In his remarkable polemic against the bias toward the affirmative, against the purification and the harmonization of the unruly and the negative, of what refuses itself, there also stirs an impulse to resist the danger of idealist apotheosis—the same impulse for the critique of ideology that extends all the way up to the pessimistic materialism of Horkheimer and to the optimistic materialism of Bloch.38
Horkheimer had in fact written and lectured on German Idealism in general and Schelling in particular in the 1920s, before assuming the Institute’s directorship.39 Although distancing himself from what he saw as Schelling’s goal of absolute identity located in nature or symbolized in art, he applauded the philosopher’s critique of Fichte’s constitutive subjectivism and solipsistic reduction of nature to a mere effect of subjective creation. Toward the later antirationalist Schelling, to be sure, he remained hostile, but he acknowledged that there was something in his search for an absolute beyond a subjective constitution that comported well with a materialist critique of idealisms of any kind.
In his middle period, exemplified by the unfinished Ages of the World, Schelling had addressed the issue of foundations directly.40 Although the book is an uncompleted torso, often cryptic and hard to decipher, the gravamen of its argument is that attempts to know the absolute are always aporetic, as it ceases being absolute when it is transformed into an object of knowledge. Schelling’s primary animus was against the rationalist monism of philosophers like Spinoza, although his contemporaries Fichte and Hegel were also inviting targets. Without regressing to a no less problematic dualism of the kind associated with Descartes, Schelling struggled to articulate a way to gesture toward something unknown that could not be adequately expressed.
It is not true, Schelling opined in opposition to the subjective idealism of his day, that “a deed, an unconditioned activity or action, is the First. For the absolutely First can only be that which the absolutely Last can be as well. Only an immovable, divine—indeed, we would do better to say supradivine—indifference is absolutely First: it is the beginning that is also at the same time the end.” The very notion of “ground,” he contended, is hard to defend coherently. The distinction between Urgrund and Ungrund is paper thin.41 If “ground” is more than just an empty word,
the people must themselves acknowledge that there was something before the existing God as such that did not itself exist because it was only the ground of existence. Now, that which is only the ground of existence cannot have an essence and qualities that are as one with what exists; and if existence is to be regarded as free, conscious, and (in the highest sense) intelligent, then what is merely the ground of its existence cannot be conscious, free, and intelligent in the same sense.42
There is thus an unbridgeable gap between absolute ground and empirical existence, and subject and substance cannot, pace Hegel and Spinoza, be seen as one, despite a sublation of their differences. Žižek glosses the implication of all this as follows: “Prior to Grund there can only be an abyss (Ungrund); that is, far from being a mere nihil prativum, this ‘nothing’ that precedes Ground stands for the ‘absolute indifference’ qua the abyss of pure Freedom that is not yet the predicate-property of some Subject but rather designates a pure impersonal Willing (Wollen) that wills nothing.”43
Not surprisingly, Schelling’s critique of rationalist metaphysics was attractive to thinkers trying to extricate themselves from an overly ambitious philosophy in which all contingency was absorbed into a relational system, and all ineffable mystery was interpreted as ultimately intelligible. In Weimar, a salient example was Franz Rosenzweig, whose abandonment of his earlier Hegelianism was abetted by his reading of Schelling’s Ages of the World.44 As Paul Franks and Michael Morgan put it, “For Rosenzweig, Schelling’s tremendous achievement was to disclose the twin actualities of the unique individual and the actually existing Absolute that are excluded from and yet presupposed by the system of reason, the philosophy of Idealism. These gave his thinking a new foundation in the experience of the contingent, existing individual and its relation to the preconceptual, pretheoretical Absolute, the Urgrund, the ‘dark ground.’”45 The latter was also an abyss (Abgrund) prior to the system of rational relations that made up the world described by meta-physicians. There was no way to illuminate this negative space out of which creation had emerged.
The proto-existentialism in Schelling, who anticipated Sartre in denying that essence preceded existence, is not hard to discern. Nor is it surprising that later advocates of what has broadly come to be called poststructuralism, such as Slavoj Žižek, would find in Schelling a kindred spirit.46 His warning against the excessive reach of rationalism could be interpreted as a psychoanalytic—in Žižek’s case, Lacanian—defense of the resistance of the unconscious to the claims of consciousness.47 His critique of the reflection theory of knowledge, in which subjects and objects mirror each other, anticipated the antirepresentalism of post-structuralist epistemology.48 And his version of an absolute that cannot be objectified or made present has been seen as proto-Derridean, foreshadowing the ways in which différance both attacks identitarian concepts and serves as an anti-originary parasite dependent on them.49
But how does Schelling help us to understand the early Frankfurt School, which in so many ways drew on the power of Hegelian dialectical negation? How could a philosopher who fashioned a theory of identity at one point in his career and affirmed positivity at another be a possible source of Critical Theory’s defense of nonidentity and negation? If there is a distance from Hegelian Marxism in Horkheimer’s work, it is, after all, normally understood to be a product of his abiding sympathy for Schopenhauer’s legacy, not Schelling’s.50 As we have seen, Lukács had first employed the epithet “Grand Hotel Abyss” with reference to Schopenhauer rather than Schelling, although the latter was also a target of his critique in The Destruction of Reason. And in the case of Adorno, it is the anti-Hegelian Benjamin who is often credited with alerting him to the limits of even a materialist dialectic.
Yet it is not implausible to see some Schellingian motifs, especially when it comes to the question of ground in Critical Theory, most clearly evident in Adorno’s version of it. It is worth recalling that Adorno, as Susan Buck-Morss first argued, was likely to have learned of Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” in Jewish theology in the 1920s.51 Neither he nor Horkheimer were, to be sure, ever in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus circle, unlike Löwenthal and Fromm, but he certainly knew of Rosenzweig through Benjamin and Scholem. And, although Adorno did not follow Rosenzweig in explicitly repudiating Hegel, he might well have absorbed some of his reservations about an identitarian dialectic in which all otherness was absorbed into a rational totality.52 After his return to Germany, Adorno would, in fact, acknowledge that “in [Schelling’s] approach from the standpoint of identity philosophy many themes can be found that I reached coming from completely different premises.”53 Here he was referring in particular to Schelling’s Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, a work that Benjamin had also appreciated.54 Habermas would in fact remark on the continuing influence of this book at the Institute even in the 1950s: “What Schelling had developed in the summer term, 1802, in his Jena lectures to serve as a method of academic studies as an idea of the German university, namely to ‘construct the whole of one’s science out of oneself and to present it with inner and lively visualization,’ this is what Adorno practiced in this summer term in Frankfurt.”55
There was also a substantive debt to Schelling in Adorno’s suspicion of seeking firm ground for philosophical critique. In his 1931 lecture “The Idea of Natural History,” he mediated history by nature and nature by history without seeking a higher level sublimation of the two terms. Although Schelling is not explicitly mentioned, one can discern his shadow in Adorno’s resistance to a purely historicist model in which “second nature” is identified solely with Lukács’s idea of a reification that must be overcome by the power of a collective subjective constitution of the historical world. As one commentator put it, “Arguably Ages [of the World] invents this history of nature which will inform Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reformulation of ‘natural history’ as history subject to nature: ‘the