MRP Proposal - Freedom, Evil, Violence: Friedrich Schelling and the Death of God
Patrick Ramrattan (1178584)
Supervisor: David L. Clark
12/03/03
According to journalist and Nietzsche biographer Lesley Chamberlain (Nietzsche in
Turin), German idealism was ‘a unique kind of philosophy’ in which ‘God still headed up
systematic explanations of man and nature and the meaning of life’ (Par. 3). In other
words, German Idealism was a philosophy that ought to have been rendered irrelevant
by Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum ‘God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed
him’ (224). I find Chamberlain’s assessment to be intriguing in so far as it seems to
capture what I think is the common perception of German idealism: that it is an outdated
philosophy for our post-metaphysical, post-humanist age. Against this assessment, I
want to forward the radical claim that the death of God plays a central role in German
idealism, particularly in the work of German idealist Friedrich Schelling. Using
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject, I argue that Schelling’s mythical
accounts of pre-history and the creation of existence in Philosophical Investigations into
the Essence of Human Freedom (Freedom Essay) and Ages of the World are theoretical
accounts of the death of God.
What is the pertinence of examining Friedrich Schelling as a death of God
theorist? It is not my only intention to remedy a greatly misunderstood thinker (and his
tradition more generally) by re-situating his work as death of God theory for merely
intellectual purposes alone. In addition to this, I argue that the death of God is central to
the radical breakthroughs in Schelling’s texts on the subjects of ethics and ontology, and
that these breakthroughs can greatly aid us in thinking about the crisis of objective
violence. In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Slavoj Žižek argues that today,
At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and
terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to
disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible "subjective"
violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive
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the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back
enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence
and to promote tolerance (1)
In other words, Žižek thinks that today’s societies tend to entertain a Panglossian
ideological attitude towards objective violence, in which we see our given political,
economic, and social systems as the best means for the cessation of subjective
violence, and rarely if ever do we consider them to be the conditions of that very
violence. Instead, the very intensification of subjective violence that we witness in our
day-to-day lives is often met with calls for the intensification of violent systems. Given
the contemporary proliferation of objective violence, Žižek poses to us the question: how
are we to take responsibility for objective violence, an invisible circuit of violence into
which we are thrust and simultaneously implicated as both victim and aggressor?
Although Schelling’s texts do not address or answer Žižek’s question directly, I argue
that the innovative re-thinking of ethics and ontology in Schelling’s Freedom Essay
fashions us with a post-death-of-God ethics that can both clarify, and suggest possible
avenues of response to, the crisis of objective violence.
In sum, I have made three assertions that will inform my major research project: 1)
that Friedrich Schelling’s Freedom Essay and Ages of the World are, when read with a
Lacanian inflection, accounts of the death of God; 2) that the death of God is central to
Schelling’s radical re-thinking of both ethics and ontology; 3) that Schelling’s Freedom
Essay can fashion us with a post-death-of-God ethics that is uniquely situated to
address the crisis of objective violence. The structure of my MRP will be broken in to
four parts, the first part being a general introduction, with the subsequent parts deploying
arguments for each of the three assertions.
The general introduction will expand on the forgoing paragraphs by introducing the
key themes of the MRP in detail. In addition to this, my primary concern in this section
will be to situate Schelling and Žižek’s texts in relation to each other so that a dialogue
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between these two very different texts becomes possible. I argue that the identification
of violence (subjective or objective) pre-supposes a system of meaning that makes the
distinction between good and evil actions (a form of ethics). From this perspective,
Žižek’s text can be interpreted as an analysis and critique of the sort of ethics (or the
lack thereof) that renders objective violence invisible. This interpretation of Žižek’s text
parallels the concerns that motivate the Freedom Essay insofar as Schelling’s primary
objective in the essay is to critique ethical systems that render evil invisible by denying
the positive existence of evil (i.e. theodicy). Against these systems, Schelling will argue
that a necessary feature of any ethics, ontology, or politics will be a struggle to come to
terms with ‘the truly diabolical’ (Clark). With these features of Schelling and Žižek’s texts
in mind, I argue that both texts taken together form a cohesive dialogue in which we
might see Žižek as highlighting the ideological-political foundations of contemporary
systems of ethics, and Schelling as theorizing a radical ethics with which to replace
them.
The first of the three argumentative sections of my MRP will begin with an
examination of Schelling’s myths of pre-history and creation. My objective is to use
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theses on subjectivity to re-asses Schelling’s myths and
re-situate them into the discourse of death of God theory. My argument begins by
introducing Lacan’s theory of the subject, in which lack is posited as the crucial condition
for the possibility of subjectivity. Lack is a surplus product, a dissonant gap that is
produced between identity and non-identity, contraction and expansion, the Symbolic
and the Real. I argue that this lack, this ‘power of the middle’ (65) as Žižek calls it, is
precisely what God loses in Schelling’s mythical accounts of God’s genesis. Schelling’s
mythical accounts of the genesis of God are accounts of God’s struggle to achieve
absolute self-identity out of an undifferentiated state. Reading the myths in the vulgar
and perversely heterodox way that Žižek does in The Indivisible Remainder, I argue that
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Schelling has God achieve this state in the myths to demonstrate the Lacanian paradox
that absolute subjectivity is simultaneously the negation of subjectivity. In other words, a
God that is an absolute subject is a dead God.
The objective of the second section of my MRP will be to argue that the death of
God is a central feature of Schelling’s radical rethinking of ethics and ontology. My
argument begins by explicating the argument made by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt,
that although Schelling’s texts are primarily concerned with the philosophical
problematics of human freedom and the genesis of God, they also ought to be read as
direct critical engagements with the philosophy of theodicy (Love and Schmidt x). I argue
that it is this critical engagement that accounts for the specific form the death of God
takes in Schelling’s text, the death of God as subject, and that this has two
consequences that shapes Schelling’s radical re-thinking of ethics and ontology:
1) Evil is ontological, a feature of existence – The development of existence is no
longer governed by God, or some other transcendent subject that is absolutely
outside of existence, that would give us reason to think that evil served some
higher reason or purpose. Instead, evil has to be understood as a concrete
feature of existence.
2) Evil can be impersonal and meaningless – Lacking a transcendent subject
governing existence in a specifically meaningful or reasoned way, evil is not
restricted to inter-personal exchanges between human subjects.
I argue that these two consequences of the death of God in Schelling’s work are crucial
to his radical conclusion that posits ‘interpenetration of physics and ethics’ (Toscano 80):
that ethics, ethical action, is a way of relating to existence.
The third argumentative section will focus on unfolding the consequences and
dynamics of Schelling’s post-death-of-God ethics. In addition to this, my primary
objective in this section will be to address how this new ethics might aid us in confronting
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the crisis of objective violence. Although I have yet to exhaustively draw out all the
conclusions for this section, there are three insights I will draw attention to at this stage:
1) That the expanded scope of Schelling’s ethics draws our attention to the fact that
the failure to identify objective violence and confront it highlights the existence of
a deficient set of ethics that pervasively undergird our everyday practices.
2) Schelling’s post-death-of-God ethics highlights the ideological efficiency of
theodicy in contemporary late-capitalism. Using Žižek’s model of ideology, I
argue that although we may readily assent to contemporary discourses that posit
existence as being contingently governed, we nevertheless act as though we
were believers in a form of theodicy when we fail to engage with objective
violence.
3) The confrontation with objective violence becomes not simply an ethical concern
to do good or evil, but instead, with Schelling’s post-death-of-God ethics, ethics
becomes a way of relating to the world in which the confrontation with objective
violence becomes the sole condition for human freedom.
Understandably, these last few propositions are a bit vague as I am still in the
process of developing them. They will be clarified and expanded upon in the MRP.
Several other questions remain that were unaddressed in this proposal, such as: What is
the relation between Nietzsche’s death of God and Schelling’s? What of Lacan’s
theoretical distinction between biological and symbolic death? Where does the third
order of violence, divine violence, fit into Schelling’s post-death-of-God ethics? I hope to
address these questions in detail throughout the deployment of my central argument in
the MRP.
Bibliography:
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Chamberlain, Lesley. ‘The Political Message of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’’, The
Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/07/politicalmessage-nietzsche-god-is-dead?INTCMP=SRCH). Guardian News and Media Ltd.,
2011.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Nietzsche Reader. Eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan
Large. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Schelling, Friedrich W.J. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human
Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. SUNY Press, 2006.
Toscano, Alberto. ‘Fanaticism and Production: Schelling’s Philosophy of Indifference’,
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 8 (1999), pp. 46-70.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. Verso,
1996.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Picador, 2008.
Proposed Bibliography:
Benjamin, Walter. ‘Critique of Violence’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings. Shocken, 1986.
Chamberlain, Lesley. ‘The Political Message of Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’’, The
Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/07/politicalmessage-nietzsche-god-is-dead?INTCMP=SRCH). Guardian News and Media Ltd.,
2011.
Clark, David L. ‘Mourning Becomes Theory: Schelling and the Absent Body of
Philosophy’, Posthuman Destinies: Science, Culture, Integral Yoga
(http://www.sciy.org/2010/06/23/mourning-becomes-theory-schelling-and-the-absentbody-of-philosophy-by-david-l-clark/). Posthuman Destinies, 2010.
Heidegger, Martin. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Ohio University Press, 1985.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Warner S. Pluhar. Hackett, 2002.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Leibniz, G.W. Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays. Trans. Daniel Garber and
Roger Ariew. Hackett Publishing Company, 1991.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Nietzsche Reader. Eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan
Large. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Norman, Judith and Allistair Welch, eds. The New Schelling. Continuum, 2004.
Plato. Timmaeus and Critas. Penguin UK, 2008.
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Rajan, Tilottama and David L. Clark, eds. Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
and Contemporary Theory. SUNY, Press 1995.
Schelling, Friedrich W.J. Ages of the World. Trans. Jason M. Wirth. SUNY Press, 2000.
Schelling, Friedrich W.J. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human
Freedom. Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. SUNY Press, 2006.
Toscano, Alberto. ‘Fanaticism and Production: Schelling’s Philosophy of Indifference’,
Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 8 (1999), pp. 46-70.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. Verso,
1996.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.
Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. Verso, 2008.
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