Part II: Ontological Problemata in Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Light of the Potenzenlehre
III. Copula: the dynamics of identity
540 SW XIII, 165: “Solang die Vernunft sich selbst zum Objekt macht (und diese Richtung war ihr durch Kant gegeben und tief eingeprägt), kann sie als ihren unmittelbaren Inhalt nur die unendliche Potenz des Seyns finden - dadurch sieht sie sich in die apriorische Stellung gegen alles Seyn, aber nur gegen das endliche gesetzt;
sie kann aber selbst mit diesem nicht zu Stande kommen, es nicht – zum Abschluß bringen, ohne das
Ueberseyende zu fordern, dieses aber hat ein ganz anderes Prius, nämlich nicht die Potenz, sondern das Seyn, und zwar das Seyn, dem kein Denken einen Grund oder Anfang finden kann. Wenn die Vernunft sich selbst Gegenstand ist, wenn das Denken sich auf den Inhalt der Vernunft richtet, wie in der negative Philosophie, so ist dieß etwas Zufälliges, die Vernunft ist dabei nicht in ihrer reinen Substantialität und Wesentlichkeit.” For English, see GPP, p. 205.
541 SW XIII, 155 (For English, see GPP, p. 198): “Das Letzte nun aber, was existiren kann, ist die Potenz, die nicht mehr Potenz, sondern, weil das Seyende selbst, reiner Actus ist; wir könnten sie darum die seyende Potenz nennen.“
542 Before we go on, however, it must be noted that in addition to the two Janus-faces of the unconditioned, there is a third face. If we are to keep with the Janus metaphor, it would be a face pointing upwards – or downwards. Following Schelling’s claim in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom that that the ground of all things and all duality has to be an essence that we cannot but name Ungrund (“vor allem Grund und vor allem Existirenden, also überhaupt vor aller Dualität, ein Wesen seyn muss“
and that “wir es [nichts] anders nennen [können] als den Urgrund oder vielmehr Ungrund“ – SW VII, 406 and PI, p. 68), and following the reasoning that both material production and conceptual determination emerged from something other than them if they emerged at all and if there is a beginning at all, we are forced to postulate the existence of Ungrund – and stay silent in its face, insofar as it is not just non-conceptual, it also does not stand in any relationship to any concept. To use some foreshadowing, the unprethinkable and ground both contain the concept’s extainment, while the Ungrund does not. To try and define the unground by transforming it into a principle, as we did in Chapter I with the unprethinkable being: it is that principle by which everything, no matter how primordial, is a consequent and has an antecedent.
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Identity, as Schelling points out pithily in the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, is not sameness.543 Indeed, in his middle and late writings, Schelling coins a concept of identity which points to a generative form of identity.544 Hence, if we use this concept to think about identity, then the statement “unprethinkable being is the fact of unprethinkability of being” does not mean that unprethinkable being is the fact of unprethinkability in the exact same way in which it is the unprethinkable being, and neither does it mean that the unprethinkable being and the fact of unprethinkability correlate, as as they are not separated, as if lying on two parallel lines, to then be correlated. Rather, the statement should be read according to “[t]he ancients’ profoundly meaningful logic differentiat[ing] subject and predicate as what precedes and what follows (antecedens et consequens)”.545According to this logic, there is a relationship of antecedent and consequent between the unprethinkable being and the fact of being’s unprethinkability, whereby the actual unprethinkable being is the real temporal antecedent of the fact of unprethinkability: the unprethinkable being has to exist out there, in order for anything – including the fact of unprethinkability as a transcendental condition – to be generated. The fact of being’s unprethinkability is, after all, only a local emergence,546 conditioned,547 there because-of-thought without ceasing to be the condition of because-of-thought. Moreover, the statement of identity between the unprethinkable being and the fact of unprethinkability can be meaningfully reversed, without it becoming just a play on words – in any relationship between antecedent
543 SW VII, 341: “Der Grund solcher Mißdeutungen, welche auch andere Systeme in reichem Maß erfahren haben, liegt in dem allgemeinen Mißverständniß des Gesetzes der Identität oder des Sinns der Copula im Urtheil. Ist es gleich einem Kinde begreiflich zu machen, daß in keinem möglichen Satz, der der
angenommenen Erklärung zufolge die Identität des Subjekts mit dem Prädicat aussagt, eine Einerleiheit oder auch nur ein unvermittelter Zusammenhang dieser beiden ausgesagt werde - indem z. B. der Satz: dieser Körper ist blau, nicht den Sinn hat, der Körper sey in dem und durch das, worin und wodurch er Körper ist, auch blau, sondern nur den, dasselbe, was dieser Körper ist, sey, obgleich nicht in dem nämlichen Betracht, auch blau: so ist doch diese Voraussetzung, welche eine völlige Unwissenheit über das Wesen der Copula anzeigt, in Bezug auf die höhere Anwendung des Identitätsgesetzes zu unsrer Zeit beständig gemacht worden.“ For English, see: PI, 13.
544 For an interesting approach to identity, which considers the law of identity in Schelling as threefold: as absolute identity, as quantitative indifference (the point at which subject and predicate meet) and as the quantitative difference between subject and predicate, see Rie, S.: Individualität und Selbstheit. Paderborn:
2005, p. 72, [zit. Individualität und Selbstheit]. For perhaps the most important discussion of identity in the Identitätsphilosophie, in the literature, see Das Unendliche Mangel, p. 187ff.
545 PI, 14. For German, see: SW VII, 342: “Die alte tiefsinnige Logik unterschied Subjekt und Prädicat als vorangehendes und folgendes (antecedens et consequens), und drückte damit den reellen Sinn des
Identitätsgesetzes aus. Selbst in dem tautologischen Satz, wenn er nicht etwa ganz sinnlos seyn soll, bleibt dieß Verhältniß. […] Selbst in dem tautologischen Satz, wenn er nicht etwa ganz sinnlos seyn soll, bleibt dieß Verhältniß. Wer da sagt: der Körper ist Körper, denkt bei dem Subjekt des Satzes zuverlässig etwas anderes als bei dem Prädicat; bei jenem nämlich die Einheit, bei diesem die einzelnen im Begriff des Körpers enthaltenen Eigenschaften, die sich zu demselben wie Antecedens zum Consequens verhalten. Eben dieß ist der Sinn einer andern älteren Erklärung, nach welcher Subjekt und Prädicat als das Eingewickelte und Entfaltete (implicitum et explicitum) entgegengesetzt wurden.“
546 Because thought is a local emergence – it arises at some point in time and space.
547 A “conditioned unconditioned” sounds very odd – but only until we remember that relations are very important for Schelling: it is unconditioned for our reason, but conditioned insofar as it only arises in reason.
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and consequent, the consequent retroactively determines the antecedent because the antecedent’s being antecedent depends on the existence of a consequence which followed from that antecedent.548 Thus, if we invert the identity relationship between the unprethinkable being and the fact of being’s unprethinkability, the fact of unprethinkability becomes the ideal ground of thinking the real ground; it would be the negative key to beginning the construction of a positive philosophy. These two directions of reading the same identity are, respectively, positive and negative.549 The first direction, in taking the unprethinkable being as antecedent, lays this ground as a starting-point for the emergence of everything, opening up to consequences for thought, among others, i.e., to the material production of everything, and to its conceptual determination. The second direction starts from the fact of being’s unprethinkability, which is obviously not itself being, but its infinite potency – it is the essence of what being is, and it can only ground the “appearance” of actual unprethinkable being, strangely, but predictably, in thought, i.e. it is the mere thought of unprethinkable being. This thought, the unprethinkable being discovered as required ground for the operations of reason, is the demand requested by the negative philosophy in laying its foundations and is finally uncovered in the positive. To sum all this in two little formulae: the being of the unprethinkable being brings essence (the whatness of things) into existence, and a philosophy of essence paves way to a philosophy of existence.
The identity of the infinite potency of being (as content of the infinite potency of cognition) within the negative philosophy and the actual unprethinkable infinitely open being within the positive, as well as the identity between unprethinkable being and the principle of unprethinkability and the relation of these four terms towards each other as antecedent and consequent, invites the conclusion that positive and negative philosophy extain each other in the way which was already examined in chapter II: namely, in the process of mutual border-determination between two different things, which are dependent on each other through this border-determination despite their difference. If we map the relationship of extainment onto identity and onto the relation between antecedence and consequence, it becomes clear that grounds do not contain consequents but extain them, since grounds are only grounds when they produce something new, something not contained in them, something which defines them in turn, and so consequents are only consequent when they have a degree of independence from their ground. Because of this independence, consequents also extain grounds as their antecedents: they define grounds without being part of them. Grounds and consequents involve each other in the production of each other’s boundaries. In this relationship of mutual
548 See Nature Thought, p.39.
549 Theunissen calls this “die Doppelbödigkeit des Anfangs der Sprache“ – compare Aufhebung des Idealismus, p. 22.
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extainment, extained things can contain extainments which extain them.550 The identity between the unprethinkable being and the fact of being’s unprethinkability, between the series of positive philosophy and that of the negative is then an identity of mutual extainment and codeterminance. Instead of being a double series whose horns are parallel to one another, the positive and the negative are two parts of one line – or one curve, touching in identity at the starting point of the former and the endpoint of the latter.551