Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil

Abstract

Overcoming his early admiration of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science and his philosophy of the “absolute I,” Schelling crowned his own philosophy of nature with an account of the emergence of the absolute out of itself. The only way in which God or the absolute might thus emerge and evolve was if it encompassed within itself what was both itself and not itself. Two years after Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schelling published his Freedom essay, arguably setting Hegel’s 1807 dialectic on its head. Starting with God (or what-is) as a self-organizing being, Schelling introduced vitality and self-origin into an absolute that was no longer a historic terminus ad quem. By reviving Spinoza’s holism, Schelling proposed a new logic of identity: A=A and their indiscernible difference, or B. The possibility of the living absolute giving rise to itself thus resulted from two principles existing in “indifference to each other” yet inseparable, and there was no third term by which to distinguish them. Eschewing Hegelian dialectic in favor of contrariety in a genre, Schelling characterized the coexistence as Sehnsucht, an objectless “affect” out of which emerged an incipient order. All living beings contained this bi-une principle. However, in humans the two could become unbalanced, thereby accounting for the possibility of evil, of “a merely particular will” striving for ascendency. While this characterized evil in humans, the tension between the two principles, which had begun as Sehnsucht, would soon be called angst in the Ages of the World, underscoring the importance of the affect.