David Farrell Krell

Department of Philosophy
DePaul University
dkrell@wppost.depaul.edu

 

Here is the primal source of bitterness intrinsic in all life. Indeed, there must be bitterness. It must irrupt immediately, as soon life is no longer sweetened. For love itself is compelled toward hate. In hate, the tranquil, gentle spirit can achieve no effects, but is oppressed by the enmity into which the exigency of life transposes all our forces. From this comes the deep despondency that lies concealed in all life; without such despondency there can be no actuality–it is life’s poison, which wants to be overcome, yet without which life would drift off into endless slumber.

 

–Schelling, The Ages of the World¹

 

Is there reason to believe that trauma studies have anything to learn from philosophy? The happenstance that philosophy today, whether of the analytical or hermeneutical persuasions, is itself traumatized–having both run out of problems and bored even its most dedicated audiences to death–is no guarantee. It seems incredible that a never-completed work of romantic-idealist metaphysics, namely, Schelling’s Ages of the World (1811-1815) could have much to tell the contemporary student of trauma. What could the omnipotent divinity of ontotheology have to say to victims of violence? What would the God of traditional metaphysics and morals know about ignominious suffering–about a passio deprived of the safety net of resurrection?

 

I am not sure. In the present paper I am operating on the (naive?) assumption that several aspects of Schelling’s account of God’s difficulties–those told in narratives about the distant past–are somehow related to the traumas that human beings have undergone in the recent past and are undergoing in our own time. While I am not prepared to say that Schelling’s God is suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), there do seem to be grounds for saying that God’s memories, like those of his or her children, are “stored in a state-dependent fashion, which may render them inaccessible to verbal recall for prolonged periods of time” (Van der Kolk, et al., “Introduction” xix-xx). As we shall see, that inability to recall over prolonged periods of time is precisely what Schelling understands to be the principal trait of time past and present. Further, if experiencing trauma is “an essential part of being human,” and if human history “is written in blood,” then being human is an essential part of divinity, and the blood spilled in human history is the blood of the lamb (Van der Kolk and McFarlane, “Black Hole” 3). The memory of God is surely deep, but it is also anguished, humiliated, tainted, and unheroic (Langer).² If human memories are “highly condensed symbols of hidden preoccupations,” and are thus very much like dreams, and if the memories that are “worth remembering” are memories of trauma, then it is arguable that a memorious God could be nothing other than a suffering godhead (Lambeck and Antze xii). Indeed, if psychic trauma involves not only intense personal suffering but also “recognition of realities that most of us have not begun to face,” no God worthy of the logos would want to be without it (Caruth, “Introduction” vii). No Creator worthy of the name would be willing to forgo testing his or her creative powers against radical loss–the terrible test of survival (Aberbach).³ Finally, such a suffering God would also have to become his or her own historian, exercising a craft in which both memory and narrative are crucial–and disenchantment inevitable (Le Goff).⁴ The suffering godhead would have to advance from trauma to melancholia, living a life “that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty,” under the dismal light of a black sun (Kristeva 4). In the light and dark of all these recent inquiries into traumatized memory, the question is not whether trauma studies have anything to learn from philosophy but whether philosophy is capable of thinking its traumas.

 

Having spoken of narrative, trauma, forgetting, the past, and time in general, let me begin with an effort to situate Schelling in some recent philosophical discussions about the possibility of recuperating the past. Is the past essentially available for our recuperation and inspection, or is it ruined by radical passage of time? Is the past so absolutely past that we must say it was never present? More pointedly, is trauma itself the source of repression–of all that bars or distorts every possible memory of the past? Would trauma then be the nonorigin of origins?

 

In Martin Heidegger’s view, the temporal dimension of the past (die Vergangenheit) is the only dimension that needs to receive a new name for both the fundamental-ontological analysis of ecstatic temporality and the “other thinking” of the turning: from hence, according to Heidegger, we will think not the past but the present perfect, “what-has-been,” die Gewesenheit. Yet, before Heidegger, Hegel too had preferred das Ge-Wesene to das Vergangene, as though the absolute finality of the past–which a number of contemporary French thinkers write and think as le passé absolu–would absolutely resist positive speculative dialectic. There appears to be a split between Hegel and Heidegger, on the one hand, and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida, on the other, a split between conceptions of the past as either essentially recoverable or absolutely bygone. (The case of Heidegger is, of course, much more intricate than I have made out here.) How old and how wide is this split?

 

I will approach the question only indirectly by offering an account of Schelling’s earliest notes on Die Weltalter, notes not yet dated with certainty but probably from the year 1811. These notes focus on the words Vergangenheit, gewußt, erzählt, and they culminate in the famous opening sentences and paragraphs of the introduction to all the printed versions of The Ages of the World: “Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gegenwärtige wird erkannt, das Zukünftige wird geahndet. / Das Gewußte wird erzählt, das Erkannte wird dargestellt, das Geahndete wird geweissagt.” In translation: “The past is known, the present is cognized, the future is intimated. / The known is narrated, the cognized is depicted, the intimated is foretold.” Why the known must be recounted or narrated rather than depicted or presented dialectically is my question–it is also Schelling’s question, and right from the start. My presupposition, not yet a thesis, is that Schelling speaks to us about our own fundamentally split experience of the past, which seems by turns to be both absolutely irrecuperable and absolutely inescapable.

 

In this paper I would like to do three things. First, I want to look closely at the oldest of Schelling’s sketches toward The Ages of the World, trying to see how these first steps on Schelling’s path determine the rest of the endless journey toward that book. Naturally, that will be too large an undertaking for a paper such as this one; I will therefore restrict my investigation to the first half of the 1811 printing of The Ages of the World, the first printing of the text. Second, I want to pay particular attention to the emergence of several figures of woman in Schelling’s account of the past, woman as the night of Earth, as the wrath of God, and as the giver of life–inasmuch as she seems to be at the epicenter of trauma, repression, and forgetting in the divine life. Third, I would like to pose some more general questions about the nature of the trauma that Schelling seems to espy in the life of the divine, along with the mechanism of repression that he finds at work both in our own present and in the divine consciousness that began to stir in the remote past.

 

The Earliest Notes toward The Ages of the World

 

Karl Schelling, serving as the editor of his father’s never-completed magnum opus, identifies the first recorded plan of The Ages of the World as “The Thought of The Ages of the World [Gedanke der Weltalter].“⁵ Of the three original Bogen or fascicles of the plan, that is, of the three folded sheets of foolscap, only two (A and C) are preserved. On the left side of the first page of Fascicle A we find a margin extending over a third of the width of the page. In it are nine numbered notes and two unnumbered ones; these notes consist of key words, many of them abbreviated and therefore difficult to decipher. Across from these notes, covering two-thirds of the page, appears the exposition of the plan itself.

 

Why bother with such a problematic sheet of notes, especially before the Schelling-Kommission has prepared it in its historical-critical form? The answer must lie in Schelling’s own preoccupation with the art of beginning and with all beginnings. Virtually all the Weltalter sketches, plans, and drafts thematize in a reflexive and reflective way the problem of beginning (Zizek 13).⁶ More strictly, they deal with the impossibility of beginning at the beginning, since the beginning is in some radical sense bygone. Not only is the beginning past, it also pertains to a time before time, a time that in the current age of the world (namely, the present) never was present. Schelling will eventually say that the beginning is an eternal beginning–that in a sense the beginning has neither end nor beginning (78). We therefore cannot simply assume that our own present and future flow from this distant or “elevated” past–Schelling always calls it die hohe Vergangenheit–for which we are searching. True, he is driven by the belief that we must stand in some sort of rapport with the elevated past; yet he is hounded by the suspicion that the past is closed off to us, encapsulated, isolated, cut off from us. Sometimes it seems to him that the past is all by itself, solus ipse, absolutely solitary, well-nigh un passé absolu. If we do experience some sort of rapport with it, all the critical apparatus of science and philosophy must be brought to bear on this presumed relation, and from the very beginning. Yet something more than science and philosophy will have to be brought to bear from the outset–something like a fable or a narrative. Let us therefore begin with the very beginning of the Früheste Conzeptblatt, reprinting its text as it stands, in all its enigmatic form, and introducing some necessarily conjectural comments on it as we proceed–with trepidation–to translate it.⁷

 

1. Ich beginne.
2. alles an Verg.
3. Die wahre Vergang. d. Urzust. d. Welt… vorhand. unentfaltet eine Zeit…
4. Philos.-Wiss. Verg.
5. Was gewußt wird, wird erzählt.

 

“Number one. I begin.” Or, in the progressive form, “I am beginning.” One might wish to use this progressive form in order to avoid the sense “I always begin,” which would mean as much as “This is the way I have always begun.” Finally, there is nothing that prevents us from reading the present tense as an elliptical future tense, “I shall begin.” Perhaps the first thing that is odd about the beginning of this earliest sketch is that its apparently straightforward, candid, self-referential, self-indexing “I begin” (look at me start, can you see me getting underway at this very instant?) can yield a number of different tenses–simple and continuous present, present perfect, and future.

 

It is perhaps important to notice that the simple past is not among the tenses into which we can translate Ich beginne. The past seems to resist both Schelling’s beginning and our own. And yet everything hangs on the question of a possible access to the elevated past.

 

“Number two. Everything in the past [or: everything concerning the past].” Is the sense here that all that is, all being, reverts and pertains to the past? Or is Schelling making a distinction, as he is wont to do, between things past–in the mundane sense of the history of our present world–and the past in itself, the past in some more lofty sense?

 

“Number three. The true past. The primal state of the world… at hand, undeveloped, a time [or: an age]….” The past properly speaking is a time or an age unto itself. In that former time the world was at hand in its undeveloped state, whereas now, in the present time (the Age of the Present), the worlds of both nature and history are constantly unfolding. Yet could the elevated past–with which we stand in some sort of rapport–be truly undeveloped? When and how could its developmental dynamism have been introduced? This is the very conundrum that had stymied Schelling’s philosophy of nature: his First Projection toward a System of Nature Philosophy (1799) was unable to imagine what might have initiated movement and life into a static universe. If dynamism and dualism pervade nature now, they must always have done so, and right from the start. For omnipresent life and ubiquitous animation are contagion.⁸

 

“Number four. Philosophical-scientific past.” The past is the proper object of dialectic, which is the method best suited to speculative knowledge. However, “Number five. Whatever is known is narrated.” If knowledge is the goal of philosophy as science, it is difficult to understand why the known must be recounted, narrated, told as a story. The suggestion is that even though the past, considered philosophically-scientifically, is the proper object of knowledge, the proper medium of knowledge concerning the past is not presentation, depiction, or portrayal, all of which pertain to the present, but some other form of communication. Schelling will often call it “the fable.” Perhaps he is thinking of the astonishing figure of Fabel in the Klingsohr fairy tale of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. In any case, a hidden reference to Novalis seems to lie in the opening of Schelling’s exposition.

 

Let me return now to the top of the front side of Fascicle A, back to the beginning, or to the second beginning, in order to take up Schelling’s exposition–which I will here, for simplicity’s sake, translate without reference to the many corrections in Schelling’s text:

 

“I am what then was, what is, and what shall be; no mortal has lifted my veil.” Thus, once upon a time, according to some old narratives [nach einiger Erzählung], from under the veil of the image of Isis, spoke the intimated primal essence in the temple at Saïs to the wanderer.

 

It is unclear why this traditional narrative–a fable in Novalis’s if not in Aesop’s sense–begins the exposition. Nor is the import of the fable unequivocal. One recalls that for Schiller’s poem, Novalis’s prose text, and Hegel’s account of the myth in his philosophy of nature, the goddess’s words are sometimes heard as a warning, sometimes taken as an invitation. Lifting the veil sometimes grants immortality, sometimes mortality. If Schiller’s wanderer is struck dead because he dares to lift the veil, Hegel has the written inscription on the hem of the goddess’s dress dissolve under the penetrating gaze of spirit, while the far more gentle Novalis declares that only those who dare to lift the veil–with respect, but without remorse–deserve to be called apprentices at Saïs. Schelling’s exposition offers us no clue as to how the old fable is to be heard. Yet it does assert the importance of the tripartite division of the ages for philosophical science: Past, Present, and Future are not dimensions of the present time but independent times of the world.

 

If reams of questions begin to pile up for readers of the exposition, the numbered remarks on the left seem to anticipate the difficulty. Let me return again to the left-hand margin:

 

6. Warum unmöglich
7. da ich mir nur vorges. in dem ersten Buch d… dieser Verg. zu behandeln, so wird es nicht ohne Dial.
8. D. Vergang. folgt die Gegenwart. Was alles zu ihr gehört — Natur Gesch. Geisterwelt, Erkentn.-Darstellung — Nothw. wenn wir die ganze Gesch. d. Gegenwart schreib. wollten, so d. univ. unter aber nur d. Wesentl. denn… nur d. Syst. d. Zeiten kein Ganzes d. Nat.n.

 

“Number six. Why [it–the narrative–is] impossible.” The exposition tells us that it is not enough to know the One. We must also know the three divisions of the One, namely, what was, what is, and what will be. And after we know these three, we must narrate them, even if something about such narrated knowledge is “impossible.” Yet the nature of this impossibility–which has to do with both the supremacy of narrative over dialectic and the repression of narrative in our time–is not clear to us.

 

“Number seven. Because I have proposed [reading vorges. as vorgesehen or vorgestellt] to treat only what pertains to this past, it will not be without dialectic [Dial.].” It is not yet clear why dialectic is called for at all in our scientific-philosophical pursuit of the past; indeed, we can be rather more assured of Schelling’s troubled relation to dialectic. In the various plans and drafts of Die Weltalter Schelling employs dialectic–and yet almost always he expresses his worry that dialectic may be no more than the manipulation of concepts without the requisite seriousness of purpose or thoughtfulness. Schelling often seems to trust images and fables more than he does dialectic, which he faults for being a kind of intellectual sleight of hand, a conceptual legerdemain. “The past” will be about that time before (the present) time when the intellect was unclear about all that was, when dialectic was more strife and suffering than controlled negation and confident synthesis. Perhaps the very fact that the first book of The Ages of the World will need dialectic is the mark of a flaw or an impossibility? That is an interesting (im)possibility, if only because the editor of these early drafts, Manfred Schröter, himself consistently degrades the first half of the 1811 draft as being too “naive,” too suggestive, too full of images–in a word, as being insufficiently dialectical (“Introduction”). We will have to come back to the question of dialectic, because the narrative or recounting that Schelling has in mind can be understood only in (nondialectical) opposition to dialectic–only in some sort of distance and releasement with regard to dialectic.

 

“Number eight. The present follows the past. All that belongs to it–nature, history, the world of spirits, knowledge-presentation–Necessary if we wished to write the entire history of the present, thus of the universe [reading so des universums], but only in its essential aspects; for [this is] only the system of the times, not the entirety of all their natures.” Here the decoding is particularly hazardous. It is clear that Schelling intends to provide no more than a “system of the times,” not a detailed inventory of everything in nature and history. What is entirely unclear is why and how the present can be said to follow the past. For what has been emphasized so far is that the past is not only essentially prior to or earlier than but also cut off from the present time of the world. If past, present, and future are not to be taken as measures of the current time (namely, the Present), but as “three times that are actually different from one another,” as the exposition says (188), then it is not clear at all that the present should follow upon the past. The problem is blurred when one translates the plural of Zeit, namely, die Zeiten, as “ages” or “eras”; when one translates them and tries to think of them as three distinct times, the problem becomes rebarbative. Indeed, that rapport on which Schelling stakes everything, the relation that ostensibly links the present to the past, remains entirely problematic: everything that Schelling does to elevate the past to its “true” and “genuine” status vitiates the rapport that those of us who live in the present (that is, all human beings, past, present, and to come) might have with it; everything that Schelling does to expose the efficacy of the present in repressing the true past debilitates our faith in his or anyone’s ability to accede to it.

 

Let us now turn to the ninth of Schelling’s marginal notes on the left-hand side of the page:

 

9. Die Zukunft so d. Besch. d. Welt nur… D. hier bg. Werk wird in 3 Bücher abgeth. seyn, nach Verg. Gegenw. u. Zuk. welche hier… in d. hier beg. Werk nicht als bloße Abm. d. Z. sond. als wirkl. Zeiten vers. wäre d. — Welt — allein.

 

Ein Altes Buch.

 

“Number nine. The future. It is thus [usually taken to mean] the way the world turns out [reading Besch., very uncertainly, as Bescheidung]…. The work presented here will be divided into 3 books, according to Past, Present, and Future, which here in the work that we have begun are not mere dimensions [Abm. = Abmessungen] of time, but are to be understood as actual times–the world–alone. [¶] An Old Book –.” Much in these final lines resists our reading–especially the relation of “–the world–alone” to the three “actual times.” Why does Schelling insist that there are three distinct ages or times? He does so, he says, because of “an Old Book.” The book is Ecclesiastes, and to its question “What is it that has been?” Schelling replies, “Precisely what will come to be afterwards.” And to the further question, “What is it that will come to be afterwards?” he replies, “Precisely what also has been before.” Because it is not speaking of the essence, says Schelling, and because it evades the problem of the past by speaking in the perfect, the Old Book can equate past, present, and future and declare that there is nothing new under the sun. Yet the sun of that Old Book shines on the things of this world alone, the present world, says Schelling, so that Ecclesiastes is actually pointing in the direction of something else. “The time of this world is but one vast time, which in itself possesses neither true past nor genuine future; because the time of this world does not possess them, it must presuppose that these times belonging to the whole of time are outside itself” (188).

 

In Schelling’s view, the true or genuine past is clearly privileged. At least he will say throughout his work on The Ages of the World–which never gets out of the past precisely because it never gets into it–that as much soothsaying skill is needed to discern the past as to augur the future. Two final unnumbered notes on the left-hand margin now try to distinguish past from present:

 

Wenn es die Abs. ist dieß Syst. d. Zeit. zu entw. s. steht d… doch Verg. u. Gegenw. nicht gleichs… D. Verg. gewußt.

 

Woher nun Wiss. d. Verg. in jenem hohen, [sic] Sinn philos. verstanden? Wenn aber warum nicht erzählt?

 

“If the intention [of this work] is to develop this system of the times, then past and present are not posited as identical…. The past is known. [¶] Now, whence our knowledge of the past, understood in that elevated philosophical sense? But if [it is known], why [is it] not narrated?”

 

Here the left-hand margin comes to an end, but the exposition continues to elaborate the questions posed. And the principal question seems to revolve around the apparent contradiction that, whereas the known is narrated, the past, though indeed known, is not narrated–but then why not? Schelling argues that “the true past time is the one that came to be before the time of the world; the true future is the one that will be after the time of the world,” and the present time–with its own epiphenomenal past, present, and future–is but one “member” of time. Yet no one has as yet lifted the veil: what was, is, and will be–considered as three distinct times–remains concealed.

 

Schelling’s exposition now finds the statement that will serve as the opening for the introduction to The Ages of the World in all its drafts: “The past is known, the present is cognized, the future is intimated. The known is narrated, the cognized is depicted, the intimated is foretold” (189). Yet this refrain–both more and less than an assertion or the thesis of a dialectic–only underscores the severity of the double question posed in the margin. If the past is known, where does that knowledge come from? How can we in the present time of the world know anything of the elevated past? The second question is more confusing, and Schelling’s marginal formulation of it is quite condensed: “But if [the past is known], why [is it] not narrated?” Up to now Schelling has made use of an ancient myth–the myth of Saïs, reported to his contemporaries by Herder and recapitulated by Schiller and Novalis–and an Old Book that is part of the Good Book; apparently, therefore, something of the past has indeed been recounted. Yet Schelling wants to know why it is recounted in such cryptic, Sibylline forms:

 

Science would thus be the content of our first part [on the past]; its form would have to be narrative [erzählend], because it has the past as its object. The first part, namely, a science of the preworldly time, would speak to everyone who philosophizes, i.e., everyone who strives to cognize [erkennen] the provenance and the first causes of things; but why is that which we know not narrated with the candor and simplicity with which everything else we know is narrated; what holds back the Golden Age, when science will be story [or history: Geschichte] and the fable will be truth? (189)

 

We cannot read Schelling’s words without thinking ahead to Nietzsche’s account, in Twilight of the Idols, of “how the true world finally became a fable” (Sämtliche Werke 80-1). Schelling’s account would only alter slightly the sense of the endlich, “finally.” For what Schelling envisages is a recurrence of that time, that Golden Age, in which truth and fable were coextensive, the time when inquiry was–and will be–indistinguishable from story. The gold of that Golden Age will prove to be the densest of metals, the metal that feels as though it has an oily skin, a skin that exudes balsam, a balsam that heals flesh, the flesh that is of organs and that wishes to adorn itself with nothing else than divine gold.

 

After two significant false starts (“There still slumbers in human beings a consciousness of the past time…” and “It is undeniable that human beings are capable of cognizing only that with which they stand in living relation…”), Schelling avers that human beings today still retain a “principle” from the primordial time, or pre-time, of the world. The past serves as a kind of matrix or foundation of the present, die Grundlage. Yet that matrix or foundation has been “repressed” or at least “covered over” (verdrungen oder doch zugedeckt), somehow “relegated” to or “set back” into the dark (ins Dunkel zurückgesetzt) (189-90). Schelling calls this principle of the proto-time the human “heart of hearts,” das Gemüth.

 

We would need to trace the history–or the story–of this word Gemüth from Kant’s third Critique to Heidegger’s Being and Time in order to feel the full weight (past and future) of Schelling’s asseveration. For Schelling, the rapport we sustain with this earlier time, the time before our own worldly time, arises within the human Gemüth, which is not a faculty but a principle ruling from the beginning. His genealogy of time(s), carried out in the second half of the 1811 printing,⁹ will be a genealogy of Gemüth–and here it is almost as though Schelling were quoting Being and Time, if one can quote from a future that can only be intimated. At all events, it will be a genealogy designed to sustain a rapport in the face of the most powerful repression. For even when the past is repressed or covered over in the present, there is something in the human heart of hearts that has the experience of déjà vu; even when the past is “set back” into the dark, it preserves treasures. One is reminded–if one may take yet another leap into the future–of the way in which Husserl insists that even at the zero-point of internal time consciousness, where retention fades away into absolute nothingness, something of the past is preserved. For Husserl, such preservation will constitute the secret font of Evidenz. It is perhaps not out of place for us to note here that Husserl is also involved in Schelling’s more dialectical deduction of the three times of the world, inasmuch as that deduction has to do with the problem of what Husserl calls die lebendige Gegenwart, the living present. Yet Schelling’s problem, as we shall see, is the obverse of Husserl’s: whereas Husserl needs the living present in order to explain our retention of the past, Schelling fears that the living present will expand excessively and thus block all passage to the genuine, elevated past.

 

Those who live in the present age time are all like the Greeks–as the sages of ancient Neith (at the temple of Saïs) saw them, according to the story in Plato’s Timaeus: we are like children who have no memory, especially no memory for the beginnings of things. And if we have a vague premonition of an ancient memory, we cannot find the words to tell it. Thus Plato’s Socrates will always call upon some higher power represented in a myth, some recollection, so that by collection and division, by dissection and analysis of the old stories, he can struggle to remember what we all have forgotten. We are all like Faust: two souls dwell in our breast, and it is the art of interior discourse–the dialogue of self and soul–that enables philosophy first of all to search for what it has forgotten and then to give birth to dialectic. If candor and simplicity (Geradheit und Einfalt) are the virtues of philosophical reasoning and dialectic, it is nevertheless the case that something prevents our heart of hearts from hearing and understanding the stories of the remote past. The present seems to have repressed the past, condemned it to the inner darkness of un for intérieur. What could have been the motive of such repression? Why are the treasures of the past locked away in an interior vault? What accident or contingency or shock could have induced such a repression? And what kind of narrative will release the effects of the repression and give us back our rapport with our own provenance, give us back our own past and thus promise us a future?

 

One recognizes the astonishing parallel with, or anticipation of, psychoanalysis. One could understand the parallel as a straightforward historical inheritance–from Schelling to Schopenhauer to Freud to Lacan–or one could problematize (or at least leave open) the very meaning of “inheritance” and historical succession. One would thereby show greater respect for both psychoanalysis and Schelling–precisely by setting out in quest of the undiscovered source of primal repression. That source lies hidden in a time so remote that it appears–to both Schelling and Freud–as timeless.¹⁰

 

Niobe’s Children

 

Schelling saw the 1811 text of The Ages of the World into print, then retracted it. He withdrew his text (in three completely different versions) three times, first in 1811, then in 1813, and then for the last time in 1815. Different commentators highlight different parts of these three drafts–some three hundred pages of text; in my view, it is again the earliest part of the 1811 text that seems most remarkable, most memorable, and most repressed. For it is the first half of the 1811 printing of “The Past” that presses back to the most recalcitrant materials–including the material of matter itself. Whereas the second half of the text finds familiar comfort and solace in the Christological story, the story of a loving solar Father and his mirror-image Son, the first half finds itself forced to introduce the themes of darkness, wrath, and the mother. Whereas the second half expresses confidence in the divine will of expansive love, the first half cannot escape the lineage of love that is longing, languor, and languishing (die Sehnsucht), as well as craving and tumult (Begierde, Taumel). Whereas the second half of the 1811 printing is happy to fall back on the reiterated story of the spiritualization of all matter, the first half tarries with the matter and the materials–gold, oil, balsam, and flesh–that seem themselves to invite and incite divinity.¹¹

 

The posthumously published text of the 1811 printing is marked by many revisions and corrections and is therefore difficult to read and cite. The narrative always seems to be fighting against a strong current, or against two strong currents, one of which wants to sweep it up and away into the remote past, the other threatening shipwreck on the familiar shores of Christological consolation and salvationist delights. These cross-currents make the going rough, both for the reader and (presumably) for the writer; the waters are choppy, the interruptions irregular but quite frequent. The text is filled with what the trained logician will gleefully expose as blatant contradictions: the first words of “The Past” tell us “how sweet is the tone of the narratives that come from the holy dawn of the world,” whereas seven lines later we hear, “No saying reverberates to us from that time” (10). Among the many topics pursued by Schelling in the first half of the 1811 printing (10-53), let me single out three: first, the problem of the living present and the negative deduction of the times of the world; second, the problem of the basis or birthplace of the world; third, the wrath, strength, and tenderness of God. All three topics should contribute to the overriding methodological question that haunts The Ages of the World and reappears in every draft in virtually the same words, words we have already heard from the “earliest conception,” but here taken from the introduction to the 1811 printing: “Why cannot what is known to supreme science also be narrated like everything else that is known, namely with candor [or straightforwardly, mit der Geradheit] and simplicity [Einfalt]? What holds back the Golden Age that we anticipate [Was hält sie zurück die geahndete goldne Zeit], in which truth again becomes fable, and fable truth?” (4).

 

Clearly, the Golden Age is as much of the future as of the past; it is intimated or anticipated more than known, and yet it is the proper object of our scientific-philosophical pursuit of the elevated past. The fabled past, anticipated as the hallowed future, poses problems for the truth of the present. Science, which is to say, dialectical philosophy, will have to tell stories as well as deduce, will have to listen to narratives as well as to arguments. Not only its enemies but also its friends will ridicule it for its fascination with that night in which all cows are black. Yet if the ridicule will not banish Schelling’s fear, it will not quell the disquiet in all who mock, will not dispel the suspicion that something is holding back the recurrence of the Golden Age. Some as yet nameless trauma or suffering is still causing the past to be repressed or covered over and buried. Freud will use Schelling’s word Verdrängung, perhaps not knowing that it is Schelling’s word, although he will quite consciously use Schelling’s definition of the “uncanny.” The methodological question–the question as to whether and how we can ever resist the force of repression–is what invites us to ask about (1) the negative deduction of the times of the world from the enigma of the living present; (2) the birthplace of the world, which is a site and situation of trauma and suffering; and (3) the sundry qualities and contradictions of divinity. As we shall see, all three of these topics (but most notably the second and third) have to do with figures of the female and the feminine in Schelling’s text.

 

1. If the past is a time of silence and stillness, so that no saying comes to us from it–no matter how sweet the tone of its narratives may be–how will we approach it as an object of silence rather than science? Nothing is more difficult. For we live in a living present, a present that seems to dilate and stretch its envelope forward into the infinite future and backward into the infinite past, such that these two dimensions are never truly released by the present. “Most human beings seem to know nothing at all of the past, except for the one which expands in every flowing instant [in jedem verfließenden Augenblick], precisely through that instant, and which itself is manifestly not yet past, that is, separated from the present” (Weltalter Fragmente 11). Schelling’s problem is the opposite of Husserl’s and is perhaps closer to Aristotle’s. Whereas Husserl will deploy the antennae of retentions and protentions in order to prevent past and future from vanishing beyond the zero-point, a prevention that is necessary if internal time-consciousness is to provide the matrix for all evidence, Schelling, like Aristotle, sees the contiguity of the dimensions of time as a problem. Access to the past is closed if the past is still (of the) present, so that Husserl’s solution is but a restatement of the problem of continuum. What Schelling seems to yearn for is passage back beyond the zero-point into the territory that both he and Husserl will populate with figures of night and death, the funereal figures of the spirit world.¹² Schelling has recourse to that Old Book, Ecclesiastes, which he reads in an admittedly bizarre way: if as the Old Book avers there is nothing new under the sun, then we must ascend beyond the solar system, or at least beyond the system of the present world, in order to encounter something new–a system of times or ages of an expanded world. Within such a system, “the genuine past, the past without qualification, is the pre-worldly past [die vorweltliche]” (11). Schelling realizes that he is trying to sound the seas of time, and that abyss may bottom out upon abyss, in such a way that the appropriate response is horror (13). Only the discovery of a “basis” or “true ground” of the past that sustains the present world will banish the sense of horror.

 

2. Schelling realizes that he is speaking in an all-too-human or anthropocentric way when he asks about the basis. “Who can describe with precision the stirrings of a nature in its primal beginnings, who can unveil this secret birthplace of essence [diese geheime Geburtsstätte des Wesens]?” (17). Schelling has already called The Ages of the World the companion science to Creation (Mitwissenschaft der Schöpfung) (4), and the search for pristine beginnings can be nothing less that that. If the essence of all essence is divine, if divinity is purest love and love infinite outflow and communicability (unendliche Ausfließlichkeit und Mittheilsamkeit) (19), we can expect the essence of essence to be the expansive force. Yet if divinity exists, if it is, then it must be on its own and as its own; to be is to be a precipitate that resists total outflow. Divinity must be what Walt Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” calls the human being, namely, “a float forever held in solution.” Divinity must have a ground (einen Grund); otherwise it would dissolve, disintegrate, evaporate. However, such a ground would be “what eternally closes itself off, the occluded [das ewig sich Verschließende und Verschlossene]” (19). Such occlusion would be unfriendly to outsiders; it would spell the death–death by fire–of any creature that sought love from it. Self-closing would be the very figure of a wrathful God, the figure of eternal fury (ewiger Zorn), which, as we shall see, is an unexpected figure of woman.

 

3. Schelling begins to deduce the two opposed forces that constitute the divine essence–the expansive, dilating force of the will of love, and the contractive, centripetal force of the will of ground. For Schelling, these two forces constitute what one might call the ontological difference: in God one finds both a to-be (Seyn) as the basis and a being (das Seyende), both contraction and expansion. Presumably, the birthplace of the world would host both the to-be and being, both ground and love, inasmuch as lovemaking–and prior to it, desire, longing, and craving–leads to the conception that in turn leads to birth, the birth that is itself to serve as the birthplace of the natural world. As Schelling pushes back into the past that belongs to love and ground, dilation and contraction, he confronts his first two images of the lordly mother–first, the image of proud Niobe, whose children are being slaughtered by Apollo and Artemis, and second, an image of the Amazons. The strength of God, the very pith of his essence (die Stärke Gottes), is what makes him himself alone, sole, “cut off” from everything else (von allem abgeschnitten). Yet if there is something living in divinity, it must be superior to God’s mere to-be (über seinem Seyn), or beneath it as the deeper ground of its ground. Schelling elaborates, apparently thinking of a painting by Raphael and a Hellenistic statue of Zeus:

 

Heaven is his throne and the earth is his footstool [sein Fußschemel]. Yet even that which in relation to his supreme essence must be called not-in-being is so full of force that it irrupts into a life of its own. Thus in the vision of the prophet, as Raphael has depicted it, the eternal appears to be borne not upon the nothing but by figures of living animals. Not one whit less grand is the depiction by the Hellenistic artist of the very extremity of human fate: carved on the foot of the throne of his Olympian Zeus is a relief of the death of Niobe’s children; and even the god’s pedestal [Schemel des Gottes] is decorated with forceful life, for it represents the battles of the Amazons. (20-21)

 

All three images–living animals, Niobe’s children, and the Amazons–are meant to evoke that great force of life that subtends the being of God. Yet at least two of the three evoke violence and death. The Amazons are devoted to Artemis and Ares, and are remembered for the bloody battles they fought against Herakles and Theseus. Niobe’s seven sons and seven daughters were killed by the Olympian twins, Artemis and Apollo, after Niobe had mocked the twins’ mother, Leto. According to ancient interpreters, the slaughter of Niobe’s children may in fact be a cryptic retelling of the battle of the Olympian gods against the seven Titans and Titanesses. In any case, Niobe’s children are images of anger and the night–joining an image of animated animality–which is precisely where Schelling himself will locate the birthplace of the natural world.¹³

 

To be sure, Schelling devotes himself to “the tender godhead, which in God himself is above God” (21), and not to the God of wrath. This tender divinity he clearly associates with the expansive will of love, and he counterposes it to the God of wrath who closes in on herself. I say “herself” because the age of wrath, the time of the night, will be identified with womankind and even with the mother. If God herself is shut off in such a night, closing in on herself and furious toward everything that might be external to her, wrathful toward every creature, she is also abgeschnitten, “cut off.” She hovers in the selfsame relation to her self that obtains between us and our own elevated past, which has been cut off from us.

 

Matters of the divine birthplace are more complicated than castration and emasculation, however. Schelling refers to an “active occlusion, an engaged stepping back into the depths and into concealment,” a description that is reminiscent of the earth in Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art. For Schelling such an occlusive force is also a force that suffers (Leiden). The folding in upon itself or contraction of the essence is prelude to the expansiveness of love, yet it is unclear to Schelling whether love–the tender will–can ever leave behind its capacity for passion and passivity, pain and suffering. Everything about this “beginning” is obscure: “Darkness and occlusion make out the character of primal time. All life at first is night; it gives itself shape in the night. Therefore the ancients called night the fecund mother of things; indeed, alongside Chaos, she was called the most ancient of essences” (24). If light is taken to be superior to darkness, it is nonetheless true that the superior presupposes the inferior, rests on it and is upheld by it (trage und emporhalte) (25). Zeus’s pedestal, God’s footstool, on which Niobe and the Amazons hold sway, is and remains the ground–a ground so nocturnal and so abyssal that in the 1809 Treatise on Human Freedom Schelling had called it the Ungrund, the “nonground.” In his address to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on October 12, 1815, entitled “The Divinities of Samothrace,” which Schelling hoped would provide the very ground (footstool? pedestal?) of his The Ages of the World, which was so difficult of birth, he explicitly related the rigors of wrathful, primal fire to the magic of Persephone (“Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake” 8: 356).¹⁴ In The Ages of the World he writes: “Thus too wrath must be earlier than love, rigor earlier than mildness, strength earlier than gentleness [Sanftmuth]. Priority stands in inverse relation to superiority” (25-26).

 

For a project that seeks the beginning, the a priori prior, and seeks it in the elevated past, it is surely odd to say that its object is not superior. Indeed, one of the cross-currents to which I referred earlier is the force of “the early” as such: Schelling will always feel swept away by the phantasm of the earlier, and he will release himself to its attractive force because he is convinced that there can be no superior goal for science. He can never be certain whether he is being drawn upward to the expansive will of love or being displaced from the center to the periphery–which was Franz von Baader’s and his own description of evil in the 1809 Treatise. Schelling’s essential indecision about these forces induces a call for their existentielle Gleichheit, “existential equality.” He notes that although the south pole exerts a weaker magnetic pull than the north, and although the female sex is reputedly “weaker than the male,” even so, the one must for a time bow to the other. What is odd, however, is that in the beginning for which he is searching, nothing can be less certain than the putative weakness of the female–an imputation that sounds more like a prejudice of our present age, which has no sense of the true, elevated, superior past.

 

In the elevated, superior past, the first existent is in fact a double essence (ein Doppelwesen) (29). When it comes to the primal images of the world, which our tradition calls ideas, the principle of existential equality and of doubling prevails: one consequence of this doubling is that such ideas cannot be thought “in the absence of everything physical” (31). The spiritual cannot be thought without its being bound up with “the first, most tender corporeality [mit der ersten, zartesten Leiblichkeit verbunden]”; the highest form of purity (Lauterkeit) takes on “the first qualities of suffering [die ersten leidenden Eigenschaften]” (31). “The spiritual and the corporeal find themselves to be the two sides of the same existence so early on that we may say that the present moment of their supreme intimacy [Innigkeit] is the communal birthplace of what later come to stand in decisive opposition to one another as matter and spirit” (32). If these opposites were not twins, they could never partake of one another: “If there were no such point where the spiritual and the physical entirely interpenetrated, matter would not be capable of being elevated once again back into the spiritual, which is undeniably the case” (32). Schelling begins to look for this “point of transfiguration” in which spirit and matter are one, and he believes he sees it in the very place where Novalis too, in his very last notes, saw it: spirit looms in the most dense and compact metals–gold, for example. For the density of gold is soft to the touch: gold seems to have a skin, and its skin seems to have a smooth, almost oily texture. Gold has the softness, viscosity, and tenderness that is similar to flesh (die Weichheit und fleischähnliche Zartheit), which it combines with the greatest possible density and malleability (Gediegenheit) (33). Not only Novalis but also Hegel praised the Gediegenheit of gold. Hegel too found it in the skin–specifically, in the skin of the black African (see Krell, “Bodies of Black Folk”).

 

The Golden Age is therefore an age in which matter and spirit–and presumably also female and male–are in perfect harmony. Schelling finds the principle at work in organic nature in particular. The ethereal oil that nourishes the green in plants, “the balsam of life, in which health has its origin,” makes the flesh and the eye of animals and human beings transparently healthy. Health is a physical emanation (Schelling again uses the word Ausfluß, which earlier described the expansive force of love) that irradiates everything pure, liberating, beneficent, and lovely. The most spiritual form of this radiance is what Schiller had identified as Anmuth, the grace, gracefulness, and graciousness that transcend the merely charming. Yet no matter how transfigured or spiritualized the physical may seem to be in Anmuth, which may be related more than etymologically to Gemüth, the physical and corporeal is undeniably palpable in it: Anmuth astonishes us precisely because it “brings matter before our very eyes in its divine state, its primal state, as it were” (33). Perhaps that is why artists who sculpt or paint the divine are drawn to Amazons and Niobes and other living beings.

 

Trauma, Repression, and the Absolute Past

 

Yet beautiful, gracious, and graceful life is not without its fatality, its passion and suffering. As Schelling is swept back to the beginnings, to the distant and elevated past, suffering and fatality become ever more central to his narrative. It is as though the way up were the way down. For centripetal being (Seyn) feels the centrifugal, affirmative force of love only as suffering, and even as a kind of dying. If contraction is embodiment, and expansion spiritualization, pain and suffering are bound up with both: contraction cramps, expansion distends. There is a principle of gloom that does not cease to strive against spirit, light, and love–indeed, light and love themselves participate in that gloom. The farthest reaches of the past are reaches of strife and supreme enmity or revulsion (Streit, höchste Widerwärtigkeit) (37). Schelling finds himself propelled back to the era of Chaos, the yawning abyss in which matter is fragmented into the smallest particles, only to be unified in sundry mixed births. For the inner life of the essence, such Chaos can be experienced only as suffering and pain. Which essence? The essence of all essence, where Wesen can mean–and perhaps must mean–both creature and Creator. “Suffering is universal, not only with a view to human beings, but also with a view to the Creator–it is the path to glory [der Weg zur Herrlichkeit]” (40).

 

The age of the Titans is the age of “monstrous births.” During this preworldly, protocosmic time, wild visions and phantasms beset the essence. “In this period of conflict, the existent essence broods as though on oppressive dreams looming out of the past: soon in the waxing strife wild fantasies pass through its inner life, fantasies in which it experiences all the terrors of its own essence…. Its corresponding sensation is the feeling of anxiety” (41). Even the primal time of Chaos–out of which, according to the myth of Plato’s Statesman, both the Titanic time (dominated by Ouranos and Cronos) and the Olympian time (of Zeus) arise–is haunted by a still more primal past. So many crises and separations (both words translate the word Scheidung, which was the key word of Schelling’s 1809 Treatise) are experienced that the centripetal force fears it will be pulled apart; being trembles (zittert) like a dog before the storm or a bomb before it explodes.¹⁵ The essence is anything but free. The lightning bolt of freedom, wielded by Zeus (or was it wielded by Prometheus the Titan? or by some essence earlier than both the Olympian and Titanic?), cannot be grasped. Spirit and consciousness suffer “a kind of madness,” and even if it is the divine mania described in Plato’s Phaedrus, the essence that suffers it does not feel divine. Even if its tumult proves to be the origin of music and dance, the essence that suffers it feels like the helpless prey of voracious animals–perhaps the very animals Raphael painted as the sustaining ground of eternity. Among the most remarkable lines of the 1811 printing, reminiscent here of Hegel’s remarks on “Bacchic tumult” in his analysis of “the religion of art” in the Phenomenology of Spirit (504), are the following:

 

Not for nothing is it said that the chariot of Dionysos is drawn by lions, panthers, and tigers. For it was this wild tumult of inspiration, into which nature was plunged by the inner view into its essence, that was celebrated in the primeval cult of nature among intuitive peoples, with their drunken festivals of Bacchic orgies–as though thereby to lament the demise of the old and pure things of nature. Working against this tumult was the terrific pressure of the contractive force, that wheel turning crazily on itself in incipient birth, with the frightful forces of circular motion working from within, symbolized in that other terrifying display of primitive ritual custom, to wit, insensate, frenzied dancing, which accompanied the terrifying procession of the mother of all things, seated on the chariot whose brazen wheels resounded with the deafening noise of an unrefined music, in part hypnotic, in part devastating. (43)

 

Schelling is no doubt thinking of the Korybantic dancers, which he had written about in the 1809 Treatise on Human Freedom. Whereas their rites of self-emasculation served Schelling in 1809 as a parallel for modern Cartesian philosophy, which with its mind-body split mutilates science and philosophy, here the allusion occurs in the context of a discussion of essence itself. The Korybants, of which the Whirling Dervishes are distant descendants, dance the inner strife of essence. Their terrifying rites, which require them to throw their severed organs against the statue of the Great Mother as her brazen car clatters by, suggest something quite specific about the divine father’s suffering and pain, to which Schelling was referring earlier. If later, for Nietzsche, music will give birth to Greek tragedy, the most savage of Greek (or oriental) cults will, prior to that, give birth to music:

 

For sound and tone appear to originate solely in that struggle between spirituality and corporeality. Thus the art of music alone can provide an image of that primeval nature and its motion. For its entire essence consists of a cycle, taking its departure from a founding tone and returning to that beginning-point after an incredible number of extravagant sallies. (43)

 

No one assists at the birth of essence. Human beings help one another at birth, and so do gods. “Yet nothing can assist the primal essence in its terrifying loneliness; it must fight its way through this chaotic state alone, all by itself” (43). “The spinning wheel of birth,” discussed also in the second half of the 1811 printing (68-69), represents the overwhelming force of nature; as it turns, both Schelling and his readers are confused about whether the force it represents is centripetal or centrifugal, or both. What is certain is that this spinning wheel of fortune–as the opening song of Carmina burana emphatically tells us–points sometimes up, sometimes down.

 

From Schelling’s concluding discussion, let me extract only two points. The second has to do with the greatest of the Titans, namely, Prometheus–the Titan without whose craftiness and foresight Zeus would never have defeated the other Titans, thus instituting the reign of the Olympians. The first has to do with that transfigurative point in the beginning of the beginning when spirit and matter interpenetrated with grace–the grace of gracefulness or beauty in motion. Schelling knows that many of his readers will be shocked by this apparent elevation of matter to equiprimordiality with spirit, and so he tries to absorb some of the shock:

 

By the bye, what is it about matter that most people consider an insult, such that they would grant it an inferior provenance? In the end it is only the humility [Demuth] of matter that so repels them. Yet precisely this releasement [Gelassenheit] in the essence of matter shows that something of the primeval essence dwells in it, something that inwardly is purest spirituality and yet outwardly is complete passionateness [Leidenheit]. As highly as we honor the capacity for action [Aktuosität], we nevertheless doubt that in itself it is supreme. For even though the essence out of which God himself emerges glistens with purity, such glistening can only stream outward, can achieve no effects. On all sides, gentle suffering and conceiving seem to be prior to achieving and being active. For many reasons, I do not doubt that in organic nature the female sex is there before the male, and that in part at least this accounts for the presumed sexlessness of the lowest levels of plant and animal life. (46-47)

 

Many will find Schelling’s association of women with suffering, passivity, and the lowest levels of life as troubling as they find women’s association with wrath reassuring–or at least refreshing. Yet I may be at fault for translating Leiden too quickly as “suffering”: it is the root of Leidenschaft, “passion,” so that the “passivity” of releasement (Gelassenheit) may be something quite animated and vital. Indeed, as we shall now see, Schelling wishes to upset the usual ways we think of activity and passivity. Let us not underestimate the impact of Schelling’s words: here the traditional metaphysical priority of activity over passivity falls away. For Schelling, Meister Eckhart’s releasement prevails over the “actuosity” that our tradition has always preferred–and which it has always identified with the logos and with the masculine.¹⁶ Schelling coins a new word or two here, the most telling one being Leidenheit, the quality of suffering, or the capacity to undergo passion. True, he celebrates passio and identifies it with the principle of matter. He does not break with the traditional association of materia with the mother, or the mother with woman, or woman with sensuality and sexuality, but he does break with the long-standing tradition of Plato’s Timaeus when he suggests that the female sex comes first–in the beginning, at the beginning, as the beginning of the beginning.¹⁷ Even a sparkling God, radiant and unalloyed, is a flash in the pan until he can achieve effects. And “he” can achieve effects only when “he” achieves for “himself” a gentle passivity, a passionate nature, a releasement by virtue of which alone he may become pregnant with a future. In the second half of the 1811 printing, Schelling describes God’s past and future as bound up with nature: “Nature is nothing other than divine egoism softened and gently broken by love [der durch Liebe gemilderte, sanftgebrochne göttliche Egoismus]” (85). Perhaps that gentle breaking, that loving acceptance of humble yet passionate passivity, will also make her a better storyteller?

 

One final passage, the Promethean, seems as ungentle as any passage might be. For Prometheus is surely titanic strength, light, and power. Yet the Prometheus that Schelling has in mind is the Prometheus of Aeschylus, Prometheus bound. Bound by what, to what, for what? Schelling’s answer is surprising:

 

There is something irrational in the first actuality, something that resists confrontation. Thus there is also a principle that repels the creaturely, the principle that is the proper strength in God: in the high seriousness of tragedy, Force and Violence, the servants of Zeus, are depicted as those who fetter Prometheus, who loves human beings, to the cliffs above the surging sea. It is thus necessary to acknowledge that this principle [i.e., the principle that repels creatures] is the personality of God. In the language of traditional philosophy, that personality is explained as the ultimate act or the final potency by which an intelligent essence immediately subsists. It is the principle by which God, instead of mixing with creatures, which surely was the intention–separates himself from creatures eternally. Everything can be communicated to the creature except one thing, namely, its possessing in itself the immortal ground of life, that is, its being itself, that is, its being by and on the basis of itself. (52)

 

Would such incommunicability and lack of generosity be unworthy of God? Not at all, says Schelling, if it were essential to his being. Yet both Zeus and Yahweh turn to violence in order to repress that past in which they were the very woman they loved, or in which they were unable to make the distinction between themselves and Demeter. Whether the Christological story–which is always the story of fathers and sons–can help us to confront the mother and mortality is to be doubted. The only rescue for us groundless, orphaned mortals, Schelling suggests, is pantheism–beyond both idealism and realism, and also beyond dualism. For pantheism, which is the oldest of the old stories, embraces every form of life, whether divine or creaturely. The problem is that the narratives of pantheism have been banished by more recent history, so that the all-encompassing unity of life that pantheism celebrates lies beyond our reach. Precisely this system of the primal time, writes Schelling (and here the first half of the 1811 printing ends), “comes to be increasingly repressed by subsequent ages [durch die folgende Zeit immer mehr verdrungen] and posited as past [und als Vergangenheit gesetzt werden soll]” (53).

 

Why pursue the repressed past? In order to discover a living divinity who in the end will not keep her distance from mortals, who will not accept violence, and who will embrace human beings as the children to whom she gave birth. What would it take for such a God to embrace her children? She would have to overcome the trauma, the shock, and the suffering that initially caused her to cut herself off from her children. She would have to accept the full implications of what Schelling in the second half of the 1811 printing calls Zeugungslust, the desire to procreate, as the only possible form of Creation and the only possible form of divine life. The castration and emasculation suffered by her male worshipers is therefore not an imitatio matris, inasmuch as her sex is not elaborated by a cut. It is elaborated as an unfolding and infolding, Entwicklung and Einwicklung being two of Schelling’s favorite words for the expansive and contractive forces at work in her. Yet neither will it do to dream endlessly of das ewige Weibliche. For the sobering fate of the Amazons and of Niobe’s children–seven males, seven females–is portrayed on the pedestal of divinity. When God learns of his femininity as well as her masculinity, when God learns longing, grows languid, he and she alike will learn that languishing is a part of passion. When God learns what love entails, she and he will discover that they are dying, and that their death is coming to meet them out of a past so distant that it seemed it would never arrive.

 

It will.

 

Such a death could only be announced in a story, a narrative, which is itself an arrêt de mort.

 

Not enough–indeed, nothing at all–has been said here about the question this paper set out to discuss, namely, the necessity that makes the known past an object of narrative or recounting, of saga or fable. It is a necessity that prevails beyond all dialectics–and my own dialectical foray does not seem to be up to telling the tale. Yet what can be said about that necessity affirmatively rather than negatively? Narrative recounts creation, is itself creation. Creation is procreative, centripetal and centrifugal at once. Creation recounts the itinerary taken by the gods to mortals–to mortal women and men.

 

Schelling, along with his friend Hölderlin, had been attuned to such tales since the days of their youth. For his part, Hölderlin knew why Zeus could not keep his distance from Niobe, Io, Rhea, Semele, Europa, Danaë, and the countless other mortals for whom he longed and languished. Hölderlin told the story in many different places, as far back as Hyperion, but the most famous of his recountings is in Der Rhein. It is a story he would have whispered to his friend Schelling as the two young enthusiasts wandered through the thick woods that border the Neckar, the woods and the riverbank that smacked sweetly of pantheism:

 

A riddle wells up pure. Even
Song can scarcely veil it. For
As you begin, so you shall remain.
Much is achieved by necessity
And also by discipline, but most
Can be achieved by birth….

 

Who was it that first
Ruined the cincture of love,
Tearing it to shreds?
After that they made their own law
And surely the spiteful ones
Mocked the fire of heaven, only then
Despising mortal paths,
Choosing overbold
And striving to be equal to the gods.

 

But they have enough of their own
Immortality, the gods, and if they need
One thing, the celestial ones,
Then it is heroes and human beings
And whatever else is mortal. For if
The most blessed ones of themselves feel nothing,
Then it must be, if to say such a thing
Is allowed, that in the name of the gods
Another feels for them, takes their part;
They need him. (1:342-48, lines 46-51, 96-114)

 

One should remember, however, that the last words of this poem recall the feverish days and nights of the present time, to which our lives seem to be fettered. We are chained to a hectic and forgetful time. Trauma and forgetting seem to accompany us every step of the way, and are the troubling themes of our very best narratives. The present in which we tell these stories to one another is itself a Chaos, linked by both its repressed memories of suffering and its longing for a caress to the remote past and a distant future. Ours is thus an inevitably traumatized present,

 

…when everything is mixed,
Is without order, and all that recurs is
Primeval confusion (1:342-48, lines 219-21)

 

Notes

 

1. In this essay, all translations of Schelling’s works are by David Farrell Krell.

 

2. It may be perverse to suggest that the Judaeo-Christian God of Schelling’s philosophy has been traumatized; indeed, it may seem to be some sort of “revisionist” trick. Yet if the traumatic suffering of the Jewish people in the twentieth century bears no relation to the suffering of Yahweh, that very fact bodes ill for the chances of divinity. See in this regard Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. On the difficulty of remembering and memorializing what dare not be forgotten, see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, esp. Part II, “The Ruins of Memory.” It is unfortunate that Young’s wonderful book was produced before Daniel Libeskind’s “Between the Lines,” his addition of a Jewish Museum to the Berlin Museum, the most remarkable of nonmemorializing monuments that I have seen.

 

3. See esp. chap. 6, “Loss and Philosophical Ideas,” although there is little in Schelling’s biography that would lend itself to a biographical reduction of his ideas concerning the difficulties of divinity.

 

4. On the return of narrative to the historian’s craft, see p. ix. On disenchantment, Le Goff writes: “The crisis in the world of historians results from the limits and uncertainties of the new history, from people’s disenchantment when confronted by the painful character of lived history. Every effort to rationalize history, to make it offer a better purchase on its development, collides with the fragmentation and tragedy of events, situations, and apparent evolutions” (215).

 

5. Cited henceforth by page number in the body of my text. Schröter’s volume appeared as a Nachlaßband of Schellings Werke Münchner Jubiläumsdruck. The new historical-critical edition of Schelling’s works has not yet released the volume on The Ages of the World and the unpublished notes related to it.

 

6. Zizek rightly recognizes the force of the unconscious in Schelling’s Ages of the World, yet in his desire to develop a political philosophy based on the idea of freedom, he does not grant “the unconscious act” that occurs “before the beginning” its full power. That said, Zizek’s is a stimulating interpretation, one that deserves a more careful reading than I can give here.

 

7. Our commentary should not be confused with Schelling’s exposition, which does not always seem to be in tandem with these notes in the left-hand margin. Although I will reprint the whole of Schelling’s left-hand margin, I will take up his exposition only in part. Whether or not such intense focus on the margin of this earliest sketch will help us with a more general reading of Die Weltalter remains to be seen. At this point, that is merely my hope.

 

8. For a discussion of Schelling’s First Projection toward a System of Nature Philosophy and a listing of the sources, see part two of my Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism.

 

9. See the Urfassungen (74-88). Schelling’s genealogy of time from eternity lies outside the purview of this paper, if only because of the complexity of the topic. The birth of each moment of time occurs in the “polar holding-apart” of the entire mass of past and future (75). These births are separations (Scheidungen) compelled by love as longing or languor (die Sehnsucht). They are always a matter of the father’s contractive force and the son’s expansive force; they are also a matter of suppressing the past on behalf of a present perfect, “as absolute having-been” (79), “that gentle constancy” (80), which tends toward the future as toward the promise of love. On its way to the future, love creates time, space, and the natural world. However, as we shall see, such creations alter the creator. On die Sehnsucht, “languor,” see Krell, “The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling’s Treatise on Human Freedom (1809).”

 

10. For more on repression (Verdrängung), see the second half of the 1811 printing (99-100).

 

11. Oddly, it is in the second half of the 1811 printing that Sehnsucht–the languor and languishing of God–is most discussed (see 57, 77, and 85), even though the mother seems to have disappeared altogether from the Father-Son axis.

 

12. For Husserl’s figures and metaphors, see Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (esp. 172-222 and 364-85); see also my discussion in The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (130-33).

 

13. One should note here the importance of Phrygian Niobe also for Friedrich Hölderlin’s understanding of tragedy: in the Anmerkungen zur Antigonä, Hölderlin identifies her as the “more aorgic realm,” the realm of savage, untamed nature, which (in the figure of Danaë in the fifth choral song of Antigone) counts or tic(k)s off the hours for the father of time, Zeus. Niobe, Melville would have said, stands where Una joins hands with Dua on the clock of “The Bell-Tower,” or, rather, where their loving clasp is severed. On Hölderlin’s Niobe, see Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (2: 372).

 

14. See also the long endnote 64. Perhaps this relatively brief and compact text–voluminously documented, however–offers the best testing-ground for the theses contained in the present paper. Note that Schelling also refers to the abyss or nonground (Ungrund) in the second half of the 1811 printing (93).

 

15. In the second half of the 1811 printing (at 61) Schelling concedes that Scheidung is never complete: there can never be an absolute rupture with the effects of the past. What the 1809 Treatise on Human Freedom had called die ewige gänzliche Scheidung is therefore still eternal but never total. Heidegger, of course, read the Treatise with considerable attention. What he apparently never read–even though Manfred Schröter was an admired colleague and friend–was The Ages of the World. (I am grateful to Otto Pöggeler for this last observation. In a personal communication, Pöggeler asked me to speculate as to why Heidegger might have avoided Die Weltalter. Neither he nor I came up with a telling answer, yet we suspected that there is something subversive about the latter text, subversive perhaps also of Heidegger’s own confidence in a Gewesenheit–a present perfect–that putatively enables him to appropriate the past for an “other” beginning.)

 

16. It is important to note, however, that Gelassenheit in Schelling’s text sometimes has consequences that would perhaps have surprised Eckhart, or at least driven him to his own most radical conclusions. For one of the things that Schelling eventually feels compelled to let go and release is God. Schelling concludes the second of two “preliminary projections” of the Weltalter by asserting that “to leave God is also Gelassenheit” (200).

 

17. In a personal communication, John Sallis reminded me that in Timaeus woman “comes second” only in the final lines of the dialogue, lines that can only appear as comic in the light of the dialogue’s earlier insistence on the eminence of the chora, “the mother and nurse of becoming.” See the first chapter of my Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body; see also John Sallis’s Chronology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Finally, or in the first place, see Jacques Derrida, Khôra.

 

Works Cited

 

• Aberbach, David. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
• Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. 3-11.
• Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
• Derrida, Jacques. Khôra. Paris: Galilée, 1993.
• Hegel, G. W. F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. 6th ed. Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1952.
• Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Ed. Michael Knaupp. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992.
• Husserl, Edmund. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Husserliana. Vol. XI. Ed. Margot Fleischer, from lecture and research manuscripts dating from 1918 to 1926. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1966.
• Krell, David Farrell. Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
• —. “The Bodies of Black Folk: Kant, Hegel, Du Bois, and Baldwin.” boundary 2 27.3 (Fall 2000): 103-34.
• —. “The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling’s Treatise on Human Freedom (1809).” The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years. Ed. John Sallis et al. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1989. 13-32.
• —. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.
• —. The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2000.
• Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• Lambek, Michael, and Paul Antze. “Introduction: Forecasting Memory.” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. Ed. Antze and Lambek. New York: Routledge, 1996. xi-xxxviii.
• Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.
• Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Vol. 6. Berlin: DTV, 1967.
• Sallis, John. Chronology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.
• Sallis, John, et al., eds. The Collegium Phaenomenologicum: The First Ten Years. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1989.
• Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Die Weltalter Fragmente in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813. Ed. Manfred Schröter. Munich: Biederstein Verlag and Leibniz Verlag, 1946.
• —. “Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake.” Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 8. Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta Verlag, 1861. 345-423.
• Schröter, Manfred. “Introduction.” Schelling, Die Weltalter Fragmente xv-lviii.
• Van der Kolk, Bessel A., A. C. McFarlane, and L. Weisaeth, eds. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
• Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and A. C. McFarlane. “The Black Hole of Trauma.” Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Ed. Van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth.
• Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
• Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 1996.