we can know are finite, which means that some aspect of the living Absolute itself will prove to be somehow finite. However, because limitation is present in the Absolute, limitation must be in relation with something such that there are always at least two forces, and never simply one extrinsic “life force.”

Where we think of force (as in matter)…we must also presume a force opposed to it. Between opposing forces…we can only conceive a double relationship. Either they are in relative equilibriumFootnote 10…then they are thought of as at rest, as in matter…[and] said to be inert. Or one thinks of them as in perpetual, never-settled conflict, where each in turn prevails and submits. (IPN: 37)

While relative equilibrium is a state that characterizes life in Schelling’s proto-universe, it promises to reemerge with the ultimate self-realization of that universe, at a metaphoric point where the two inaugural grounds prove to be part of a single totality. Even then, equilibrium may not wholly supplant conflict. And, while we discern ongoing conflict, or resistance, throughout nature as well as in humans, it is not the fundamental characteristic of the world—or not the sole characteristic, as that would lead to one of two things: the destruction of one of the terms, and therefore both ultimately (since the one depends on the other), or to an oscillation of dominations from which nothing new could arise. For this reason, the Absolute holds together two modalizations of its “self,” whose symptom or expression is the troubled Sehnsucht. In the Absolute, the presence-in-indifference of these two processes generates their own third term in the contraction of the Absolute into the One. In nature, too, the tension between material and form-giving forces likewise produces a third term. Schelling argues that this third term cannot itself be a force, lest it join or replace one of the other two. Instead, we find at work a third term analogous to the relationship between the dualist base and its contraction into the One. For his natural philosophy Schelling proposes to call this third term “soul” or “principle of life,” because the separation of thinking and extension is a difference of expression. In this, he is a Spinozist. More importantly perhaps, he understands that any logic that separates the concept from what it collects and specifies, will prove as inadequate to grasping life as the vitalism that imposes life-force extrinsically.

In order to comprehend [the] union of concept and matter, you assume a higher divine intelligence…who designed his creations in ideal forms and brought forth Nature in accordance with these ideals. But a being in whom the concept precedes the act, the design, the execution, cannot produce, [it] can only form or model matter already there, [it] can only stamp the impress of the understanding and of purposiveness upon the matter from without. What he [the higher divine intelligence] produces is purposive, not in itself, but only in relation to the understanding of the artificer… only contingently. Is not the understanding [thereby made into] a dead faculty? (IPN: 33)

When Schelling thinks a third term in nature, not as force but as soul, he is working out of a coherent spiritual vitalism: nothing self-animates from without. There is no divine artificer in Schelling. God and nature are processual, and both arise from themselves, although de facto nature appears to stand in a relation of analogy to the emergence of the Absolute. This has led commentators like Werner Marx to argue that when Schelling investigates human freedom starting from the Absolute, he could just as well be starting from life itself.Footnote 11 It is a matter of a difference of levels, here, between life as observable, and life as its own genetic condition and self-production. This difference of levels would be pure transcendentalism were it not for the fact that Schelling above all strives to hold together the speculative and the empirical.

Nature, in its dual aspects—the seen and the unseen—thus unfolds everywhere in the same way. In the Absolute, the birth of God to itself from itself may be likened to the emergence of two cells out of one, or the emergence of a definite entity out of the indeterminacy of a seed or droplet condensing from a cloud. The best example is Schelling’s own, which speaks of the emergence of light, drawing away from dark gravity but carrying with it the resistant inertia of its own obscure ground.Footnote 12

We must imagine the primal longing [or desire] in this way—turning towards reason, indeed, though not yet recognizing it, just as we longingly desire unknown, nameless excellence. This primal longing moves in anticipation like a surging, billowing sea… following some dark, uncertain law, incapable in itself of forming anything that can endure. But in response to the desire, qua still obscure depths, the first emotion of the divine Being is formed as a reflective internal representation taking shape in God himself, thanks to which God perceives himself as in an image (Ebenbild), since there can be no other object here than God. (NHF: 35, trans modified)Footnote 13

The dynamic ground of this total life called “God”—which evolves by ec-stasis throughout the natural world—is thus anxious desire without an object. Facing the conundrum of rendering this “primal longing” and “anticipatory surging,” Schelling’s French translators proposed désirement (process of desire) and angoisse for the notion. It is after all the first “emotion of divine Dasein,” where emotion must be understood as e-movere or a moving outward. The zero degree of phenomenalization—that is, of a speculative, genetic self-phenomenalization—is an absolute mood, prior to any understanding and accompanying both the stasis that surrounds birth and the process by which difference emerges from sameness, without becoming alienated from it. It is not hard to see why readers like Slavoj Žižek find in Schelling a precursor to the psychoanalytic drives-unconscious, much less why Deleuze illustrates his concept of minimal difference, i.e. “contrariety,” using Schelling’s example of lightning that stretches outward from the dark ground that accompanies it without engulfing it.Footnote 14 These are Schelling’s thematic debts to Aristotle and above all to Spinoza. As he says of God’s first contraction:

This image is the first in which God, viewed absolutely, is realized, though only in Himself…This image [or re-presentation, a return at a different level] is at the same time understanding—the Word, the “logos” of this desire, and the eternal spirit that feels in itself the word and at the same time … infinite desire. (NHF: 36)

Schelling can call this ‘precipitate’ or concrescence “understanding” for the simple reason that it corresponds to a primitive Vor-stellung, which is emotion and sense, not an idea; comparable to an intensification of the initial Sehnsucht. At this level, Vorstellung and passion correspond like passivity and activity, as something crystallizes out of its own ground yet is different from that ground insofar as virtuality precedes and produces actuality, although not in a singular “time.” Nothing external is superadded and there is no higher temporal framework. As flow and counter-flow, this is the structure of representation or Vorstellung, the inadæquatio that contracts into a temporary adæquatio, or the excess whose concentrations mirror it to itself. If we are inclined to say that Schelling is naïvely projecting the model of thought onto something he has called the Absolute, we need not long await his reply. For we must begin with something that is “neither a subjective nor an objective Idea” (IPN: 46), above all not the production of scholastic casuistry.

Schelling will argue cogently that there is no way to objectify subjective universality or subjectivist formalism, other than by a further (human) insight that redoubles and limits the initial subjectivism. The problem is not solved by enlisting a community of external observers and Schelling is not pleading for the objectivity of his system. He is urging that we approach thinking as the spontaneous ordering of differentiated miasmas, which do not persist in stasis and should never be limited to human subjectivity. We would do much better to see, in the work of understanding, complex combinations and oppositions that are also found in natural processes. Because the hypothetical paradigm of natural processes will be called the Absolute, Schelling will argue that here we have the possibility of approaching being and becoming before they are conceptually, or even ontologically, separated. At the level of phenomenality, whereby we imagine this process, a conception of time, qua accompanying-duration or succession, cannot be avoided and therefore the unity seems more dynamic than static. Yet in Schelling, it is really as if the phenomenal level existed together with its own possibility—which is the case with life, as well. Unity is never completely dissolved, “but … because … Nature and the ideal world each contains a point of absoluteness, where both opposites flow together, each must again, if it is to be distinguished as the particular unity, contain the three unities distinguishably in itself … we call them potencies” (IPN: 49). The three unities in question are: being as production and dynamism, the dissolving of dynamism into static form, and those states of affairs where the first two exist conjoined in indifference.

To return, now, to the Philosophical Inquiries, if we take what Schelling calls “understanding”—that first metaphoric fold of desire—whereby the Absolute mirrors itself, or stands as if facing itself, we can also trace this “understanding” in nature. What follows is a structuralist account of this so-called understanding.

The first effect of understanding in nature is the fission of forces, which is the only way in which understanding can unfold and develop the unity which was held in it unconsciously, like a seed, and yet, necessarily. Just as in humans there comes to light, when in the dark longing to create something, thoughts separate out of the chaotic confusion of thinking, in which all were connected but each one prevents the other from coming forth—so the unity appears which contains all within it and which had lain hidden in the depths. Or it is as in the case of the plant which escapes the dark fetters of gravity only as it unfolds and spreads its powers, developing its hidden unity as its substance becomes differentiated. For since this Being (Wesen) of primal nature is nothing else than the eternal basis of God, it must contain within itself, locked away, God’s essence, as a light of life … but longing or desire, roused now by the understanding, strives to preserve this light of life … within [the base], and to close up in itself so that they always remain [together in the] ground. (NHF: 36)

Sehnsucht, or the anguished yearning intrinsic to virtuality, carries a disturbing, dual movement. As a symptom and as the medium of the trembling of birth out of itself, Sehnsucht characterizes a temporary stasis that is both absolute, simple, and becoming-relative as two. Unity must unfold itself in order ultimately to return to itself with internal differentiations. In the “dark longing to create something,” separation occurs as a leap; however, the intensification of unity that produces two entities is not sublimation. The ground, being itself alive, exerts a force on the new entity, whether this is light, a plant, or a complex body. In the speculative recapitulation of the emergence of God out of itself, the base can be seen as the very being of all that will unfold from it. As such, impelling yet resisting the intensification through which it becomes two, the base protects itself by “striving to preserve this light of life within it.” And the erstwhile student of Schelling, Kierkegaard, will extend this to human angst and speak of “in-closing reserve.” He too distinguishes between an objective and a subjective anxiety, although his project turns from Schelling’s speculative physics explaining positive evil to a psychology that justifies Christian theology’s approach to evil as “sin.”Footnote 15

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. (COA: 61)

Kierkegaard deliberately inflects Schelling, recoiling from what he conceives as Schelling’s “vigorous and full-blooded anthropomorphism” (COA: 59n). Above all, Kierkegaard focuses on anxiety as preceding the creative leap, which in humans is freedom enacted and in nature points to the struggle to self-transform.

Schelling’s main thought is that anxiety … characterizes especially the suffering of the deity in his endeavor to create…. The mistake, however, is a different one…Here is an example of how strange everything becomes when metaphysics and dogmatics are distorted by treating dogmatics metaphysically and metaphysics dogmatically. (COA: 59n)

For Kierkegaard, the interest of Schelling’s work lies in its conceiving the ways in which evil can be positive—thus something more than mere privation. Nevertheless, Schelling failed to consider the way in which evil passes into human history and into the psychology of cultures themselves (“the history of the race”) as a growing gravitas, to be understood as anxious melancholia and as a capacity for spiritual discernment.

[A]nxiety is of all things the most selfish, and no concrete expression of freedom is as selfish as the possibility of every concretion. This again is the overwhelming factor that determines the … ambiguous relation [to anxiety as] sympathetic and antipathetic. In anxiety, there is the selfish infinity of possibility, which…ensnaringly disquiets. (COA: 61)

What occurs in Schelling’s God or Absolute life, plays itself out at the psychological level for Kierkegaard, where it is precursive to any spiritual awakening. Schelling might well have accepted such a variation in perspective, though his ends—and his approach to belief—remain more formal and idealist.

Nevertheless, because Schelling too works perspectivally, anxious longing shows us that the Absolute is invariably but never dialectically two-in-one. And what goes for vegetal life is also the case for human existence. We speak of entities as unities containing plurality because, in their respective existence, their inner multiplicity holds together. For Schelling, the ultimate sign of the simultaneous presence of unity through the diversity of natural and spiritual history will be illustrated by what looks like a final unification; final because indemonstrable and non-chronological. Unity, whose pluralist aspects express themselves in nature and in humans, must be viewed as ‘holding’, sometimes even in-closing, as in Kierkegaard’s psychological inclosing reserve (COA: 123–135). In the Absolute, the dynamism of unity is both force and “love,” by which Schelling refers to something not unlike Freud’s Eros, which draws together: “for there is love neither in indifference nor where antitheses are combined, which require the combination in order to be; but rather … this is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist in itself and nonetheless neither is nor can be without the other” (NHF: 89). This is why we must consider absolute unity according to two perspectives, while understanding that the two original forces are in a sense one. At the end of their cosmological pluralization—following the trials of positive evil and freedom in the world—we can imagine either a return to the state in which “neither is nor can be without the other” or acknowledge that this unity is present throughout the ages of the cosmos, as virtuality.

The dualist and monist perspectives are co-present and co-necessary. They can hardly be envisioned at the same time, however. For human understanding, the explication of the duality makes possible a final approach to its fundamental unity, which is not a Hegelian telos to be attained.Footnote 16 Moreover, there is a processual quality already in the initial fission because, without the emergence of the first intensification, Schelling’s “the One,” emerging out of itself, out of the base, there could be no further development and therefore no way in which to see the unifying efficacy of Eros. The unity is invariably there, virtual; love does not come from the outside to reconcile the anxious dualisms spread across natural or cultural history. Love and desire are aspects of the same dynamism, although their relation to each other, as emotions, or moving powers, is unclear. Schelling suggests that we consider this through the example of meaning, produced by actual words: morphemes constitute phonemes thanks to voiced and non-voiced components guided by intrinsic invisible rules; substantives take on attributes, and verbs are adjoined thanks to higher levels of combinatorial rules. Sounding again like Deleuze to post-modern ears, Schelling refers to vowels as light elements and consonants as dark ones, against which what is voiced stands forth.

These are all approaches to the same fundamental question: How to conceive the co-originarity of the simplest meaning and life, in and for themselves? Schelling no doubt represents the ultimate idealist attempt to think life without falling into vitalism or mechanistic physics. He opposed the physicalist reductions of his age (like Franz Joseph Gall’s work on the origin of the nervous system in 1809),Footnote 17 just as he opposed grounding “rational philosophy by means of [mere] physiology.” The whole subsequent school of thought, inspired by Schelling, urged that “in the universe there was no absolute distinction between the material and the spiritual: mind was immanent in all matter and particular natural objects could be regarded as thinking beings” (NCO: 272, 82).

Following a logical strategy as ancient as Philo’s pre-Plotinian emanations, Schelling argued that out of the intensification, which breaks free from and concentrates the base into the one, there also emerges meaning. He called meaning “das Wort.” It denoted the productiveness of what Schelling characterized as the divine fold or mirroring “understanding.” This will ultimately be the model of human reason. Yet the ground is also differently productive. From it arises what we call “matter” in the world. In nature, matter and form, inertia and dynamism coexist with a stability that resembles the indifference of the principles in the divine Grund. Therefore, nothing in nature ever enduringly disrupts the order of its cycles of becoming. If the divine Word phenomenalizes naturally as light—a light that breaks free of that attractive, basal force devoid of illumination, i.e. gravity— meaning in the human being is an illumination of a different sort. Predictably, the dualism of principles is united in humanity as well, but understanding does not always coexist well with the drive-ground that Schelling calls ipseity, or self-will when speaking of humans. It happens that self-will enters into conflict with understanding or the light principle, or spirit; in this case the natural relationship of the two principles gets reversed, and a hypertrophy of drives results.

Man’s will may be regarded as a nexus of living forces; as long as it abides in its unity with the universal will [Love], these forces remain in their divine measure and balance. But hardly does self-will move from the center which is its station, than the nexus of forces is also dissolved; in its place a merely particular will rules which can no longer unite the forces among themselves … but must therefore strive to form or compose a … peculiar life out of the now separate forces, an insurgent host of desires and passions. (NHF: 41)

This is Schelling’s account, both of the positivity of evil and the necessary resistance opposed by self-will to human freedom; no force being what it is, virtually, unless it can act against a limiting counter-force. The positive account of the origin of evil and the effectivity of freedom is aligned with Schelling’s major élan which extends out of his “identity philosophy,” first formulated in the 1800s, and into his philosophy of nature as a concern that ultimately guided his whole philosophical endeavor. The positive account of evil is faithful to his early conception of intellectual intuition, or the tension he maintained between a pre-conscious and a conscious activity, out of which creation arises spontaneously and unfolds humans’ mental powers. In regard to nature, Schelling kept a similar, structural transcendentalism, distinguishing between empirical nature and its deeper conditions of possibility. Consequently, he was able to develop the outlines of a chemistry and physics of finite forces that were not reducible to mechanical necessity or to an anti-mechanistic vitalism. Each level of his thought mirrors the other by placing emphasis on grounds, consisting of degrees of inertia and activity. The higher-level intensities explain the effectivity or “mind,” which works like a genetics of life and reason. This becomes particularly important insofar as what we call evil is often the result of a positive choice, of enthusiasm, even intense pleasure. The drive of the pre-conscious center to extend itself throughout the periphery, usurping the place of reason, is Schelling’s conception of a recurrent tendency in human beings, whose outcome is not determinable in advance, though it explains the embrace of cruelty. This does not, however, define the essence of a human being. For Schelling, we are simply our acts. The motor of our choices are passions. These are not intrinsically evil; rather they express the drives. In privileging our narcissism, whose attractive force functions like the gravity that dogs the emergence of light, we give weight to what Schelling called a “false imagination” of outcomes. At the drive level, a collection of impulses is thus privileged, which comes simultaneously to resemble profound anxiety and one dimension of Plato’s Eros: “The general possibility of evil … consists in the fact that, instead of keeping his selfhood as the basis or the instrument, man can strive to elevate it to be the ruling and universal will, and, on the contrary, try to make what is spiritual in him into a means” (NHF: 68). With this, the balance of forces in us becomes skewed and incomprehensible.

[If] the two principles are at strife, then another spirit occupies the place where God should be. This, namely, is the reverse of God, a being which was roused to actualization by God’s revelation but which can never attain to actuality … which indeed never exists … and which, like the ‘matter’ of the ancients, can … never be grasped as real by … reason but only by false imagination. (NHF: 68)

False imagination thus realizes, in an image or an aspiration, a stasis, an uncanny fullness and a sort of rest, resulting from sur-potency. We might speak here, in Freudian terms, of the duality of drives coming apart, and of the base drives pursuing their course alone. It remains that the imbalance is a passage from being into a kind of non-being, and its enactment is de facto evil. “There springs the hunger of selfishness, which, in the measure that it deserts … unity becomes ever needier and poorer; but just on that account, more ravenous, hungrier, more poisonous. In evil there is that contradiction which devours and always negates itself, which just while striving to become creature destroys the nexus of creation and … falls into non-being” (NHF: 69).

An intuitive representation of these movements—or disruptions—is given to us as mood. Moreover, it is mood that remains with us, semi-consciously, in the perverse fullness of the expanded drives-base. It is mood that indicates that psychic harmony has been broken, just as a mood precedes creation. “True freedom is in accord with a holy necessity of a sort which we feel in essential knowledge, when heart and spirit, bound only by their own law, freely affirm that which is necessary” (NHF: 70). Schelling’s “necessity” is one that unfolds; one that moves through time at the empirical level. However, for love to triumph, the inertial and the intensified principles, body and mind, drives and rationality, must remain together and balanced in their difference. It is precisely this that Kierkegaard will glean from Schelling.Footnote 18

The synthesis of psychical and the physical [must] be posited by spirit; but spirit is eternal and the synthesis is, therefore, only when spirit posits the first synthesis along with the second synthesis of the temporal and the eternal…. Just as … the spirit … when it is about to posit the synthesis as the spirit’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individuality, expresses itself as anxiety, so here the future in turn is the eternal’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individuality expressed as anxiety. As freedom’s possibility manifests itself for freedom [in a decisive act], freedom succumbs, and temporality emerges in the same way as sensuousness in its significance as sinfulness [in persons and over time]. (COA: 91)

Kierkegaard’s aforementioned concern to connect the individual and the human race—while insisting upon each person’s freedom to leap freely into action—obliges him to work out various dialectics between individuals and groups (“the race”). In this way, anxiety denotes the possibility of freedom, and anxiety expresses the weight of phylogenetic sin or evil. The Kierkegaardian dialectics depend on the preservation of unity between body and mind: spirit. Desire, affect and reason are for him the work of spirit as an evolving, moral self-consciousness. Thus Kierkegaard’s “spirit” reproduces Schelling’s “love,” at a level where history and psychology unite in single individuals. For his part, Schelling always remained closer to the structural conditions of possibility of freedom, a choice resulting from his enduring engagement with post-Kantian idealism.

In fact, Schelling inherits significant aspects of Kant’s conception of evil, as seen in the latter’s essay “Religion in the Bounds of Mere Reason.” For Kant, radical evil was more structural than positive, in the sense that we are never able consistently to determine our will according to a maxim in harmony with the Categorical Imperative. Kant nevertheless refrained from determining why we are unable to hold fast to our practical maxims. He acknowledged that “the ultimate ground of the adoption of our maxims, which must itself lie in free choice, cannot be a fact revealed in experience, [and therefore] the good or evil in man … is … posited as the ground antecedent to every use of freedom in experience.”Footnote 19 This innate ground was as far as human understanding was permitted to go in tracing the origin of evil. Indeed, Kant’s transcendental empiricism explains why Schelling first developed his philosophy of identity, which first focused not on evil but on the pure, spontaneous upwelling of creative thought or intellectual intuition. Schelling’s original point of departure held consciousness and pre-consciousness, activity and passivity, in correlation, and in a state of indifference. As the condition of possibility of intellectual intuition, it is redolent of the spontaneity psychoanalysis, notably Lacanian, pinpoints, “Ça parle tout seul.” Something means by itself, spontaneously. Something unfolds, limiting itself and its world, in what is called, at the empirical level, the “discovery of the not-I” or exteriority. I cannot explore Schelling’s identity philosophy in depth, here. It is crucial to note however that, rather than dismissing affect and passion as proper merely to a pragmatic anthropology or a reflection on everyday psychological states (Kant’s position), Schelling employed a speculative philosophy to explore the indeterminacy that preceded self-differentiation and autonomy in all life forms.

In the place of Hegel’s “work of the negative,” Schelling, and Kierkegaard after him, placed a passion: restless desire for the one, anxiety and earnestness for the other (COA: 15). Only an affect that was both passive and active could precede founding distinctions between necessity and freedom. The affect had a specific relationship to human motivation and acts, whether for good or for evil. If freedom could be evinced as real for humans, thanks to the possibility of positive evil, the unfolding of evil had to be tied to a drives conflict, whose corollary was, in turn, an indeterminate passion.

For it is not the passions that are in themselves evil, nor are we battling merely with flesh and blood, but with an evil … which attaches to us by our own act, [and] does so from birth … and it is noteworthy that Kant, who did not in theory rise to a transcendental act determining all human being, was lead in later investigations, by sheer … observation of the phenomena of moral judgment, to the recognition of a subjective basis of human conduct … which preceded every act within the range of the senses. (NHF: 66–7)

Schelling’s project requires that this subjective basis be structural rather than corporeal or psychological—much the way early psychiatry and psychoanalysis had to point to inherited predispositions to ground their etiology of psychic disorders attached to circumstantial trauma. I will not decide, here, whether Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries are a treatise of theology or a new transcendental exploration of the perversions of the drives-core in humans and its relationship to freedom. For Schelling, human freedom is best illustrated starting from the origin of the Absolute, whether that is God or life, or both at once. As the end of the essay makes clear, the best revelation of the structure of the Absolute, with its base of forces existing in tension and fundamental indifference to each other, is indeed nature. The unfolding of God is thus the unfolding of empirical natural being and its condition of possibility. The contraction of the divine base explains how an entity that is simultaneously natural and cosmological, immanent and transcendent (as love), is possible. Humans thus arise, in and like nature, from and with God. However, humans’ emergence comes from the aspect of the Absolute which has already undergone a fundamental precipitating change with the emergence of the One and the Word that is active signification. We should pause here and observe that, in order to explain evil as a reality, and as pleasure and enthusiasm, Schelling declares:

It would require nothing less than … a … thoroughly developed philosophy to prove that there are only two ways of explaining evil—the dualistic, according to which there is assumed to be an evil basic being … alongside the good; and the Kabbalistic, according to which [positive] evil is explained by emanation and withdrawal…. Every other system must annul the difference between good and evil. (NHF: 93)

If we are to understand the importance of mood in nineteenth century post-Kantian philosophy, we should note that moods arise at the point where dialectics proves too formalist, thereby threatening immanent self-development or life. Mood arises with the difficulty of justifying freedom and evil in a system where practical and pure reason stand divided. Schelling attempted to read life into Hegel’s dialectic of history through Spinozism. He had recourse to kabbalistic imagery as he attempted to surpass Kant’s antinomies of freedom and necessity, practical postulates versus pure impossibilities (God, the soul, freedom). Schelling knew that “a transcendental act determining all human being (alle menschliches Sein) could only be realized intuitively through images. At the heart of this work, then, we “perceive” a base inhabited by the strange movement called Sehnsucht, which seeks to denote unrest without concepts. If longing seems closer to desire than to anxiety, we might note the futility of proposing a single noun to characterize a motion that engenders but “goes” nowhere. What arises out of the base is the base precipitated, just as understanding concentrates indeterminate experiences into concepts. For Schelling, something comparable occurs in nature, and it is fair to regard the sprout as belonging to its seed, light as belonging to gravity as well as resisting it. These images present the unfolding of what does not express itself directly in the seed or the gravitational field.

Between 1841 and 1842, Kierkegaard was impassioned by Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of mythology. By 1844, when he published The Concept of Anxiety, he was convinced that Schelling’s fidelity to idealist logic meant that he would theorize life without ever reaching existence. Thus, Kierkegaard—and Heidegger after him—would take up anxiety as the true opposite of necessity, the corporeal precursor of freedom, and the sign of power—that concomitant excitation and exhaustion that accompanies our striving to create.

Within the framework of the meaning of moods for philosophy, the concept of Sehnsucht, which in Schelling occasionally slides into Angst,Footnote 20 is both anthropomorphism and an attempt to show something fundamental. From a dynamic perspective, which attempts to get past the fixity of idealist formalism, there is no simple origin of life, much less of freedom and consciousness. By extension, there is no pure foundation, even of God. Life is characterized by the curiosity of arising in and of itself, without remaining recognizably what it first was, and without being able to endure eternally in a developed form. When God is thought on the basis of life, as Schelling does, God becomes finite—from one perspective. However, even if a species of life proves to be finite, something about the organization called “life” is not similarly limited by mortality. For Schelling, the duality of finitude and infinity had to be thought metaphysically, as genesis and reconciliation. This characterized German-language post-Kantian thought after him, from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche—at least in the concept-experience of “Eternal Recurrence.” Hence Schelling urges, late in the treatise, that this God of two principles is also one. Grasping this primordial unity means thinking the anti-ground, which borders on absurdity.Footnote 21 We may imagine this through a change in perspective, which required the entire foregoing analysis of cosmos and nature. Love, naming the “neither-nor” logic of divinity as two and one, is related to the Sehnsucht that characterized divine duality-in-indifference. A mood thus names the impossible “movement,” which we know only because we feel it at the human level. Vigorously anthropomorphic, as Kierkegaard would say, Sehnsucht registers affectively the two ambiguous potencies in relation. The core of Schelling’s philosophy, like that of Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Levinas after him, turns on the ways that fundamental relationality passes through modes and moods. If the origin lies in the indifference and indistinctness of the base, the base nevertheless contains forces in relation. Before their relation evolves into a generative tension, it is dynamic coexistence.

The same is true of the embodied human being. How could we know such a thing? We can observe those who derive positive pleasure from evil; we may also observe creative spontaneity—the sign of Schelling’s freedom. The artist reveals at least that much to us. In nature, the dual principles never separate. They remain in a relationship of equilibrium. In humans, the mood of anxiety shifts our focus onto the relation between our own drives-base, and the understanding, which can either move past the inclinations of the drives or raise them into prominence. As Heidegger realized, using different language, Schelling’s Sehnsucht points us precisely toward the question that we are and, beyond this, to the one that asks, Why is there is being instead of simply nothing? Schelling, however, preferred to ask, ‘Why is there life instead of nothing?’ As historians of philosophy, we might observe, here, that idealism moved toward vitalism and gnosticism as Kant’s successors strove to simplify or amend his system. This motivates a more contemporary question as well: Toward what will the grand “idealism” of the twentieth century, phenomenology, move?