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1-1-1975
Heidegger and Schelling: The Finitude of Being
Michael Vater
Marquette University, michael.vater@marquette.edu
Accepted version. Idealistic Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 ( January 1975): 20-58. DOI. © 1975 Philosophy
Documentation Center. Used with permission.
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
Heidegger and Schelling: The
Finitude of Being
Michael G. Vater
Department of Philosophy, Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI
The recent publication of Heidegger's 1936 lectures on
Schelling's essay on human freedom1 reveals yet another point of
transition along the way from Being and Time to the later works on
language and poetry. It brings to light an influence on Heidegger
almost as weighty as his reading of Hölderlin and Nietzsche in that
same decade, an influence hitherto only hinted at in published works.
It now appears that Heidegger's essays on identity, on grounding, on
being, all bear the imprint of a dialogue with Schelling, that he
discovered in the latter thinker a valuable prototype of his notion of
being. If the reader is not aware of the direction of Heidegger's own
thought, the 1936 lectures on their own reveal little of the dialogue.
Schelling's Investigations2 is a difficult and obscure work, and
Heidegger confines himself to close textual work, with care and insight
bringing even the most obscure passages out of allegory into lucid
philosophical statement. The lectures are a triumph of pedagogy, the
most careful attempt to date to read Schelling as an ontological
thinker. Yet their smooth surface, scholarly poise, and objectivity leave
hidden a question of real interest: Why should Schelling, commonly
thought a weak link to Hegel or the first symptom of "existentialist"
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
1
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
anti-Hegelian reaction, be of interest to Heidegger the philosopher?
And why, in particular, should this most exotic of Schelling's works,
touched by the influence of theosophists like Boehme, be accepted by
Heidegger as one of the crucial moments of the West's historical
thinking through of being?
There are certain affinities between Heidegger and Schelling,
including a shared preoccupation with the question of being, an
anthropological or "anthropomorphic" approach to that question,
common interests in language and temporality, common repugnance
for the domination which "things" exercise in ontology, for the easy
way in which being-at-hand wins acceptance as the paradigmatic
mode of being. But what fundamentally attracts Heidegger's interest
and moves him to take Schelling as seriously as Plato, Kant, and
Nietzsche in the "history of being" is the direction and movement of
thought found in the Investigations. In what Hegel found a work
interesting but lacking in significance since it handled an isolated
problem3 Heidegger discovers a line of thought which leads earnest
ontological thought or "system" away from the formalism of logical
categories such as identity and difference to categories of concrete
spirit, human existence if you will, to process, decision, history, to
finitude, to being as a doublefold structure in which man finds himself
ambiguously placed as the inbetween.
The central question of Schelling's essay is whether spirit can be
made the basis and central point of systematic philosophy, not merely
its product, whether spirit can be grasped without the reduction of
selfhood, otherness, and their uneasy togetherness to ciphers in an
abstract calculus. The key to a live grasp of spirit, first provided by
Kant, is the notion of freedom. Yet Kantian freedom is itself abstract
and formal, a general notion of self-determination which interprets the
self off the model of abstract identity (A=A) and is unable to specify
the quality of causation this "freedom" involves. Schelling wanted to
surpass this Kantian notion of freedom to enable systematic
philosophy to reach down to a founding act of spirit—an act which
founds spirit's sense of self and can accordingly found "system" on the
same basis. This is a decisive turn from idealistic formalism, from the
attempt which Schelling's earlier thought and Hegel's system alike
embody, viz. to grasp spirit in terms of structure. Schelling moves to
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
2
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
replace a logic of things as the hermeneutical tool with a logic of
founding acts, a logic of human existence. Heidegger recognizes the
importance of the attempt while admitting its fragile character, its
partial success, for as a problem it is the pathfinder for serious
thought. Schelling enunciates the question of "system," the
togetherness of things in thought which, Heidegger claims, is what the
ancients meant by logos. How, he asks, can freedom be contained
within system? If reason proceeds from will and yet system is the work
of reason, in reason, how is will comprehended? How, in the last
analysis, is system founded or judged to be well-founded?
Heidegger's 1936 lectures are cast in the form of a close
commentary which somewhat conceals the points of his own
philosophical attachment to Schelling. Heidegger's aim is not mere
scholarship or a reproduction of the course of the Investigations. The
essence of truth is in process, it carries its history along, and each
point of that history has life and validity in the present.4 Heidegger is
engaged in thinking with Schelling, not "thinking about." Our task will
be to locate the essential points of confluence of their thought which
permit this co-thinking. They are four in number:
(1) Philosophic thought is systematic in essence. It is or
represents the whole of being in its structured configuration as the
whole. (2) The system-principle is being itself, not as revealed in
things or in a metaphysics which grasps only the Seiendheit of beings,
bald identity, but as an identity of the different. This identity is not one
of sameness but of gatheredness. It is "grounding," the emergence of
the existent from a ground, the maintenance of this manifest
difference as their togetherness. (3) Grounding is ungrounded, there is
no reason for reason. The meaning of grounding must therefore be
sought humanly, in terms of will, and accordingly it appears as
temporal process, as decision, as differentiation of good and evil.
Along with Schelling Heidegger maintains that the meaning of
grounding lies in freedom and so likewise does the meaning of
"system," the "sense of being." (4) That freedom is the ultimate sense
of grounding, which in its own right is the structuring sense or logic of
being, implies that being is essentially finite. For freedom is always
"thrown," necessity in its most decisive appearance, its most divisive
appearance. Schelling emphasizes that concretely freedom is decision
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
3
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
for good and evil. Since this conditioned freedom, the place where the
doublefold character of being breaks out as decision, is the only sense
of grounding, grounding is always ungrounded and ab-gründig,
abysmal. The doublefold structure of being is ambiguous. Schelling at
this stage of the argument attempts to expunge the finitude from
freedom and propose a ground for grounding, an absolute timelessly
beyond the process of separating ground and existent. Heidegger must
here reject Schelling's line of thought, and the rejection indicates the
motives behind his rejection of metaphysics and his call for a new
beginning in the thinking of being which would at least keep faith with
the ambiguities of experienced being.
I
Heidegger and Schelling both believe that philosophical thought
is systematic in essence. System is not a mold for thought, a form
somehow imposed on a hitherto amorphous stuff which, for all its lack
of definition, is supposed to be "thought." System is the heart of
thought itself. We can best convey the centrality of the notion of
system to both thinkers if we distinguish two aspects. First, philosophy
aims at a grasp of the whole. Not as a mere aggregate, however, but
as a founded totality. It is a fundamental knowing, a getting down to
foundations. In the West this quest for the fundamental took the form
of the question of being, hence philosophy is systematic in being
ontological. Secondly, philosophy is systematic in a peculiarly modern
or postmodern sense. It attempts a knowing command over what is,
that is, it tries to discover or construct the structure of being itself in
human knowing. Hence philosophy is systematic in being a will toward
ordering knowledge, whether one makes grandiose claims for the
sense of things thus unearthed and calls it "the absolute" or whether
one acknowledges the limits of an hermeneutical enterprise forever
locked inside interpretations and preinterpretations.
To bring to light their common belief in the essentially
systematic nature of thought let us compare Schelling and Heidegger
first as ontological thinkers, then as "systematic" philosophers in the
narrower sense of the term spelled out above. For in our lax and
somewhat pictorial approach to the history of thought we normally do
not treat "absolute idealists"—commonly imagined as philosophers in
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
4
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
whom the will toward ordering knowing turned malignant—as
ontological thinkers nor do we represent philosophers of existence or
"historians of being" as systematic philosophers.
Schelling came to the position that philosophy's orientation is
ontological early in his career, at the start of the System of Identity
and eight years prior to the Investigations. Philosophy does not occupy
itself with the particular as such, nor is it rooted in the particularistic
epistemic stance of subjectivity. Its object is "being in reason," the
whole, that which is actualized in the differentiated individual, which
realizes itself as subject and as object. Subject and object are not
different au fond; they are instances of identity comparatively
differentiated, thus quantitatively different (4, 123).5 It is this essential
identity, not the differentiated particulars, which is philosophy's proper
object. For it is, above all, comprehending knowledge, one which binds
the individual in its independence into the universal (7, 140 f.). It is,
says Schelling, knowledge indifferent with the absolute, the emergence
and exhibition of the sense of the whole—in fact the "construction" of
that whole.
The being which is philosophy's object is constructible, not lying
at hand but yet-to-be-fashioned. Its fashioning is a process of
intermediation which Schelling calls a uniforming or invention of the
universal and the particular. We may liken it to artistic creation, as the
term Ineinsbildung suggests. Like those artistic processes whose
outcome are ideas made concrete, the universe captured in individual
form, each individual a universe (5,390), systematizing philosophic
invention depends upon a creative prescience of sorts, "intellectual
intuition into the absolute." By intuition into the absolute Schelling
does not mean an access to a thing-like totality, a ready-made whole,
for the whole and the "sense of the whole" is philosophy's work,
necessarily a child of process and labor. He means by it rather the
insight into the ultimate equipollence of being and thought, the
congruence of being and thought which is the principle and the ground
of philosophy (4,368-69). Intellectual intuition is methodological
certainty, and receives the name "intuition" from an idealistic
polemical stance. Intuition alone delivers the real, and the highest
"reality" for philosophy is that congruence of being and thought which
supplies a pattern for working the isolated and fragmented bits of
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
5
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
experienced being into a totality But why call this constructible totality
Schelling has in mind being? Why does Heidegger explicitly point out
Schelling as an ontological thinker? It would appear a misuse of the
term if names name only things, and if being is a thing of sorts, albeit
an odd thing.
The question of being, insists Heidegger, is not simply a
question of the things that are. It is a double question, the onto—
theological question. It asks after not just being as the beingly, the
denominated being in its individuality, but after the theion, the divine
or the ground of being, i.e., after being in its totality.6 In asking after a
sense of the whole, then, Schelling is asking the ontological question.
Inasmuch as the Investigations poses the question in a new way (the
static incorporation of the individual into a structural totality, the
position of the System of Identity, gives way to a dynamical
totalization of being in its history) Heidegger praises it as one of the
deepest ontological works. Its profundity, he maintains, lies in the way
it seeks out the hidden unity of the onto—theological question and
through the notion of the historical existence of the individual as the
revelation of the whole links the questioning of what is as such to the
questioning of what is in its totality.
The central thrust of Heidegger's own thought is ontological;
thought directs itself to a questioning of being, seeking the "sense of
being" or the "truth of being" or the "essence of truth." As the plurality
of terms indicates, the basic ontological orientation survives a number
of tactical shifts. The questioning of being took the form first of a
metaphysical inquiry, then that of an existential analytic of human
experience, then that of an "antimetaphysical" history of being, and
finally that of inquiry into truth and language.
We cannot here present in detail the stable core of Heidegger's
thought and document its ornamentation and expression from phase
to phase. In general outline, the questioning of being turned out for
Heidegger to be an historical dialectical search. The question of being
is inexorably tied to being's first opening in the West, the Greek
experience, to what was revealed there, to what was concealed, to the
forgetfulness of the concealment. In this forgetfulness the search for
being gets linked with the questioning of the being of beings; the
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
6
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
stable way beings have of standing in being is accepted as
characteristic of being itself. The urge to answer the question after
being easily and falsely by pointing out a being which is being arises
again and again. These mistakes cannot simply be brushed aside as
conceptually wrongheaded. For they are part of the original experience
of being, and if there is any way to an adequate grasp of being, it
must be a way back, won through grappling with the primal
falsifications of the sense of being.
In Heidegger's sense of the terms, a serious ontological
philosophy is the exact opposite of a metaphysics. It is precisely
antimetaphysical, challenging the way the question of being is
mistakenly heard as the question of the being-ness (Seiendheit) of
beings and mistakenly answered by the construction of an extra
worldly source of this odd property. An ontological inquiry which
proceeds down to the ground, which is fundamental ontology, destroys
the dominance of beings over being and tries to lead questioning back
to the truth of being, i.e., to the dialectic of hiddenness and clearing in
which being happens, and back to the way truth happens, viz.
temporally, in discrete social quanta, hence historically and finitely.
For both thinkers, then, the philosophical task is to come to a
sense of the whole through a dialectical overcoming of false
particularistic or thing-oriented perspectives. For both philosophers the
dialectic is internal, part of the structure of being itself, and not an
external and merely critical tool. Schelling does not deny the truth of
particulars, just the ultimacy of their particularity, and he attempts to
open out their meaning until they are seen as specified functions or
organs within the whole. Similarly Heidegger does not just point out
the falsity of taking Seiendheit for being, but pursues the meaning of
the falsity to its positive function as concealment of being. The "sense
of being," or as Schelling calls it, "the absolute," is in no sense an
alternative to the experience of things, to knowledge at its most
everyday. Neither philosopher hopes to locate the absolute instead of
individuals, being instead of beings. Neither Heidegger's being nor
Schelling's absolute is available as a being. This is what Schelling's
intellectual intuition means: there is no particularistic or thingly way of
grasping the whole.
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NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
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For both philosophers speculation must bring being to
expression in thinking through the obviously or historically determined
false. It must be the thoroughgoing refutation of the everyday and the
commonsensical. For Schelling philosophy must think through the
particularity of beings to their common "deep structure" and then
proceed to think through the abstractness of this structure to its
existential basis in the human and divine will. For Heidegger
philosophy must rethink the historical opening of being, i.e., it must
think through the primal concealment of concealment, the original
falsification in this opening. It must follow the Platonic detour from
truth as the sense of being to truth as the certainty of being,7 and
think it through to its ground. It must break apart the Greek reification
of the concealing-clearing doublefold of being into "idea," that which
steadily holds itself open for sight, and deliver us over to experiencing
the doublefold within our hedged and conditioned transcendence, in
our freedom which is ungrounded grounding.8
Many names, including that of "dialectic," could be put on this
thinking through to the ground wherein the one-sidedness which would
advance an aspect valid in its place to a false picture of the whole is
conquered. Yet it is not so much the method of philosophy as its
substance. Philosophy is ontological; it achieves the whole, wrests the
whole from the aggregate of parts. It is onto-theological; it puts in the
light the essential connection between questioning after the truth of
being and questioning after a ground and wholeness for being.9 If
philosophy achieves this wholeness by a thinking through to the
ground, rather than calling this movement "dialectic," we might say it
is but the negative aspect of the central act of philosophy, the fulfilling
of the ontological difference. The ontological difference—crudely put,
that being is not beings and beings are not being—is at the basis of all
ontology; it grounds every metaphysics, i.e., every misguided
ontology, as the unasked and the unexplored central question, as that
which is most worthy of question.10 The ontological difference is that
which is most pressingly to be thought through and, likewise,
metaphysical neglect of the difference is that which most urgently calls
forth the negative movement of thinking through to the ground. The
difference between being and beings, between being and Seiendheit, is
the crux of philosophy. Or rather, philosophy's chief task, pursued
through all subordinate detail, is the correct drawing of this distinction,
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
8
NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
the progressive differentiation—over against the muddled identification
in the framework of the everyday—of the structure of being and the
characteristics and properties of certain beings.11 Systematic
philosophy, then, is the disengagement of the framework from the
particulars placed therein, of the field of happening and its temporal
structures from isolated acts occurring within it.
We have seen that both Heidegger and Schelling are
ontologically oriented thinkers, that they view philosophy as the
construction or reconstruction of a sense of the whole, as an ontotheological effort in which the crucial step is the fulfilling of the
ontological difference, thus protecting the whole against thingly or
particularistic interpretation. How are they systematic thinkers in that
narrowed sense wherein "system" means will toward ordering
knowing?
An initial difficulty is that Heidegger does not seem to fall even
roughly within the bounds of comparison. He certainly does not
strike one as systematic in the popular sense of the term. In his
eyes philosophy cannot pretend to completeness, formal perfection,
and all-sided ness if a ground for that completeness, a
comprehensiveness of intuition is lacking. We sense today the falsity of
attempting to impart a purely formal closure to thought. Here
Nietzsche is formative of the modern attitude. The age is the age of
nihilism, and the will to system is always in bad faith if the problem of
nihilism has not been solved.12 Such an attitude does not denigrate the
notion of system as such, rather it holds it in the highest reverence.
Nihilism is the transformation of all meanings, of the highest and
consequently normative meaning, into "values," strange "moral
entities"; it signals the banishing of meaning from the world. Now
system or the ordered integration of meanings into a body of central
meanings cannot be founded on the premises of nihilism, upon
meanings found meaningless in themselves and forced into
otherworldly exile. There can be no nihilistic system.
We cannot call Heidegger's thought systematic, then, if we
mean that it has the formal trappings of a finished system or that it
heads toward conceptual' closure. If system means only completeness
or the full set of categories for the complete range of phenomena, then
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
permission has been granted for this version to appear in e-Publications@Marquette. Philosophy Documentation Center
does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express
permission from Philosophy Documentation Center.
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NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.
Heidegger's thought is radically unsystematic. But Heidegger
continually points out that thought must be intensive before it can be
extensive, that it must be a fundamental knowing before it can be
comprehensive. In that Heidegger wishes to leave thought open
toward phenomena and let them reveal the kind and degree of
coherence of which they are capable, he might be called "systematic"
in a sense more primitive than that of completeness and closure. His
thought is foundational; it consistently aims at getting to the bottom of
things, if not as metaphysics or even "fundamental ontology," then as
a fundamental questioning. He takes completeness in listening to the
question of being as a value inestimably higher than the elegance
which motivates arbitrary conceptual closure. He aims not at a
complete account of things, but at a ground-laying account which
makes possible the coherence of phenomena and brings the integrity
of being to the fore inasmuch as it is capable of "integrity." His
thought is systematic in that it attempts to reach down to integrative
forces and enunciate the first structures on the basis of which all will
cohere, on the basis of which being can assume the completeness for
thought of which it is capable. Its aim is logos in what Heidegger takes
to be its pristine Heraclitean sense, the versammelnden
Vorliegenlassen of being itself, the gathering grounding for presence
and individuation.13
It is in this spirit that Heidegger sympathetically approaches
Schelling's investigations of the possibility of system and freedom.
System, in its authentic sense, is the structure and integrity of being
itself, "die wissenmässige Fügung des Gefüges und der Fuge des Seyns
selbst."14 The taste for system in this sense—not the desire to find a
casual framework for an aggregate at hand, but the urge to find their
proper matrix, the framework in which they take their origin—is
identical with the taste for the whole which we found central to
ontological philosophy.15
Heidegger's exegesis of the notion of system in post-Kantian
idealism is quite incisive. The concept itself, he notes, is wholly a
modern invention, a clear claim of self-certain thought over being such
as ancient thought never witnessed. It is no coincidence that the
central attitudinal components of the will to system are also
determinative of the modern scientific temper, including the emphasis
Idealistic Studies, Vol 5, No. 1 (January 1975): pg. 20-58. DOI. This article is © Philosophy Documentation Center and
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NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author’s final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be
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on certainty in thought, on reason's power over what is, on man's
ability creatively to reconstruct being through technique, through art
and the work of genius.16 Philosophy's whole business is thus to
become a system, a grounding and a gathering of being inside man's
knowing. It is "the will toward a freely patterning and knowing
ordering of being in its structure and integrity."17
System is will to a knowing ordering of being, to a structure of
thought congruent with the structure of being. Heidegger indicates
that on such a model—and the model was operative in all of postKantian idealism—philosophy has a double outreach, toward a
coherence in knowledge and toward a comprehensive grasp of being.
The goals do not really differ from one another:
System is the structure of what is in its totality, which structure
knows itself with absolute knowledge. This knowledge itself is
part of "system." Knowledge constitutes the inner
connectedness of what is. Knowledge is not, as man usually
supposes inside the horizon of the everyday, just an occasional
affair which from time to time stumbles upon what is. Being as
articulated structure, as structured togetherness, and as the
knowledge of being are one and the same—they belong
together. Through what, then, is the structure of being
determined? What is the law of being, and what is the mode of
grounding of this consonance of being? What is the "principle" of
system? What other than being itself? The question of the
principle of system-building is the question of where the essence
of being stands, where being has its truth. And this is the
question of the region in which something like being can come
generally to be revealed, how being can maintain this openness
and maintain itself within it.18
Knowledge constitutes the inner connectedness of what is, supplies the
coherence of being. If system is the will toward coherence of
knowledge it is eo ipso the will toward finding and preserving the
integrity of being; it as the concern for being's openness and the
conditions of this openness. The two aims are not different; since
being is brought before the bench of reason for justification, it suffices
that thought will itself as system for it to be a comprehensive grasp of
being. System is precisely what Schelling's philosophy is about, and its
essence, as Heidegger recognizes, lies in the richly misunderstood
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claim that the system of philosophy is founded on and is the
explication of "intellectual intuition."
Heidegger finds the historical origin of Schelling's notion of
system in Kant's teaching of the unitive work of reason in the
production of "ideas." Two suppositions of the critical theory of
knowledge kept Kant from acknowledging the validity of the will to
system, first, that knowledge depends upon sensible experience, and,
secondly, that what is known must necessarily be an object. Schelling
rejects the presuppositions. System is an holistic knowledge, not
parceled out and dependent upon representation. It is knowledge of
the whole, thus nonobjective, not thingly or reified. Heidegger seems
to appreciate how free of the model of the thing Schelling's ideal of
philosophical knowledge is. It is intuition into being which comes to
itself inside of philosophical inquiry. It is not knowledge of a being, but
a progressive and self-won achievement of a sense of the whole. Of
the nature and task of the philosophical system Schelling had said,
"One cannot describe reason, it must describe itself in everything and
through everything" (7, 146). Heidegger, in comment on this
systematizing knowledge, reveals the ontological impulse in the will to
system or intellectual intuition:
This non-object-oriented knowing of what is as a whole
recognizes itself as the authentic or absolute mode of
knowledge. What it pushes on to know is none other than the
structure of being which no longer opposes itself to knowing as
an object of some sort, but comes to itself in the knowing. This
becoming and coming into itself is absolute being.19
System pushes beyond knowledge of objects at hand into a process of
knowing which is fundamental in the full sense of the word, selffounding. Our being and being as such are implicated in this process;
their togetherness is at once the basis of the systematic knowing and
its outcome. System is thus the work of spirit, of human knowing in its
gathering power, functioning as eros. Spirit finds and founds the sense
of the whole in coming to itself: this is the central doctrine of the
Investigations and the one point where Heidegger's philosophical
sympathy for Schelling is firmly anchored. The philosophical moment,
maintains Heidegger, lies not in any mechanical progression of
thought, whether analytical or synthetical, but in a leap in thought
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away from beings and their seemingly static Seinendheit to the "play"
of being wherein our human existence is located, the "play" in which
man is used, set in play, remains in the play, and in which being itself
plays and delivers being and grounding over to us.20 The fundamental
question for philosophy is not how far it can explain, but the perfection
and integrity of its will to explain. One asks of thought not how
"comprehensive" it is, but how deeply it is founded in the workings of
spirit, how perfect it is in its coming to itself in the play of being, how
perfect its will to system. For after all explaining is done "the question
remains whether and how we who attend to the moves of this play,
play along with it and gather ourselves in the play."21
Heidegger thus agrees with Schelling that thought is in essence
systematic, both in its ontological direction, its impulse toward
disengaging the structure of being as a whole, and in its commitment
to "system," the will that being be captured in an ordering knowing
and reveal itself as essentially involved in that process. In this
agreement it might seem that Heidegger endorses the program of an
absolute idealism. This is far from true. Whatever else one makes of
Heidegger's rather obscure pronouncements on being, one does not
get the sense that he thinks all being in principle graspable. It is
graspable only inasmuch as it is elusive; its whole availability for
thought is in the dialectic of hiddenness and clearing.
Absolute idealism is, for Heidegger, part of the history of
metaphysics, that is, it belongs to the tradition that has forgotten
being inasmuch as it has consistently forgotten the moment of being's
hiddenness. It is not as an absolute idealist that Heidegger values
Schelling, certainly not as the creator of a paper system, a closed
Euclidean deduction of all being. His affinity with Schelling lies in a
common view of systematic philosophy as will to system, as a process
in which the philosopher and his audience are engaged, a process
which alone can convey the doublefold character of being, the tension
between its availability for thought and its elusiveness. Heidegger
values Schelling because he understood system as the work of spirit,
as the product of man concernfully engaged in the roots of his being.
We must understand that it is neither the author of the System of
Identity who attracts Heidegger nor the Schelling of the later positive
philosophy, with its emphasis on divine transcendence, but the author
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of the Investigations on Human Freedom, the "anthropomorphic"
approach to system which takes human transcendence as the key to
being's structure and integrity.
Schelling's earlier thought was systematic only in an abstract
and structural manner. The central element of system, the impulse of
self-certain thought to bring forth the structure of the whole, was
there conceived as the work of disembodied intelligence, timeless and
impartial, rather than as the work of spirit bound into time and history.
The possibility of coming to a sense of the whole was thought to
depend upon a transcendence of the perspectival character of our
knowing, upon an "abstraction from subjectivity" (6, 142-43). Being
was conceived as a nondifference of subjectivity and objectivity; for
philosophy to attain this supporting medium for both thingly being and
human subjectivity, it must renounce the place of the subject for an
indifferent state of knowing. Systematic philosophy must presume a
congruence between its knowledge and the whole, and this congruence
dictates its basic logic and mode of investigation. Philosophy's most
basic thought is the equivalence of knowing and being; the structure
of this equivalence determines all the further reaches of that thought.
In the System of Identity, then, all being was captured as structure, as
a quantitative tensing of the fundamental equipollence of subjectivity
and objectivity. Prior to the Investigations we might say that
Schelling's grasp on being is purely logical.
The essay on freedom marks a new stage, the removal of the
basis of system from a mathematicized nature to spirit, an attempt to
come to the whole not only in terms of structure but in human terms,
in terms of will. This is, as Heidegger points out, an anthropomorphic
approach, but it remains an approach to system, to a thoughtgathered structure of being. Such an approach, which Schelling calls
"comprehending the god outside oneself through the god within" (7,
337), places human action, reasoning or knowing will at the basis of
its concern for the total grasp of being. As Schelling expressed it in an
1811 manuscript:
Created out of the source of things and kindred to it, the human
soul has a conscience of the creation. In it lies the greatest
clarity of all things and it is not so much knowing as it is itself
science.22
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System is to be founded in man's essence. The Investigations is so
taken up with this program that there is little explicit discussion of
what system means. Schelling's concern is how will can be made
central to system, even its foundation. Only through a thinking
appropriation of the complex dependence-independence relation
involved in human freedom can the togetherness of man and nature,
nature and God, and man and God be formulated—and the temporal
character of their interdevelopment.
Heidegger finds himself attracted, then, to this anthropomorphic
attempt at system, to Schelling's effort to conoeive being and human
being as process, to conceive the underlying structure of being not in
terms of spatial inherence but in terms of temporal development,
differentiation within unity. And it is not just the similarity to his own
project of a fundamental ontology based on an analytic of Dasein that
attracts Heidegger's attention, but the way that Schelling almost
transcends the limitations of metaphysics in posing the question of
grounding. This almost-transcendence interests Heidegger both in its
positive and negative aspects. As we shall later see, Schelling's
attempt to think the groundlessness of being into a transcendent
ground of some sort, an indifferent absolute, is for Heidegger one of
the crucial repetitions of the "metaphysical" falsification of being, the
forgetting of its hiddenness, the consequent distortion of its
evanescent openness into a timeless holding itself in the open.
II
The whole course of Heidegger's thought might be described as
an attempt to think through the question of being without the
presuppositions which have made that thinking "metaphysical,"
namely, that the thing is the paradigm existent and that its being,
unchanging presence or strict identity despite change, is characteristic
of being itself. The metaphysical way of thinking is nihilistic, worlddestroying; in seeking for a being which is timelessly evident and selfpresent, metaphysics ejects being as a process of bringing truth to
light and concealing it from the "real world." Truth, maintains
Heidegger, is happening, covering-uncovering, an interplay of man and
world, the contingent and fragile outcome of the interworkings of the
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fourfold, of earth and world, of the divine and the mortal.23 Truth is a
worldly occurrence, being is radically finite and incomplete. This is
what metaphysics time and again forgets in thinking being as steady
presence, as a permanent holding itself in the open, free from the
counterweight of a hiddenness ever seeking to enclose.
Both Heidegger and Schelling see the West's understanding of
being as mediated through its understanding of the copula, the "is" of
the judgment. Metaphysical thinking finds the copula enunciating the
same kind of unspecified, atemporal, fully symmetrical identity which
the mathematical equation sign signifies. It says: Being is sameness, a
timeless ground in which the "states" of a "being" are interchangeable,
within which, fundamentally, nothing ever happens to what is. The
detemporalizing of being worked by this understanding of identity
distorts the worldly character of being. If we consider identity as a
character of being, not as the sameness typical of the Seiendheit of
beings, we find it is happening, the context of the togetherness of
being and man, of the way they mutually call ~ach other out. Identity
is a belonging together, with the emphasis on belonging. Far from
being abstract sameness, it is a fragile togetherness based, as it were,
upon acts of will, upon call and response.24
To think through being in a nonmetaphysical way, Heidegger
must find a way of enunciating being in its event character and avoid
the sterile logic of thing-identity which underlies Western metaphysics.
One way to do this is to work upon language itself, to exploit the
kinship of poetry and thought, to force language into naming the
fragile situations in which man and world as different bearers of being
interplay. Another way is to work upon inherited metaphysical
language itself, exploiting the possibilities as yet not thoroughly
integrated into the everyday sense of being as object. For this second
task a logic of difference or progressive differentiation must be
developed, a logic which adopts as its primitive sense-making
operation not identification across change, but change and
differentiation across nominal identity or continuity. Heidegger finds
the key to this logic in Schelling's notion of grounding, in his proposal
that the basic sense of being is not self-enclosed identity but
emergence from a ground itself ungrounded. Heidegger's central
ontological terminology, widely used beyond the Schelling lectures,
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indicates his debt to the latter philosopher, e.g., being as a "ground"
which is "ungrounded," as the "primal ground" or reason for that which
is itself groundless, the "Abgrund" or abyss.25
The Investigations is a system of grounding, an attempt to
fashion a "sense of the whole" on the model of emergence or
progressive differentiation. Now part of the task of system, the
"theological" part of the onto-theological project, is thought's discovery
of a ground for the coherence of being into a whole. For there to be
system, being must be thought in a ground which gives wholeness and
integrity, a the ion. What is crucial here is how this theion grounds, or
in what sense being is "in" a ground. Against Spinoza, Schelling
remarks that his fault lies not in conceiving all things as inhering in
God, but in conceiving them all as things, consequently in thinking
their inherence in the ground as spatial containedness (7, 349). The
Investigations demands that we think being from the model of human
being, from the experience of human freedom. How is being as
experienced in freedom grounded? We do not feel ourselves placed,
containerized. Freedom reveals not only the passive dependency we
normally associate with inhering in a ground, but the active autonomy
of selfhood. Hence the kind of grounding in the theion which the
system of freedom must have as its basic thought must be complex; it
must be a thinking through of the complex dependence-independence
which the Christian stories of creation represent. God (in the
ontological, not the theistic sense) must be conceived not only as a
ground of beings in their dependence but as a ground of their
independence.
Thus the ground of being must ground not only the moment of
inherence in the ground, the moment of wholeness, but also that of
differentiation, the individuation of the whole. The ground of being in
Schelling's system of freedom is not an inert measure of sameness, a
kind of platinum bar for identity, but a ground for difference. The
togetherness of being as a whole is established not by a simple beingin-a-ground, but by individuated beings proceeding from the ground or
being. Beings not only inhere in a ground, they are out of the ground,
they are grounded, establish their selves by differentiation from a
containing ground.
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The experience of freedom indicates that man is independent of
the ground upon which he depends, that man's being is his own doing
in spite of his dependent origin (7, 385). Man's independence of his
ground indicates for Schelling that the grounding of the ground or the
theion must be a process of coherent (thus structuring) differentiation.
Grounding is not simple containedness or having a place, it is
differentiation from the ground, emergence out of the ground.
Grounding thus splits into two moments, the ground or basis and the
existent, that which has emerged from the ground. What connects the
two moments is not the passive identification of spatial inherence, but
temporal differentiation, becoming.
The possibility of a system of freedom rests on this notion of
grounding, the emergence of the existent from the ground. On the
basis of his differentiation from the ground of being, man, the
togetherness of being and thought, exists, and on the basis of this
existence the ground or theion has its actuality and is progressively
actualized. Being comes into wholeness in a progressive and dynamic
togetherness achieved through differentiation, through the separation
of ground and existent in man. Man's freedom (Entscheidung) is the
place where this differentiation (Scheidung) of principles takes place;
consequently it is the locus of the structuring or gathering of being—
themes close to Heidegger's formulations of the reciprocal interplay of
being and Dasein.
It is rather too much to hope that a thumbnail sketch of the
system of freedom will seem cogent upon first reading. To see
philosophically how the logical character of grounding as differentiation
passes over into a cosmological process of the separation of the dual
principles (basis and existent) in which human decision plays the key
role we must look more closely into the logic of grounding Schelling
proposes, first investigating how it situates the experience of human
freedom and solves traditional objections to the possibility of freedom,
and secondly searching into its ontological presuppositions, viz. that
being is will.
The task of founding the philosophical system upon the
experience of freedom posed for Schelling the challenge of adjusting
ontology to the complex situation of independence-dependency. It
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demanded the rethinking of the problem of pantheism, more pointedly,
the rethinking of the concepts of identity and being expressed in the
"is" of "God is all," taken as an expression of the inherence of all in a
unifying ground. The complexity of freedom forbids any static
formulation of this inherence; the nonsensical nature of all
interpretations of the pantheistic statement in terms of abstract
identity forces Schelling to conceive inherence in a dynamic fashion, as
inherence across a definite and unbridgeable difference. Since freedom
is the model of being, grounding must be a structure of thrusting-forth
and gathering-back, and the identity which the copula expresses in
"God is all" must be an identity of antecedent and consequent. The
relation indicated by the "is" is one of emergence and outcome. As
illustrations of this sense of identity Schelling offers these statements,
"The perfect is the imperfect" and "The good is the evil," both of which
indicate that the subject term is prior to, and in fact the essential
component in the predicate, which is a modification or redirection of
the subject's essential activity. Identity in these instances is a case of
grounding, the identity at the basis of each being whereby it is a
being, i.e., whereby it divides into ground and existence. The ground
component is that which remains behind and, as it were, under as a
physical basis, while the existent component goes forth from the
ground in revealing itself, i.e., revealing what in the basis is hidden.26
This processive identity-in-differentiation, the togetherness of ground
and existent, neither component logically or temporally prior to the
other, is what Heidegger simply calls the Seynsfuge, the structure of
being.27
Every being has a ground out of which it exists. Schelling's
logical solution to the problem of reconciling freedom and system, of
correctly delimiting the interplay of independence and dependence, is
to locate man in God's basis or ground, nature. Man inheres in or
depends upon God's ground, upon that which is God inasmuch as it is
God's ground, but which is not strictly to be identified with God, who
as existent and personal has gone forth from this ground. Man is
independent of the existent God—thus his being is "his own deed"—
while inhering in God's ground. Schelling thus achieves a purely formal
notion of freedom: Man is "in God" and yet "free" since he pertains to
the basis. The basis is "in God"—since there can be nothing outside
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God—and yet it is not God, for the essence of every being (God
included) consists in difference, a difference of ground and existence.
Formulated in such high abstraction, the ontological divergence
between ground and what exists as grounded furnishes only a
negative concept of freedom. Man is "left free," exempted from the
control or overwhelming determination of God, since he is contained in
God's ground. "The real and vital conception of freedom," however, "is
that it is a possibility of good and evil" (7, 352). This negative freedom
does not really establish its own possibility either, but pushes all the
problems of pantheism back one step where they arise once more,
now in relation to God's basis rather than his personal existence. And
finally the question arises of why God is subjected to the Seynsfuge,
why not only beings but the theion or ground of being should be
characterized by the split of existence from ground.
It is only when being is grasped as will, says Schelling, that the
true notion of freedom as decision, the division of good and evil,
comes to light. Only when the highest ground of being is seen as will
and not self-enclosed identity does the differential structure of being
become meaningful.
In the final and highest instance there is no other being than
Will. Will is primordial Being, and all predicates apply to it
alone—groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, selfaffirmation. All philosophy strives only to find this highest
expression (7, 350).
Abstract structural formulations do not reach down to the essence.
Being is "will," but "will" itself is an abstract expression. Brought, as
Schelling would say, closer to the human, interpreted in terms of our
experience, being is process, development through differentiation.
"Being is only aware of itself in becoming ... All history remains
incomprehensible without the concept of a humanly suffering God" (7,
403).
Grounding, then, is not a static difference of two components,
but their progressive differentiation, the emergence of the existent out
of the ground. Time is the sense of this differentiation; its continuity
gathers the different back together. And yet, as we shall see, it is not
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just a uniform mechanical passage of events that establishes
continuity and gatheredness, but the temporally processive work of
spirit, the actualization of will as eros, the binding of the separate and
disparate. That the articulated system of beings, the togethernessthrough-differentiation, is not a matter of abstract structure but is the
logos enunciated by finite spirit is the new element in Schelling's
speculations in 1809 and the point of Heidegger's convergence in that
line of thought. For Schelling man is the locus of divinization, of the
emergence of the divine from the ground of nature as spirit, the power
of binding basis and existent, just as for Heidegger man is the place
where the earth "worlds," where the divine shows itself in the finite,
fragmented and deathridden creature whose "destiny" is to suffer
being.
The Investigations leaves much unclear about the relation of
God and man, for example, whether the divine exists over and against
the humanly revealed divine, whether being is still conceived, in
consonance with the metaphysical tradition, as a being, the highest of
beings. The single-minded direction of Schelling's later thought toward
establishing the existence of a transcendent God leaves little doubt
about the tendency of Schelling's thought as a whole. Heidegger,
however, attaches himself only to the Schelling of 1809, the man, he
claims, who for the first time entered into dialogue with Leibniz on the
full significance of the concept of ground,28 who captured being as a
doublefold structure of grounding and refused to think its doubleness
away into a singular being, into Cartesian substance, the selfgrounding. For the Schelling of the Investigations God and man are
inexorably intertwined in a dialectic of revelation. Neither term of this
dialectic has meaning on its own, neither God nor man, and neither
has at its own disposal, so to speak, the meaning of being. Their
interplay is revelation, i.e., progressive separation of differentiation,
progressive establishment of the Seynsfuge.
Emergence or separation from the basis and the eventual
binding of the fully separated basis back into the existent as the
fulfillment of the process are, on God's part, delivered over to man's
spirit, to his decision, to his ultimately contingent and fragile binding.
Read ontologically, as it should be, this cosmological scenario indicates
that being is revealed only in spiritual beings, beings capable of
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appropriating the doublefold structure of being-ground-existence or, in
its human meaning, good and evil—and effecting the actual
differentiation. The separation of basis and existent and their
subsequent binding or union in spirit is "absolute in God, but
actualized in man." Only through the finite and temporal binding of
ground and existent in man does the emergence out of the ground
take place, i.e., the ultimate elevation of will as impulse into reason or
spiritual selfhood. Man alone is the place of decision, of differentiation,
of revelation or the establishment of difference. Man is the place where
the grounding character of being can break into the open, and
"grounding" is only a convenient way of saying that identity or
togetherness of being must be founded through differentiation. Man is
the point of difference where the structure of being establishes itself,
the difference of good and evil, of ground and consequent, of being as
ground and of being as existent, i.e., as beings. This is the central
point of the system of freedom, as this schematic passage indicates:
If God as spirit is the indivisible unity of the two principles
[ground and existent] and this same unity is actual only in
man's spirit, then if it were just as indissoluble in him as in God,
man could not be distinguished from God at all; he would
disappear in God and there would be no revelation and no
stirring of love. For every nature can be revealed only in its
opposite—love in hatred, unity in strife. If there were no division
of the principles unity could not manifest its omnipotence; if
there were no conflict love could not become real. Man has been
placed on that summit where he contains within him the source
of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the
nexus of principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of
freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses
will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God
must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in
creation can remain ambiguous (7, 373-74).
III
To this point we have explored how Schelling's system of
freedom demands that being be conceived as progressive grounding or
differentiation and noted how, generally, the doublefold structure of
grounding must be conceived in terms of process, becoming, or being
as will. We must now go to the central point, that the progressive
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differentiation of ground and existence which frames the structure of
being is not an abstract cosmological process but a human work, the
accomplishment of spirit. For Heidegger's adoption of Schelling's
notions of grounding and emergence from the ground may signal little
more than a casual eclecticism if the two philosophers are not in
agreement that it is man's privilege to frame the structure of being
while standing in it and that this structure is possible only through the
unitive work of spirit. We must see how human freedom founds
system, how man's resolute standing in being brings forth the
articulated wholeness of the world's meaning, how, in Heidegger's
words, "freedom is the ground of grounding."29 Since Heidegger puts
his own explanation of this "freedom" in terms borrowed from
Schelling, e.g., freedom as ultimate ground is Abgrund or unground,
we must plunge further into the most complex parts of the
Investigations.
The separation and the binding together of the two principles in
the structure of being, in simpler terms the bringing of what is to
system, depends on man's decision for good and evil. Schelling wants
to establish freedom as the "reason" or ultimate meaning for that
framework of grounding within which alone something can be
"reasonable" or maintain its meaning. Yet freedom in the negative
sense, as being left free from divine determination, is possible only
because the twofold split of ground and existence has already opened,
because man inheres in God's ground or nature. How can this circle be
explained? How can freedom as decision for good and evil ground
grounding and yet depend upon that very structure?
There are two main senses of "freedom" in play in the
Investigations, the negative or Cartesian sense of being exempted
from influences and left free to act, and what Schelling calls the "true
concept of freedom," the possibility of good and evil (7, 352). (The
"true" concept, it should be noted, does not involve choice or acting,
but refers only to the outbreak of double possibilities. "Good" and
"evil" are ontological poles, not mere moral qualities.) There are also,
we recall, two senses of "grounding," the abstract one wherein ground
and what is grounded are conceived as simply different, and the truer
dynamic conception, based on the insight that being is essentially will,
wherein ground and existence are differentiated into clearly different
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entities only through the process of emergence from the ground. The
two senses of freedom correlate with the two senses of grounding.
Abstractly freedom is simply inherence in a ground different from the
divine. Dynamically, however, freedom is a process of dividing
existence from the ground, a process of establishing the double
possibilities "good" and "evil," a process of man as spirit emerging out
of God's ground or nature. And just as grounding statically conceived
made sense only with the introduction of the dynamic sense, the idea
of grounding as emergence, so the static sense of freedom first
becomes meaningful in the light of the dynamic. Only because man
divides existence from ground (and binds them as spirit) in emerging
from nature is he left free from God's domination, i.e., from that of
Spinozistic "nature" (the ground) and from that of the personal God
(existent).
Schelling conceives human ways of being as constitutive of
being itself, as determinative of its fundamental structure or meaning.
Differentiation and reunification, individuation and "binding" (spirit's
gathering into a whole), in more human terms, the choice of self and
the choice of community, are all processes in being itself. They
establish the Seynsfuge of ground and existent, nature and the divine.
Primally being is will; its highest possibility—the revelation of God—is
spirit and its unitive work in eros, the binding together of such things
as are capable of existing without each other (7, 408), or as Heidegger
would express it, that gathering into a unity or towards a self which
the ancients called logos.30 The history of being necessarily involves
division, separation, individuation, for the gathering worked by spirit in
eros, the revelatory speaking out of the hidden unity, is possible only
across the greatest difference, across the greatest resistance. In man
this gathering—speaking appears most decisively as freedom, the
possibility of good and evil, the necessity for decision and separation.
But how is the decision for good and evil the division of ground
and existent? How does freedom, on any definition, determine the
structure of being? Schelling's answer is simple: The unity of spirit, the
fragile and dissoluble union of the double possibilities, of good and
evil, of selfhood as universal will and selfhood as individuality, of will
as rationality and will as impulse: this unity is the structure of being,
and not only its structure but its history. Systematic philosophy thus
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becomes a natural history of spirit, in Schelling's terms, a philosophy
of the creation. Man's spiritual character is not factual; it is not
explained by man's being an instance of being inside the decisiveunitive Seynsfuge. Rather it is active and historical; the doublefold
structure of being is established only in man's progressive decision, his
adoption of self-enclosed, self-grounded existence as one possibility
and a gathering communicative type of existence as the other.
Man is decisive for being, divisive and integrative within being,
because he carries the history of being, because starting within nature,
a creature of the ground, he has become spirit. Starting as negatively
free or sheltering in the ground he has become the willed and
intelligent unity of that ground and of his present being. Man as spirit
is at once the product and the bearer of the history of being. Schelling
calls him the spiritualization of the ground, the revelation of the divine
in nature, of the godly light hidden in the depths. Declining to alter the
anthropocentric approach in any way and think nature and spirit as
radically different types of being, Schelling insists that they differ only
according to the pattern of emergence of the Seynsfuge. Man is central
to the whole creation, he maintains, that is, the creation has taken
place within man's being and in its culmination brings his spirituality to
light as the meaning of being. Man's creation or coming into being has
been the history of nature, its transformation from chaos to stable and
individuated existence. Likewise the history of nature has been the
emergence of man as spirit, the transformation of blind impulse into
logos (7, 360-61). Man's being is thus the historical framing of the
structure of being. He takes his rise in the ground, in the primal willstate Schelling pictures as impulse and yearning, and has become
spirit, will operative as reason and love. And as the spiritualization of
the ground and the ordering of nature man is ever more sharply the
division of ground and existent, of individuality and community.
The progressive differentiation which structures being is a
division worked out over history, reaching its full development in
man's choice of his self, the double possibility of "good" and "evil"
which Schelling visualizes as the possibility of individual existence, of
selfhood. Man as individuated—Heidegger would say "thrown"
existence has come out of the central ground, out of the generality of
will, and in his individuality he clearly and finally divides ground (the
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general) and existence (the individual). This is the final division.
Throughout the process of being—first as a cosmological development,
then as an historical one—the division has been one of knowing will.
But once the division is accomplished and man stands out in his
individuality the division explicitly becomes decision, decision about
individuality, about selfhood.
Within man's spirituality, we might say, the cosmological
process of division is interiorized. He is placed at the dividing line, the
point where everything as yet ambiguous and undecided about being
will be revealed in his decision (7, 374).
The decision is about individuality, about the possibilities opened
up for the tenuous state of individuation which the cosmological and
historical dialectic of impulse and reason has brought to light. The
decision is the possibility of good and evil, of the unification of
individuality with the generality of nature which is spirit and of selfenclosed individuality, self-will. In his interpretation of the
Investigations, Heidegger emphasizes that this freedom or decisive
setting apart of the two principles of the ontological framework is
indeed the possibility of good and evil. It is the outbreak of a double
possibility, not a division of good and evil as a decision for good and
against evil, but a decision for good and evil. The decision for selfhood
which is freedom's essence is evidently not a choice of one kind of
selfhood as opposed to another; such choices are ontic possibilities for
selves, but we are concerned here with a decision which opens up the
very ontological structure of selfhood. The "good" and "evil" whose
possibility founds the structure of being are not moral qualities, but
the fixed double possibility of being itself, polar opposites whose
polarity cannot be thought away or suppressed, even by choosing one
over the other. Thus Heidegger remarks that the emergence of "evil"
in human existence is at the same time the emergence of "good." The
selfhood chosen by man in his essence, ontologically decided then, is
the dialectic of individuality itself, the possibility of self-enclosed
existence and of existence in community with the ground from which
he takes his rise (7, 364-65). Neither possibility can be eliminated,
and were one to be left behind, selfhood would perish and being would
be sterile and lifeless, revealing nothing.
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Why should Schelling conceive selfhood, particularly the
spiritualized selfhood of freedom, to be so tenuous, so delicate a thing
that its very essence is a double opposition of tendencies, the
possibility of good and evil? We have seen that spirit is an historicalcosmological product, the outcome of the division of principles in
nature and a transformation of that division into decision. The unity of
principles which man is is inherited from nature; spirit is a unity of
factors implicitly united in the ground but which could not there attain
unification and which were in need of differentiation through
emergence from the ground. Spirit, then, is the selfhood of the ground
made over, it is the self-seeking and self-enclosure of impulse changed
into a unity which gathers difference, into love. "It is will beholding
itself in complete freedom, no longer the tool of the universal will
operating in nature, but above and outside all nature" (7, 364). There
is the key. Man as spirit is the self-seeking of the ground gone out
from the ground, thus the definitive division of ground and existent
which yet holds them together into a structure. The history of nature is
this act of emergence from the ground and man in his capacity as
spirit is this fundamental act of being raised to consciousness. Now the
whole sense of man's spirituality lies in his having emerged from the
ground, gone out from nature. Thus his spirituality is ever conditioned
and fragile since it is, in its first instance, the ground's own impUlsive
self-seeking distanced from itself. If spirit's highest possibility, the
gatheredness of love and reason, is the selfbood of the ground
transformed, it is in basis identical with' the self-will of the ground,
and part of its very essence will be the constant solicitation to return
to the ground.
Spirit is of its essence conditioned and tenuous. It is a dynamic
union of opposing possibilities, more of the nature of a balance than of
physical solidification. Thus man's decision is about selfhood, about the
dual possibilities of selfhood as self-enclosure and selfhood as a
gathering thrusting-forth of being in its diversity. Spiritualized selfhood
can forget itself and return to the ground, i.e., it can forget that it is
spirit off of the basis of the ground and attempt to be spirit in a selfgrounded and self-seeking manner. This is evil, that "self-will may
seek to be, as a particular will, that which it is only in its identity with
the universal will" (7, 365).
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For Schelling evil means that man can take his life without
regard for the ground from whence it arose, that as spirit he can
attempt to be spirit without regard for nature and his history in nature,
that, in theological terms, man can seize his independence as spirit
while forgetting the creaturely basis of that independence. In
ontological terms this "evil" is the possibility of the collapse of the
structure of being itself, the possibility of senselessness. Since the
gathering and uniting sense of all that is depends upon the progressive
emergence or grounding which nature has undergone and which
comes to itself knowingly in man's capacity as spirit, the forgetfulness
of the ground which is one of spirit's fundamental possibilities for
selfhood signals the persistent possibility of senselessness, the
collapse of the Seynsfuge. Freedom is the possibility of good and evil.
Spirit establishes itself tenuously as a dialectic of differing possibilities
of selfhood, self-enclosing impulse on one hand, world-gathering
reason on the other. Spirit establishes the sense of being, the
structure of the whole, only contingently, temporally, never in some
timeless and absolute manner.
How does Heidegger concur with this analysis of freedom
establishing the sense of grounding, of man in his decision framing the
structures of being's coherence? He is deeply sympathetic to
Schelling's thesis that man's spirituality is in its ontological basis
historical, a process implicated in articulating nature into world. Man
has historically become the decision place in being, a "clearing" where
the doublefold or ground-existent structure of being comes to
expression. Yet this locus of expression is being's most fragile point;
the principles Schelling supposed absolutely united in God are bound
only contingently in man by the finite and temporal act of spirit.
Human freedom is decision for good and evil, the standing possibility
of both the maintenance of the structure of being and of its collapse.
As the clearing for being, man is radically limited, and the sense of
being which can emerge from his spirituality, from his historical
standing in being as a gathering place, is similarly limited. Man stands
in being tenuously and gathers tenuously. Schelling does not maintain
that man simply is spirit; he has become spirit and that spirituality
involves a constant solicitation to misinterpret his being, to miss the
meaning of spirit. For Heidegger man's authentic standing in being or
listening to being is only one pole of his possibilities as Dasein, the
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other of which is the mechanical and object-like life of the everyday.
The sense of being which can emerge from man's fragile standing in
being is as finite as man's spirituality itself. Being itself is as fragile as
the web of opposed possibilities Dasein reveals, insists Heidegger. In
its clearing it shows itself as clearing-and-hiddenness.
I would suggest that what Schelling indicates in making man the
place of decision for being, the standing possibility of good and evil, is
what Heidegger wants to convey by the dialectic of hiddenness and
clearing within being, that dialectic which enables metaphysics to
cover over the moment of hiddenness and reduce the dynamic tension
of being to the solidified openness of the thing. Man's decision is the
systematizing of being, the outbreak of the double possibilities which
are his response to the call of the ground and the revelation of the
final meaning of that ground. Schelling's notion of decision, the
emergence of the differentiated being-structure from the originally
undifferentiated ground, is akin to what Heidegger calls man's listening
to conscience, the response of the mortal to the divine whereby man
finitely and in thrown fashion makes a world or allows the world to
world around him.31 This systematizing of being which man effects or
the world he occasions around him is a radically finite structure, a
"situation" rather than a "thing." Being itself is a tension; it has deep
within it a cleft, a fault, an inner dialectic which comes to expression in
the thrownness of freedom. Being, says Heidegger, is something to be
suffered: ". . . only the finite existent has the privilege and the pain of
standing within being as such and experiencing the true as what is."32
Schelling maintains that even the theion, the divine itself, suffers
being, suffers from being's internal wound or finitude:
All existence must be conditioned [i.e., grounded] in order that
it may be actual, that is, personal existence ... This is the
sadness which adheres to all finite life, and inasmuch as there is
even in God himself a condition at least relatively independent,
there is in him too a source of sadness (7, 399).
Comparisons such as the above can be drawn between
Heidegger and Schelling but what is of more interest and importance is
the parallel Heidegger himself proposes between the Investigations
and his own thought, namely, between Schelling's sense of freedom as
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decision (Entschiedenheit) and his own notion of authentic existence
as anticipatory resolve (Entschlossenheit).
According to Schelling man is in essence decisive. This means
not that he has choices ahead of himself to make but that he has
already fundamentally chosen himself. At issue in freedom is not any
particular ontic choice, but the constitutive choice of selfhood. Man is a
revelation of the decision in being, the doublefold unity of ground and
existent. Man is in freedom, he dwells in the decision. Hence his
existence is characterized not so much by having choices yet to make,
but in having to live out a prior decision for selfhood. In commentary
on this reading of freedom Heidegger adds:
This essence [of man] must, in accord with the origin of man
from out of the life-glance of the divine ground, have been
determined from eternity, and in fact, since the essence of man
is always an individual, it must consist in the eternal
determination of itself to its self. The characteristic essence of
every man is always his own eternal act. Thence that feeling, at
once uncanny and gratifying, that we have always been who we
are, that we are nothing other than the uncovering of things
long ago decided.33
The self-choice or spiritualization of will wherein man essentially
consists is not so much active choice of selfhood as the acting out of
selfhood already, in contingent or thrown fashion, chosen. As
Heidegger interprets Schelling, then, the decisiveness of human
freedom is a taking one's place in history. Deciding one's self is not the
bundling together of fragmentary introspective acts into a null point of
unity, but rather resolve, a standing in the openness of truth and
history. Commenting on Schelling's interpretation of freedom as
decision for good and evil, Heidegger says,
Within decision toward one's inmost essence it will be found that
no one reaches the peak of his good nor the depths of his evil
(7, 433), but that he is placed in this in-between to work out his
truth, which is in itself necessary, but for just that reason
historical .... An achieved truth alone is truth, for it wrests the
being into the open, prepares the way for the binding of beings
to come into play.34
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How does this decisiveness which Heidegger says is in its true
state only as resolve compare to the anticipatory resolve of Sein und
Zeit? There resolve was described as the choice of the choice of
selfhood (270), as preparedness for anxiety or projection into guilt
(297, 301), most fundamentally as a comprehending being-towarddeath (305). Resolve is Dasein's appropriation of the dialectic of selfgatheredness and thrownness in selfhood. It is anticipatory living
under death, a fashioning of a self-understanding in terms of
mortality, the general situation for man (382). It is a freedom to give
oneself over to one's place, one's situation, a situation which places
the individual by the way it compels his interest and limits his activity.
Resolve is man's recognition of his radical finitude, a recognition of
how his own being as spirit appears only within the structures of
finitude, viz. time, death, the "nothing" of consciousness.
There appears to be little difference, ultimately, between the
decisiveness which Heidegger discovers in Schelling's thought (and
which he wishes to push into the foreground in his interpretation of the
Investigations) and the anticipatory resolve of Sein und Zeit. They are
figuratively different ways of indicating the same thing, man's radical
finitude and the corresponding finitude of the being in which man
stands. Man's decisiveness is really decidedness, a revelation of the
twofold structure of being in a backward-pointing glance to the
conditions of spirit, to spirit as the history of nature. Resolve reveals
the same decidedness in a forward-pointing manner. It defines man's
finitude as a being-toward-the-end, indicates spirit's fragility in the
present by pointing out its future dissolution.
IV
It has become evident that Heidegger's fundamental point of
accord with Schelling, the basis for his sympathy with Schelling despite
his lack of taste for "absolute philosophy," is his grasp of the radically
finite character of being. Heidegger reads the Investigations as an
attempt to fashion a systematic grasp of being from the hermeneutical
standpoint of man's experience of his radical finitude, his ultimate
groundlessness. Human existence first brings the structure of being
into the open as a doubling of being—a split into ground and existent,
into Sein and Seiendes—and it does this by suffering being. Heidegger
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would clearly like to read what Schelling points out as man's
groundedness, the double orientation of his being toward good and
evil, toward self as self-enclosure and self as gathering thrusting-forth,
as thrownness pure and simple. Man is a creature out of the ground,
he lives off of grounds—off of possibilities, bases, reasons—but there is
no ground for this grounding, no primal possibility for possibilities, no
reason for reasons. The ground in which man is grounded, from which
he lives, is ungrounded. Grounding itself is ab-grundig, abysmal,
utterly without foundation.35
Schelling will not easily be read this way. In the last analysis he
does not wish to abandon man and history to pure thrownness, but
sees in the doublefold of being, in the dialectic between spirit's selfgatheredness and its dispersal in the world, the workings of a
teleology which will ultimately decide the competing principles in the
human spirit and subject the ground to existence. This teleology he
calls the will to love, to revelation. It is an impulse toward an ultimate
sense of ground and existence, toward a final togetherness
transcending their fragile differentiation and reunification in man as
spirit. On the basis of this projected teleological union of principles
Schelling tries to make sense of their original disparity, their tensed
unity in emergence or becoming. He searches here for a logic more
ultimate than that of grounding itself. He attempts to think through
the ab-grundig character of the structure of being and to convert it
into an ultimate ground. It is here that Heidegger is forced to
dissociate himself from Schelling's way of thought.
Schelling has shown that the being of finite, comprehensible
beings must be thought through difference, the emergent
differentiation of consequent from ground. All positive predication is of
finite characters, based ultimately upon difference or upon the logic of
grounding. Yet the grounding structure is in some ways an ultimate
dualism, a hidden dialectic which frustrates reason in its desire for
unity of principles. Grounding reaches only so far as to throw light
upon the finite and conditioned character of being, upon a necessarily
unhealed dualism at the basis of things.
Heidegger would say that reason with its demand for unity is
brought up short at this point, but Schelling disagrees. If reason
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persists in asking after the ground of grounding—and for him it must—
it must abandon thinking through difference, must therefore abandon
positive predication, and think through nondifference or "indifference."
Schelling conceives indifference as a disjunction of principles or
entities absolutely opposed in themselves. Prior, then, to the split of
being as ground and being as existent is a principle of indifference
called the Abgrund or Ungrund, and it is nothing more than the
disjunction of ground and existence, a logical prior to their actual and
progressive differentiation in history.
As Schelling describes the primal unground in the Investigations
it is truly an abysmal principle. Not a product of antitheses, it is a point
where their opposition has become meaningless. It is the place where
distinctions break apart upon the rock of their nonbeing, where
difference is superseded without the differentiae having collapsed in
themselves (7, 406). It has no proper predicates, only nonaffirmability
can be affirmed of it. Its inner structure is that of negation, difference,
grounding, but all as counting for nothing, not so much suppressed as
not yet made express. It is like a chaotic field of linguistic utterances,
all possible predicates, before the invention of syntax, i.e., before the
structure of utterance itself.
There are obvious flaws in this mode of explanation. The claim
that a logic of nondifference grounds the sense of things founded upon
difference leaves the sense of "logic," "grounding," and "principle"
vertiginously near collapse. Schelling confuses the priority of a
principle with the temporal-causal precedence of a ground, and in his
search for a ground of grounding postulates a being whose whole
being is not-to-be-a-ground. The indifferent Abgrund is difference prior
to itself, i.e., a unitary principle of senselessness grounds the
doublefold principles of ground and existent whereby anything makes
sense. Schelling further compounds the confusion by saying that this
attempt to think experienced duality back to a "neither-nor" justifies
and grounds the ultimate factical character of that duality. Ground and
consequent somehow immediately break forth from the indifferent
"neithernor" (7, 407).
But Heidegger's objections are not, like the above, merely on
the logical plane. The reversal or confusion of logical and temporal
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priority we have noted is to him only symptomatic of a deeper error,
failure to attend to the ontological difference, failure to think through
being and beings differently. Schelling's persistent questioning after a
ground to grounding signals a relapse into metaphysics, into a theory
of being which would remove the unhealed duality from grounding,
thus remove the duality of the grounding relation itself from the
meaning of the world and establish the timeless governance of
"principles" over being.
Heidegger himself adopts Schelling's language of "ground" and
"groundlessness," but holds it in its purity. Guided by the leading
thought of the ontological difference—the difference between being
and beings, between being and the Seiendheit of beings—Heidegger
refuses conceptually to turn the ungrounded character of being itself,
the Abgrund or ultimate lack of grounding, into a ground, an ultimate
explanation of some sort. Only beings are grounded, and if our whole
categorial scheme is based on the difference of ground and existent, if
our whole comprehension is based on a logic of grounding, we have no
proper logic for being itself, no concepts readily available for it, no
language to enunciate it. Only silence or such language as can be
fashioned by those ordained to specially suffer being, the poets. Says
Heidegger, in a passage crucial for understanding his notion of being,
Being and ground belong together. From its coherence with
being as being the ground receives its essence. Conversely
being as being takes its rise from the essence of the ground.
Ground and being ('are') the same—but not identical, as the
differentiation of the names 'being' and 'ground' already shows.
Being 'is' in essence: ground. Being thus cannot have a ground
which it in turn should have to ground. Accordingly, the ground
falls away from being. Ground remains apart from being. In the
sense that such a ground is lacking to being, being is the Abgrund, the abyss. Insofar as being as such is grounding, it is
itself groundless.36
Heidegger's objection to Schelling's indifferent absolute, then, is that
to formulate a ground for grounding is to destroy the essential
togetherness of being and grounding. When grounding is conceptually
lifted out of finite being and made a transcendent explanation, the
sense of being as grounding beings and the sense of grounding itself
equally perish. And Heidegger objects not only to this attempt to think
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the groundless character of being into a transcendent ground for
being, but to Schelling's further attempt to fit finite being and its
"grundartig" character37 inside a framework processive yet atemporal,
to locate being in between an origin and an end. For Schelling
supposes his indifferent Abgrund is not only the absolute, a healing
over of the doublefold in being, but an origin for being, the point from
which differentiation breaks forth, from which being as will heads for
division. This move to insert the emergent character of being into a
quasi-eternal frame is destructive of the essential finitude of being, a
deracination of being from history, a denial of being as will.
The Investigations' concept of an indifferent primal ground for
differentiation is the ghost of the absolute of the Identity System. In
that earlier static system the indifferent absolute was a field of
differentiation, an encompassing structure within which every being
was directly comparable with every other because it was a specified or
differentiated instance of indifference. The Investigations is quite a
different system, a philosophy of spirit, an attempt to systematize
being from the basis of freedom. Whereas in the earlier system
difference was a quantitative or structural matter, here it is emergence
into decisiveness, a matter of process and history. Hence Schelling no
longer conceives the indifferent as absolute in the sense of allencompassing and all-founding, but only as a point of origin. The
indifferent is not the absolute; it is merely the primal basis for what
may emerge as the absolute, an ultimately unifying act of spirit.
The essence of the ground as well as of the existent can only
exist as prior to all grounding. It is the absolute, viewed simply,
the unground. It cannot be in any other fashion-as we have
proved-than by splitting into two equally eternal beginnings. It
is not both at the same time, but both in the same way, the
whole or self-same being in each. The unground divides itself
into two equally eternal beginnings in order that the two which
could not be one or exist simultaneously in it as the groundless
come to be one through love. It divides itself only that life and
love might come to be, and personal existence (7, 407-08).38
Indifference, then, is not the absolute character of being, but only one
of its postures, the origin over against which being becomes fully
personalized in the course of history. It is a "neither-nor" of difference
only so that difference may break out in acute form, in the doublefold
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structure or Seynsfuge, and come to fully spiritualized integration in
love. The grounding structure of being is but being underway, the
transit from indifference to integration. In Schelling's mind this
integration is clearly apocalyptic and universal. It is a cosmic decision
and the fulfillment of the history of nature; it is the rejection of the
intractable selfhood of the ground, the integration of ordered and
spiritualized selfhood into the principle of personality or God. This
integration is clearly envisaged as the overcoming and the purifying of
the doublefold character of finite being, as a transcending of the
ambiguity of a structure of being based on nothing more lucid than
grounding, than emergence from one state into another.
In short, there is for Schelling an absolute indifference of ground
and existent, a ground for grounding, only in opposition to an absolute
te/os. Indifference is the equanimity of the cosmos before creation,
before differentiation. The apocalyptic end is final differentiation, the
separation of personal deity from the pantheistic totality or the ground
as refined (7, 408). The processes of finite being in between origin and
end take on the significance, in the last analysis, only of an inbetween. There is no ultimate significance in the process, only in its
terms, in origin and end, in benign indifference and divine aloofness.
The doublefold of finite being whose whole meaning, as the
Investigations most of the time strains so hard to establish, is in
process, in grounding, in being as emergence, is in the end disvalued.
Schelling's bold view that the decision of being involves human
freedom, good and evil, disappears in the subtle weavings of theodicy;
the ambiguity of the shifting states of finite being, symbolized by the
"and," is resolved. "Good and evil" is made a temporary state, an
imperfect form of differentiation to be completed in apocalypse. If the
"decision" in human freedom is always, as Schelling indicates,
ambiguous decision, the outbreak of double possibilities of selfhood,
then there must be an ultimate cosmic decision which is truly divisive,
which will decide one thing over another, resolve the ambiguity into
monocular clarity.
It is this framing of the structure of being with its unhealed
duality and its burden of ambiguity between origin and end which
Heidegger cannot accept. The move is metaphysical; that it comes at
the very end of the Investigations shows the lure of the forgetfulness
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of being, reveals our typical discomfort in the face of the ambiguous
uncoverings of being. It is interesting not as a particular mistake, but
as a symptom of the general movement of thought. The more
Schelling struggles against his discovery of the indefinite duality,
tension, or ambiguity at the heart of being, the more he tries to unite
(identify) the moments of the structure of being, the more they fall
apart and the more he is forced to repeat the mistakes first made in
the beginning of Western thought. Because Schelling essentially
uncovered the doublefold or essentially finite character of being, says
Heidegger, his final failure is all the more poignant. Poignant but also
productive, for it forces upon us the urgency of trying a "second
beginning" in the history of being, or opening up a nonmetaphysical
seynsgeschlichtlich grasp of being.39
The Greek mistake must be avoided, namely, the attempt to
explain the elusive and dialectical character of being in terms of
beings, to explain its situatedness between the mortal and the divine,
between openness and hiddenness in terms of object-like components,
origin and te/os, themselves exempt from process and situation. Such
finalizing principles cannot be principles of being; at best they are
principles over being, principles which are only principles, in no sense
the origin and ordering movement within the doublefold structure of
being. Origin and end deprive logos, the unification and articulation of
being invented by finite spirit's standing within being, of its sense; as
supposed principles they violate the sense of what they are to explain
and order—even if, as Schelling maintains, the origin is merely the
nullity or indifference point of all the strife and division being exhibits
and the telos, a love which reconciles differences while preserving their
autonomy. Taking with utmost seriousness Schelling's doctrine that
the origin must be the nullity of all the tensions the doublefold of being
brings to light, Heidegger points out that it cannot be an origin for
being:
Absolute indifference is nothing in the sense that in contrast to
it every assertion of being is nothing, but not in the sense that
the absolute is nUll, purely worthless. But here Schelling does
not see the necessity of a central step. If in truth being cannot
be predicated of the absolute, it follows that the essence of all
being is finitude and that only the finite existent has the
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privilege and the pain of standing in being as such and
experiencing the true as a being.40
The "nothing" of finitude is the heart of being, the thrown
freedom which makes man a Wesen der Ferne, which makes him the
open in-between of the hiddenness and the revelation of being.41 It is
neither mere nothingness nor nothing as a thing. Nor is it Schelling's
transcendent nothingness or indifference upon which all differences,
hence all finite characters of beings, break and burst asunder. The
nothing of the in-between is indicated only in terms of situation, of
tension between extremes; it cannot be formulated in terms of the
unity of things and principles.
At the heart of being is an ambiguous duality. It is a duality, and
so cannot be comprehended by unitary principles; it is an ambiguous
duality, and so resists simplification to a definite opposition formulable
in terms of two principles. Thus we have named it generically "the
doublefold." Heidegger maintains that if we refrain from reifying the
structure of being experienced in human freedom and grasp thrown
responsibility in its full tension—the inner dialectic of "place" and
"project"—the fragile doublefold may be preserved in its delicacy.
Ontology must live within being's essential equivocation and, avoiding
single meanings (prose) and single principles (metaphysics), learn to
speak equivocally. Being as grounding is abysmal, ab-gtundig. He who
would speak out (ultimately the poet, if anyone) must go into the
abyss, must renounce the comfort of the single meaning and the single
vision which the horizon of the everyday offers. He must seek
apartness, for apartness is spirit and gathering power.42 Gathering
power is logos, the gathering of being, and the poet's speaking,
worked out in the listening of apartness, becomes the "house of being"
only because poetry is not so much invention as preservation and
repetition. The poetic word brings apartness itself to a stand and rings
out the fragility of being in all its necessary equivocations. It takes its
stand in ambiguities, faithful to what is, and this faithfulness is central
to its claim to replace metaphysics, to its position as the second
beginning in the history of being.43
The doublefold of being, found in apartness as the in-between or
the precarious dialogue of the divine and mortal, of the world and the
human, allows of no healing. Being is radically finite, that is, not
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fenced in from without but uncertain, divided, and ambiguous within.
Grounding, or the sense of things, is groundless; one cannot find a
"reason" to explain why possibilities present themselves, bases open
up and causes preserve the sense of things for us. There is no
transcending the finitude of "sense"; on the contrary, being breaks
out, shows its transcendence, only within this finitude. The "because"
finally loses itself in the play of being, a play which is only play, which
plays because it plays. The "why" drops out of being experienced in
any depth or profundity, and to attempt to fit being into the limits of
the "why," as Schelling ultimately does, is only to mutilate what sense
it has, to destroy its contingency and fragility, to close over its open
texture and mute its sharp divisions with a logic of closure and
completeness which is fictional rather than poetic.
Notes
1
Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freihert,
herausgegeben von Hildegard Feick (TUbingen, 1971). Hereafter called
Schellings Abhandlung. Passages quoted in this article are my own
translations and appear with the permission of Northwestern University
Press which will publish a translation by Joan Stambaugh in 1974.
2
The full title of the work is Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of
Human Freedom and the Things Systematically Dependent on It. The
translation from which I quote goes under the name Of Human
Freedom, translator James Gutmann (Chicago, 1936).
3
Quoted in Schellings Abhandlung, p. 15.
4
Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Bern, 1947), p. 50.
5
All Schelling references are to the Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling,
1856 f., reproduced in the Munich Jubilee Edition, ed. M. Schröter,
1927. The first number indicates the volume—there are 14, published
originally in two series—the second number the page.
6
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 62.
7
Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, pp. 41-42.
8
Vom Wesen des Grundes, 4th ed. (Frankfurt a.M., 1955), pp. 53-54.
9
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 79.
10
Nietzsche, vol. II (Pfullingen, 1961), pp. 209-10.
11
Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen, 1957). pp. 58-61.
12
Schellings Abhandlung pp. 28-29.
13
Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen, 1957), p. 184.
14
Schellings Abhandlung. p. 34.
15
Ibid., p. 31.
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16
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 39.
18
Ibid., p. 77.
19
Ibid., p. 55
20
Der Satz vom Grund, p. 186 f.
21
Ibid., p. 188.
22
Sämtliche Werke. Nachlassband, ed. M. Schröter (Munich, 1946), p. 5.
23
Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen, 1954), pp. 149-50.
24
fdentität und Differenz. pp. 31-32.
25
Though the English "ground" carries the same basic sense of the German
"Grund," the term is not philosophically established in English and
some of Heidegger's usages may sound odd. The German term is a
generic name for the existence of a precedent and explanatory state of
affairs. It expresses continuity of sense across difference or the logical
validity of "following upon." Specifically a ground may be either the
possibility of something, or its cause, or its reason. Cf. Vom Wesen des
Grundes. pp. 49-50.
26
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 129.
27
Ibid., p. 130. Cf. Schelling, Werke, 7, 358.
28
Der Satz vom Grund, p, 43.
29
Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 53.
30
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 152; Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, 1967), p. 33.
31
Vorträge und Aufsätze, pp. 150-51; Vom Wesen des Grundes, pp. 43-44.
32
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 195.
33
Ibid., p. 185.
34
Ibid., p. 187. On the "binding play," the Heraclitean logos which founds the
sense of things, into which all grounding and explanation sinks, cf. Der
Satz vom Grund. pp. 186-88.
35
Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 53; Der Satz vom Grund, pp. 92-93.
36
Der Satz vom Grund, pp. 92-93.
37
Ibid., p. 90.
38
Translation mine.
39
Schellings Abhandlung, p. 194.
40
Ibid., p. 195, emphasis mine.
41
Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 54; Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M., 1950), p. 104.
42
On the Way to Language, tr. Peter Hertz (New York, 1971), p. 185.
43
Ibid., p. 192.
17
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