Schelling and the Facticity of Being

Night

Thus far from man and his endeavours making the world comprehensible, it is man himself that is the most incomprehensible and who inexorably drives me to the belief in the wretchedness of all being, a belief that makes itself known in so many bitter pronouncements from both ancient and recent times. It is precisely man that drives me to the final desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?

- Schelling

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. -

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Man's quest for intelligibility, for science, begins in wonder. This wonder stems from an indiscernible excess in the givenness of being. Not only are beings such as trees, mountains, and animals given to us, but we too are given to ourselves. Indeed, this givenness, the presence of being to us, is not limited to any single being. Rather, it encompasses all that there is. Our original state contains an excess of otherness, an otherness that encompasses even our presence to ourselves and our recognition of it. This is what makes man a wondering being.

Man, in his wondering, aims to overcome this overflowing otherness and the feeling of overwhelm it imprints upon us. The seed of such a quest sprouts in man's attempts to understand the particulars he encounters in experience; their transformation from the unfamiliar to that which is intimately known. This sprouting becomes a blooming when man, in his wonder, reorients himself from the particular to the universal: from a plant to vegetation, from a living being to life itself.

This manner of ascent and the fruits it bears give man a sense of safety and assurance through the successive creation of sciences. Each science claims for itself a more general domain than the preceding one, until a science that encompasses the domain of nature itself is reached. The other is no longer a true other, slowly assimilated into man's own knowing.

Man, however, reaches a stage where he realizes that his existing sciences are still insufficient. His wonder, and with it, the other, still remain. It is in this realization that the blooming reaches full flower, and man goes beyond nature, beyond physis, to metaphysics. The culmination of such a journey of wonder, the other's resistance to closure, lies in the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?

The question at hand, is no easy question. In fact, not only is it the fundamental question but also the most radical. Man in his wonder sought to overcome it, each question was one that aimed to rid man of the other and the wonder it instilled in him. Man was in a quest to transform the other from an other that is truly other to an other in which he himself as a knowing agent is made manifest to oneself. In asking 'Why there is something rather than nothing' Man returns to where he started, a return to the original beginning. Such a return is different from the initial condition in that Man does not seek to escape the other, to make away with it but to fully confront it, and in it to confront himself.

Tragically, whenever this question is posed, more often than not, the radicality of the question is missed. The question is either tamed through limiting the scope of it, so that the something in question is delimited to that which is contingent (Leibniz) or to that which is concrete i.e. spatiotemporal (Van Inwagen), or when its all-inclusive nature is realized it gets dismisses as meaningless, unthinkable. As Brain Marine states:

If 'the ultimate why question' [that is, why is there anything at all?] is taken to mean asking why there is something rather than nothing, where the expression 'nothing' is supposed to mean 'nothing at all' or 'absolutely nothing,' I don't think the question is worthy even of being called useless. It is simply meaningless. Proposing 'absolutely nothing' as the alternative to 'something' is the same as saying that there is no alternative to 'something.' ... In order for the question 'why is there something rather than nothing' to mean anything, there has to be at least in principle an alternative proposed to the existence of something. Where no alternative is proposed—as is certainly the case when one suggests that the alternative is absolutely nothing—what was formulated as a question turns out to be an assertion, the assertion of something or other.

Both approaches share a common motivation: a desire to protect intelligibility. Here, Intelligibility is understood as the relation between thoughts, statements, and what they are about. If the question is admitted, then there is something beyond intelligibility, beyond reason. What is other will then always escape reason; there will always be a remainder. Such reasoning, though driven by noble aspiration, ends up undermining what it sought to safeguard, that is, reason itself. Indeed, if reason simply is, if intelligibility is beyond questioning and is itself simply given, then reason is not, as Hegel puts it, "as it were, the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible," for reason would be blind to itself. In dismissing the unthinkable that the question raises, reason itself becomes the unthinkable.

To ask "why is there something rather than nothing?" is to ask why sense rather than nonsense, and therein lies the irony. The question asks for a ground that is no ground, a ground that escapes all thought and determination. To think the question is to think the unthinkable. It is this unthinkable that Schelling sought to confront in his positive philosophy, which he unveiled in a series of lectures. This paper aims to give a general outline of Schelling's answer to "why is there something rather than nothing?"

To fully appreciate both the impetus of Schelling's insistence on the question and his solution, it would be worthwhile to understand skepticism as Conant has shown in his paper "Two Varieties of Skepticism" not as a position one takes but as a dialectical space in which one holds a range of opposing views on the issue at hand. The problematic that inaugurated one of the two well-known skeptical dialectical spaces of modernity is that of Descartes, whose central question, as Conant demonstrates, is a whether-question: whether external reality exists, whether a certain knowing is true knowing, and so on. The second is that of Kant, with its central problematic being a how-question e.g. how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? It is within the context of this second problematic that Schelling's approach to the question is to be understood.

The Kantian problematic made it so that the actual cannot be taken prima fascia, its possibility needs to be delimited. This insight is what shaped much of the philosophical output that took place after Kant. A science of conditions of possibility of the actual however is a science of the determinations of thought. Philosophy then is the science that deals with the possibility of intelligibility. However, a problem remains. How does one proceed from the possible to the actual? Philosophy is now under the threat of being an empty formalism. Philosophy as a system of objectivity that delimits real possibility now needs to demonstrate that its principles are actual, that is, that they do govern what is actual. Philosophy needs to come to term with the cartesian problematic, the whether-question. It is this realization that acts as a background for Schelling's late philosophy.

This threat of emptiness, a lack of real content, is not just limited to philosophy conceived as a science of reason in which philosophy is no more than a system that expresses "relations of difference, devoid of positive meaning, in which each word is defined negatively as its reflexive other." Indeed, such an approach begs the question of what is being negated. A question that philosophy has no hope of answering if philosophy's subject matter is simply ideas/essences. The threat is also present in the pre-modern scholastic philosophy. In such philosophy, the faculty of intellect (understanding) was the source of universal categories such as substance, causality and so on while experience provided the particular. In essence, the understanding provided the most universal forms while experience provided the particular matter that admits of being otherwise i.e. contingent. The third source that united the previous two engender metaphysics as a knowing i.e. productive activity that departs from what can be given to experience (the realm of nature) and reaches what is beyond it, is reason as the faculty of deduction. The crown jewel, the full realization, of this philosophy as reason's activity of deduction was the idea of God in which the pole of universality was present as the universal cause and the pole of particularity was presented in His individuality. The proof for God took many forms but it suffices us to focus on only one, namely that of contingency. The argument starts from what is given as existing in experience, and so something contingent, and abstract from its actuality to then proceed in a regressive manner to its condition/ground. The series of regression terminates on the pain of the impossibility of an infinite regression and so the ground that is necessary in itself is posited. It is then inferred that the necessary ground actually exists. However, this conclusion is not warranted according to Schelling's criticism. The argument, similar to any other one, says that for the reality of the soul, takes as its starting point the givenness of something existent, it then excises this actuality in its departure to the Ideal i.e. the domain of essences. Indeed, if philosophy is just a science that pertains to answering "What is this" then all its conclusions are conditioned, that is conditioned on there being something actual. The argument for the necessary existence, God, does not then prove that God necessarily exists. Rather it proves that if God exists then He exists necessarily. Philosophy, unless it takes existence as its object, is then confined to the realm of possibility. It would only reveal how and what something exits but not that it exists.

Before proceeding further, it may be worthwhile to understand from where does Schelling retrieve this idea of a that which is above and beyond a what i.e. essence and how he understands this that in itself. As García demonstrates in 'Energeia vs Entelecheia: Schelling vs Hegel on Metaphysics Lambda' both Schelling and Hegel's method can be understood as derivative on what they took the term ἐνέργεια (energeia) to mean. The term itself admits of two conceptions. The first takes it to be the opposite of δύναμις (potentiality) and so ἐνέργεια would then be understood as 'actuality/actualization', making it interchangeable with ἐντελέχεια i.e. 'actualized.' The second understanding holds ἐνέργεια to a narrower sense that is contrasted with κίνησις (change/movement) rendering it as activity rather than actuality/actualization. The former view, that of ἐνέργεια as actualization, was that of Hegel. To him ἐνέργεια was then a processuality towards τέλος (telos), a realization of an end. The latter, that of ἐνέργεια as activity, was of Schelling. He took it in its strict sense,"as an activity that is not movement and in that sense excludes any actualization of potentiality, any process."

With this understanding of ἐνέργεια, Schelling viewed in Aristotle's metaphysics a development of ἐνέργεια as "actualization-of " something potential towards an actuality that is not the actualization of anything. This latter actuality is ἐνέργεια in the proper sense. Unlike Hegel then, there exists a sharp demarcation between ἐντελέχεια (actualization-of ) and ἐνέργεια as activity. With this in mind, one is able to understand why Schelling takes actuality to not just be a realization of a intelligible content, εἶδος (form) as actuality, that is as acting on matter is then not be conceived as concept [Begriff]. Taking εἶδος to be that fails to appreciate the fact εἶδος is individual not universal, something he himself highlights:

I can answer the question 'what is Callias' with the concept of a genus, for instance, he is a living being; but that which is for him cause of being (here then of living) is nothing universal anymore, not ousia in the second but in the first and highest sense, πρώτη οὐσία, and each has its own and this belongs to no other, while the universal is common to many; the cause is each thing itself, in the living being then what we call the soul, which is explained as the ousia, the energy of a body formed as an instrument, as its τί ἦν εἶναι, and this is also proper to each and not common to many. (Schelling, 1856-1861, DRP, XI, 406f)

Indeed, he also writes "But for him [Aristotle] Eidos is act, that is, not a mere quid [Was], but rather the quod [Daß] of the quid [Was] posited in the being, the same as the ousia, insofar as this is cause of being for the corresponding being, in our expression: that which is the being. "The only proper Daß for Schelling is God, for only He is actual for himself. This in contrast to the soul "As energeia the soul is the quod [Daß] of this determined body, but not a quod [Daß] which is separable from it. In this respect the quid [Was] is contained and conceived in the quod [das Was in dem Daß]. Only in this sense is in eidos also the concept. " Schelling supports this understanding of God as the one Aristotle intended by highlighting the fact that while the term εἶδος is used by Aristotle to describe organic life as well as human thinking as an εἶδος to be attained, inserting the idea of ἐντελέχεια and with it teleological development, he does not use the term when it comes to God's activity: "Everything that is becoming demands that which is neither as possibility nor, like the soul, as actuality of something else, and for that reason Is absolutely for itself and separated from everything else, [...], not universal anymore, but an absolutely individual being which as such is pure actuality without mixture, that excludes all potentiality, not entelecheia but energeia [...]". (Schelling, 1856 1861, DRP, XI, 412). This is contra Hegel's understanding of the Aristotelian God as mentioned by him in Lectures on the History of Philosophy: " He [God] is the substance that in its possibility also has actuality, whose essence (potentia) is itself activity, where both are not separate; in this substance the possibility is not distinct from the form, it produces itself its content, its determinations [...]. There must be a principle whose substance is grasped as activity (movement) [Bewegung]." Given his understanding of the Aristotelian God, Schelling contests that "the act of thinking" is not a capacity. God to both Schelling and Aristotle, as understood by Schelling, is not to be taken as νοῦς (a faculty of thinking), but rather as pure νόησις (actively thinking): "The highest is to such a degree actus for Aristotle, that for him God is not properly νοῦς separated from νόησις (from actual thinking). He is not mere potency of thought anymore." God then is in no need for a substrate, His own activity is who He is and so He is in no need of a substrate. The passage from Λ 9: "its thinking is a thinking on thinking" that Schelling himself quotes accentuates this fact, God is not a "substance-which-acts" but a pure, self-sustaining or substantial activity (Cf. Inciarte, 2005, 156). He simply is. The idea of God cannot be articulated in the form of 'S+P' because actuality is not predicated of Him; actuality is constitutive of Him. This puts God in contrast to anything that is articulated through 'Subject + predicate' propositions which can be or not be. How does such an understanding of God render him individual however? García suggests making a distinction between the individual as an instantiation and the individual as 'self-being.' The former regards the individual from the perspective of the matter it instantiates, of 'what it is.' As mentioned earlier, the soul falls under such a characterization, the soul for animate beings is the constituent of their self, it is what actually is each of them (Cf. Schelling, 1856-1861, DRP, XI, 408). The soul is not, however, the individual of its own self, it is "Daß of a Was." God as existing is not that which is considered from the viewpoint of what is it but from the fact that it exists, God need not answer to a What. His being from the consideration of a 'What is it' is a result of His free choice to be. As Schelling himself states: "That which Is Being, as that which is absolutely free of essence, or free of idea (namely for itself and considered apart from Being), cannot even be the One, but just one, Ἕν τι, which for Aristotle means the same as that which is a this (a τόδε τι ὄν) and that which is able to be-for itself, the χωριστόν." (Schelling, 1856-1861, DRP, XI, 314). And he also writes "Because God is Being, but against this still has a being of His own, a being that He has even without Being. [...]. Nevertheless, that He is independent of Being according to his pure self, this we know, and this whole science is based on the assumption that Being is separable from him" (Schelling, 1856-1861, DRP, XI, 418).

As stated earlier, pure Daß, the absolute prius, is the starting point of positive philosophy. The desire to know the pure Daß is what initiates philosophy, but how does philosophy such conceived proceed? Given that the pure Daß is in virtue of itself lacking any quid is unthinkable then the beginning of the science as knowing is with which could possibly be or not-be. As Schelling himself says "Positive philosophy could potentially begin purely for itself with the mere dictum: 'I want that which is beyond being' " where being here refers to its traditional understanding as answering the 'what is it.' It is this desire to know that compels reason as the faculty of knowing (faculty here means no other than the possibility to be actualized) to move itself towards its immediate object. As the infinite possibility to know/cognize reason has for its immediate object the possibility i.e. potentiality to be. As a pure potentiality of that-which-could-be, i.e. the figure of Being as a whole, this immediate object of reason, the first potentiality can both be and not-be. However, if Being's figure that is the totality of that-which-could-be was merely that then Being would not that-which-could be, it would instead be that-which-absolutely-is. Why is that the case? Being is general but as we have shown only the individual is what actually exists, the essential/idea/general is simply a possibility that could be actualized or not. Whether it is or is not is dependent on the free decision of God Himself to be i.e. be knowable/cognizable. Now, if the figure/totality of that which-could-be had for itself as a determination the first possibility then as we stated earlier it would immediately become that-which-absolutely-is. The first potentiality would then not be a possibility but that which simply and absolutely is. That cannot be the case. What we have on our hand, is a virtual contradiction, virtual and not actual because it is in thought and not in reality. Schelling resolves this through his dialectical method.

Schelling's dialectics cannot be that of Hegel in which progression takes place through an immanent movement in which progress is made through a sublation, that is what was logically implicit in the preceding concept is made explicit in the following concept. The truth of the former is partially negated and partially preserved in the proceeding, and higher, concept enriching the former through the lens of the latter. Instead, as Beach points out in his paper 'The Later Schelling's Conception of Dialectical Method, in Contradistinction to Hegel's' Schelling's dialectic, what he terms as productive dialectics, obtains its successive forms not as produced by a kind of procreative causality that reenacts the process by which the outer universe came to be, the act of creation. A second potentiality is then posited not as a sublation of the first but along with the first. The second potentiality is pure being, it is that which must be. If the first was the will that could will or not will, then the second is the will that must will, it is the will that acts on the first potency to keep it in its state of repose, that is as a pure possibility. The first potentiality for Schelling is the subject, and the second the object. The first is subjects because in virtue of it being pure possibility it admits i.e. is receptive to predication. The first potentiality is the subject of Being, Being determinability to be. The second potentiality is the object in so far it is that which must lack any capacity to be, it simply is that which is. And so is the objective pole. Those two potencies that are in opposition to each other cannot be the entirety of the figure of that-which-could be. The third potency is what stands in the middle between those two disjuncts as free from both, only as the equipollence of both willing and not-willing does the third appear as the unity of both, as a neither/nor, the unity of subject-object. Those three together constitute the figure of Being.

What was just sketched out above was the totality of possibility of that-which-could-be, including the absolute as pure Daß if he himself wills to be i.e. to have an essence and act to create. Only in this act of willing, a willing that could very much not be is the absolute Daß God. For Schelling God is God in as much He is the lord of His own being. It should be noted however, that what we sketched is a negative procedure in the sense that it lacks any actuality to it by itself. It is nothing but a provisional proof whose truth is granted if there is existence. For the proof to be realized then a turn to the real must be made, and given that the real is in experience the turn is towards experience. But how does a turn to experience make philosophy positive? how does it make it progressive that is as taking the absolute as its point of departure and not merely as its end. These are valid questions for God is not present in experience. How does one then prove that what has been charted out above in thought is what actually happened? Given that things exist and are given to us in experience, Schelling takes it to be that God's act has already passed. It cannot be witnessed as it is what's prior to creation and experience. The turn to experience then provides a proof in so far that the progression of experience presents the deeds of God's act. Given that experience is yet to end however, the actual/real proof for God to Schelling is always incomplete/provisional. While there is more to say about the actualization of the potencies and experience acting as proof such topics are beyond the scope of this paper. What will be said however is that in turning to experience an interesting entailment that characterizes positive philosophy must be brought to our reader's attention. Positive philosophy is both a priori and a posteriori. The former in so far, its start is what is before any experience, the absolute, and a posteriori in that it proceeds through experience. It should also be noted that positive philosophy in proceeding through experience is historical. Indeed, to Schelling philosophy is historical.

Bruno in 'The Facticity of Time Conceiving Schelling's Idealism of Ages' remarks that there is a reciprocal relation between the negative aspect of philosophy and the positive similar to the epistemic reciprocity between intuition and concept in Kant. In the same way intuitions are blind without concepts and concepts are empty without intuition, the rational (i.e. negative philosophy) is empty without existence (i.e. the positive) and existence is blind (i.e. unthinkable) without rationality. Under such a view the positive and the negative mutually condition each other. However, this is a mistaken view. This view is operating from the standpoint of negative philosophy. Indeed, as Tritten highlights to Schelling there is no path from the ideal (thought/essence) to the individual, only from the individual to the ideal. In the co-belonging of thought and Being, thought i.e. reason occupy the subordinate position: To ask how the general could actualize itself and make itself individual and particular is to ask how, why and to what end the One would ever depart from itself. To this question there is no answer. The problematic is instead how the absolute Individual makes itself intelligible, how it becomes thinkable and conceivable, in short, how it manifests itself. The question is not how the general develops but how the individual is undeveloped, i. e. revealed. The absolute Individual, the unprethinkable Daß, enters the realm of intelligibility and thus thinkability, the realm of reason and possible acknowledgment, by realizing itself as an all-encompassing essence (das alles begreifende Wesen) (II/1, 588, "Quelle"). Praxis always holds priority over theory. The post-Kantians and among them the early Schelling himself took it upon themselves to construct a philosophical science, a science of reason excised from all facticity i.e. contingency contra Hegel (add reference to my paper in the first issue). Throughout his philosophical development however Schelling came to realize a point once made by Maimon, an early critic of Kant, any system of intelligibility must account for its own actualization lest it risks being an empty formalism, a castle in the sky. Presented in general outline was Schelling's answer to this problematic, if philosophy is to be more than the fancy of reason it needs to deal with facticity, with existence. Schelling's late philosophy is of relevance not just for its originality but in the sense that Schelling could be regarded as the last great western metaphysician in the storied canon of metaphysics; he was the last philosopher to use metaphysics to address the concrete, the actual, the contingent. The remainder of reason. After Schelling, the 19th century witnessed the rise of many non-metaphysical movements, phenomenology, existentialism and Marxism. All such schools were influenced by Schelling's late philosophy one way or the other. Indeed, both Kierkegaard and Engels, each of monumental relevance to existentialism and Marxism respectively. One then ought to ask, does philosophy's attempt to wrestle with the factual spell the 'death of metaphysics'?