It seems that this problem cannot, however, be resolved other than from within the world. In this, we approach the crux of the issue. At the standpoint of the absolutely Real, there is no world. As soon as the world is there, however, we find ourselves always already in the world. Even if we say with Schelling that, in fact, the absolutely Real is the “essence” of the I or the soul, so that in a more essential sense we are always already nowhere or nothing, prior to the imposition of the world—a fact that the world forecloses—and that the world is therefore an unreal, even illusory thing, this does nothing to make the world go away or cease its violent imposition. At best, it tears us between two “always already”: one blissful, another imposed, with which we still have to engage.
It is, in effect, through this metaopposition that the world is constructed. This tear between the two “always already” itself is (the fact of) the world, existing as the gap within the Real. I am taking the term construction from Schelling’s later philosophy, where it means exhibiting the world speculatively in—or with a view to—the absolute. To put it simply: if absolute identity and freedom are the absolutely Real, then how to think the world? Since there is no world at the standpoint of the absolute, to think the world is to think it as negation of the absolute—a negation of absolute freedom and bliss. In order to construct the world, then, we need not merely absolute being or nothingness, but twoness and division. The world functions by way of dividing and then mediating (bringing into relation or unity). Accordingly, in order to be a “system of the world” without absolutizing the world,8 the system must be a system of oneness and twoness: it must at once annihilate or suspend the world and exhibit or construct it. The twoness is introduced by the fact of the world, a fact that cannot be thought if we remain at the standpoint of the absolute. Once it is introduced, however, the world can only be thought by way of negation and doubling. In other words, if the absolutely Real is without world, and if speculative thinking seeks to think according to the Real and not according to the world—seeks not to make the world into the first—then the only way to think the world is to think it as negative and imposed (vis-à-vis the Real). To think the possibility of the world turns out to think it as necessarily the (negative) way it is. The world cannot, it seems, be thought otherwise than in the very terms that serve to create it: the transcendental knot again.
To construct the world is thus, in the early Schelling, to reconstruct the way it is. But it is also to construct the end of the world. To think absolute being or nothingness as the Real, and to think the world as imposed negatively upon the Real, is to think that which immediately annihilates the world. The world can only be thought as its rejection or end. However, from within the world (where we are as subjects), this annihilation cannot but be thought of as its future (and not immediate) end. The issue is, in other words, how to think the annihilation of the world from within the world—given the fact that the world is there and does not simply and immediately go away.
If the absolutely Real is what annihilates the world, then to do so becomes imperative. In the absolute itself, no imperative could arise; however, from the point of view of the world, the soul’s striving for the absolute translates into the demand of putting an end to the world. “In order to resolve the antagonism between I and not-I,” Schelling says, “nothing else remains except complete destruction of the finite sphere (practical reason).” It is only if “we pierce through these [finite] spheres”—as demanded by the moral law—“that we find ourselves in the sphere of absolute being” (VI, 145). As a result, the question Why is there a world at all? “cannot be resolved except the way Alexander the Great resolved the Gordian knot, i.e., through the canceling-out of the question itself.”9 It is in the cutting of the knot of the world so as to break through to absolute identity and freedom, that the only resolution of the problem of the world consists. The moral imperative “enters, not in order to untie the knot, but to cut it into pieces by means of absolute demands” (VI, 100). To Why must the world be?, the only absolute answer is, The world must not be.
Since, however, the world is there, this absolute demand can only be remediated (from within the world) in terms of a future. The problem is that the canceling-out of the world, its affirmative reduction to nothingness, must be enacted from within the world. In order for the soul to strive toward the end of the world, this end must be configured as possible—become representable as a goal. That which is supposed to annihilate the world becomes thereby a position in the world, a telos or Endzweck toward which the world must be directed. The absolute demand of immediate annihilation is impossible and so gets postponed into a possible future that is, constitutively, never now as long as the world remains. All that the striving toward this future can realistically amount to, then, is a progress of morality, an approximation of the absolute demand: an “incremental approximation to the end goal” (VI, 124). The world is supposed to be, in the end, annihilated, but this annihilation is always not-yet. In this way, the world remediates bliss as telos. As soon as nothingness becomes possibility and telos, it gets caught up in the same logic of futurity thanks to which the world exists in the first place: the gap in which past is redoubled as future. Via possibility and the not-yet, the world endlessly defers its annihilation.
By thinking the end of the world as the end goal—by thinking bliss as producible from within the world—the world is thus reproduced. Not only can the world only be thought as its rejection or end; the end of the world is the world. To construct the world with a view to its end thus runs the risk of justifying the world as the only way it can and must be.
I do not intend to suggest that this issue is absolutely unresolvable; to suggest so would also mean to absolutize the world. In his later thinking, Schelling may be seen as attempting to approach this issue differently—to think the fact of the world without reproducing the way the world is. In his so-called identity philosophy, Schelling insists that the world is something that we have imposed upon ourselves and need simply to reject; that we need to begin not with striving but with the refusal of striving; that we need to remain where we already are, to remain in the now, which is what the world forecloses. There are not two “always already,” but only one. Essentially, we are never in the world. All finitude, temporality, relation, are already “annihilated in God.”10
The identity philosophy proclaims the finite world, this world of reflection and the relation between subject and object premised on their separation, to be an illusion (Schein) that only appears if we adopt the point of view of reflection in the first place—a product of our “finite” way of looking at things, which must “disappear” if we are to think what is Real.11 What is needed is to refuse to see the world that way: to re-vision the world as bliss, thereby annihilating it as world. There is but one being, an immanence common to all things; to see being otherwise—as divided—is to introduce division into it, to create the reality of which we then futilely strive to break free. To intuit this immanence-in-common is to see all things as simply being what they are—to see the pure “=” at the heart of everything, in which all distinctions between particular and universal, lower and higher, human and nonhuman disappear. Finite things may come into being and perish; but the “=” persists. In this, all divisions that make up the world are dissolved.12 To construct the true reality is to exhibit it indifferently, that is to say, without difference, relation, or striving.13
On the one hand, this is a more fruitful move: to unground the very transcendental conjunction—to see the world in which we modern subjects exist as one whose necessity is tied to the conditions of possibility that produce this world as necessary—in this case, a certain way of looking at the world (of producing it by envisioning it as a world of alienation and division) that, one could argue, becomes dominant with modernity.14 One could then investigate this conjunction historically, genealogically, or speculatively in order to destabilize it and to think a world not in terms of the transcendental knot. The transcendental is thereby made contingent or ungrounded. To expose this contingency is also to insist that the being that all things have in common, prior to the world thus produced, is where one already is, so that one must inhabit this common being and immanently refuse the world as unreal.
On