Abstract
Long neglected, Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom has been the subject of renewed contemporary interest with scholars linking it to debates in ontology, psychology, and social philosophy. This paper argues, however, that its fundamental importance lies in bringing to our attention the way in which our moral categories are grounded in conceptions of metaphysics. To do so, it suggests that Schelling focuses on two questions: first, does evil have positive being? And second, why do some individuals commit evil acts while others do not? In response to the first, Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that insists that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings him to the second question, namely, why some individuals choose to actualize this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision that can subsequently be altered, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be changed. The paper concludes by raising two critical questions about Schelling’s analysis relating to the determinism inherent to his account of moral choice and whether it, in fact, actually explains why some moral agents choose evil and others do not.
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Notes
Schelling first discusses evil in the 1804 essay, Philosophy and Religion (Schelling: 2010), before returning to it in his Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1841–42 (Philosophy of Revelation, 1841–1842) (Schelling: 1977). The 1809 essay is, however, the most extensive treatment of the topic and the one that most explicitly links it to the question of metaphysics, the subject of this paper.
To say that Schelling developed his theory of evil from a critique of Augustine’s privation theory is not to say that the positive conception of evil that resulted was not influenced by other strands of Christian thinking; Bruno and Boehme being the most obvious examples: the former based on Schelling’s 1802 Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things (Schelling: 1984), while his relationship to the latter has long been noted (the classic study is Brown: 1977). Guerrier (2013) also argues that Luther was an important influence. This paper is not, however, concerned with charting the influence that Christian thinkers may have had on Schelling’s overall thought, but focuses on his theory of evil, which in the 1809 essay is primarily orientated against the privation account of evil found in the Augustinian and Aquinian traditions.
In many respects, Schelling develops a metaphysics of difference that is remarkably similar to the differential ontology that Deleuze relies upon. There are important differences between them, but both agree that the ground of existents is differentiated and self-differentiating, that actual beings are differentiated, and that beings continue to differentiate based on a folding structure whereby the actual is ‘overcome’ by the ‘prior’ realm of reality; in Schelling’s case, the dark-light movement and, in Deleuze’s case, the virtual-actual movement. For an interesting comparative analysis of the two, see Groves (1999). For a more detailed analysis of Deleuze’s differential ontology, see Rae (2014).
Wallen (1994) offers an interesting discussion of the notion of disease in Schelling’s account.
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This paper forms part of the activities for the Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics’ co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371, The Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013-40258), The Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI-15-17), and Banco Santander. More information about the research project can be found at: https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress.com/.
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Rae, G. The Problem of Grounding: Schelling on the Metaphysics of Evil. SOPHIA 57, 233–248 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0594-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0594-9