Abstract
Considering the significance of moods for philosophy, Schelling’s concept of Sehnsucht, objectless yearning that slides toward Angst, is an attempt to show something fundamental about life. From a dynamic perspective, Schelling proposed a process philosophy of the origin of life and human freedom. Thinking about life, at any level, meant conceiving an absolute that arises out of itself, epigenetically. Combining Aristotle and Spinoza, Schelling dismantled philosophical foundationalisms, even speculative ones concerning the divine. He turned away from Idealism toward Gnosticism and monism, arguing that what we call “life,” whether as nature or “God,” arises in and of itself, without remaining fixed or being able to endure eternally. God and cosmos thus become simultaneously finite and infinite. On this complex basis, Schelling reframed the meaning of freedom in terms of the relationship between natural drives and modalities of reason in nature and humans. This relationship can be discerned thanks to moods or attunements of existence. Freedom, an extension in humans of universal intelligibility, could only be truly determined if we could define “evil” concretely, as acts and passions. Kierkegaard, Schelling’s erstwhile student in Berlin (1841), repositioned Schelling’s philosophy of freedom in an existentialist framework, where anxiety, not freedom, was the true contrary of necessity. This essay unfolds Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, and compares it with the Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s existentialism.
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- 1.
F. W. J. Schelling 1986. Hereafter NHF in the text. Also see Schelling 1980. For “Sehnsucht,” see the entry in the Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm, Vol. 16, 157. Here, “Sehnsucht” can evince a sharp orientation toward a determinate object, as Kant writes. The term was extensively employed in Romantic literature where it denoted a Krankheit des schmerzlichen Verlangens, Liebeskrankheit, Liebesbegierde—disorders of painful longing or hankering, a malady of love, amorous neurosis; in short, Eros as force and excessive passion.
- 2.
Kierkegaard describes the movement of infinite resignation by the Knight of Faith as rooted in the only authentic “mediation” possible: passion. “Every movement of infinity is carried out through passion, and no reflection can produce a movement. This is the continual leap in existence that explains the movement, whereas mediation is a chimera…” In Repetition, the author of letters to his “silent confidant,” struggles to be rid of the “infinite striving of my soul”; to no avail. See Søren Kierkegaard 1983: 42n. 214.
- 3.
“Sehnsucht” in Grimm, 157. Thanks to David Piché, Université de Montréal, for his assistance.
- 4.
Kant spoke of Sehnsucht as “der leere Wunsch,” the empty wishing that corresponds to the “unbestimmtheit des Gemütszustandes,” the indeterminacy of mood. When Luther writers of Sehnsucht it is in experiencing a lack; his soul thirsts after something, after God….Lacking a concrete object, Sehnsucht functions anti-teleologically, as indeterminate hope.
- 5.
Tiedemann published his respected Zoologie between 1808 and 1810, precisely around the year that the Philosophical Inquiries was published (1809). Criticized by French materialists, German biologists shared a metaphysical concern with, in the words of Pierre Flourens, “a general organism, which [they] postulated as a real being: [thus] particular beings were no more … than simple … arrests of development of this organism. Apart from their (degree of) complication, all beings are similar; the different classes are nothing but different ages of a single (being).” See Clarke and Jacyna 1987: 40–41. Hereafter NCO.
- 6.
Hegel 1967: 807. Hereafter PM.
- 7.
Gemützustand or Gemütsanlage would denote state of mind.
- 8.
Schelling credits Marcion with this logic; he reads Kabbalah through Franz Baader.
- 9.
Despite his derision of the “theologians,” Hegel, Schelling, Kant, and despite the laughter that rings in Beyond Good and Evil (§11) about Schelling’s baptism of the “Übersinnliche,” Nietzsche pondered Schelling’s (and the German romantics’) philosophy of nature, and may have returned to it for his multifaceted Wille zur Macht. See Nietzsche (1967–1988), Vol. 3, 163 and Vol. 5, 25.
- 10.
“(In absolute equilibrium, they would both be completely eliminated).” See Schelling 1988: “Introduction,” 37.
- 11.
For Werner Marx, this equivalence, God and Nature, is clearest in the young Schelling of the “Philosophy of Identity.” “In view of Spinoza’s system, Schelling recognized quite clearly that the proof of freedom’s predominance in both realms, in nature and in spirit, can be convincing only if the appearances of finite freedom are founded in divine freedom. Therefore, Spinoza’s causa sui, the freedom of the absolute as absolute ‘groundlessness’, must previously have been conceived of as such if freedom within the finite realm is to be secured….Schelling had taken great pains to model himself after Spinoza and to conceive the absolute, God, as the unity of mind and nature, as the unity between the ideal and the real….[It] is obvious that both these aspects are ‘not actual’ [wirklich] in God’s essence…[but] at the same time, divine Being is the ‘universe’, ‘absolute totality’.” After works like the Presentation of My System, the dialogue Bruno (1802), and the Philosophy of Nature (1805–1806), the diremptions inherent in according a positive reality to evil, or ‘non-being’, shifted the emphasis of Schelling’s system, and freedom had to be thought in light of the freedom to enact evil. See Marx 1984: 60ff.
- 12.
Compare Deleuze 1994: 28–31. Deleuze recalls a scale of differences the minimal conceivable being “contrariety”—as in contrariety in the species or the genre. Here, difference is not the difference called “opposition,” it “alone expresses the capacity of a subject to bear opposites while remaining substantially the same (in matter or in genus).” He concludes, in a Schellingian tone, “Thought ‘makes’ difference, but difference is monstrous. We should not be surprised that difference should appear accursed…There is no sin other than raising the ground and dissolving the form” (29).
- 13.
Schelling 1980 is the source of the modification. The Grimm Brothers dictionary provides the following examples of the use of Ebenbild, all of them Neo-testamentary: (Christus) ist das Ebenbilde Gottes” 2 Corinthians 4:4. “Welcher ist das Ebenbilde des unsichtbaren Gottes. Colossians 1:15.
- 14.
Deleuze 1994: 31. “Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal…but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like membra disjecta….Is difference intermediate between these two extremes? Or is it not rather the only extreme….[I]nstead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also train it behind….It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be the ground,” (28). The example comes out of Schelling. And Deleuze would add: “The most important aspect of Schelling’s philosophy is his consideration of powers…it is Schelling who brings difference out of the night of the Identical, and with finer…more terrifying flashes of lightning than those of contradiction: with progressivity…not from a negative or a non-being (ouk on) but from a problematic being” (190–191). This recapitulates Schelling’s thinking of the gestating oppositional yet undifferentiated Absolute.
- 15.
When Kierkegaard adapts Sehnsucht to his perspective, he will distinguish between a subjective anxiety and anxiety in nature. Objective anxiety is the finitude and incompleteness of nature itself, the chasm. See Kierkegaard 1983: 61.
- 16.
Hegel is speaking, in 1807, of the phenomenalization of spirit in history, not of the a-chronic logic that presides over the process: “Spirit externalized and emptied into Time…This way of becoming presents a slow procession and succession of spiritual shapes (Geistern), a gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit, and moves so slowly just for the reason that the self has to…assimilate all this wealth of substance,” in Hegel 1967: 807.
- 17.
See Clarke and Jacyna 1987: 274–280. Gall’s most important contribution was a monist conception of mind.
- 18.
See also Schelling 1986: 96: “The nexus of our personality is the spirit.”
- 19.
Immanuel Kant 1960: 17, emphasis added.
- 20.
In Sect. I, Part 7, Schelling writes of human striving: “Die Angst des Lebens selbst treibt den Menschen aus dem Zentrum, in das er erschaffen worden; denn dieses als das lauterste Wesen alles Willens ist für jeden besondern Willen verzehrendes Feuer; um in ihm leben zu können, muss der Mensch aller Eigenheit absterben.” Thus anxiety drives life as the conscious cognate of instincts, but it must be surpassed, because nothing in creation can remain ambiguous. This Schelling argues about the evolution of the ground. Kierkegaard picks it up in a logic of the either/or. Schelling 1986.
- 21.
Schelling 1986: 86–87. “Here at last we reach the highest point of the whole inquiry….What is to be gained by that initial distinction between being insofar as it is basis, and being insofar as it exists? For either there is no common ground for the two…absolute dualism; or there is such common ground—and in that case…the two coincide again… there must be a being before all basis and before all existence…before any duality; how can we designate it except as…the ‘groundless’ [Ungrund]?”
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Bergo, B. (2011). The Birth Pangs of the Absolute: Longing and Angst in Schelling and Kierkegaard. In: Kenaan, H., Ferber, I. (eds) Philosophy's Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 63. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1503-5_8
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