174 music, philosophy, and modernity
ideas might make, albeit very contentious, sense.^5 These texts reject
the idea of evil being explained, as it is in Rationalist positions like
that of Spinoza, as a lack or deficiency that can be overcome by proper
philosophical insight into the nature of the world, and by concomitant
social changes.^6 Such an explanation would, Schelling thinks, take away
the reality of freedom, by subjecting it to determination by something
else. This determining factor would then become the ground of the
explanation – and can itself in turn lead to a regress of explanations of
explanations.
The idea of freedom therefore becomes two-edged. For Schelling
we are connected to being by the fact that our existence is ultimately
groundless in the same way as he thinks that being as a whole is ground-
less, because God did not have a reason to create the universe, creation
being His free act. We are therefore also not determined in advance by
our essence, though we have no choice about the fact of our existing
at all, and have a potential, that is not reducible to causal explanation,
for which we are at the same time responsible. This idea develops from
Schelling’s attempt to establish a concept of nature which goes beyond
Kant’s conception of it as the realm of law-bound appearances. Even
if one does not accept the theological version of Schelling’s argument,
the idea in contemporary cosmology that the universe is the result of
a ‘singularity’, which itself precedes a universe of causal laws, suggests
the groundlessness at the origin of things at issue here. The disturbing,
but logical, upshot of Schelling’s argument is that:
nobody has chosen their character; and yet this does not stop anybody
attributing the action which follows from this character to themself as a
free action...Common ethical judgement therefore recognises in every
person – and to that extent in everything – a region in which there is no
ground/reason (‘Grund’) at all, but rather absolute freedom.... The
unground (‘Ungrund’) of eternity lies this close in every person, and they
are horrified by it if it is brought to their consciousness.
(Schelling 1946 :i, 93 )The question is how to respond to this awareness of a groundless con-
tingency which is inseparable from responsibility for one’s actions.
5 TheFreedomessay was one of the last substantial texts that Schelling actually published. I
am not so much concerned here with Schelling’s direct historical influence, but with the
structure of his key ideas, which focuses some major concerns of the era.
6 See Bernstein ( 2002 ) and Neiman ( 2002 ) who show how theodicy was the core issue in
the apprehension of the idea of evil as something that ultimately ‘made sense’.