I. The Three Friends at Tübingen

The early 1790s. Southern Germany, the Duchy of Württemberg, Tübingen.

The Tübingen Stift was a seminary that trained Lutheran ministers. It had been there for centuries. Most of its graduates would become village pastors or theology professors.

In one of those classes, three young men shared a room.

One slightly older than the others — Hegel. From a middle-class family in Stuttgart. Quiet. Focused. A slow but retentive reader.

Another the youngest — Schelling. Admitted to the seminary at fifteen, ahead of the normal age, because he had been considered a prodigy from childhood. Born into a family of Lutheran ministers; his father was a scholar of Hebrew and Oriental languages.

The third — Hölderlin. The temperament of a poet was visible in him from twenty. Later he went mad. From his thirties on he entered a slow, chronic mental disorder, lived to seventy-three, and spent the last thirty-six years of his life in a tower above a carpenter's house on the river Neckar in Tübingen.

In some year at Tübingen — probably around 1793 — the three friends did one thing.

They wrote something together on a single sheet of paper. It later came to be called The Earliest System Programme of German Idealism — Ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. Who actually wrote that sheet is still disputed in scholarship — some say Hegel, some say Schelling, some say Hölderlin. But most scholars agree that it was the product of the three friends thinking together.

What they wrote on that sheet, in essence, was a vow —

They would complete the work that Kant had begun.

Kant — they had read him entire — had done something extraordinary. He had proved the limits of pure reason. He had named the place of the moral law. He had opened the direction toward the kingdom of ends. But Kant had not finished. He had stopped, in many places. He stopped because he was strict — he would not let himself say what he could not strictly prove.

The three twenty-year-olds thought they could go on.

They would push further from where Kant had stopped. They would build a complete system — a philosophical system that included nature, freedom, God, art, history. They would let philosophy complete.

This was the moment of birth of German Idealism.

Twenty years later, the fates of the three were entirely different.

Hegel — from Jena to Bamberg to Nuremberg to Heidelberg to, finally, Berlin. He built a vast philosophical system — logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit. The system claimed to include everything. From 1818 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, his influence sweeping across the German intellectual world. He died of cholera in 1831, fifty-nine years old.

Hölderlin wrote his greatest poems. Then he went mad. In 1806, at thirty-six, he was committed to the Tübingen mental hospital. After a year there, a carpenter named Zimmer took him into his home — Zimmer had a house on the Neckar, and on the upper floor he gave Hölderlin a small tower room. Hölderlin lived in that tower for thirty-six years, until his death in 1843, at seventy-three. The poems he wrote in his late years had a childlike simplicity — he signed himself "Scardanelli"; he did not recognize visitors who came; he bowed too deeply, in courtesy, to strangers.

Schelling —

Schelling was the one of the three to become famous earliest. At twenty-four he was already a professor of philosophy at Jena (Hegel was his assistant at the time). In his twenties he published a series of works on the philosophy of nature, bringing the natural world — rocks, plants, animals, electricity, magnetism — into the field of philosophy. In his twenties he was considered the most promising figure of German philosophy after Kant and Fichte.

Then Hegel surpassed him.

In 1807 Hegel published the Phenomenology of Spirit. In its preface Hegel made an oblique reference to Schelling — "calling everything one absolute is like the night in which all cows are black." That single line broke the relationship of the two old friends. They never spoke to each other again.

Schelling lived on. He lived to 1854, seventy-nine years old. Twenty-three years longer than Hegel. But across those twenty-three years he was largely overlooked. The German intellectual world had stopped listening to him. He himself stopped wanting to publish — most of his late work was never released in his lifetime, and was edited and printed only posthumously.

Three friends from Tübingen.

One built a great edifice, was raised up as the summit of philosophy, and was then, by later thinkers, slowly dismantled. One wrote the most beautiful poems, and then withdrew from the world, and lived the rest of his life in a tower. One outlived the other two, but lived in such a way that he gradually disappeared from the foreground.

This essay is about the third — the hardest of the three to write.

II. Naturphilosophie

In his early twenties Schelling did something the other German Idealists had not done —

He took nature seriously.

The philosophy of Kant and Fichte was built from the subject. I think. The I. Self-consciousness — these were the foundations of philosophy. Nature, in their systems, was the object known by the subject, the field that supplied experience to the subject. Nature had no dignity of its own.

Schelling did not accept this arrangement.

He held that if philosophy was to be complete, it had to be able to explain nature — not nature as the object of the subject's knowledge, but nature as something with its own internal unfolding. A rock was not only what I see. A plant was not only the object of botany. An animal was not only the topic of zoology. Each had its own way of being, its own process of unfolding, its own internal structure.

From the age of twenty-two he produced a series of works on the philosophy of nature — Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World-Soul (1798), First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799).

What he wanted to do was this —

He wanted to reconnect the two domains Kant had left apart: freedom and nature.

Kant held the two were separate. Nature was the realm of causal law — every event determined by previous events. Freedom was the realm of free will — a rational being could act according to his own purpose. The two realms used different categories. Kant admitted the distinction made certain things hard to grasp (how can a person, as a natural being, also have freedom?), but he held to the distinction because he was strict.

Schelling wanted to open the boundary.

His strategy was to interpret nature itself as a process unfolding toward freedom.

A rock is dead. But within the rock there are mineral structures, mineral structures can become crystals, crystals have rules. This is the first step of nature toward more complex structure.

A plant is alive, but its "alive" is still determined by its environment. It has structure, rhythm, a life cycle, but it cannot choose. The second step.

An animal has consciousness. It can perceive, react, remember. It has more interiority than a plant — its inside is no longer wholly determined by its outside. The third step.

The human has self-consciousness. The human can reflect on itself, can imagine its own future, can act according to imagined possibilities. The human is the highest point of nature unfolding toward freedom.

But this does not mean the human is the purpose of nature. It means the human's free consciousness is the last step in a process by which nature's interior "darkness" gradually becomes "light." That darkness was always within nature — that part not determined by the outside — almost invisible in the rock, beginning to show in the plant, more evident in the animal, becoming full self-consciousness in the human.

In its time, this argument was revolutionary.

It moved nature from "the margin of philosophy" to "the center of philosophy." It gave nature its own unfolding. It said nature was not a dead object observed by a subject; nature had its own inner life as a process.

To us today, this can sound a little mystical. But several major intellectual lines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries trace back here —

Some intuitions of evolution come from here. The Romantic worship of nature comes from here. Some versions of deep ecology come from here. Some premises of Whitehead's process philosophy come from here.

In his twenties Schelling sowed these seeds. He himself later turned to other directions, but the seeds kept sprouting through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But more important is what this argument pointed toward in his own later work.

If nature has within it always a "darkness" — that internal part not determined from outside — then the human self must also have within it always a "darkness." This is not a defect. It is a basic structure of being.

Within everything that really exists, there is some part it cannot wholly control.

That part is its internal other.

III. Caroline

Let us leave philosophy for a moment.

June 1803, Munich. A couple was married.

The groom was Schelling, twenty-eight, already one of the most watched figures in German philosophy. The bride was Caroline, forty.

It was her third marriage.

She had been born in Göttingen, in a family of scholars; her father was professor of Oriental studies at Göttingen. She had read since childhood, knew several languages, wrote her own essays and reviews. Her first marriage had been at nineteen — to a doctor in Göttingen. He died four years later. She was widowed with a daughter. She had lived through the aftershocks of the French Revolution — in 1793 she was arrested by the Prussian army in Mainz, because she had connections with sympathizers of the French Revolution. She spent several months in prison. When she came out, she was alone and pregnant (not by her husband); her social standing was utterly destroyed.

It was August Wilhelm Schlegel who saved her then. They later married — he was one of the central figures of German Romanticism, who, with his brother Friedrich Schlegel, translated Shakespeare into German. Caroline took part in that translation — many scholars now think the best of those German Shakespeares were actually her work, but in publication only August's name appeared.

In Jena — where the Schlegel brothers lived — she became the center of what is now called the Jena Romantic circle. Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Novalis, Fichte, and the young Schelling were in it. She corresponded with all of them, debated with them, gave them suggestions, edited their work.

She met Schelling. She was twelve years his senior. The feeling between them grew slowly. Her second marriage — to August Wilhelm Schlegel — had become a marriage in name only. In 1803 she and August formally divorced; a few months later she married Schelling.

She brought to Munich the daughter from her first marriage, Auguste. Her health by then was not strong.

In 1800 — before Caroline and Schelling married — Auguste, her daughter, died of dysentery at fifteen. Caroline never fully recovered from that.

After the marriage, she and Schelling lived in Würzburg, then in Munich. She kept doing what she had always done — editing her husband's work, suggesting things, discussing with him, shaping the direction of his thought.

There is her presence in Schelling's work of this period. When he studied the history of religion, she read sources with him. When he wrote on art, they discussed Greek sculpture and Italian painting together. The early gathering of his Lectures on the Method of Academic Study and his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom both took place with her present.

But her name does not appear in those works.

She is not the co-author. She is not a cited interlocutor. Her place in the history of philosophy is "Schelling's wife" — a romantic story, a wife who died young, an object of Schelling's grief.

When we read Caroline's letters today — she left over a thousand letters — we can see the force and the breadth of her thought. She discusses Kant. She comments on Napoleon. She analyzes drama. She describes landscape. She writes about the death of her daughter. She debates with her husband over what God is. Each letter is one of the most learned women of her era in conversation with other learned people.

She is not Schelling's assistant. She is an equal interlocutor — possibly, in some respects, the more intelligent one.

But the history of philosophy in the nineteenth century had no place for this. A woman could not be a philosopher. A woman could at most be the "inspiration" or "muse" of a philosopher. She was compressed into that place.

She died in Munich in September 1809. She was forty-six. The cause was dysentery — the same disease that had killed her daughter killed her.

Schelling was thirty-four.

In the four months after her death he completed a book — what came to be considered one of his most important works — Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.

That book was written out of the pain of her death.

The history of philosophy has not acknowledged this. It acknowledges the place of the book in German Idealism, analyzes its arguments, compares it with Hegel. But the writing background of the book — a man trying to understand why the world holds this kind of loss, having lost an equal intellectual companion — has been long overlooked.

When we look back today, what we have to do is to put Caroline back in. Not as a footnote to Schelling's thought, but as one of its central conditions.

Without her, without her death, without his trying to understand her death, the Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom would not exist in the form it does.

She was the other in his life — someone he loved, depended on, could not fully understand, and could not keep.

Her leaving made him face a question — a question he had not really faced before.

That question is the content of the next section.

IV. Freedom

Why does a person do wrong?

This is a question that looks simple. A person hurts another person, destroys something good, takes a road that everyone has told him not to take — why?

Many philosophies have answered this question.

One answer: a person does wrong because he does not know. If he knew what was really good, he would not choose wrongly. This is the Socratic-Platonic answer. Its implication is: evil is ignorance. With sufficient education and reflection, evil disappears.

Another answer: a person does wrong because of original sin. Through Adam and Eve a tendency was inherited that makes us, even when we know the good, fail to choose it. This is the Augustinian-Christian answer. Its implication is: a person cannot, by himself, solve evil; grace is needed.

A third answer: a person does wrong because of environment, society, economic structure. Change the environment, and evil decreases. This is the answer of Rousseau, Marx, and many social theories of the twentieth century. Its implication is: evil is structural.

Schelling was satisfied with none of these.

He held that none of them caught the central thing —

A person has real freedom.

A person does wrong not because he does not know — he knows and still does. He does wrong not because of an inherited sinfulness — he is, in that moment, really choosing to do wrong. He is not entirely determined by environment — within environment, he still has space to choose.

But this "freedom" is not a simple thing.

If a person has freedom, where does that freedom come from?

Kant's answer was: freedom is a property of the rational subject. But this answer has a difficulty — it places freedom on the side of reason. If freedom is purely rational, then a person who chooses according to reason is free. But choosing according to reason necessarily leads to the good (because reason can identify the good). Then evil is either not free (evil is irrational, so evil is unfree, so the one who does evil is not really choosing), or freedom is more than rational.

Schelling said: freedom is more than rational.

Freedom must be able to choose the good, and must be able to choose evil. A "freedom" that can only choose the good is not real freedom — it is necessity determined by the good. Real freedom must contain the possibility of choosing evil.

If freedom contains this possibility, where does the possibility come from?

This is Schelling's central question.

His answer was —

The possibility of freedom comes from the inner structure of being itself.

Within everything that really exists, there are two layers. One is the light layer — clear, graspable by reason, conceptualizable. The other is the dark layer — not fully rationalizable, having its own growth, resisting conceptualization.

A person can choose because a person has these two layers within him. If a person had only the light layer, he would act with rational necessity, no choice. If a person had only the dark layer, he would act with instinctive necessity, no choice either. A person can choose because the person has, between light and dark, a place of his own to stand.

A person can let the light dominate — choose to act according to reason, the good, the recognition of others. A person can let the dark dominate — choose to act according to self-centeredness, the rejection of others, the impulse of destruction. Both choices are really possible. Both come from the same internal structure.

This is the central argument of Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809.

It solved a problem that had long troubled all theories of free will — how to make evil really possible without making evil necessary.

Schelling's solution: evil is possible because the human inside has the dark. But evil is not necessary, because the human inside also has the light. The human chooses between the two.

This structure, he held, is not only the structure of the human. This structure is the structure of everything that really exists.

Including God.

V. The Darkness in God

Here we come to the deepest and the most difficult place in Schelling's whole system.

He says, in the Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom: there is darkness in God.

This sentence, in 1809 Germany — a Germany still mostly Lutheran — was heretical. The traditional theology says God is absolute light, absolute good, with no dark part. A God who has darkness is not the Christian God.

Schelling knew this. He was not attacking Christianity. He was doing something else — using the language of Christianity to think anew about the inner structure of being. He held that if he was right, traditional theology had to be revised.

His argument runs like this —

If God is absolute light, with no darkness whatever, why is there darkness in the world? Why is there evil? Why do people do things that destroy other people?

The traditional theology answers: human free will brings evil. But this answer pushes the question back — where does human free will come from? If God created it, then God created a being capable of evil; the possibility of evil is, in the end, with God.

Schelling does not avoid this conclusion. He admits: the possibility of evil must have some root in God. That root is the darkness in God.

But he immediately adds: the darkness in God is not evil itself. The darkness is the ground — Grund — the root of God's own being. It is the other within God — that part of God that is not, by God's own light, fully absorbed. This part lets God be a being with internal unfolding rather than a static perfection. This part lets God not only be a concept, but a living existence.

The possibility of evil comes from this darkness — but only when an existent (a human) lets the darkness dominate his self does evil become actual. The darkness in itself is not evil. Evil is darkness and light reversed in their positions.

This passage of philosophy is very hard. Most readers in 1809 did not follow it. Most readers today still do not.

But its central claim is simple —

Acknowledge that there is the negativa within being.

Not in order to let the negativa dominate — that becomes nihilism, becomes chaos, becomes destruction. In order to acknowledge the negativa as the ground of being — only between the negativa and the affirmation can real unfolding occur.

In its structure this is the same thing as several core concepts of this series —

Kant's kingdom of ends is the negativa in the distance — always in approach, never fully reached. Levinas's other is the negativa before me — placing on me a responsibility I can never fully complete. Buber's eternal Thou is the negativa at the depth of relation — never able to become It. Cao Zhi's what cannot be held is the negativa at the depth of desire — he longs but can never fully possess. The mechanism Girard exposed is the negativa of the social — the suppressed other that cannot enter consciousness.

Schelling's darkness in God is the negativa at the depth of ontology — the inner structure of all real being.

Every real other, before it shows itself to you from outside, already has the negativa within itself. It is not a being fully transparent to itself. There is, within it, a part it cannot itself fully see. To acknowledge it as other is, in part, to acknowledge that it has within it that darkness — that part not even it itself can fully control.

This is the deepest layer of leaving a place for the other.

Further —

The capacity to acknowledge the external other is built on the capacity to acknowledge the internal other.

If you cannot acknowledge that there is, within yourself, some part you do not wholly control, you cannot acknowledge that, outside, there is another being like you — another being with internal darkness. You will either absorb the external other as your object (eliminating his internal darkness) or destroy him (refusing the existence of his internal darkness).

Only one who has acknowledged the darkness within himself can acknowledge the darkness within another.

Only one who has acknowledged the other within himself can acknowledge another as other.

This is Schelling's central contribution to the theme of Round Six.

VI. The Berlin Classroom

The time jumps to 1841. Schelling was sixty-six.

For most of his later life he had been in Bavaria — Munich, Erlangen. In the late 1820s he remarried (Pauline Gotter, a close friend of Caroline's), rebuilt a private life. But his philosophical work appeared in public less and less. He wrote — his notebooks and unfinished works piled up — but he did not want to publish. He knew the attention of German philosophy was all on Hegel, and his and Hegel's directions were no longer the same. He did not want to step out and debate the Hegelian school.

In 1831 Hegel died.

The Hegelian school split. The "Old Hegelians" tried conservatively to inherit the system. The "Young Hegelians" — Strauss, Feuerbach, Bauer, Marx — applied the dialectic in radical directions, criticizing religion, the state, society.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the Prussian throne in 1840. He was deeply uneasy about the Young Hegelians' radicalism. He wanted someone to go to Berlin to oppose the Hegelian school at the philosophical level.

He found Schelling.

In 1841, Schelling came to Berlin. He was made a professor at the University of Berlin and given a residence by the royal house. What he was to do was — lecture, let his "positive philosophy" displace Hegel's "negative philosophy," make Berlin the center of a non-Hegelian philosophy.

The first course he gave in Berlin began in November 1841 — Philosophy of Revelation.

The hall was full that day.

In the audience were several young men in their twenties.

A twenty-eight-year-old Dane, Søren Kierkegaard. He had come to Berlin from Copenhagen specifically to hear Schelling. A twenty-one-year-old German, Friedrich Engels. He was doing military service in Berlin, attending lectures in his off-hours. A twenty-seven-year-old Russian, Mikhail Bakunin. And a twenty-three-year-old Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt.

These names had no meaning yet in 1841.

Forty years later, each was the source of a major intellectual line —

Kierkegaard became a precursor of existentialism. What he heard from Schelling — the "positive philosophy" against the "negative philosophy" — deeply shaped his own later critique of Hegel. Engels became one of the co-founders of Marxism. His response to Schelling was negative — he thought Schelling a reactionary, and wrote a small pamphlet against him. But the lectures gave him familiarity with the deepest problems of German philosophy. Bakunin became the father of anarchism. Burckhardt became one of the founders of cultural history as a discipline.

Four people in the same classroom, listening to the same old man.

What was the old man saying?

He was saying his "positive philosophy" — a direction that tried to go beyond pure conceptual thinking and to take existence as the starting point of philosophy. He argued that Hegel's system, however great, had a fatal lack — Hegel's system handled concepts, not existence. A complete philosophy could not only explain the relations among concepts; it had to be able to explain why there is a world at all — why is there not nothing. This question Hegel could not answer because he began from concepts. To answer it, one had to begin from existence.

That argument — taken up later in the twentieth century by Heidegger ("Why is there something rather than nothing"), and answered in different ways by Sartre and Levinas — was systematically articulated for the first time in that 1841 Berlin classroom.

But the audience's response was mixed.

Kierkegaard at first was very excited. After a few lectures he wrote home to Copenhagen: "I have placed all my hope in Schelling." But after a few months he was disappointed. He felt Schelling had not driven through what he himself was saying. He left Berlin. But what he took from Schelling — the priority of existence over concept — became core to his own later work.

Engels wrote that pamphlet against Schelling. He learned from Schelling the complexity of German philosophy, but chose the opposite direction — using Marxism to turn philosophy toward social critique.

Bakunin continued his own rebellious thought; Schelling's influence on him was indirect.

Burckhardt took from Schelling a sense of history — history not as the unfolding of concepts, but as the concrete creation of human beings.

Schelling himself lectured for several years in Berlin. The course gradually lost attention. He did not accomplish what he had been brought there to do — he did not displace Hegel. By 1846 he had largely stopped public lecturing. He stayed in Berlin a few more years, wrote in his notebooks, did not publish. He died in 1854 at a Swiss spa town, seventy-nine years old.

But the 1841 classroom — the old man and the four young listeners — is a strange node in the history of philosophy.

A philosopher forgotten by his time, in his last years, in a position he had been called to in order to oppose Hegel, speaking to a group of young men who would each become representatives of opposing directions.

Each of those young listeners took something different from him, and walked off in his own direction — existentialism, Marxism, anarchism, cultural history.

Schelling himself belongs to none of these directions.

But all of them had heard him.

What he did — speak what he could speak, let those who came hear what they could each take — was itself a form of leaving a place for the other. He did not require them to inherit his system. He did not require them to complete his work. He spoke; they each took what they could; they each walked off in their own directions.

This is the most restrained form of teaching.

VII. The Other Within the Self

In Round Six we have already described several kinds of other.

In the Hypatia essay, the destroyed other — the crowd had not seen her face. In the Aquinas essay, the other beyond the boundary — he wrote eight million words to the boundary and stopped. In the Bergson essay, the absorbed other — Einstein declared, with physical time, that consciousness time did not exist. In the Levinas essay, the other who places infinite demand on me — the face says, of itself, Thou shalt not kill me. In the Buber essay, the other in the meeting moment — I-Thou. In the Cao Zhi essay, the other one cannot hold — the Luo Goddess, the elder brother, freedom. In the Girard essay, the other focused upon by the scapegoat mechanism — the arbitrarily chosen one.

Each kind of other comes from outside — another person, another people, another mode of existence.

What Schelling speaks of is another kind of other —

The other within the self.

Not some external person or thing. The part within yourself — the part you cannot fully see, cannot fully control, cannot fully conceptualize.

Within everything that really exists, there is this darkness — Schelling has said this. But he says one more thing —

To acknowledge the other within oneself is a capacity. One who lacks this capacity cannot truly acknowledge the other outside.

This is a new claim of Round Six.

The previous seven essays have all spoken of the external other. We have written different ways of leaving a place for the other — ethical (Kant, Levinas), relational (Buber), distance-acknowledging (Cao Zhi), mechanism-exposing (Girard). Each is a posture of a subject toward the external other.

But Schelling points out: the subject itself first has to do something — has to acknowledge that there is, within itself, an other.

If a person cannot acknowledge that there is, within himself, a part he does not wholly control, what state will he end up in?

He will feel that he is fully transparent to himself — he knows all of his own motives, he can explain all of his own actions, he can predict all of his own reactions. He is a self-sufficient, self-consistent, internally seamless subject.

How will such a subject act toward an external other?

He will try to absorb the external other as his own object — because he cannot tolerate any unabsorbable existence (he does not even tolerate the darkness within himself; he certainly does not tolerate it outside). If the external other resists absorption, he will destroy it — because an unabsorbable existence threatens his self-transparency.

This is the inner logic of the kingdom of means.

The kingdom of means is not made of evil people. The kingdom of means is made of people who refuse to acknowledge that there is, within them, an other. Each such person keeps a high control-narrative over himself — I know what I am doing; I have justified reasons; my motives are clear. This control-narrative makes him keep equally high control over the external other — because he does not allow himself to lose control, he certainly will not allow loss of control outside.

And the people on the bridge — those who leave a place for the external other — have all done one thing: they have acknowledged the darkness within themselves.

Hypatia stepped onto her lectern each day knowing that what she taught was not absolute truth, that there were things she did not know. Aquinas wrote eight million words and then stopped, conceding that what he had written was straw — none of his words could pierce the negativa standing before him. Bergson held that consciousness time was real, but knew his arguments could not convince everyone — there was, within himself, what he could not fully grasp. Levinas wrote infinite responsibility his whole life because he knew he was always in debt — that debt could not be completed. Buber held that the I-Thou moment cannot be sustained — he conceded he could not maintain that moment. Cao Zhi wrote his whole life of what cannot be held — including not being able to hold the person he himself wanted to become. Girard exposed the mechanism but knew exposure could not erase the mechanism — he himself lived in a world where the mechanism was still operating.

Each of them, within himself, acknowledged the darkness. They could therefore acknowledge the other outside.

Schelling gives Round Six a new language —

The other is, first of all, the part within me that I cannot wholly absorb.

To acknowledge this internal other is the precondition of acknowledging any external other.

Kant said: the human is an end, not a means. Levinas said: see the face of the other. Buber said: re-enter the I-Thou. Cao Zhi said: acknowledge that I long, and that I cannot hold. Girard said: see clearly the mechanism of destroying the other, and choose not to participate. Schelling said: acknowledge that there is, within me, what I cannot wholly absorb.

Six languages. The same direction.

In that direction there is a wind. A mild wind.

VIII. The Bridge

When Schelling walked up, he was wearing a dark suit.

He was of medium height. His hair was entirely white, combed back. His eyes were deep-set, but clear. He had died at seventy-nine in Switzerland, but his form on the bridge was a little younger — perhaps in his sixties, around the time of his Berlin lectures.

He walked unhurriedly, but steadily.

He carried a book in his hand — a thin book, plainly bound. The 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Of all the books he had written, this was the one he most wanted to keep.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

There were more people on the bridge than the last time. Hypatia was there, the astrolabe in her hand. Aquinas. Bergson, leaning on his cane. Levinas. Buber. Cao Zhi — the one carrying the bamboo slips. Girard.

The middle of the bridge was not just these named figures. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation — those drawing equations, those watching corn, those writing poems, those reading star charts, those writing novels, those sketching diagrams, those crouching aside taking notes, those sitting and looking into the distance, those speaking quietly with their neighbors.

Schelling nodded to them.

He recognized a few. He recognized Fichte, of Kant's first generation of disciples — they had met in life; later their relationship had broken. He recognized several early-nineteenth-century Romantic poets. He did not recognize the twentieth-century figures — Levinas, Buber — they had not yet been born when he was alive. But from their bearing he could see what kind of work they did.

He did not approach for further talk. He found a place in the middle of the bridge and stood.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight you could see the folds of Kant's clothes — clearer than ever before.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones farthest along were no longer visible. That man in the professor's robe — Heidegger — had walked further than last time.

Schelling looked at that road for a moment.

In his lifetime he had not seen what would later happen on that road. But he had seen its omens. He had seen, on the lecterns of the University of Berlin, those who tried to turn philosophy into ideological tool. He had seen the German nationalism just beginning to take fire. He had not lived to see the road fully unfold.

He was not particularly sad.

He had done what he could — he had tried to make clear that within an existent there is some part it cannot wholly control. If a person accepts this, he will find it harder to walk that road. If a person does not accept this, he will find it easier.

Schelling had finished what he could write. He had set it down.

He turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight. The moonlight was mild.

He gave Hypatia a small smile. Hypatia smiled back. She had taught Greek philosophy — she might have understood, more deeply than almost anyone else on this bridge, the kind of "nature unfolding toward freedom" that Schelling in his youth had been drawn to. Their languages were different, their times were different, but there was a mutual recognition.

Aquinas walked over from the other side. There were a thousand years between them. But each had tried to articulate the same kind of thing — what is the inner structure of being, what is the relation between being and the negativa, what is the relation between freedom and necessity. The languages they used were entirely different (Latin scholasticism versus German Idealism), but the questions were similar. Aquinas nodded to Schelling. Schelling nodded back.

Buber walked over. Buber had spoken of I-Thou, but Buber's subject was the relation. Schelling's was the ontological structure beneath the relation — why "I" and "Thou," as different real existents, can stand to each other. The two thinkers' work is two layers of the same matter. Buber gave Schelling a small smile.

Cao Zhi stood not far off, holding his bamboo slips. There were fifteen hundred years between them; their languages did not meet. But Cao Zhi had written the Rhapsody on the Luo Goddess — one of the deepest texts on the distance of being. Schelling had not read it. But if he had, he would have recognized that the question inside that rhapsody was the same as the question inside himself — how does a real other appear to you, how do you know it is a real other and not your own object.

The middle of the bridge — many people, the moonlight was mild.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas, at Buber, at Cao Zhi, at Girard.

This time he looked at Schelling.

Schelling's eyes met that figure's, briefly.

Schelling lowered his head — slightly. Not in thanks. In confirmation — a kind of "I acknowledge you stand there, and you acknowledge I stand here," a mutual confirmation.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance nodded, lightly.

Schelling raised the book in his hand — held it up briefly, so the figure who had always been looking into the distance could see.

Not display. The act itself: I wrote this; this is what I can give.

The figure nodded, lightly.

Schelling lowered the book.

He stood in the middle of the bridge, with the rest.

In his lifetime he had been overlooked by his contemporaries. After his death he was overlooked again for over a hundred years. He was first really read seriously only in the second half of the twentieth century — Heidegger, Jaspers, Tillich, several philosophers in the twenty-first century — they rediscovered that what he had done was not failure but too early. He was a little ahead of his time. His time needed a hundred and fifty years to catch up.

He knew this only after he was dead. But that did not waste what he had done. What is done is infinite. Whether or not it was heard is another matter.

What he had done was infinite. He knew the infinite was not something he could complete. He had done it anyway.^[1][2]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives