Pill Pod 201 - Only German Idealism can save us ft. Christopher Satoor

So, after decrying philosophy last episode, we are back on it hard again in 201. The Pill Pod interviews Christopher Satoor on Schelling and his conception of freedom from "the freedom essay", also known as THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ESSENCE OF HUMAN FREEDOM. 

Chris also does a bunch of interview and video content on YouTube, at https://www.youtube.com/@UCjybB5M-knVLAvrohRXtklQ

get all our content at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome listeners. We have another episode for you today, a
special episode in our Freedom series, a bit of a
skeleton crew. Today, I'm here with my co host Victor
and we have a guest today, Christopher Setur, our resident
Schellingian and German idealism expert. So we have brought him

(00:31):
on today to have a discussion about Shelling's Freedom essay. Right,
so we're gonna delve into that. We're gonna get to
the bottom of it, or as close as we can
to the to the heart of darkness. Yeah, if there
is a bottom, it's it's a bit of an abyss,
but we'll well, we'll work our way into it, nevertheless,

(00:56):
and we'll try to sort out exactly what shealling be
means by freedom and then why he pivots into a
discussion of good and evil for the seeming rest of
the essay.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, but it's.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Relevant, you know, the problem of good and evil. But anyway,
let's check in with our guest here. Hi, Chris, how
are you doing.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
I'm doing well, and I'm excited to be here. Actually,
I'm a big fan of the podcast and I listen
all the time, so it's pretty awesome to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
Happy to have you, Yes, thanks for coming. Okay, So
where to begin? Well, I guess we've discussed freedom mostly
in existentialist terms with sorry or political and yeah, we
did sort of swerve into the political conception of freedom

(01:47):
as positive negative liberty with Isaiah Berlin, but we have
not touched the German idealist kind of conception of freedom.
So there's a bit of background there that's that's a
be a bit lacking. We're not going to be looking
too much at, say Kant and is practical reason, but

(02:10):
that's an important element in the background. We're just gonna
have to deal with that. That's there. And Shelling is
sort of engaging with Kant but also doing his own
thing from the perspective of nature philosophy. Not to put
you on the spot there, Chris, but I guess it

(02:32):
would be helpful if you could say a little bit
by way of introduction about Shelling and freedom, getting to
that idea of freedom and Shelling sort of as quickly
as possible. I guess is that a big ask or
can you do something with that?

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Maybe I want to make the ask even bigger because,
like I'm also curious if you could say something about
German idealism, because I also think, I mean, I don't know,
maybe we don't need to get that deep into it,
but I think that could be useful and important to
just like get on the table. I mean, I think
a lot of listeners will know, like Kant is sort
of the beginning, and then Hegel is sort of considered
like at least common sense, sort of like the end. Well,

(03:12):
in so far as there's an end, it's still going on,
I guess, but you know what I mean, it's kind
of like the major figures. So maybe you could just
tell us a little bit about the movement and chat
and where Shelling fits into it, if that's not too
big of an ask.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
I don't think it's too big of an ast at all.
Right now, Actually, there's huge debate that Kant isn't actually
not really part of German idealism. He's still a part
of what's called classical German philosophy. The true father of
German idealism is Ficta. Actually, right, Dikta sort of separates

(03:44):
himself from Kant, but it does, You're right, It does
start with this, This entire movement starts with Kant's critique
of pure reason. Now, when the critique of pure reason
comes out, it's not read and it's not well liked,
and it takes someone like someone named Carl Reinhold to

(04:05):
write a kind of a letter series like it was.
It was in a journal where he was writing for
a popular audience. So he was writing, you know, little
bits and pieces about reason, about God, about freedom, et cetera,
et cetera, and then all of a sudden, this entire
movement happened with cons critique. Now what is this? What

(04:27):
is this movement of German idealism and everything? It's kind
of it was. Philosophy was almost in a sense at
a at a stalemate between rationalism and empiricism. There were
the empiricist dogmas that were believing that, you know, all
knowledge is grounded, you know, through experience. And then there's,
of course, the great rationalist schools that believe that all

(04:49):
knowledge is kind of innate and we need to kind
of harness reason like a flashlight, even you know, the
light of reason shine on concepts and takes a look
at the you know, the very essence of metaphysics. Now,
his terminology for metaphysics is not the Aristotelian not you know,

(05:11):
next to metaphor next to the physics, but for him,
it's beyond nature, beyond the sensible. So he really wants
to take a look at reason and and take a
magnifying glass to go through the elements of how we
know the world, how we know knowledge. And for Kant,

(05:32):
he does something that a lot of people, especially twenty
first century thinkers, are kind of don't really know why yeah,
and he kind of he kind of states that you
know the world how we see it and how we
how we apprehend it, and how it appears to us
kind of conforms to our senses. I'm sorry, it conforms

(05:53):
to our categories of the understanding. And so he breaks
down all of these so called categories of the understanding.
And then after that we get all of this abundant
debates from people like Schultze and of course Rhyinhold and
Ficta and many other people writing about what is Kant doing?

(06:13):
Solomon Maimon as well, And so we get these die
we get these very interesting arguments about what philosophy can do.
And maybe that's the maybe that's the best way to
start it off, that really this this period starts off
with three questions, what can I know? What ought I

(06:34):
to do? And what may I hope? And of course
what can I know relates to cons epistemology, So what
we can know from from philosophy what ought I to
do is of course the ethical imperative that's in CONT's philosophy,
and the what may I hope is the you know,
the next generations, you know, blending the torch after that,

(06:57):
you know who comes next after Kant, right, And of
course the next person that comes is Ficta. And it's
really funny because when Ficta comes, he kind of goes
all the way to Kernigsberg, where Kant is born, and
he asked, he asked Kant for a loan. Con says no,
because he's very frugal with his money, and he, you know,
Con says, I'll put you in touch with my publisher,

(07:18):
and you know, we'll get you a piece published. And
so Ficta's first publication that comes out, everyone thinks it's
the fourth Critique, and then Icta kind of gets really
really huge overnight, and so Ficta kind of takes German
idealism to the four. He moved to Yana, which is

(07:41):
the kind of biggest area in Europe right now, for philosophy.
Ryan Hold, who I brought up previously in our discussion,
was the chair of philosophy, and after Reinhold left, Ficta
picked that up, and then Shelling would take it, and
then of course later on Hegel would come there as well.

(08:03):
So you can see already that this this one little
city where all these people are merging around, are are
just enveloped in trying to understand epistemology, ethics and everything.
I should just say on one other thing before that,
every single major university after Kant had a chair that
was a Kantian chair, so someone in Kantian philosophy. So

(08:26):
of course Reinhold, who wrote these letters on the Kantian philosophy,
would take Jena, and there were other thinkers as well
and Halla that were taking a you know, going through
kant scholarship and teaching it. So that's how massive this
movement was sweeping through the continent. And of course they

(08:48):
all had their own their own versions of Kant, right,
So Reinhold's reading of Kant, you know, is a little
different than Kant himself, and of course Ficta, you know,
is a little more is he focuses more on the
subjective element of consciousness.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
So did Ficta. I'm curious, did Ficcta sort of start
off self identifying as a Kantient? And then is he
because you said that, really and I've heard this too,
Idealism starts with Ficta in a way where you know,
hegel you know, he obviously kind of sets the groundwork
or like clears the ground in a way maybe you
could say for idealism to be possible, but really it's
like fictus, is Ficta kind of start off as a Kantian?

(09:28):
Then does he go like is he the first to
kind of be like, you know, I'm a different thing.
I'm like this idealist that's like kind of separate and
apart from Kantianism.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yes, that's a really great question. Actually, yes, So Ficta
is in a lot of dialogue and discussion with Kant
until seventeen ninety nine, believe it, and then Kant actually
end the discussion because he was just so appalled with
how Fikta was taking with his philosophy generally speaking Ficto
when he got to when he was in Yana and

(09:59):
meeting the Romantics at the time, the Schlegel Brothers and
the poets like Tika Tik and Novllles. He was kind
of in charge of like culminating this group of philosophers
and kind of like what Mersenne and Gsendi were doing
for Descartes at the time. But yeah, no, he saw
himself as a cantyon, as someone that would take transcendental

(10:23):
philosophy right, this new logic, that comp right, this new
critique of pure reason, this forward. And so however, what
Ficta ended up doing was there was a debate going
around about that conc just you know, takes Aristotle's categories

(10:45):
and just kind of moves forward with it and kind
of defends his own system. But the great question in
philosophy now was how can we ground philosophy on transcendental logic.
So what Ficta and Ryan will do is talk about
a ground for philosophy. That term ground will be huge
in German philosophy. D grunt is used in Shelling and

(11:06):
in Hegel and of course Heidegger. So this terminology, so
this debate about does philosophy have a ground, does it
have a formation? Oh? Sorry, a foundation is where the
new kind of movement of German idealism starts. So it
starts with Reindwolden Ficta. And there's a letter between Shelling

(11:26):
and Hegel when they're really young, saying, you know, CONT's
got at all, but the premises are missing. They mean
the premises for a foundation of transcendental philosophy. So you
know they need more. We need to start from the
foundation and build up. So to your question, yeah, so
Victo starts off as a as a canteen, but then

(11:49):
realizes that what's needed is a kind of rigorous foundation
that he calls his Vissenschaffle or his science of knowledge.
So it's a science of science basically.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
Well that that's awesome. That gives you the sort of
broad melia in which now we're gonna see Shelling kind
of comes up. Okay, but we can't do everything about
Shelling's you know, different systems and where that all comes from,
and what this this this essay itself though, this this

(12:22):
philosophy of freedom essay has been identified as as a
very key document in the in the Shelling overra and
this question of freedom that he's investigating, well, Shelling has well,

(12:42):
he is something called a nature philosopher, like natural philosophy,
nature philosophy of nature, and this this is one of
the angles he's coming at this question from is the
philosophy of nature kind of angle, right, because he sees
the idealist conception of freedom as I mean this almost

(13:07):
connects to positive and negative freedom in a very distant way.
Is that he almost sees the idealist concept of freedom
as lacking substance, as negative, as almost just formal as
negative freedom in a way, not in Isaiah Berlin's sense, maybe,

(13:30):
but it does seem a little bit similar. And what
he wants to do is describe the sort of positive
content of freedom, I guess you could call it, or
something more real and substantial that freedom is, rather than
defining freedom as something you know in a negative way

(13:52):
or as opposed to determinacy. Right, you have that old
debate of determination versus freedom or necessity freedom necessity kind
of debate. So he's picking up here in this this question,
in this atmosphere, with this nature philosophy kind of approach

(14:12):
as a part of it. Does that Does that capture it?
Do you think, Chris? Or did I make a mess
of that?

Speaker 3 (14:19):
No? No, The freedom essay is kind of what we
call the middle term of Shelling's thought. He kind of
is moving away from many of his previous maybe earlier thinking.
He starts, he starts rereading the Latin tradition, so people

(14:40):
like meister Eckhart, you know, in the Catholic tradition, I
mean at least but Catholic Germans. He's kind of led
by this Catholic philosopher area named fran von Batter who's
steering him more in a kind of neo Platonic theosophy,
theosophicals side of pilosophy. You are right. Nature does play

(15:02):
a huge part in the in the actual treatise one
hundred percent, and he's got a little bit of his
law of identity that he gets from Victa in it
as well. It's a really really compact, seventy page treatise
with so much going on. So it's his last work

(15:22):
number one, and in the Freedom Essay it deals with
many things. So he right off the bat says, everyone's
got a notion of freedom. Everyone has, you know, a
kind of first idea of what freedom is. And he says,
what we're looking for is the concealed essence of freedom,

(15:45):
you know, not the surface level of freedom, but the
most deepest root of freedom, which we find out is
actually onto logical. So this is the key point. This
is why people like Paul Tillic, Martin Heidegger, Luigi Parrison,
even Habermats, you know, after his kind of Marxist period,

(16:07):
are looking at Shelling because he's one of these idealists
that even to get back to your question, Eric is
not really an idealist anymore. He's an idealist realist. He'll
even say in the treatise that idealism is the soul
of philosophy, but realism is its body. Only the two

(16:28):
together can form a whole. So he has this kind
of idealist realist project. And now he's moving away from
let's say the maybe the subjective understanding of consciousness from
ficta or you know, the categories with Kant, and now
he's really kind of looking for all, right, what grounds

(16:51):
the human being in personality? And what is how can
we understand freedom and being free within the con text
of the world that we live in. And this is
the first thing he does. He says that philosophy can
never be separated from its world. That's the first part
of the first page. You know, philosophical investigations into the

(17:12):
essence of freedom right can lead you, in part to
the right conception of freedom, but what is that? It
can't be separated from world, and it can't be separated
from system. Now, his idea of system is not is
not supposed to be understood as how we understand system.
He's kind of, as you said, from nature is nature philosophy.

(17:33):
He's got an organic understanding of system. That means he's
bringing in everything you know, nature and mind, right, you know,
human being and nature. He's bringing in all of these
things together to form what he calls a system in
order to find this concealed essence of freedom. Sorry, am

(17:54):
I going too much over?

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Let's just let me actually just kind of ask now,
I mean, I think that was good, but let's let's
try to get maybe concrete about like what Shelling is
saying about freedom, and maybe like one way of doing
that would be to distinguish it from CONTs, which I
see more of our listeners will be familiar with, right,
like CONT's account of freedom, because I think, you know,

(18:16):
if kN has this account of autonomy right, and I
know he spends a lot of time and you know,
I'm more familiar with his ethical work being a political theorist,
but you know, you know, the idea that you can
have like pure practical reason, that you can have kind
of reason that is, like, you know, somehow separated from
like conditions, somehow which you know I don't find plausible.
But whatever. Setting that aside, you know what's Shelling doing

(18:40):
that's different?

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Well, first off, you know, Kan doesn't have a theoretical
concept of freedom. Right. He has a practical concept of freedom,
freedom that demands activity. Praxis right, you have a duty
and obligation steontological right. You your demand in a sense
to recognize the other, or to grasp the other without

(19:05):
being in heteronomy or without you know, without making yourself,
without subordinating the other to yourself. Shelling takes that and
really and that becomes part of his freedom. He actually
states that freedom is the capacity to choose the good
or the evil. Now what does that mean for Shelling?

(19:28):
He's very particular about the words. So the word he
uses for decision is end chidong in German. Now, if
you remove the end. I was telling this to Eric yesterday,
Hidong means decision, a cut between two two particular things.
And so for him, goodness is and it's going to

(19:50):
sound a little bit mystical, but goodness is when we
put the others. We put others themselves before our before us,
so we we think of, you know, the other in
this sense, we're not subordinating them to our own demands
and desires. So originally, what Shelling does is he gives

(20:15):
us a cosmological uh a kind of really fantastic cosmological
reading of it sounds like the time as it's kind
of Christian time Timeeus where he talks about this dark
ground in God, which is him trying to kind of
spiritualize Spinoza's ethics. Now I'm getting back to your question,

(20:37):
but I just need.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
To No, No, that's it's all good.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
So this dark ground is in God. So if we
if we, if we think about this for a second,
this ground that I'm talking about is an empty receptacle.
So it's this empty space that is yearning and desiring
to get back to God in this sense. Now, that

(21:02):
is nature, that is the that's the implicit brute facticity
of nature. It's this darkness at first. Now the reason
why it's dark. Now we have to remember that Shelling
is writing, I guess in a kind of Christian context.
It doesn't have the locals. It doesn't have reason, so
it's nature without reason, nature without freedom. And so we

(21:27):
get this blind drive yearning. The word is zain zouped
in German, which means yearning, So it's yearning to get
back to the one. This is the root of evil.
So essentially God's not the cause of evil. The root
of evil is this excess in nature, this excess in
all of us. It becomes this dark kind of I

(21:49):
was about to say taint, and it was this. It's
this dark kind of spot in all of us that
is this urging desiring. So when we put our own
desires are craving, and we put that for other people,
that is evil for him. It is in a sense
it's just we get so consumed with ourselves, we actually

(22:13):
remove individuality, personality, We become so put into this blind
viral of drives. Now you can see why a Jijak
likes this and b where Schopenhauer gets this cycle of
drives and will zone theory.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
I also saw some sort of a compatibility with some existentialism, which,
of course I mean you can see the line the
figures that you just mentioned there too.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Well.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
At least Schopenhauer right is clearly like a line that
leads towards existentialism by a Nietzsche and all these other people,
you know, to kind of return to the question of
cont a little bit, like because I think that in
a way, like some people could read, con is just freedom,
is just deciding between two arbitrary decisions and you just
like decide one, Whereas it seems like what Shelling is doing,
which again is sort of compatible with existentialism, It's like no, no,

(23:00):
it's actually like about aligning yourself with something that is
like deeper, right, It's like you rather than just making
a choice, it's like you align with something truer. I mean,
for the existentialists, it's going to be like, you know,
some kind of authenticity or something like, you know, I'm
the owner of my choices. I'm aligned with myself. It's like,
but with Shelling, you know, there's obviously a theological aspect,

(23:20):
which maybe we can talk more about, but it does
seem like at the root of it, it's like, you know,
the way analytic philosophers talk about like our higher order
interests in like being a fulfilled person versus our base interests,
which is like you know, desire, pleasure, And it's like
if you're just following your desire, your base desires all
the time, then you're somehow going to be a slave
or like an existentialist. It's like, if you're just following

(23:42):
the they self, you know, to use Hidegerian language, you're
just like, you know, going with the flow. Well, you're
not really an owner of yourself. So somehow it seems
like there's something in showing that. It's like, no, no, freedom
is about aligning yourself with this like more truer, deeper yearning,
which I guess he uses, you know, theological language to
talk about. But it does seem like, you know, being
a better version of yourself. I don't know, does that

(24:05):
sound right?

Speaker 3 (24:05):
The kind of outline Now here's the thing. You're right
on the money. But Shelling takes this this image that
Kant brings up about having our character or creating ourselves
kind of in eternity in this moment, which sounds very abstract,
but essentially what Shelling says is that we already know

(24:28):
ahead of time, like in a kind of presupposed moment,
we know how we're going to choose things. We know
what we essentially want at the very root of our being.
And he takes this you know, this essence from content
he's and he makes this great example. He says that
Judas is not a sinner or doesn't create evil because

(24:49):
of giving thirty pieces of silver or thirty pieces of yeah,
thirty shekels to the Sanhedrin to you know, have Christ,
to give away Christ. He is a sinner and he
creates he chooses evil because he puts his own desire
right above the other. In this sense, Jesus, so you

(25:11):
can see the you know, it's not just a choice
for showing. It's also kind of onto logical. It's a
kind of ground in a sense, you know, like that
this inner depth of your personality, like you become the
choices that you that you in sense in a sense act.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
That's helpful actually, you know, And just to go back
again then, so showings conception of freedom isn't you know
there is this choice element right, Like he'll say freedom
is capacity or possibility of good and evil. Maybe Sart

(25:52):
puts more emphasis on radical freedom being a choice. You
can't choose not to choose, but you have to choose
between these kind of undecidable situations like the you know,
staying home to help your mother versus going away to war,

(26:13):
you know, your family obligation or your obligation to your country.
And he really puts the emphasis on choice there. And
Shelling does a bit too with good and evil. But
I think freedom is a bit deeper with Shelling because
it also is like this chaotic force under the surface

(26:33):
that all creation shares. What's interesting here is that Shelling
sort of gives us a bit of a framework for
how he's thinking about this question. He gives us this
sort of logical framework. He's kind of saying, Okay, he
brings up the copula, right, and the copula is like
the is part of like a predicate, like like God

(26:56):
is good, a is b The copula is is part
that connects the subject. It's part of the predicate. But
for him, ground proceedes existence, right, but it doesn't have
priority over existence, just as the same way he thinks,

(27:18):
God has this kind of difference within himself. So God exists,
but he exists through this internal separation.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
So God has a ground and he has existence. So
maybe you could just say a few things about ground
and existence and what I said before, I think about
facing this like sort of we have this chaotic element
of ground in us in all created beings have it,

(27:52):
and it's even more developed in the human being. But
ground is a little bit like the ID if you're
in psychological terms, Ground is like the ID, and existence
is like the ego. Ground is this sort of undercurrent
of chaotic forces of desire and need or wanting and
yearning things, and existence is like this ego that's sort

(28:16):
of connected to all that, but also trying to sort
of make sense of it and put it into rational,
actual actionable terms that can actually guide our decisions rather
than just being sort of, I don't know, a bundle
of instincts, kind of like an animal you might think of. So, yeah,

(28:38):
ground and existence. Sorry, that was a lot, But can
you say anything about that, Chris.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
I really like that example. But I would just say
that the super ego has to be the logos. It
has to be the word, right, like he brings up.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, the spirit is kind of above both positive and negative. Right,
So you do have three terms?

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Sorry, yeah, no, no, no, it's all good. I just
want to say one thing just before we get into this.
It's really really important. You're really really right about this.
Evil is not privation. It's not a lack it's not
a negation. And this gets to the copula as well,
that is logical identity. Good and evil have their own being,

(29:18):
like darkness and light. This is why he uses the
day and the night, because one couldn't say that, you know,
to differentiape the night in the day. Right, they're different,
but their difference allows for this this space of their
own being. Right, he calls it in difference in a sense.

(29:39):
So in a sense, just like you have two hands
left and right, day and night are like that in
a sense. There they're opposites, but they're in a sense
identical and mirror one another. So good and evil have
their own sense onto logical being. They have their own essence,
and it's determ by how we act, right, how we choose,

(30:02):
how we decide. So you're right one hundred percent. This
ground that's in God, as you said, as the id
is this kind of dark spiral of desire. It's this,
you know, yearning, yearning for something right, So we can
think of in biblical terms this is well, this would be,

(30:24):
I guess, the garden of evil, even before you know
getting the Book of Knowledge or you know, eating the apple.
And when the logos is at it or when the
so called word is Shelling's kind of christian or Christology,
we get a conception of what he calls light. We
get this, we get now we can understand difference. Now.

(30:45):
The reason why he does this is because he's been
told by Hegel that his philosophy collapses into homogenization. So
he does have this whole holism, this whole philosophy, but
he wants to really stress difference as well. So ground
and existence make up his logical predicates. So in the

(31:08):
sense we can say that the ground, which which is
nature in God right, so it's in Spinoza's terms, it's
natural naturans and existence is natural naturata. So we need
both of these the elements. But there's always something, a
third that keeps them together. And we don't get the

(31:29):
third until the end of the dialogue, which is of
course the ungroomed. So you're right. So this ground, which
is basically nature, has everything, has the capacity for everything.
Now we can think of the ground without reason as unreason.

(31:50):
It's chaotic. He literally states that what is you know,
reason isn't just formed, you know, we're not just giving
it innate right. There to be something that precedes reason,
that's the unreason, and he gives this this kind of
chaotic maybe cosmological cosm or theogonic understanding of it. And

(32:14):
then all of a sudden, when reason is implemented, or
when reason kind of is, as he says, transfixed in
the light, sorry to use the cryptic language, there is
now an understanding of the capacity to choose. Right, So,
you know, if we if we kind of do a

(32:34):
meta move here, ground and existence break down to what
Chellen calls real and ideal. So the ideal existence is
the essence of the human it's the personality, it's the character,
it's you know, it's it's the purest element of our being.
And ground is that raw animality, a part of us.

(32:58):
So there's these two essences, there's two sides. So we are,
in a sense, are pulled between these two predicates, right,
these these you know, ground and existence. You know, the
way that this predication works, the way that ground and
existence work is the ground is kind of endfolded and
existence is unfolded. And when existence enfolds, the other unfolds.

(33:25):
So there there's this kind of motion back and forth
between the two of them. And you could see that,
you know, every day every day you recreate yourself right
with your with your just your decisions, your choices. So
every day you become a new person in a sentence,
just like you know, at twilight it's it's nighttime, and

(33:47):
then at dawn it's morning. Right, there's a whole new
beginning with this movement. Isn't that same that same motion?
And he'll say, he'll say later on a couple pay
just before existence and ground, they'll say that, you know,

(34:07):
rozine is to volin, so pure primordial being is will.
So will is this deepest element of our beings. So
you can see how this all of this is kind
of unfolding. So this is where this is where the
excess of evil comes from.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
Okay, one thing that stood out to me that was
interesting was isn't there a part in the in the
text where he kind of says that that like evil,
real evil only emerges with reason or am I misread
like so that because in a way, like animals who
are just like subject to their instincts, well, how could
they be evil because they can't really do anything else.
But it's like, but it's like human beings because they

(34:49):
have reason and then they like decide to do something
they decide to fall victim to their base or instincts
to let's say, like steal something from someone that's evil
because they have reason right versus is that? Yeah, so
do I have that right? That's that seemed pretty interesting
to me.

Speaker 3 (35:02):
And in animals, the two principles of darkness and light
or ground in existence, they haven't separated. They're just one.
So they don't have they don't have that outer reflective
they don't have that. Yeah, they don't have that element
to Okay, what you just said very nicely, So you're right,

(35:26):
so does God?

Speaker 2 (35:28):
So is so on this picture of the world is
God like kind of the others where it's like it's
not separated or like so like because you know, I
was kind of trying to figure this out when I
was reading it. It's like it because it does come
off as very theological in many parts of the text,
but like, I don't know, I guess, you know, coming
from a political science department too, you know, I sort

(35:48):
of started thinking, like a STROUSI in a little bit
and I'm like, oh, is he is he just saying
this to like appease all the all the like Christians
around him? Or is he really like a robust Christian here,
is this like a real account? Is he kind of
saying it to be? Like, well, I can't sound too
secular because then I'll get like, you know, I'll get
as many people are suspicious of like Hobbes, you know,
as Hobbes really as theological as he was, or like

(36:09):
even cont So I don't know, maybe that's like more
of a meta question about like his intent, but I
guess I was just trying to figure out, like how
you know, like how important you know, how relatable is
it to like, you know, can you give it a
secular reading? Right? Like can you give it a secular reading?
Or do you have to be theological?

Speaker 1 (36:25):
I was going to take a stab at that one, actually, okay,
just because that question of separability of darkness and light
the two principles becomes you know, the foundation later on, right,
So we haven't quite got there yet in the logic

(36:47):
of the essay, but it will be the idea that
light and dark and spirit the sort of third term
you'd say, which is like above both in God, this
is inseparable, right, There's no possibility of separating these two.
And it is the emergence of man and then the

(37:09):
separability of these two principles that is the source of evil,
and a little confusingly, not only their separability but their reversibility.
So going back to the ground existence thing, right, ground
precedes existence, but it doesn't have priority over existence. Right,

(37:32):
how can he maintain these two different things? Precedents and
priority they mean the fucking same thing. Fuck you shellick No, no,
for him, they don't mean the same thing, right like priority,
I don't know, doesn't mean logical priority? Does it mean
more importance? In a way nature is first, it proceeds,
But in a way God is first, He supersedes, right,

(37:56):
he subordinates, supersedes. This is the proper way to look
at it. In the end, is that the light principle,
like like supersedes, subordinates the darkness principle, and man, because
of their separability, they can become reversed. Right, So you're
no longer operating according to the universal will. You're just

(38:18):
the self will, your particular existence, your particular survival. You're
concerned with yourself over the universal.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
And by the way he uses this term when we
get to reason, when we get to talk about personality,
just one quick point.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
In so far as kings and queens are humans. They
can be evil. Sorry on, Victor, go on, Victor.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah. So, like this point of clarification I'm wondering about
is like, to what extent, how do can we define
dark in light? Because we've been using that term and
I think it would be good to get on the table, like,
because it seems like we've been talking about it. As
you know, dark is like falling victim to like bease
or instincts, right like sort of, I mean maybe it's
not identical to that, but that seems to be an

(39:04):
aspect to it of it, right that, like you kind
of you follow your desires? Right, So is light then
just reason? Or is it not identical to reason? Is
it additional to that? Like how do we think about
those two things? Because I think it's important for the
audience to be clear.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
There's three things at the level of nature. It's gravity
and light. So gravity is the dark principle, It's what
it's what in a sense holds down on. You can
think of a plant, right, so the plant needs to
in a sense push forward, It needs to be determined,
it needs to strive. Right. Well, light is this, you know,

(39:38):
light is in a sense it fills the space, It
fills everything. It also gives energy, it gives life in
a sense. But going back to what Eric said, darkness
is in a sense the self will of the ground.
It is the urge, it's yearning, whereas the universal is
understand the universal will is un or light is understanding

(40:03):
that there's a world of other people. You know, there's
a world of that's not just you that you're you're
there within a communal environment. So that's what he means
by that. So there's a universal will, which is in
a sense, you could say, let's use the Kantian terms,
it's the categorical imperative. And then the self will of

(40:25):
the ground is in a sense a more onto logical
understanding of heteronomy in a sense.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Right, So how close is that then to because obviously
for cont it's like reason, right, you use your reason
to figure out the categorical imperative, right, like you're convinced
by that, and like you use dare to use your
reason whatever to to you know, calculate things and be
like and that's why like for Kant, like even if
you do something that would be like in accordance with
the categorical imperative, if you're not doing it for the

(40:54):
right reasons, you're not being moral. Like if you just
happen to be like heteronymously pulled towards doing something that
is actually categorical according to the categorical imperative good, you're
actually still not being ethical because you haven't used your
reason right to figure it out. So how is how
different is that in Shelling?

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Well, Shelling actually complicates the matters because he thinks that
in and he again uses mythical terminology here, reason represents
what he calls consciousness. Unreason represents the unconscious. So you
can think of anything that isn't using reason as in
a sense unconscious. They're this unconscious dark self will of

(41:37):
the ground. And so reason in a sense propels us
into being conscious beings. And he uses the term unconscious.
But I just wanted to just give you one example
for a second, just to go back on one thing.
When I read this text, I in a sense need
to almost always bring up the kabala for and I'm

(42:01):
sorry to do this to your viewers. Oh sorry, viewers.
So Shelling is in a sense even more radical than
Sart because what he'll say is, look, we can't be
live in it here and say that God needed to
create world A and B to do that, and to
say that means that we're adding necessity to him. So

(42:25):
God freely chose to create the world, and in that
free creation he chose so he makes this distinction, which
gets back to your question, Victor, in terms of Kabbalah,
that God in a sense contracts into himself the zimzum
and pulls out this ground, which is nature. So he

(42:46):
pulls this element oue. This is why when you read
the text, he says that God and this ground are
coeternal but separate. So you have the infinite and the finite,
but the finite is separate from the infinite. It's like
the fall. He actually calls it that. So we had
this separation into the ground, but we're still in God.

(43:08):
Sort of say so.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Yeah, that was the next That was actually the next
point I was going to bring up too, is that, Okay,
how do I put this? Because of that that internal
division within God I was talking about, like the ground.
He's saying things like the ground is in God but
is different from God, just as any created being, whether

(43:33):
it's a thing or a human, also finds their ground
in God and precisely that in which like that in God,
which is not God.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
That's why I say internally divided, that God is divided
between his existence and the ground of his existence, which
are both in him. But the ground of his existence
is nature, that pree eating part, and his existence itself
is that prior, that prior part, that part that has priority.

(44:10):
And so creation, created things, creatures have their ground in God. Right,
but in that different part, that nature ground of his
existence part.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
Yeah. Now, if this sounds like Spinoza, it is Spinosa,
but it's Spinosa with more differentation. Right. You know all
human being beings are just modes. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Infinite substance?

Speaker 3 (44:39):
Right, So Shelling wants to give more difference and kind
of spiritualize Spinoza's monism in a sense, give it more animation,
animate it more so that there is this separation from God.
But we're in God, and it's they're both co eternal.
So ground and God are similar. We're in the God

(45:01):
of We're in the ground of God, which is nature
in God. And this gets really confusing when he keeps
saying it over and over again. But they're different. And
now when I teach this text, I give this example
to all my students. Think of a lake, a body
of water, right, So in this sense, God would be

(45:22):
h two oh, he'd be the entire lake, he'd be
the entire everything, But human beings on the ground would
only be like the ripples on the surface of the water.
So like, we're on the surface, right, But just because
we're on the surface doesn't mean that we're We're not
a part of the ocean or the the body of water, right,
We're not at the very bottom, right, So bubbles can

(45:43):
appear and everything. So it's in that but they each Remember,
each ripple has its own individuation, has own differ, its
own difference, right, So ripples bump into other ripples, et
cetera on the surface of the water. So in a sense,
that's what he's trying to get at. So there is
this kind of whole, dynamic entity that's God, but there's

(46:06):
also the space that's the ground that allows for beings
like us to be different and to be beings and
to be free in a sense, to choose our own
kind of lifestyle, create ourselves.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
I'm trying to think as we go along, like what
is the upshot of his concept of freedom?

Speaker 3 (46:28):
Do I like it.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
Is it useful in politics or in daily life? It's
difficult to say for sure. There's this process of element
to his explanation, right, like you have, you know, the
dark ground which proceeds, and you have the light coming

(46:54):
out of the ground. He says this in so many
different ways. One of the ways he seems to say
it is like, let's say the dark ground is like will,
but will that is really just a kind of blind
desiring yearning will, and it doesn't become it doesn't come
fully into itself until understanding is added to it. And

(47:18):
then again understanding is like the existence part the light
of understanding, for instance, or the word of revelation to
a dark and benighted world.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Who got it?

Speaker 1 (47:29):
What is it twenty twenty five? So twenty twenty five
years ago? Something like that, right, So there's a developmentalist
aspect to it. Hegelian kinds of terms. But Shellings is
different again because he wants this concept of freedom also
to deal with the question of good and evil. Yeah,
so the indivisible remainder comes out of this. I was

(47:53):
bringing this up because as much as the light, you know,
chases away the darkness, as much as the understanding comes
to dominate over the will or not, maybe subordinate the
will to the ends of understanding. As much as whatever, Yeah,
as light chases away the dark, the darkness the grounds

(48:14):
can never be fully extinguished or taken over because there
always remains this remainder, this indivisible remainder. And this is
a very strange, you know. Jijik's book is called the
Indivisible Remainder, isn't it. So Heidegger writes this whole book

(48:35):
on Shelling's philosophy freedom without mentioning the indivisible remainder, and
then Jijik writes a book called The Indivisible Remainder and
makes a big deal out of it. But I think
it fits in with my developmental story that as much
as the light, you know, is superordinate and subordinates, the

(48:58):
darkness chases it away. As I there's always this dark,
this indivisible remainder in the dark ground that the light
cannot chase away. Which is people take to say another way, Oh,
Shelling is an irrationalist because he believes that the core
of rationality and understanding there's always this irrational, chaotic kernel

(49:21):
or something like that. Right, is that I don't know
Chris if I, that's a scattershot at indivisible remainder.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
However, towards the end of the essay, to confuse even
more people, the ground dissolves. It becomes what he calls
a caput mortem. It dies, The ground is dissolved. What
does that mean, Well, as you stated very nicely, as
it dissolves in a sense, it dissolves into all beings.

(49:52):
So as you're right, that indivisible remainder or I don't
like that term that you know, ear a reducible remnant
of the darkness of the ground. The urge, the what
you called gravity very nicely, is in all people, and
it's it's it's a part of us. They become part

(50:13):
of the principles of human being. This is why like
Hidigger won't bring that up, because for Hidigger, what's more
essential is what he calls the jointure of being between
ground and existence. He's more concerned about the ontological.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
Stratological difference kind of thing, right, yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
Yeah, and difference, yeah, ontological difference. Yeah. But essentially, yes,
Shelling is kind of saying, you know, this is in
all people. You can't get away from it. You know,
it's it's the deepest remnant, the oldest remnant, that's there.
It's part of our origins in a sense, you know,
and you're right, people like lukash has called Shelling an irrationalist.

(50:55):
But for showing that irrational principle, you can't get away
from it. Like good and evil, you can't get away
from either of them. You can't just say I'm going
to be good today. You become a different person every
second or every moment. And that's the whole point of
the freedom essay. It's this process, as you said, it's
this struggle of being yourself, of being a human being,

(51:16):
as being a personality. In a sense, is that we
all have this dark remnant, this you know, indivisible remainder
in all of us, right that that every day you know,
it's there in a sense. He even he gives this
great example of it's like a what he gets from
Franzo and Botder. He imagines a circle with a dot
in the middle. He says, you know, we wake up

(51:39):
with this kind of center of being, right we have,
you know, wake up in the morning, your victor, you
have your coffee, your victor. But then something happens and
that dot, you know, you become so enraged by something,
and right, the world happens. Stuff happens, and that in
itself takes over and in a sense consumes you. S

(52:00):
Shelling states, and when that happens, your decisions are in
a sense kind of level down. You kind of just
act right and don't care about the other or whatever. No,
I'm not saying that about you, Victor. I'm just saying
you know, no, no, no, I hear it. So, yes, it's
always there. It's this principle, just like like universal will,

(52:21):
the self will of the ground is in all of
us onto logically speaking, and.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
Just kind of like the real in Lacan, right, like
the reel can never be symbolized. Symbols destroy the real.
They're like a wound or a crack. They're like something,
you know, the reel can't be symbolized. It's irreducible to representation.
Although representation is the way that humans are cursed to

(52:48):
approach these questions through words and things like that. But yeah,
symbols can't extinguish the real. Yeah, the light can extinguish
the ground.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
Like the fallen angel Satan what he calls the reverse God,
we can all become the reverse God by subordinating that
universal will right in like Kantian terms, by just constantly
acting in heteronomy, constantly putting our own drives and urges
and will above everybody else, you become what he calls

(53:22):
this reverse god, this complete reverse being. In a sense
right at the end of the essay he would actually
even call evil non being. If you continue to act
in a certain way, you're no longer an individual with ipseity,
You're just pure egoity.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
He'll say, Okay, that's that's good. And then so part
of this developmental story. But then part of this development
At one point he says, all the all these forces
are bound up in the ground. There's like, that's the
kind of unity in incoate units. And what the light does,

(54:02):
is it it? Or what the word does is that
it goes into the ground and it creates divisions of forces,
It divides things, It brings the possibility of understanding. That's
that's analysis, right. Analysis is taking something and then dividing
it into its parts. Right to see how the whole functions,

(54:23):
we have to cut it up into parts and see
the relationships between the parts of it. Right, But that's
one side of the story. That's a kind of if
you just stick with that side, you're a kind of
one sided realist or a mechanist or something like that.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
That.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
But nevertheless, it is an important factor. As the light,
you know, lightens the dark, as understanding becomes the guide
of the will, we get these divisions of forces, and
you know, humans being tempted to be becoming self satisfied

(54:59):
and ego. We might forget that the unity is, the
center of unity is in the ground still, and we've
then choose to locate it on the periphery. Instead, we
turn away from the love of God and instead we
try to locate the center in the periphery right right,

(55:22):
much like Darida does instructure sign and play cut that reference.
We locate the center in the periphery, and we turn
away from the love of God. And that's another way
of saying kind of there's the origin of evil in
these special beings called humans, in which these two principles

(55:42):
are united, but they're separable. In humans, what.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
You're describing in platonic terms, you're describing the demiurge stretching
soul and in souling things like in the time is
which he's getting a lot of this from and so
you're talking about Yes, the division of forces is in
a sense the creation of spirit.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Or in the Genesis story, like dividing the word, dividing
the waters from the waters and the land from the water.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
But then he adds one other force, which is the
attractive force. And this is how he ends the essay. Obscurely,
he says, there's something higher than spirit, something higher than
these division of forces, and that's love. It's the attractive
the attractive will. It's the attractive forces that bring us together.
When you love someone, you don't love them because you

(56:35):
need them, because if you need the other, then in
a sense, you're using that other. So love as this
attractive force is in a sense, it's you both decide,
you both to choose to be, you know, come together.
And a sense, but you can't live without the other,

(56:56):
right as they can't live without you in a no
on selfish manner in a sense. But yeah, you're right,
you're you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
No, no, no, this is good. I was wondering, you know,
I feel like, you know, channeling pills a little bit here.
I feel like if he was here, you know, he
would want to, you know, he would want to challenge
this or something you know, he'd want to be like,
what's you know? Is this you know, metaphysical nonsense? I
don't know, like because because you know, I certainly wouldn't
be wouldn't wouldn't be that strong. I mean, pills kind
of has an anti philosophy sort of orientation towards things

(57:27):
that like philosophy. But I think like and at least
like one way this obviously my first time, you know,
really sitting down and reading Shelling, But it seems like
there's a certain way in which you know, there are
a lot of metaphysical and even mystical claims. At least
it seems to be right. I might just be misreading it,
but that seemed to be made that Like I guess
I just feel like, you know, I maybe don't want

(57:48):
to accept or or I'm like, you know, do I
need to accept them even though it seems compatible with
some other things that I do accept. So I guess,
just like, how do you know, how do you see
the sort of mystical claims? Do like, can you be
Shellingian and kind of reject the sort of the more
mystical theological claims or do you think they're they're they're
deeply entrenched. Why are they important? Like, can can we

(58:09):
accept a version? I mean, I think we've been talking
and developing a version of this account of freedom that
I guess like relies on some kind of speculative metaphysical content.
But maybe it maybe it doesn't. I don't know. I
just I just wonder how you respond to those kinds
of concerns.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
Okay, So I'm I'm pretty much a Schalinian, but I'm
not very Christian oriented oriented. When I look around the
world and I see the carpet bombing in Gaza or
things that are going on in the States right now,
like the I think they're gonna I think there's gonna
be some removal of same sex marriage in some states,

(58:48):
you know. And I see them saying, I'm doing this
because I want to be common sense. I'm doing this.
This is where I think Shelling's a hundred percent right,
like one hundred percent right in a sense that evil.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
So you're saying Shelling comes out as woke pro LGBT.

Speaker 3 (59:10):
No, no, no, I'm just saying that that in a
sense that evil isn't just a gesture. It literally consumes
the individual, like in the sense of their ontological being. Like,
that's how radical he is saying. He literally is saying,
you know, not to use the biblical terminology here, like

(59:30):
the reverse god element, the fallen moment, Like some of
these people are really not thinking of other people. They're
doing absolutely horrible gestures and actions against people, murdering, killing,
et cetera. And they're doing that and they're saying they're
doing this for the good, when really they have no
idea what good is in this sense, so they're only

(59:52):
following their kind of blind self, their blind drive. They're blind,
you know. So in this sense, I see him thinking
about this conception of radical freedom and an ontological sense
that I think is very important. Now, can you separate
the kind of mytho poetic side. I think it's essentially

(01:00:16):
at bottom, we can say it's how, well, where's the
origin of reason? Where did reason come from? When did
human beings start reasoning? This gets to the later shelling
where he'll say things like, well, we can't really think
of that moment. It's kind of unprethinkable, it's uncognizable. So
what we can do in the moment is understand that

(01:00:38):
there was a beginning, but it's a beginning that's uncognizable,
so we need to think of we need to think
through this. So the Shellingian like myself would say, like,
this element of the unreason that is attached to reason
in its origin is the you know, that element, that
empty space, that uncognizable element that we at philosophers like

(01:01:02):
ourselves need to discuss and need to work work through.
So I think the Shillingian would would pivot in that sense,
talk about it in that sense, and the later Shelling
actually moves away from idealism, moves away from trying to
figure out the essence, and gets more closer to what
he calls a philosophy of the existence. Positive philosophy is
looking for what he calls facticity, the fact not the

(01:01:26):
not the whattoness or essence of things. So to strip
this completely of its let's say religious I don't want
to say baggage religious mythopoetic element. Sure it is evil
in the world, there are evil people. How do they
contract these elements? How do the how do how do we?

(01:01:46):
How is there someone like Andrew Tate? Is that how
you say his name?

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
I think, yeah, Like he.

Speaker 3 (01:01:51):
Was moved into Florida this morning? Like, how is there
someone that traffics women and then all of a sudden
wakes up and says, no, I'm not doing an thing evil.
How do how do people wake up in the morning
and look at them?

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
So for you, it sounds like it gives you like
it does obviously have some strong metaphysical claims about like
kind of like how we function as human beings in
a way, like how we're pulled in different directions. And
maybe that's controversial for an anti philosopher like pills. But
on the other hand, like you're kind of saying, well, look,
it actually gives us like a pretty important and helpful

(01:02:24):
tool belt to kind of make sense of like why
people go wrong, Like we can look at which actually
goes to like maybe another question that I was gonna ask,
which you basically answered, is like, you know, how is
this useful for? And I think you just like outlined that,
like it gives you a framework for thinking about, uh,
for thinking about like why and how people end up
going wrong, and like what it is in them that
pulls them in directions and how you know, we can

(01:02:45):
kind of identify, yeah, identify like like the reasons and
and and like I guess it gives us a sort
of platform for judgment in a way. And I guess,
like just a quick thought as I was speaking, is
it's it's interesting, how you know, kantient ethics that becomes
so influential in like place like bioethics, right, And it'd
be interesting. I don't know if there's anyone doing work

(01:03:07):
on like Schellanian ethics to see, And I don't know
if it would lead you to different conclusions. Maybe it wouldn't.
I mean, maybe there'd be some consistency there, but it
might like Heidegger's.

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
So Heidegger thinks that Shelling is the greatest of the
German idealist school of thinkers, and his work in nineteen
thirty six.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
Is especially in this essay too.

Speaker 3 (01:03:27):
Yeah, in this essay he says, this is where German
idealism leaps off the page and becomes ontology. But to
kind of to deal with your criticism here he has
the same criticism. He says, look, Shelling has given us
this existential ontology. It's wonderful. But then what does he
do at the end of the essay He jumps back

(01:03:48):
into Anto theology, so it collapses into Ato theology. So
I don't think that, but I'm just giving the you know,
the devil.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
No, that's good, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:57):
So he even Heidiger says, this is fantastic. He's got
this joint sure of being this. You know, he's got
it all there. We've got these ontological registers you can
see design, et cetera. But then then this this problem
of God comes up out of nowhere.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
Yeah, very interesting, I just add.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Yeah. Like, I also find the theological connections a little
bit difficult as someone who's not super close to the
religious ethos. But I will say one one thing that
I like about Shelling's take on freedom goes back actually
to the ground existence distinction, because when he's arguing for that,

(01:04:43):
you know, like, okay, let's say, in the theological sense,
God creates everything, God is the cause of everything. But
he kind of says, just because something is causally determined
doesn't mean it's not independent, right, Like the you can

(01:05:04):
be dependent on somebody else, say your parents, but you
can also be independent.

Speaker 3 (01:05:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
The fact that their copulation caused your existence doesn't mean
that you're now you're you're eternally dependent on them for
this silly logical reason, right Like Like in other words,
he leaves room for self determination in his system, even

(01:05:37):
though everything is determined causally, there's also room for self determination.
And I don't know what I would say gaps in
the causal network, and these gaps turn out to be
kind of necessary gaps in a way. But yeah, there's
room for self determination in his system. And I always

(01:05:57):
feel like, you know, freedom seems to be in the
maybe in the liberal discussion, freedom is always just a
sense of the individual and their self determination and their
protection from other individuals. There's no questioning of I guess, yeah,
the relationship between dependence and independence, right, like, you are

(01:06:23):
always dependent. You depend on the earth to provide what
you need to eat and live. You depend, in the
Marxist sense, even on other people because you make clothes,
but someone else makes toothbrushes, right, you need those things
right in this day and age, or someone else makes this.
We're all dependent on one another. But that doesn't erase

(01:06:45):
the fact that we have independence and we can engage
in self determination. And I think Shelling leaves room for
that in a very interesting way. And also his prose
is very beautiful at times too. I just read, like
a sample, all birth is birth from darkness into light.

(01:07:07):
The seed kernel must be sunk into the earth and
die in darkness, so that the more beautiful shape of
light may lift and unfold itself in the radiance of
the sun. And then he goes on. Thus we must
imagine the original yearning as it directs itself to the understanding.
You get the idea anyway, and quote, you get the idea.

(01:07:28):
He's got some very beautiful lines in there too.

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
What you said reminded me of this example that he
uses much later. You can see the radicalness of freedom,
but also kind of its ontological root. You know, when
a tree, we can think of the tree as God
or the tree as a parent or whatever, and it
produces a seed like an acorn. When the acorn still

(01:07:54):
has that genetic ontological makeup, right, it's still part of
the tree in sense, but the minute it hits the
ground it's separated but still in a sense closely connected.
So there is that element there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:08):
Yeah. That's the other thing too, Yeah, Yeah, there's there's
a connection there, even with that seed being dispersed. That
that's kind of what I was getting at. Well, yeah,
very beautiful prose and room for self determination. I'm sorry,

(01:08:30):
I'm just trying to think of like more practical and
less religious ways of describing certain things.

Speaker 3 (01:08:36):
He's saying, I want to say one thing about one thing.
So this is the first time we're selling actually brings
in history. So for him as someone to think through
events in the world, we have to think through the
literature and the literature of the world that gives us
the reasoning behind these right, So for him, mythos or

(01:08:58):
myth is important. It's kind of like it's in a
sense it's a genetic map to nature in a sense,
you know, Chronos eating his children, et cetera. But here
he gives us, of course, the fall story right through
a kind of Platonic Timaeus, you know. So he he's
giving us this story, but at the same time trying

(01:09:19):
to trying to touch base on ontological matters. You know,
how can we talk about the chicken, right what comes first?
The chicken or the egg? How can we even get
into the debate about that. We would need to look
at all the I don't know, we would have to
look at all the facts. We have to look at
all the information, maybe look at where that's that analogy

(01:09:42):
came from in order to understand the relation. But for him,
he wants to look at things not only just there
and their relation, but also in a kind of organic
matter manner.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
Sorry, Okay, we got to close down soon, but I'm
so stimulated I want to keep going. And I'm very
famous for my quick and snappy out outros.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
My I wouldn't call them outros. I would say, like
to keep the thing going as much as for for longer.
When we're kind of at a natural endpoint.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Yeah, I'm I'm terrible for just bringing up the biggest
concept ever right at the very end. I just wanted
to make the simple point. Okay, let's just think about Okay,
what do we think of Shelling's take on freedom, and
my way into it is to say, okay, what Chris

(01:10:33):
said there is very interesting about freedom having an ontological
rout In Shelling, freedom has an ontological root. It is real.
It is not just something added on, right, he says,

(01:10:53):
Like when he's complaining about Ficta, he says, yes, Ficta
says activity, life, and freedom, all things which Shelling thinks
should be part of the ground. Ficta says these are real, right, Okay, great,
Shelling says. Ficta says, activity, life, and freedom is real.

(01:11:15):
He says, our problem is to also show that everything
that is real has activity, life, and freedom. It's not
just that these are real, but they're in everything that
is real. Everything real has these things. You have to
show both sides, right, and then the specific difference of

(01:11:38):
human freedom within that matrix.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:42):
So that's what I thought is one of the crucial
interesting upshots here is that freedom has an ontological root.
It's not just a say, epistemological decision making problem. Right,
that we are confronted with two alternatives and we have

(01:12:03):
to decide which one is the right one, the good one,
the positive one, and the positively valued one, and which
one would would be negative or produce negative consequences, because
as we know, evil is not known in itself, but
only through its consequences. And I think that's very interesting

(01:12:27):
and deep. And I don't know what Victor would think
of that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
Yeah, no, that's a good thought. I mean, I I agree.
I mean I think the account is you know, appealing,
I would say for for for that reason, it's like
it's like a reasonable account of freedom. What I like
about it is that it's it kind of contains the
potential to not be free like that, it's not just
like something that is that is given, but it's like

(01:12:52):
you know, but it's effortful. It's it's something that, like
you you continue to work on that that's not like, uh,
that's not just like a given thing the way that
like kind of more simplistic accounts of freedom have that
there's like, you know, the way we're affected by you know, well,
to use console language, I guess heteronomy, and I guess
that's consistent with you know, me, who tends to be

(01:13:13):
like Mary la Ponti, And I would say it's like
my my go to kind of like account for human subjectivity.
And I think you know this, So at least there's
a way of reading it from my initial reaction to
it that would not be inconsistent with maryla Pontin. I
know that you know maryla Ponti somewhat, Chris, So maybe
you could tell me if I'm wrong about that or
if I'm right about that.

Speaker 3 (01:13:32):
Actually, there's a fantastic text that puts Shelling and the
Ponti together, actually, because there's this line in the Ages
of the World's another text where Shelling says, you know,
beneath the individual, there's this kind of brute animality of
our of our being, of our flesh, and it's and

(01:13:55):
you can read it into mirror the Ponti maybe, but yeah,
so there is there's a lot of linkage to it.
But Milu Ponti also sees mind and body really, you know,
he sees them as like an ontological whole, right, like
the body, the flesh.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:14:12):
So he sees things in that kind of organic understanding.
So very cool.

Speaker 2 (01:14:16):
That's true. That's true. So maybe maybe I am maybe
I do find it appealing for those reasons, for those consistencies.
So yeah, maybe that's a good place to end at. Eric,
or were you going to try to bring up something.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Yeah, yeah, a whole other topic now let's go No, no, no,
I'm kidding, No, I'm kidding. I would just end by saying, yeah,
I guess if you're a posthumanist, you might not you
might have some problems with shellings seeming anthropercentrism, But I
don't think it's that bad. Because he says this dark

(01:14:49):
principle is active in animals as well as in other
natural beings. He had it is still not born into
the light in them as it is in man. It
is not spirit and understanding, but blind, craving and desire.
In short, there's no fall. No separation of principles is
possible here where there is still no absolute or personal unity.

(01:15:14):
So there is a sense in which it is specific
to human beings. The possibility of evil is specific to
human beings in the developmental picture that Shelling gives us.
And in that sense, human beings can probably also create unjust, unfair,

(01:15:39):
quote unquote evil systems. Right, So things like structural racism, exclusion, prejudices,
insofar as those are structural problems, are created by humans,
and it's up to humans to solve them and not
wait for a god. Has been said by certain philosophers

(01:16:03):
like Maya Sue or even Heidegger himself, I think only
a god can save us. Now, I don't think Shelling
would agree with that. I'm probably I could be wrong
about that, but that's what I think. And that's where
I'll just bring it to a close. If you guys
don't have any closing comments, I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Know, well, I mean, if Chris has something final to say.
But thanks for coming on, Chris. It was a fun conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
We should thank our guests. Yeah, thank you, Chris. For
coming on and having this conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:16:37):
Well, I have to say thank you for having me on,
and thanks for you know, taking the time to reach
Shelling and work through the text. This is a beautiful text,
and I'm just happy that I got to you know,
have two other of my friends read Shelling, so I'm happy.

Speaker 1 (01:16:55):
Always a pleasure, and I encourage our viewers and listeners
to pick up some Shelling, especially the Freedom Essay. And
it's it's a it's a difficult road, but it's a
very rewarding one. So uh so, get into it and
we'll see you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Then yep, agreed, all right, and there it is.