Ages of the World
I am currently reading Schelling’s Weltalter (2nd draft) for the first time, and it is something of a revelation. Much more precise and technical than On Human Freedom, more elaborate, and it is clear that it came after influence from Hegel’s Phenomenology.
Some but not all of the terminology remains from On Human Freedom, and the philosophy expounded in each are seemingly perfectly amendable with each other. Weltalter starts from the Unground - using the double meaning of the German word Grund, meaning both cause / reason and ground, as well as of the term Vorangehende (föregående), meaning both preceding as well as antecedent (a kind of causal or ordinal precedence). In a familiar way there has to be, beyond the furthest ground (beyond the sphere of reason) an ungrounded Freedom, which as such is a thing-that-is-not, yet is not nothing. This ephemeral non-being bedrock which On Human Freedom calls the Unground (Urgrund) is here referred to as Eternal Indifference. The task of the text is then to unfold the dialectic of Being - Existence -Spirit from this elusive primordial strata.
Another primeval ordination is the division-union of every thing: all existents are split into the positive (thing-that-is) and negative (being), but at the same time also a union of these forces. This begins at the highest level of the Unground. This Eternal Indifference is also described as a Will which wills Nothing, a pure passive freedom eternally sated with its own non-being. Somehow - and this is a little mysterious - there is however also another Eternal, who indeed is co-eternal but preceded (atemporally springing forth from) the Eternal Indifference. This figure is the Will which wills Nothingness: it is a pure unconscious desire for the Eternal Indifference, which however remains completely elusive to it. In the Will-To-Nothingness’ yearning for Eternal Indifference it negates itself as non-existent and posits the Thing-That-Exists outside of itself. In doing this it splits not only itself, but the Eternal Indifference itself.
The Will-To-Nothingness’ negativity becomes Nature, as a blind cold yearning, unconscious gravity - while the positive (active) is the fleeting potentiality (Being / Understanding in On Human Freedom) which consists of glimpses of what it will become as per the spirits mediation between it and nature. Beings activity is spirit and as such it exercises it’s affirming power on the negative, absorbative Nature. Spirit is as such directed upwards towards Being, which in turn is directed towards Eternity and in itself constitutes the Understanding of Eternity the making-different of it’s Eternal Indifference.
Spirit in it’s work on Nature is as such always divisive: separation of the thing-that-is and the being (body -mind / objective subjective ) is the same as it’s coming to Being, as it’s reaching towards the higher strata as it were. In this split Freedom arises, which indeed is the Unground - the Unconditioned Freedom - welling up. As such the Chain of Being Schelling draws up is not simply linear, from the trash stratum to the divine stratum: the highest seeps out at the level of the lowest as well.
It seems like God as Being (the Potentiality of a Future Glorious which Spirit is to Actualise) is perhaps not free, that in this respect the human has something which God don’t, indeed, something which God eternally yearns for.
As such we see clearly how the History of Spirit is still the constitution of God as existing through it’s being the mediation between God and the Ground of God (That within God which is more than God). There are hints in the text that this mediation is somehow never completed - that God will never fully know where she came from - but this isn’t clear, and it’s not clear why Schelling would think this. Perhaps in the copulation between the two eternal principles there is generation of infinite variety, indeed, it would seem strange to posit their generation as exhaustible, and as such history may well never end. What is being actualised through history is however not the totality (as if we could speak of something as such) of the Eternal Indifference - because it’s as a thing-that-is it is structurally unreachable (akin to the Noumenon). It is it’s “externality” - it’s Being (for itself) which Understanding is understanding of, and a final co-incidence of Eternal Being - Understanding - Spirit would be the End of History. Schelling talks about two types of activities as per Natures elevation: a from-below piling up bricks kind of activity, and a sky-descending kind of activity. It seems the first could not possibly close the series, similarly to how it could not count to infinity. Thus it seems that, at the prospect of Full Actualisation of God, we have no choice but to place our faith in emanatory grace.