This is, at the same time, the typical transcendental conjunction, even the transcendental knot: conditions of possibility of experience are necessary for us to even have experience at all, so that to think the possibility of the world is necessarily to justify the world as necessary. This conjunction stems from Immanuel Kant, who formulates it in terms of so-called “transcendental conditions,” that is, conditions of possibility of experience—of the world as it appears to us. For Kant, in order for us to even have experience, it must fulfill certain conditions; it must conform to a specific set of categories and follow certain rules. Thus, the reality of the world (of experience) is always negative and divisive: it is a world of objects separated from the subject and from each other; a world in which unity is secondary to separation and can only be thought by way of mediation (synthesis) and relation. There can be, in fact, no experience unless it conforms to these conditions; the world can only appear in this and no other categorial way for it to cohere. If we are to think a world, it can only be this world—that is, a world structured in this categorial way—because this is the way experience (our being-in-the-world) works. The transcendental thus converts possibility into necessity: to inquire into the conditions under which the world is possible, is to show that these conditions are necessary for us to even think a world at all. The possibility of a world is converted into the necessity of the world. To think the (possibility of the) world is to justify it as necessary: the transcendental turn is a theodical operation.4
This conjunction of possibility and necessity can take many forms—including contemporary ones. For example, to say with François Laruelle that the world functions by way of dividing the Real is to say that, assuming there is a world, this is the way it necessarily works—to determine the world as necessarily this way, to convert a world into the world. This conjunction may also be seen as a tension, within which the above question—of how to think the world without justifying it or exorcizing it—exists.
This tension is already present within German Idealism, spanning the conceptual space between two poles: world annihilation and world construction. In this essay, I will present some of the ways in which German Idealism tried to resolve this tension. The point, however, is not to suggest that German Idealism succeeded in doing so, but to put forward the transcendental knot as a key problem that German Idealism shares with contemporary continental philosophy and political theology. Accordingly, the following sections will approach the transcendental knot from different perspectives to highlight its various aspects and to demonstrate the numerous pitfalls when trying to deal with it—or how the world tends to survive all thinking of its end or rejection. It is crucial to engage with the world, with the way in which it is constructed (and can be deconstructed), and with the real power it possesses rather than announcing the world to be illusory, merely contingent, or easily refusable.
I take the pair of “annihilation” and “construction” from Friedrich Schelling.5 Already in his early metaphysics, “the world” is a structure of divisive relationality: the original opposition between subject and object, the I and the not-I, which is then mediated by the I. Finding itself in the world, the subject is divided from object, faced with external reality as something different, other—something over and against which the I seeks to assert itself. Conflict, opposition, and striving are central characteristics of finitude; the finite world is a world of negativity, alienation, division.
As always already in the world, the I strives to break free of the world—be that through gathering the world into one totality that the I would perfectly possess (the dream of perfect sovereignty) or by purifying itself of any not-I (the dream of perfect dispossession, of having no need for the world). The former is the activity of synthesis: the I brings what is multiple into a unity. The latter is morality, configured as the striving to become absolutely nothing, without any need or lack. It may be seen, however, that the end goal of both strivings is, essentially, the same. “The ultimate end goal of the finite I and the not-I, i.e., the end goal of the world,” Schelling writes, “is its annihilation as a world.” What the I strives toward is absolute freedom from the negativity of the world—from conflict, division, and striving itself. This absolute freedom Schelling calls “absolute bliss.” As negative and divisive, the world is fundamentally unblissful; the I’s existence in such a world is, accordingly, a constant longing for bliss. The world does nothing but defer, postpone, or mediate salvation and fulfillment. It is, after all, through this postponement that the world itself survives. From within the world, bliss cannot but appear as transcendent: as either a paradisal past or a future salvific telos—never now.
Imagine, however, that one would not have to strive for bliss; that the subject, instead of wanting something, could get fulfillment immediately—or not want anything at all. In this state of bliss, the subject would immediately cease to be just that: a subject. If there is nothing to strive for, nothing to negate or overcome, no positions to occupy, possessions to accumulate, or goals to achieve, what would subjectivity consist in? It would amount to simply being what one is. This is precisely absolute freedom: to simply be—without any self-assertion or lack, any further determination, any reason why. The I would become, as Schelling calls it, “absolute”—and thus cease to be an I, a transcendental subject or a subject of striving. As the mere am or is, this state may be termed “absolute being”; as being what it is, this being could only be an “absolute identity”—without any negativity or relation to otherness. As immanent only to itself, absolute freedom cannot become other, cannot transition to negation or any outside. “The absolute,” Schelling insists, “can never be mediated.”6 It is “utterly immanent” and “has no need to go outside itself” (VI, 167). It is an absolute now, without before or after, possibility or actuality: immanently atemporal and amodal.
This kind of radical immanence can only function in and as the absence of a world. It possesses the “absolute power”: the power to “completely annihilate” the world (VI, 122, 104). There are two aspects to this affirmative reduction to Nichts. Firstly, no common measure applies to absolute being (122), so that, from the perspective of the world, the absolute “can be neither object nor not-object, i.e., cannot be anything at all” (101)—can only be a nothingness, “nothing at all (= 0)” (119). Conversely, since the absolute has no place or need for otherness, it is the world that is nothing at all, annihilated immediately by the power of the absolute as the absolutely nothing. This annihilation functions by transporting the philosopher to the zero point that must be thought of as preceding—not following upon—the world. In other words, even though the I always already finds itself in the world, this is not where speculative thought must begin—this is not where Schelling locates the Real. The world is a factually inevitable yet secondary, imposed, negative reality. The zero point of nothingness or bliss is prior to the imposition of the world, annihilating its very possibility.
That is, in fact, why the I strives toward bliss in the first place: because it knows or intuits the world to be forcefully imposed, foreclosing the Real as that which is without negativity or striving—and so seeks to return to it. The temporality of the I’s striving in the world turns out to be one whereby the past is redoubled as the future, the past bliss as future bliss: a utopian loop. As long as the world is there, past and future remain separate, with the world existing precisely in and as this gap. To collapse them—to enact bliss right now—would necessitate a total collapse of the world. Why, then, must the world even be? “The main business of all