The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  This provides him with an overall pattern of predication. The X of predication is what he calls “the unground.” It is an “unground” precisely insofar as its nature is not settled in advance. Before it is settled that X is both A and B, it is not necessarily determined what X is. For some x’s, which are candidates for the universal X of predication, it is true that they are produced or created by the predication. These x’s are the objects of freedom (or actions) mentioned in the title of the book. If I make it true that I danced by dancing, then there is something which is both me and dancing. The something that I am sometimes is me dancing, a fact which only obtains because I sometimes make it true that I am dancing. On the contrary, if I assert that Hesperus is Phosphorus, than the x that is both Hesperus and Phosphorus is not embedded in facts produced by the assertion. Schelling thinks of freedom in terms of performances: freedom is our capacity to produce objects by so much as stating their existence, as when we assert that we just asserted something, which produces an assertion as an object of investigation.

  But the unground itself, the universal X, is neither determined to be paradigmatically filled in by natural objects nor by objects of freedom (like successfully executed actions, institutions, or self-referential assertions). It is maximally topic-neutral: it stands for whatever can be the case and make a statement about it true. Against this background, Schelling calls it the “essence” for the simple reason that the actual truth-value of a statement is essential for the statement both insofar as it is true and insofar as the truth-value is tied to an actual truth-maker: truth settles the statement’s nature. If I assert that Solon is wise and I am wrong, then my mental state was that of an error, whereas I might assert that Solon is wise and be right about this in a relevant way so as to count as knowing that Solon is wise. If I am in error I am in an essentially different state than if I know something. The truth-value is the essence of predication. We assert something in the form of predication with the aim of making true statements.

  The difference between the unground as ground of existence and the unground as what exists can also be reconstructed along the lines of such a minimal theory of predication. Let us come back to “Solon is wise.” In this case, the x insofar as it is Solon is the ground which can unify various properties: Solon essentially can be wise, hairy, funny, witty, and small. The ground of existence corresponds to the subject-position in traditional logic with the addition that we think of the subject as capable of also having other properties not articulated in an atomic proposition articulating merely one of them. Now Solon considered as a bare particular, as blank thisness, is not determined enough to be the ground of anything. He already has to have some property that characterizes him as this something rather than something else. This can be called the essence as what exists: Solon exists as a Sage. What exists over there is a Sage, and the Sage is Solon. No actual thisness without suchness.

  What Schelling is claiming is that X designates anything within the domain of truth-makers, and every truth about any particular truth-maker comes out as having the form: ground exists as Y. For example, Solon exists as a Sage. Given that we can always prefix any such minimal truth with an existential quantifier, Schelling suggests that we understand “Solon exists as a sage” as “Among all the X there is some x which is both Solon and a sage.” Solon’s being a Sage is Solon’s existence: he exists as a Sage.

  The unground is topic-neutral and universal. If we only refer to there being all the truth-makers and call this “X,” we do not acquire any particular information about how things are. Reference to the unground only allows us to claim that there is something or other, but we do not thereby know what it is. This is why Schelling designates the unground in the text by a mere dash and writes: “—how shall we designate it?” The “it” refers to the dash and the designation Schelling offers is “unground.” The unground is the essence of predication, and therefore of everything we can think of as existing in such a way that it has some properties by which it is distinguished from something else. At this point, it becomes evident that the theory of predication is developed at the service of Schelling’s ontology. The unground is introduced to explain how statements can be either right or wrong. If they are wrong, there is no x which belongs to X. Wrong statements miss the essence. There is nothing that is the way the statements represent it as being (which is not to deny that some elements of a wrong statement nevertheless refer to some existing object).

  One can call this whole stretch of reasoning an “ontology of predication.” Schelling’s insistence on the unground as the “highest point of the investigation” is just his assertion that all truth-apt statements are fallible. It is a rejection of any form of idealism that identifies everything there is with something produced by stating its being there. The unground, in other words, is an essential element in Schelling’s ontological realism.

  Now, Schelling refers to his position explicitly as a combination of idealism and realism, a “Real-Idealismus.”30 On my reading, what he is thereby maintaining is again by and large straightforward. All he is saying is that there are some objects that are products of freedom. These are the objects from the very title of the book: the objects related to the essence of human freedom. Human freedom for Schelling is defined by its creativity. It consists in the fact that we can make something the case by doing something. The facts we thereby create would not have existed had no one at least had a concept of freedom. So, independently of the question of determinism, Schelling maintains that we at least have the concept of freedom. We are at least under the impression that there are contingent paths of action and that we can choose which facts to create and which facts to leave out of existence. He opens the main body of the text with reference to just that impression, which he calls “the fact of freedom”31 and adds that it first comes in the form of a “feeling.”32 We are at least under the impression of freedom. What Schelling sets out to do is to describe the ontological conditions of the possibility of there really being freedom. In other words, he tries to reconcile system (= the ontology) and freedom (= our feeling of the fact of freedom).

  In my reading, the whole argument is a thought experiment spelling out the structure of how the relation between reality and its appearance while thinking about it could fit together in such a way as to give room for actual freedom.33 Let me spell this out in more detail so that the structure of the text becomes more transparent. Many readings of the freedom parts of the Freedom Essay have focused on the distinction between the possibility and the actuality of freedom. In reconstructing this distinction, the crucial point is often missed that freedom for Schelling is not primarily a matter of action in the sense of carrying out an intention through bodily movement or of committing to a norm. For Schelling, to be free is neither the capacity to choose between a number of possible courses of action nor the submission to a universal norm in such a manner that we are capable of having desire-independent reasons for action (where the latter is arguably the main idea of Kant’s conception of freedom). Like Fichte and Hegel, Schelling is working on a unified account of reason that allows for a concept of reason that ascribes all essential properties of reason to all its apparently different exercises. Practical reason and theoretical reason should have something in common, namely reason. If it turns out that reason is essentially and inextricably bound to freedom, there must be theoretical freedom too. And here Schelling adds that the theory of freedom is necessarily developed by a free agent, whom I call “the theory agent.”34 The theory agent has to be free in conceiving of the theory, she must be able to get freedom right or wrong. Thus, conceiving of the relationship between freedom and determinism in a theory which entertains the possibility of freedom is already an actual exercise of freedom: if the theory agent were determined in his or her theory choices, if the transition from one proposition to the next and the connection between the propositions in terms of valid inferences were forced on the agent, he or she would not meet the minimal requirement for a theory defen
ded as a result of insight, namely that it can be true or false. Of course, one might object that theoretical freedom could just be another illusion, that our theories are caused by our neurochemically hardwired habits of “inferring.” How do we know that it is not the case that all theories are habits accepted by a number of equally hardwired other believers in the theory? Schelling’s answer to this is straightforward: in such a radically deterministic system the concept of truth or falsity would disappear. Whatever the truth-value of the theory, the theory could not be changed in accordance with a further insight into its truth-value. There would be no reason whatsoever to presuppose that there is rational theory change rather than a random reconfiguration of the elements of the deterministic system sometimes generating the illusion of self-conscious responsibility for accepting this rather than that proposition of the chain of “reasoning.”

  Forms of skepticism about practical reason supported by determinism are still easier to swallow than skepticism about theoretical reason. But if they have the same root, this difference in degree is the real illusion: to accept that one has no freedom in action is to accept that one has no freedom in theory—after all, developing a theory is just another kind of action. Therefore, there cannot be any reason speaking for the denial of rationality as a whole in favor of the idea that there are only hardwired transitions from one occurring thought to the next, where the transition is never motivated by an insight into truth so that one chooses to exchange a false (but potentially true) for an actually true proposition in one’s theory.35

  If we are even so much as capable of grasping the sense in which our feeling of freedom could indicate the fact of freedom, we can thereby come to know that we are actually free in this very conception. Schelling thus moves from the possibility of practical freedom via the actuality of theoretical freedom to the actuality of practical freedom. The argument can thus be summed up as follows.

  We have an intuitive conception of practical freedom (the feeling of the fact of freedom):

  1.If we compare this feeling with arguments speaking in favor of determinism, we are comparing freedom and a deterministic system within a theory.

  2.The theory can be right or wrong.

  3.If we develop a theory that can be right or wrong, we are acting.

  4.This action cannot be hardwired, for any hardwired preference for some proposition or other cannot be arrived at via reasoning.

  5.Our concept of reasoning is a concept of freedom: we could always have believed a true instead of a false proposition (or the other way around).

  6.If we reason at all, we are therefore free.

  7.We reason in arguing for or against determinism.

  8.We are therefore free in developing a theory.

  9.But developing a theory is an action.

  10.Therefore, we are actually practically free, which we can discover by considering the negation of practical freedom in arguments speaking against it and in favor of determinism.

  For Schelling, there is further important semantic evidence for theoretical freedom. We draw a distinction between an exercise of theoretical reason (reasoning) and an obsessive repetition of some occurring thought. The very distinction between reasoning and madness is therefore crucial throughout Schelling’s work.36 “Madness” for Schelling is a necessary predecessor of reasoning which he sometimes calls “understanding.” When he notoriously writes in his Stuttgart Private Lectures that “understanding is regulated madness (Verstand ist geregelter Wahnsinn),”37 he is not claiming that reason and madness are fundamentally indistinguishable. All he is saying is that there is a history of humanity within which reason was forged, and as such this prehistoric stretch of the evolution of historical human beings cannot have exhibited reason as we associate it with human beings today. Schelling accepts that there is a genealogy of reason which is not itself reasonable or even teleologically related to full-fledged reason, but rejects the further idea that this should undermine our commitment to reason and the associated freedom: just because reason was forged in a pre-rational process, there is no reason to assume that it does not exist now. The fact that rationality arises from madness does not make rationality mad, nor does it make madness rational.

  According to this reading of the arguments surrounding the concept of human freedom in the Freedom Essay, the discussion of “good” and “evil” turns out to be grounded in a perspective beyond moral good and evil. This is more perspicuous if one looks at the widely neglected concept of the good in the Freedom Essay, which sheds light on the concept of evil. In a decisive passage of the text, Schelling brings the concepts of good and evil together and defines them via the concepts of truth and being (where “being” refers to being in the sense of factual being or being so):

  We have seen how, through false imagining and cognition that orients itself according to what does not have Being, the human spirit opens itself to the spirit of lies and falsehood and, fascinated by the latter, soon loses its initial freedom. It follows from this that, by contrast, the true good could be effected only through a divine magic, namely through the immediate presence of what has Being in consciousness and cognition. An arbitrary good [willkürliches Gutes] is as impossible as an arbitrary evil [willkürliches Böses].38

  “Willkür” here refers to the indeterminate starting point of freedom, the “capacity of good and evil”39. Given the topic-neutrality of reason there is always a corresponding “capacity of truth and falsity” or of “knowledge and error” respectively. This allows Schelling to speak of the true good and to associate good and evil with forms of cognition. Evil, then, is the result of lie and error, it results from turning away from an insight available to the evil person, whereas the good corresponds to the resolution to be committed to rational theory change. By this I mean the following quite simple thought: evil here is not a name for the property of an action, but rather for the structure of a sustained overall course of action. Evil resists changes according to rational theory, it sticks to its premises no matter what. Good, on the contrary, is the openness for rational theory change.

  Before we move to a discussion of negative and positive philosophy, which further develops the elements already laid out in the Freedom Essay, we should take a closer look at the idea of an evil and a good overall course of action. We know that Schelling is thinking about action in the overall context of both an ontology of predication and a topic-neutral unified concept of reason. Actions as much as any other thing or event exist. Reference to them has to be covered by the ontology of predication. It is essential for predication that what is predicated can be right or wrong: If X as ground does not correspond to X as what exists, or if X as what exists does not correspond to X as ground, a predication is wrongly applied and a truth-apt thought accepting the predication as true (a judgment) accordingly amounts to error. So, if either Solon is not wise or the wise thing over there is not Solon, the judgment “Solon is wise” turns out to be false.40 An evil course of action is guided by a wrong idea as to how things are. Trivially, it is guided either by ignorance about what the right thing to do would be, or by error about what the good thing to do is. If the agent persists in the evil course of action despite better knowledge, the evil course of action is radically evil in Schelling’s sense. To be radically evil is thus to carry through an evil course of action despite better knowledge, that is, to actively resist rational theory change.

  In concluding this overall presentation of the Freedom Essay, it might be helpful to comment upon the highly unusual form of presentation of the text itself. One of the possible reasons why Schelling is not considered a prominent nineteenth century philosopher in contemporary debates lies in the form of presentation of his arguments. Even though in reality Hegel’s writing makes at least as much use of complicated and unusual metaphors as Schelling’s, a widespread complaint states that the Freedom Essay reads like a piece of fully irrational or oracular discourse, a complaint epitomized by Heinrich Heine’s dictum: “Once the cobbler Jacob Böhme t
alked like a philosopher; now the philosopher Schelling talks like a cobbler.”41 This passage is partially responsible for the historical dismissal of Schelling, as Heine goes on to claim that Schelling has been surpassed by Hegel and turned into a mere predecessor of Hegelianism.

  However, Schelling gives an interesting justification of the mode of presentation of the arguments in the text towards the end of the text in a footnote where he opposes Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of romantic aestheticism:

  The author has never wished through the founding of a sect to take away from others and, least of all, from himself the freedom of investigation in which he has declared himself still engaged and probably will always declare himself engaged. In the future, he will also maintain the course that he has taken in the present treatise where, even if the external form of a dialogue is lacking, everything arises as a sort of dialogue. Many things here could have been more sharply defined and treated less casually, many protected more explicitly from misinterpretation. The author has refrained from doing so partly on purpose. Whoever will and cannot accept it from him thus, should accept nothing from him at all and seek other sources.42