Principales problemas que afectan al productor de maíz

Schelling doesn’t explicitly identify the two kinds of will with natural appetition and spiritual volition. But there is no question that with the emergence of human freedom, the productivity of nature generates a product that is fundamentally distinct from everything which has come before:

It can readily be seen that in the tension of longing necessary to bring things completely to birth the innermost nexus of the forces can only be released in a graded evolution, and at every stage in the division of forces there is developed out of nature a new being whose soul must be all the more perfect the more differentiatedly it contains what was left undifferentiated in the others. It is the task of a complete philosophy of nature to show how each successive process more closely approaches the essence of nature, until in the highest division of forces the innermost center is disclosed. 110

This highest stage of nature’s ahistorical evolution is the human spirit, the form of life which is no longer mere nature since nature has differentiated itself so drastically in the emergence of human freedom. But as Schelling remarks here, this self-differentiation of nature as sprit also consists in a return to the ‘innermost centre’ of nature. What might this ‘innermost centre’ be? In what sense is the emergence of spirit as the ‘highest division of [nature’s] forces’ disclosive of nature’s essence? Again, on appearance it looks as though Schelling conceives nature and spirit as identical in the sense of ‘coincidence’. For if nature’s developmental process culminates in the emergence of a being which discloses nature’s true

SW I/7: 362; Freedom, p. 37.

core, isn’t nature ‘spiritual’ all along? And isn’t spirit a more ‘essentially natural’ form of being than any other?

On my view, this passage does help us to understand how Schelling conceives the ‘originary’ identity between nature and spirit, but it does not express the idea that nature and spirit merely coincide as two aspects of the same being. On the contrary, with the notion that the emergence of spirit discloses the ‘inner centre’ of nature, I believe Schelling finally unifies the two conceptions of nature-spirit identity at work in his early philosophy of nature. To see this, let’s first consider the question, what is the ‘innermost centre of nature’ which the emergence of spirit discloses? It is nothing less than the creative relationship between ground and existence. Spiritual freedom is not some contingent phenomenon that emerges from a non-intelligible ground; rather, spiritual freedom emerges as distinct from nature insofar as spiritual existence expresses more essentially than any merely natural

product the creative capacities of nature itself. Indeed, individuated human existence exemplifies the creative power of nature in a manner unparalleled in organic life. For the spiritual creature is nothing less than the power for ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’, which Schelling defines ontologically as the power to affirm the relationship between ground and existence and the power to pervert that relationship. The will of the spirit, which actively engages with the relationship between ground and existence, repeats—at a higher and therefore ontologically distinct level—the originary will of nature through which all of nature’s products are generated.

As I argued in Chapters 1 and 2, Schelling’s earlier work operates with two conceptions of nature-spirit identity: an identity of emergence (the theme of the early nature philosophy) and an ‘originary identity’ or an identity of coincidence (largely implicit in the nature philosophy and thematised in the identity philosophy). I described these ‘models’ of nature-spirit identity as incompatible since it isn’t clear how an already spiritual nature can give rise to an ontologically distinct spiritual existence, or how a basically natural spirit (e.g. spirit as ‘visible nature’) can emerge as ontologically distinct from nature. The idealist logic of emergence requires that what is unified through the process of emergence involves

differentiation. From this perspective, it looks as though the idealist logic of emergence simply has no room for an ‘originary identity’ of nature and spirit.

But with the Freedom essay’s description of the emergence of spirit as potentiating nature’s intrinsic productivity through a creative engagement with ground and existence, Schelling is able to bring together his two conceptions of nature-spirit identity. Whereas in the identity philosophy (and certain passages from the early nature philosophy), nature and spirit are understood as two aspects of the same being, the Freedom essay presents spirit as emergent from nature in such a manner as to activate nature’s inner creative power in a novel manner, thereby expressing a primordial identity between natural production (the will of the depths) and spiritual self-determination (the will of love and its potential perversion). In this way, the processual identity of nature and spirit paradoxically achieves a ‘primordial’ identity. For in the potentiation of nature as spirit, a form of being emerges which expresses the essential character of nature’s own potentiating process, i.e. its creative will. Thus, nature and spirit are not only ‘identical’ insofar as spirit emerges from nature as its ontological consequent, but they are identical because this spiritual consequent of nature’s activity discloses the inner unity of that activity with the freedom of spirit. The ‘originary identity’ of nature and spirit, therefore, does not preexist—logically speaking—the emergence of spirit from nature; on the contrary, it is only through the ontological (yet ahistorical) process of emergence that the primordial unity of nature and spirit itself emerges.

Another way to see this is to consider the fact that, for Schelling, ‘indifference’ names the originary identity of nature and spirit in the system of identity. But as we saw above, in the Freedom essay Schelling reinterprets the logic of identity as ‘intrinsically creative’ and consequently conceives ‘indifference’—the copula in judgment—as nothing 111

other than the ‘becoming’ of ground and existence. The natural ground of spiritual existence

becomes ground insofar as it grounds spiritual freedom, and spiritual freedom becomes the spirit it is insofar as nature grounds that existence. Nature and spirit are, and are intrinsically united as ground and consequent, only because they become what they are through their inner unity—the copula. But with this reformulation of the logic of indifference, Schelling

SW I/7: 345; Freedom, p. 18. My emphasis.

argues that there could be no ‘indifference’ without the emergence of spirit from nature. We can see that Schelling was already onto this thought before the Freedom essay. In the 1806 edition of the World-Soul (a text which was published a third time with the Freedom essay), Schelling argues that the bond (i.e. the copula) between nature and spirit is only as bond—is only the indifference it is—when it in fact unites nature and spirit (that which is bonded). 112

And as we have seen, it is entirely clear in the Freedom essay that this unification of nature and spirit is a necessarily creative unification, an identity in which nature contracts as ground in order to allow spiritual existence to become. Indifference, then, the originary identity of nature and spirit, is only insofar as nature becomes spirit, for indifference is nothing other than this becoming.

In Chapter 7, I will argue that in the Freedom essay Schelling is already on his way to conceiving the generation of spiritual existence from nature as a historical event. By understanding absolute identity in terms of genesis, it is no surprise that Schelling soon turns his attention to historical creation and the ontological character of the pre-spiritual past. Yet in the Freedom essay, Schelling continues to insist upon the atemporal character of the nature-spirit relation, hence my identification of Schelling’s thought, up to and including the

Freedom essay, as presenting us with a logic of emergence. In Part II of this thesis, I turn to Hegel’s version of this idealist logic.

SW I/2: 361.