The distinction between antecedent and consequent in predication brings Schelling to the pair of concepts for which the Freedom essay is best known: ground and existence. Incidentally, Schelling writes that his own nature philosophy ‘first established [this] distinction…between being [Wesen] insofar as it exists, and being [Wesen] insofar as it is the mere ground of existence’. 14
There is a further and highly significant connection between the philosophy of nature and the pair ‘ground/existence’. To see this, we must recognise that the ground/existence pair is a conceptual pair, and as such, it applies to various beings: inanimate objects, animals, humans, and so on. However, in the broadest sense, ground and existence refer to
God. The Freedom essay is, after all, an essay on pantheism. But here the identity at the heart of pantheism proves unusual: The ground of God’s existence, although not external to
SW I/7: 357; Freedom, p. 31. Translation modified, my emphasis. What is more, Schelling goes on to say
14
that this distinction is precisely what distinguishes his thought from Spinoza’s (SW I/7: 357; Freedom, pp. 31-32).
God as a whole, is somehow other than his existence. Indeed, the ground of existence does not itself exist, and this goes for the ground of divine existence as well: the ground of divine existence, although divine as ground is not divine existence per se. Now, why is this related in any way to Schelling’s philosophy of nature? Because in the very passage in which Schelling distinguishes between God’s ground and existence, he identifies the ground of the divine life as nothing other than nature itself: ‘This ground of his existence, which God contains, is not God viewed as absolute, that is insofar as he exists. For it is only the ground of his existence, it is nature.’ 15
Nature is the ground of God’s existence, and, as ground, nature is ‘not to be called God’ even though it is, properly speaking, contained within God as the broader unity of his ground and his existence. I will come to consider this ‘broader unity’ in detail below. At 16
this stage, it is important to clarify the ontological character of the natural ground of the divine life. First, we should note that when Schelling describes ground as nature he does not have in mind nature insofar as it exists in determinate natural products. Instead, Schelling identifies ground with nature’s essential productivity, the productivity responsible for the emergence of all individual being (all of which is in God). Again, Heidegger is helpful in elucidating Schelling’s thought here:
[‘Nature’] signifies a metaphysical determination of beings in general and means what belongs to beings as their foundation, but is that which does not really enter the being of the self. Rather, it always remains what is distinguished from the self. 17
These remarks should not, however, imply that when Schelling identifies the ground of God’s existence as ‘nature’ he doesn’t mean precisely what he says, that ‘ground’ in the most general sense is nothing other than nature. Thus, keeping in mind the notion that ground is an non-individuated, productive depth, we can understand Schelling’s conception of the nature-spirit relation in light of Schelling’s identification of ground with nature. To do
SW I/7: 358; Freedom, p. 32. Translation modified.
15
SW I/7: 398; Freedom, p. 78.
16
Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 112.
so, let’s consider the pantheistic statement ‘nature is spirit’. Given Schelling’s identification of ground with nature, this pantheistic statement can be read as the central albeit implicit thesis of the Freedom essay. But in order to see this, we need to keep in mind Schelling’s logic of predication and acknowledge that Schelling’s interest in the principle of identity is not a merely formal interest in the logic of judgment. On the contrary, the relationship between antecedent and consequent in predication reveals the ontological relationship between ground and existence. Thus, when Schelling designates ‘ground’ as ‘nature’, we should read this back into his logic of identity wherein ground corresponds to the subject of any given judgment. Nature, therefore, proves to be the quintessential subject in predication. And although Schelling does not explicitly say so, it follows that the statement ‘nature is spirit’ is the statement of identity par excellence, since it expresses the pantheistic maxim by positing nature as the ground of spiritual existence.
The implications of Schelling’s logic of identity for his conception of the nature- spirit relation now become clear. Because statements of identity do not express sameness
between subject and predicate, the pantheistic statement ‘nature is spirit’ does not claim that spirit can be reduced to nature (or vice versa). On the contrary, the true statement of nature- spirit identity expresses the notion that spirit unfolds from nature as distinct from it. ‘Nature is spirit’ must therefore be read as a statement of nature’s self-differentiation, or as the
unfolding of spirit from nature. Just as ‘this body is blue’ describes the manner in which ‘blueness’ unfolds as distinct from ‘this body’, ‘nature is spirit’ expresses the genuine standpoint of pantheism, that nature is spirit insofar as nature explicates itself as the spiritual
existence which it itself is not. But the order of dependence is utterly crucial here: spirit is
only insofar as it is consequent upon nature as its non-spiritualground. 18
Reading the statement ‘nature is spirit’ in this manner, we gain a better sense of what Schelling means when he says that the Spinozist concept of immanence should be replaced with ‘the concept of becoming…the only [concept] adequate to the nature of things’. The 19
‘thing’ with which Schelling is most concerned in the Freedom essay is, of course, human freedom, and thus the overcoming of Spinozism involves providing a genetic account of human freedom. To be sure, in the Freedom essay, Schelling does not go so far as to understand this becoming of human freedom in temporal terms. Schelling is explicit here, as in his early nature philosophy regarding the emergence of spirit, that existence is not
temporally consequent upon the ground of existence, but rather that the relation between antecedent and consequent in predication discloses a relation of ontological dependence. 20
Nonetheless, throughout the the Freedom essay, Schelling is at pains to uncover the birth of light from darkness; the actualisation of the good from out of the possibility of evil; the
emergence of conscious understanding from preconscious will. The language Schelling uses throughout the Freedom essay—and in Schelling’s thought more generally—indicates an implicit concern for historical creation and development. As we will see in Chapter 7, Schelling finally comes to embrace a conception of genesis as historical in the Ages of the
The above is a simplification of Schelling’s argument. Complexities arise when we consider the fact that
18
Schelling understands dialectical thought to require that we consider the inverse formulation, ‘spirit is nature’, as also expressive of the ground-existence relation. It might seem, then, that I am stacking the cards in favour of my emergentist reading by arguing that ‘nature is spirit’ is the pantheistic identity statement par excellence. However, Schelling himself identifies the ground of God—in which all beings have their being—as nature. It follows that the statement ‘nature is spirit’, where ‘nature’ occupies the place of grammatical subject, expresses something more fundamental than the inverse statement, ‘spirit is nature’. I’d like to suggest that while the statement ‘spirit is nature’ must also be central to Schelling’s philosophical thought, this statement should be read as a higher-order claim analogous to the higher-order (and therefore ontologically derivative) development from spirit to nature presented in the System of Transcendental Idealism. In that work, the construction of matter is really a reconstruction of matter from the standpoint of productive intuition (SW I/3: 440-454; System of Transcendental Idealism, pp. 83-93). Nature as cognisable is consequent upon spirit as its ground, and the claim ‘spirit is nature’ expresses this cognitive achievement of nature-spirit identity. But this higher-order identity between nature and spirit is only possible because sheer nature makes spirit possible in the first place, namely, as its logical consequent. The Schellingian dialectic is not, therefore, cyclical but directional: it moves from nature to the spirit which subsequently proves to be united with itself in its knowledge of nature.
SW I/7: 358-359; Freedom, p. 33. My emphasis.
19
SW I/7: 358; Freedom, p. 33.
World project of the 1810s. Prior to that period, however, any notion of natural-historical development remains merely hinted at in Schelling’s thought. The atemporal relationship between nature and spirit is, however, entirely clear: spiritual freedom depends upon a nature from what it is distinct and in this dependence proves its ontological continuity with nature. By conceiving spiritual freedom as a consequence of nature’s productive powers, spiritual subjectivity is dethroned from its reign over what is. At the same time, such a dethroning saves spirit from reductionism and, as we will see below, allows Schelling to champion spirit as the greatest of nature’s products.