THE INSUFFICIENCY OF GROUND: ON ZIZEK'S
SCHELLINGIANISM
lain Hamilton Grant
The fascination issuing from Schelling's metaphysics is due to its intellectual excavations reaching strata where the roots of beings no longer
lie, but where all roots decompose; they attain an unground of reason
that is equally its presupposition. . . In this conception there are
glimpses of a modernity we have not yet attained.
(Hogrebe 1989: 127)1
Amongst all the forms occurring in contemporary philosophy,
amidst the clamour of being, Zizek is not alone in proclaiming the
truth of the overcoming of metaphysics. Unlike most, however, he is
explicit as to how this overcoming is to be achieved, drawing its
resources from the eruption of metaphysics following Kant, as
against the completed form in which Hegel sought to resolve it. Of
this 'German Idealism', Zizek writes that i t ' "returns", within psychoanalysis. . . what was repressed in post-Hegelian thought: the
subject's prehistory' (1991a: 49).
Zizek's repeated forays into Idealist territories, from Le plus
sublime des hysteriques (1988) to Tarrying with the Negative (1993),
follow Heidegger (1985: 165) in taking Schelling's so-called 'philosophy of freedom' as the 'acme of German Idealism', which Zizek
explores in The Indivisible Remainder (1996), 'Selfhood as Such is
Spirit' (1996a), and in the Abyss of Freedom' (1997b), with the aim
of producing a 'materialist reading of Schelling' (1996a: 11).
When we hear of 'materialisms', we imagine a sober philosophy
that acknowledges the ground of reality as lying in physical nature.
Yet since Marx, a radical political realism conversely places 'materialism' on the side of freedom. Philosophically, these two orientations
are classically antithetical. By calling his a 'critical materialism',
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Zizek aligns his materializing with freedom against the 'crude materialism' of nature. Accordingly, he dismisses Schelling's 'philosophy of nature' as merely 'preparatory' and 'anthropocentric' (1996:
65), setting out instead to recover that author's Ages of the World
(henceforth Weltalter) as 'the founding text of dialectical materialism' (1996: 37). Importantly, this division of materialisms follows
the extraction of Schelling's 'proto-ontological domain of the
drives' from 'simpl[e] nature' (2004b: 32) and its reinsertion into the
'materialist notion of the subject' (1996: 65). As a preliminary characterization of Zizek's 'materialism', then, we may say that it extends
from the 'drives' (that, as 'proto-ontological', are not yet) to the
subject. Crucially, it is 'critical' insofar as it rejects primordial being
and eliminates 'simpl[e] nature'. Critically, it opposes 'Idealism'
insofar as it is premised not on the completed odyssey of consciousness Hegel proposed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but on
'incompleteness', remaining within the subjective and the partial.
This chapter accordingly demonstrates that Zizek's 'return' to
Schelling's philosophy resituates 'critical materialism' not as a materialism at all, but only as an incomplete idealism. In this respect,
Zizek is not simply erroneous, but exemplarily so. Incompleteness,
that is, is not self-evidently the index of 'materialism' Zizek takes it
to be.2 In other words, 'incompleteness' is no guarantee that the
Idealist philosophy of consciousness is not rather completed than
'eliminated' by the 'materialist notion of the subject'. Thus, just as
'Lacan is fundamentally Hegelian, but without knowing it' (1988: 7),
so Zizek's odyssey from Hegel to Lacan reveals a self-misrecognizing
Idealism at the heart of contemporary philosophy, characterized by
the self-evidently limited or 'parochial' ontology that, in the name of
'materialist subjectivity', 'critically' eliminates Nature and the Idea.
Since this is the very issue that separated Schelling's from Fichte's
philosophy, Zizek's 'Schellingianism' is really, as we shall see, an
unacknowledged Fichteanism.
There are therefore three principal reasons why this 'exhibition' of
Zizek's encounter with Idealism may be taken as indexical for contemporary philosophy. First, morphology: the insistence on the
'incomplete', on the figures of failure, applied to metaphysics and its
systems, are practically universal in contemporary philosophy.
Secondly, Zizek's insistence on accounting for freedom nevertheless
stipulates a metaphysics, one that sums up the history of modern
dualism, from Sartre to Lacan, that Kojeve reinvented through
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THE TRUTH OF ZIZEK
Hegel,3 although it is sourced in Fichte. Thirdly, that Zizek's return
to Schelling, rather than to his Idealist counterparts Hegel or Fichte,
is explicitly directed at the problem of ground (like Badiou, our other
great Lacanian), and marks out, despite itself, both the historical
and contemporary antithesis to predominant Fichteanism. As we
shall see, it is nature - which Zizek, with Fichte, rules out from the
first - that provides the ground through which this alternative can be
developed. With Zizek, we therefore take the problem of ground as
the root of our inquiries.
THE NATURE OF GROUND
Otherwise known as the 'principle of sufficient reason', the problem
of ground has exercised modern philosophy since Leibniz. The principle makes two interrelated stipulations:first,that, simply put, there
is a reason for everything that is, thus answering the metaphysical
problem of 'why there are beings rather than nothing?' The second
stipulation, as efficiently stated by Isabelle Stengers (1997: 25),
acquires particular force in physics: 'the full cause is equivalent to the
entire effect'. The particular issue here revolves around equivalence:
the efficacy of the cause is given as and by the extent of the effect.
For example, this is the 'best of all possible worlds', argues Leibniz,
because the actual (and therefore the best) world is the extent of the
effect, so that its cause must have sufficient 'fullness' or perfection to
actualize it. Since, as Leibniz states in the Theodicy, only God could
be the cause of such perfection, then by the principle of sufficient
reason, God is equivalent to the actual world. We will see below that
the 'reversibility' of cause and effect derived from the physical stipulation of the principle of sufficient reason is crucial to Zizek's
account of Schelling's' Ungrund as 'the abyss of freedom', although
Zizek takes the cause of freedom to be 'the sudden suspension of the
principle of sufficient reason' (1997b: 3).
It is Kant who turns these relations into the contemporary philosophical problem to which Zizek reacts. On the one hand, the
physical-causal function of ground forms 'an abyss [Ungrund] for
human reason' insofar as the pursuit of 'the ultimate bearer of all
things' (Kant 1958: 513 [A613/B641]) can reach no conclusion that
is self-sufficient: for any given cause, that is, a reason for it may in
turn be sought, ad infinitum. The only option, Kant concludes, is
to establish a transcendental ground over this abyss, a 'supreme
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reality [which] must condition the possibility of all things' (1958:
492-93 [A579/B607]). It is from this problem that the Critique of
Judgment sets out: 'there must be a ground uniting nature and
freedom' (Kant 1987: 15), which, because it must ground both,
cannot be either. The Idealist philosophers succeeding Kant Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, each propose different solutions to
this inherited problem: Hegel's absolute Mind, Fichte's generative
antithesis of I and not-I, or subject and nature, and Schelling's
'unground'. For present purposes, these divide into two: Schelling
pursues ungrounding rather than ground, but does so not transcendentally, like Kant, but 'descendentally', through nature (XIII,
15In).4 By contrast, Fichte attempts to deploy freedom to
unground 'first' nature and then to redeposit a second nature as the
product of freedom. The issue, then, is this:findingroom in nature
for freedom extends an ontology grounded on the former; having
nature produced through freedom, by contrast, restricts ontology
to the one being supposed capable of acting independently of
nature - the conscious subject.
It has always been the tendency of materialist critiques of
Idealism to assume it incapable of nature, just as 'crude materialism'
is supposed incapable of freedom. Yet Schelling's 'descendental
rather than transcendental' (Hogrebe 1989: 124) investigation of
grounds upsets this common assumption. Thus the Philosophical
Inquiries declare freedom 'inexplicable' unless its 'roots. . .are
acknowledged in the independent grounds of nature' (Schelling VII,
371; 1986: 47), clearly stipulating nature as the ground of freedom.
However, because these grounds are 'independent', they cannot be
derived by driving phenomena back to their preceding causes,
reasons or principles, since this leads, as Kant warned, only to
regress (on what does Atlas stand to support the world?) Instead,
the pursuit of phenomena leads only to ungrounding, to the chaos
from which 'grounds' first emerge:5 'the essence of ground', writes
Schelling, 'can only be what precedes all grounds, that is, the
Absolute as such, the Unground' (VII, 407-408; 1986: 88-89). This
same irreversible priority of unground over ground forms the basis
of Wolfram Hogrebe's (1989) 'reconstruction' of Schelling's metaphysics, which Zizek (1997b) takes as his guide, in terms of the irreversible priority of 'being' (onto-) that any 'ontology' only then
determines. It follows from this real priority that no ontology can
exhaust being, of which it is just one expression, since grounded on
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THE TRUTH OF ZIZEK
'something positive', it necessarily leaves an 'irreducible remainder
that cannot be resolved into reason' (Schelling VII, 360; 1986: 34).
While it is clear that Schelling's interrogation of the essence of
ground as Unground universally breaks the symmetry by which the
principle of sufficient reason operates, Zizek claims that, according
to Schelling, 'the enigma of freedom, of the sudden suspension of
the principle of sufficient reason' (1997b: 3) consists in the 'inversion
of the "proper" relationship' (1997b: 12) between 'symmetrical
polarities' (1997b: 7). Yet, as its causal-physical application makes
clear, the principle of sufficient reason grounds precisely the
reversibility of symmetrical or polar opposites. Zizek's 'enigma' is
not the suspension of ground, but its fulfilment: ground is the reverse
of freedom, and vice-versa. Thus Zizek cites Lacan's hypothesis concerning an Ideal or 'cured' subject emerging when it 'becomes its
own cause':
Lacan conceives the conclusion of the cure as the moment when
the subject, by way of its own destitution, changes into a 'being
of drive' and becomes its own cause. (1997b: 87)
The manner in which Zizek holds this Lacanian 'cure' to be key
to his account of a 'Schellingian reconciliation' of past and present
in the (unwritten) third of the 'ages of the world', or the divine
future, is instructive in two ways. First, that such a wholesale recovery of the past in a future is possible violates Schelling's 'irreducible
remainder', and is expressly rejected by Schelling: the future, he
writes, is not the unity of the system of times, but rather 'eternity in
three times' (1994: 134). Secondly, that this recovery can be, even if
as an 'Idealist fantasy', effected through the 'overcoming] of the
egotism of the contraction-into-self', presents all possible solutions
as lying within the domain of the subjective. Thus Zizek prepares the
Weltalter to become the metaphysics of subjectivity once it has been
'rid of. . . material inertia' (1997b: 77), so that its schema can be reconciled with that of the Lacanian cure. While Zizek understands
himself simply to be paraphrasing Schelling, this getting rid of the
'material inertia [of] bodily reality' is in strict conformity with his
later edict that what is 'preontological' in Schelling is 'not simply
nature' but 'drives' (Zizek 2004b: 32). Once rid of material nature (of
the 'not-F), the subject is free when it recovers the drives (actions)
prior to being as its own (as 'I'). The morphology of the thought that
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is key: that the symmetrical polarity of nature and subjectivity - of
a nicht-Ich and an Ich - is no paraphrase of a Schellingian, but rather
of a Fichtean ' Grundoperation of Idealism', is evident as soon as it
is stated;6 but the importance of this is not simply that it indicates a
flaw in Zizek's promiscuous hermeneutics, but rather that it demonstrates a persistent, if largely unacknowledged,7 commitment of contemporary philosophy to Fichtean Idealism.
The morphology of Fichtean Idealism consists in the repeated
iterations of a single imperative. Declaring himself Kant's heir in the
critical philosophy, Fichte set about reducing theoretical to a branch
of practical reason on the grounds that:
It is not in fact the theoretical power which makes possible the
practical, but on the contrary, the practical which first makes
possible the theoretical. . .reason itself is purely practical. (1982:
123)
The consequences of this collapse of Kant's transcendental faculties
are not simply to reduce theoretical reason - which has nature and
experience as its domain - to morality, but to make the transformation of nature, the 'modification of matter' (Fichte 1982: 269), into a
practically ontologizing imperative. Fichte understands this as a
transformation of the dogmatic 'the world is. . .', to the critical 'the
whole universe ought to be. . .' (Fichte 1962 [II-3]: 247). That nature
must be determined by freedom gives this metaphysics its morphology, which Fichte characterizes as the striving of the Ich to reduce the
nicht-Ich to zero: the goal of freedom is the systematic expansion of
the sphere of freedom by means of the reduction of that of nature.
Here, then, a symmetrical polarity between freedom and nature is
evident, but gains a 'dynamic' element through the 'striving' of the
Ich. The symmetry is confirmed in a certain 'wavering', however:
while the ontological imperative leads Fichte to insist that the proposition 'that intelligence. . .is a higher power (expression) of
nature. . .is obviously false' (Fichte 1971 [IX]: 362), he will in turn
postulate that 'nature has destined the human being. . .for freedom,
i.e., for activity' (Fichte 2000: 184). There is, in Fichte, a permanent
crisis of grounding, a striving to revert to grounds to demonstrate the
necessity or causation of freedom as lying in nature, and a counterstriving to unground necessity through what Kant called the 'sublime
quality of freedom to be itself an original cause' (Kant 1993: 226).
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Again, Fichte more properly corresponds to the inverting incompletion, or the insufficiency of Being, that Zizek holds to be the distinguishing feature of 'materialist thought' (1996: 7).
Hence the polar ideal represented by Fichte's 'law of inverse proportion': freedom rises as nature falls, and vice versa. Again, this is
no 'sudden suspension', but simply the 'inversion' or reversal guaranteed by sufficient reason: its premise is precisely the symmetrical
reversibility of full causes and entire effects. Rather than thinking
freedom, however, this approach eliminates it: it cannot think
freedom because it requires freedom to be equally necessary as nature
(there must be freedom) and not necessary (the free act is by definition not a necessary act). Nor, although it wants a 'ground' of autonomy, can it think autonomous, or 'self-operating ground' (Schelling
VII, 381; 1986: 58): by the symmetrical reversibility between freedom
and nature, the becoming-causal of freedom is the 'practical' elimination of nature as cause of freedom. The necessity at the core of the
Fichtean approach to the problem, echoed by 'critical materialism',
is conceived according to the parochial ontology that, in order to
have the kind of freedom it desires, restricts it to a single class of
beings - 'human and all other finite natures', as Fichte stipulates
(1982: 249) - by its symmetrical elimination from all others. Zizek
puts the point in terms sympathetic to 'modern' sensibilities:
Modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself
as 'out-of-joint', as excluded from the order of things, from the
positive order of beings. (1999: 157)
This is why Schelling's 'self-operation of the ground' (VII, 381; 1986:
34) exceeds Fichteanism's subjectivist metaphysics: the ground of
freedom is extended to the operations of nature, rather than
restricted to a single class of beings.
These, then, form the two axes for the interrogation of
Schellingianism today: either ungrounding in nature will be symmetrically completed by the emergence of isolated freedom (the
'cure', as Zizek says; or 'critical materialism': the fulfilment of an
exclusively practical ontology), or all grounds emerge in asymmetrical consequence of a universal unground. Either, that is, the 'principle of sufficient reason' is sufficient insofar as it is practically
reversible, or ground must be rethought through the irreversibility of
ground as nature.
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Having witnessed the first through our initial consideration of
Zizek's approach to Schellingian ground through the problem of
freedom, we will follow the second through Hogrebe's route through
Schellingianism below, while noting Schelling's own accounts of the
problems. At stake, as Hogrebe notes, is a metaphysics as yet unexplored due to the overarching and insensible dominance of another.
It is important to repeat that our aim is not simply to criticize
Zizek for a false or Fichtean Schellingianism, but to illuminate the
precise variety of Idealism as practised in contemporary philosophy.
The striving to eliminate nature, disregarding for the moment
whether the implied incompleteness of the 'striving' is indeed a hallmark of 'critical materialism', extends the morphology of Fichtean
Idealism beyond philosophy into every theoretical architecture
premised on incomplete constructivism, in those, that is, in which
grounds for appeal are short-circuited by the assertion of a discursive, semiotic, or economic dependency of 'the real', and where
'nature' therefore emerges as the product of freedom (a social/historical/political construct). The illusion of absent grounds is sustained
only by a covert insistence on freedom as the ultimate ground of all
Being, from which standpoint may be issued outright rejections of
its converse. These are not ungroundings at all, but rather small-town
critiques of the wider world. Accordingly, we call this approach
ontologically parochial.
'NATURE IS APPARENTLY MISSING. . .' GROUNDS WITHOUT NATURE
How could such an ontology acquire credibility? It is at this juncture
in the history of the problem of ground that Heidegger's interrogation of ground and sufficiency intervenes, pincering the options for
contemporary philosophy. Between Vom Wesen des Grundes (1931)
and Der Satz vom Grund (1957) - between essence {Wesen) and
proposition (Satz) - Heidegger undertakes to exhaust the possibilities of ground, or to explicate the question 'why there are beings,
rather than nothing'. In the later work, Heidegger unsurprisingly
critiques naturalistic and materialistic conceptions of ground, in the
course of which his project betrays a powerful procedural affinity
with Hegel's phenomenology: 'materialism is simply not something
material [but] itself a frame [Gestalt] of mind' (1957: 199).
Regardless of Heidegger's own form of phenomenological Idealism,
the applicability of this to the critical materialism Zizek advances
THE TRUTH OF ZIZEK
cries out for expression: whatever the purchase of the critique of
'crude' materialism, critical materialism articulates precisely an
ideality concerning matter, premised in turn on the Fichtean imperative that matter itself be 'modified'. Heidegger's earlier essay, by
contrast, while betraying a more Kantian complexion, undertakes to
reinvent Kant's transcendental as ground within, rather than distinct
from, nature. Heidegger writes:
Although nature is apparently missing. . .in the analytic of
Dasein - not only nature as the object of natural science, but also
nature in the more originary sense - there are reasons for this. It
is decisive in this regard that it [nature] can neither be encountered within an environment or circumference, nor above all as
primarily something towards which we comport ourselves. Nature
originally reveals itself in Dasein because the latter exists as found
and attuned in the midst of beings. Yet because foundness
(thrownness) belongs to the essence of Dasein and comes to
expression only in the unity of the full concept of care, it is here
alone that the basis for the problem of nature may be reached.
(1931: 36 n.)
Nature as ground is therefore supplanted by Dasein as the ground
of nature. Although once again we find the same inversion as in
Zizek's Fichteanism, Heidegger does not make ground dependent
on (the elimination of) nature, but instead seeks the possibility of
ground in the transcendental. Transcendence is Dasein's 'climbing
above itself to world, or its self-projection into its own worldly possibilities. This self-transcendence to transitive willing is, Heidegger
writes, precisely 'freedom itself insofar as Dasein 'projects itself in
the world (1931:43). Reciprocally, world thus finitizes Dasein so that
'grounding emerges. . .from the finite freedom of Dasein'(1931:49),
a reciprocity Heidegger designates by the explicitly Schellingian
concept of the Seinkonnen (capable-of-being):
Freedom stands in its essence as the transcendence of Dasein as
Seinkonnen in the possibilities that are spread before its finite
choice, i.e., in its destiny. (1931: 54)
The Leibnizian roots of Heidegger's solution to the problem of
ground are striking: just as the world owes its actuality to God's free
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choice amongst possible worlds, divine selection, far from being constrained as to which one is 'best', necessarily confers actuality upon
the selected world which becomes best because it is actualized.
Moreover, since the principle of sufficient reason states that the perfection of the cause is equivalent to the entire effect, divine freedom
is equivalent to actual necessity (the actual world). Although therefore Heidegger is telling the familiar story of the emergence of
freedom as spontaneity, Dasein achieves it not by eliminating the
world, but by climbing over itself towards a world that spreads its
destiny before it as its only possibilities. If 'primary ground is
nothing other than ^projection of transitive willing' (1931: 45), this
ground itself h&s no ground. Answering the question, 'What is the
reason of ground?', in other words, 'reiterates' the problem of the
ground of grounding, just as Kant warned. Heideggerian transcendence or 'projection' raises the dimension of height, opening chasms
in ground in exactly the opposite direction to Schelling's 'philosophia
descendens' (XIII, 151 n.). Heidegger's ontology-as-project enables
us to entitle it diprojective ontology. While its incompleteness ought
to recommend it for inclusion in the Milner-Zizek line of critical
materialism - all the more so due to Heidegger's overtly Idealist criticism of materialism as, in effect, a 'frame of mind' (1957: 199), or a
figure in Hegel's great odyssey of consciousness - Zizek's qualification of this incomplete ontology as 'the subject's prehistory' (1992:
49) enables us to entitle Zizek's an Idealism of subjective projection.
Perhaps this is why Zizek has himself inserted, as the explication of
the implicit observer, into scenes of 'perverse' cinematic voyeurism.8
While sharing with Heidegger a projective ontology, Zizek's subjectivism makes its essential Fichteanism clear.
Although we have seen the varieties into which contemporary
Idealisms may be arranged, and noted the divergence between
Schellingianism and Zizek's projective ontology, there is a further
element of Heidegger's account of ground that will serve to reintroduce Schelling into our discussion. Heidegger's positive evaluation of Schellingianism is well known through his lectures on the
Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (see
Heidegger 1985); but it is already evident not only in the Seinkonnen
we previously noted in On the Essence of Ground, but also in the
'zone of eruption' that is the Ungrund, and in the 'formal, endless
iteration' by which Heidegger here characterizes the recurrent
problem of 'the ground of grounds' (1931: 52-53). The problem for
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our purposes arises, however, when Heidegger invokes a resolution
of depth in height through an ' Umwillen9 that, rather than a transitive willing-in-world, simply inverts willing into the ground of
grounds. Where Schelling memorably defined the problem in terms
of 'the Unruly that lies ever in the ground as though it might again
erupt', he adds that this 'incomprehensible basis of reality in things,
the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason. . .
remains always in grounds' (VII, 359-60; 1986: 34). Heidegger
accepts the constancy of the 'eruptive potency' of the ground of
grounds but, in place of Schelling's irreducible remainder, sets
freedom: 'The eruption of the Ungrund in grounding transcendence
is rather the original motion that freedom completes with us and
gives us thereby to understand, i.e., as original world-content'
(Heidegger 1931: 54). Freedom 'pulls itself together' from the erupting Ungrund, grounding us and our relating to the world and its
grounds, while the world makes 'man. . .resonant with possibilities
[as] a being of distance' (Heidegger 1931: 55), distances filled by projections. While Heidegger's conception of freedom is radically
impersonal - freedom itself completes ungrounding, throwing
Dasein into the world, rather than 'our' freedom having as its aim
the recovery of its own prehistory - it is all the more suspect, on
Schellingian lines, for that very reason. To pursue this, along with the
implications of the 'irreducible remainder' for Schellingian ground,
we will now contrast Zizek's Schellingianism to Hogrebe's: what precisely is the modern metaphysics Schellingianism has yet to realize?
DESCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND TRANSCENDENTAL GEOLOGY
The real basis of the theory of the Weltalter is modern geology.
(Sandkiihler 1984: 21)
Zizek's central claim regarding the 'system' of the Weltalter remaining 'incomplete', is broadly speaking accurate: Schelling never progressed beyond reworking book one of three: The Past.9 What,
however, if the descent into the past were necessarily incomplete?
Precisely this follows from Hogrebe's account of the irreversible priority of being over its expressions as ontology; every ontology is
accordingly 'incomplete', and entails an 'asystasy' of many systems,
each an expression of being. Hence Schelling's tasking 'The Nature
of Philosophy as Science' in 1821, with 'discovering] a system of
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knowing or, otherwise and better put, to glimpse human knowing in
a system' (IX, 209). The pointed rephrasing makes the objective of
philosophy as science quite clear: 'human knowing' is no selfenclosed system, but is knowing at all, and human knowing in particular, only insofar as it is grounded in the systems from which it
emerges. If the ground of human knowing cannot therefore, as
Fichte thought, be sought in knowing itself, the question is, in what
systems is it grounded?
Hogrebe begins his reconstruction of the Weltalter with
Schelling's characterization of the same problem a decade later, in
The Foundations of Positive Philosophy of 1832-33: 'The entire
world lies caught, as it were, in reason, but the question is: how has
it gotten into this net?' (Schelling 1972: 222). The statement only
superficially suggests the sufficiency of reason as the ground of the
'entire world'. By confronting this sufficiency with the priority of
'world' to 'reason', Schelling opens a chasm at the core of worldreason that descends into the chaos before the world, denying the
sufficiency of reason as ground of world, just as human knowing
was earlier 'ungrounded'. Thus, where transcendental philosophy
starts from the premise that knowledge can be systematic only by
grounding itself not in the world, but on the a priori conditions of
human cognition, 'descendental' philosophy pursues the 'a priori
route' by seeking the 'prius and posterius\ the primary and the
derived, 'in nature' (Schelling 1994: 146). Distinguishing between
'being prius' and 'being known a priori\ Schelling writes of 'the
absolutely positive prius of which I may say that it is and is cognizable because it is and, to that extent, is known a posteriori' (1998: 85).
Nature, accordingly, is the prius of all cognition.
Where Schelling overtly pursues the prius and posterius in nature,
Hogrebe exploits the same asymmetry in reason. Hogrebe asks with Schelling, but as though reducing the problem of sufficient
reason to semantics - 'why is there sense rather than nonsense?',
which he draws into two arguments based on reconstructing the
Weltalter as a metaphysics of predication or judgment (Hogrebe
1989: 39, 114), as exemplified in the following passage: 'The beginning may not know itself as a beginning. In the very beginning,
nothing is or discerns itself as merely ground or beginning'
(Schelling VIII, 314; 2000: 86). The first of Hogrebe's arguments is
that the structure of predication (X is/7), is grounded in Being, or in
a 'non-predicative, pre-rational reference to something that exists'
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(1989: 126); without, that is, there being something (= X) to which
predicates may be ascribed, predication could not take place. The
second, that the transition from pre-predicative indeterminacy or
'unground of reason' (1989: 127) to predication is a becoming of
being, that is, it is ontogenetic, and not merely cognitive (1989:
92-93). Being, that is, is the prius of judgment, and judgment the
posterius of being; yet judgment is itself a modification of primary
being, which is therefore the beginning of judgment while not yet
having become it. This is also the sole ground for Schelling's frequently cited claim that 'created from the source of things and the
same as it, the human mind has a co-science [Mit-wissenschaft] with
creation' (VIII, 200; 2000: xxxvi, trans, modified). Rather than
asserting the sufficiency of human knowing as the ground of creation, thus fulfilling the principle of sufficient reason, Schelling's
Mit-wissenschaft consists in the identity of the asymmetrical beginnings of both nature and Idea. Nor does it assert that these beginnings are the same, and that therefore the human mind accesses the
past of creation directly. There are two reasons for this. First, far
from disdaining naturalistic and empirical investigation, Schelling
scolds those 'precipitate beings' who race directly to 'inspired concepts and expressions rather than descending to the natural beginnings' (VIII, 286; 2000: 63), that is, to the prius that produces it.
Since, however, 'even the smallest grain of sand' is the product of an
inexhaustible 'course of productive nature' (1946: 120-21; 1997:
121-22), let alone the ascent from silicates to organics, and the subsequent development of mind, 'nature is an unground of the past
[which] is what is oldest in nature and remains at the remotest
depths' (VIII, 243; 2000: 31). Nature therefore entails the necessity
of an inexhaustible past for every cognitive event, the 'irreducible
remainder that can never be resolved into reason' (VII, 360; 1986:
34), and denies reason's sufficiency to the nature that irrecoverably
precedes it.
Secondly, the 'system of times' at the core of the Weltalter consists
not of 'passages' between the beginning or past, the present, and the
future - 'the one does not come to an end in the other' (Schelling 1994:
150) - but of a 'succession of eternities' (VIII, 302; 2000: 120-21),
which qua eternities, remain rather than succeed one another.
Schelling thus constructs a stratified'rather than a sequential theory of
'times', for each of which, what is past - the systematic entirety of
their conditions or prius - remains necessarily unrecoverable for
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HAMILTON GRANT THE INSUFFICIENCY OF GROUND
reason. For any becoming, therefore, its 'first beginning = eternal
beginning' (1994: 167), to which descendental philosophy 'returns' as
its 'past' (1946:112; 1997:113). Even when 'the work of thousands of
years' is 'stripped away, to come at last to the ground' (1946: 120;
1997: 121), 'the essence of ground', as what 'can only precede all
grounds', turns out to be 'unground' (VII, 407-408; 1986: 88-9).
Thus Schelling fleshes out the 'irreducible remainder that cannot
be resolved into reason' (VII, 359-60; 1986: 34): the irreducibility of
past to present, or - pace Zizek (1997b: 77) - the resolution of the
two into a future, introduces a radical asymmetry into the problem
of ground which prevents the symmetrical resolution of ungrounding as the ground of freedom. Although Zizek celebrates the 'breach
of symmetry' (1997b: 16) that undoes 'any dualism of cosmological
principles' (1997b: 5) as well as the reversible polarities that, he holds,
characterize the principal failing of Idealist 'systems' (see 1997b: 11)
- and that characterize, he adds falsely, Schelling's 'early. . .symmetrical polarity' between the real and the ideal (1997b: 6-7) - he nevertheless asserts precisely the symmetrical and reversible relation
between Grund and Ungrund: 'prior to Grund, there can only be an
abyss (Ungrund)9 that, of course, turns out to be 'the abyss of pure
Freedom' (1997b: 15). Reversible symmetrical relations, as we have
seen, persist in the notion of 'passage', which is, however, written into
the entire scheme whereby Zizek engages Idealist philosophy:
'German Idealism returns what was repressed in post-Hegelian
thought: the process of constitution qua the subject's prehistory'
(1991a: 49). The medium presupposed by such passages is nothing
more than the odyssey of tortured consciousness, a consciousness
that has as its parallel and reciprocal condition a nature or a real so
fragile it can easily be broken: 'Freedom. . .designates the abyss of an
act of decision that breaks up the causal chain, since it is grounded
only in itself (1997b: 32). At last we have it: the self-grounding of
freedom common to all the Idealist philosophies, Schelling's
included, says Zizek (1997b: 12), provides the necessary 'subject's
prehistory'; to what else could it lead? How capable is Being
(Seinkdnnen) of anything other than subjectivity, and moreover, of a
subjectivity narrowly conceived within the rubric of a freely acting
self-consciousness, whatever its constitutive lacunae? As regards
ground, the holes in things provide Zizek's speleological tunnels,
leading ever and again from these cavernous 'ungrounds' to the
freedom spied in the cinematic light where they cross. While
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THE TRUTH OF ZIZEK
Heidegger notes that, ontologically, much can be accomplished by
'projection', he has at least the good grace to admit that such projection acquires its particular morphology from the world, as the insuperable destiny of all freedom.
By contrast, writes Schelling, 'the root of freedom' must lie 'in the
independent grounds of nature' (VII, 371; 1986:47): nature shatters
the convenient symmetry by which, Zizek argues, the ground of
freedom is the non-existence of nature. The Inquiries' titular
'human' therefore refers not to the one, restricted, supra-natural
domain wherein freedom arises, but rather extends natural freedom
to the 'self-operating ground' (VII, 381; 1986: 58). From this
'geology of morals', we arrive at the following conclusion: that
freedom is everywhere in nature precisely because there is no
reversibility between the ungrounding that is the eruption of beings
and their futural determination: in terms of the principle of
sufficient reason, there is no equivalence between any effect and its
causes. Hence the naturalism of the Weltalter, which Zizek's 'critical materialism' misses not accidentally, but programmatically: the
'proto-ontological domain of drives', he writes (Zizek 2004b: 32), 'is
not simply "nature"'. If the Ages of the World remain 'stuck in the
past', we might say, this is not because of Schelling's failure, but due
to the imperatives of descendental philosophy. The problem with
any critical philosophy - whether or not it bears a materialist stamp
(or has one projected onto it) - is that it is condemned to the
Parmenidean problem of granting actuality to 'what is not': denying
the 'materiality' of Idea and nature, in other words, leads necessarily to a philosophy that rejoices in incapacity: the grounds of the
necessity of the incomplete are therefore equally those of an
Idealism of the Nicht-seinkonnen.
If, finally, we return to the question of system, the following
problem arises: insofar as Schelling notes an 'asystasy', a lack-ofsystem or 'incompleteness', reigning throughout philosophy-asscience, this might be taken precisely as the preparation for the total
system commonly associated with Idealist philosophies. However, it
is the 'nature of philosophy as science', Schelling states, not
somehow to bend asystasy into a system that recovers itself from its
past, or will do so in the future, but rather to 'glimpse' the system of
asystasy. What does this 'glimpse' mean? That the irreducible multiplicity of expressions of being - eruptions of the Ungrund - is not
a barrier to the systematic pursuit of asystasy, just as univocity
HAMILTON GRANT THE INSUFFICIENCY OF GROUND
(everything is an expression of being) does not entail the eventual
satisfaction of the principle of sufficient reason, as Hogrebe shows.
Thus Hogrebe's call for a renewal of Schellingian metaphysics is key
not because it presages precisely that futural completeness Zizek
envisages would be consequent on Schelling's 'failure to fail', an
eternal resolution, or absolution, of time or the reduction of the
remainder; it is important because it demonstrates that undertaking
to complete the Weltalter could not reduce asystasy to system,
because the past is non-eliminable in every system.
If it is the task of physics, as Hogrebe accounts it, to establish the
grounds of beings, that is, to ascend from conditions to conditioned,
it is the unavoidable task of metaphysics not only to descend to the
first origin of things, to the ground of all grounds, but to unground
grounds, to press towards the unconditioned, 'the Absolute, the
Unground' (Schelling VII, 408; 1986: 89). Yet descendental philosophy does not begin from nowhere, but rather from amidst the asystasy
that is the expression of being; in other words, philosophy systematically ungrounds the totality of systems that compose the asystasy of
real - physical and ideal - systems, grounded only because they are
first and eternally, ungrounded. Incompleteness, it turns out, is indexical not of the 'frame of mind' called materialism, but of nature.
NOTES
Such excavations as Hogrebe here invokes have equally characterized the
two years of intensive reading of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference
and Repetition, the roots of which may be evident here, undertaken by
Jeremy Dunham, Peter Jowers, Sean Watson and myself. Since these collective labours form an indispensable substratum to this essay, the cited
passage equally provides a 'mantic', as Hogrebe would say, for their
fuller and more public expression.
'Incompleteness' is chief among Jean-Claude Milner's enumeration,
which Zizek cites favourably, of 'the features which distinguish great
works of materialist thought, from Lucretius' De rerum natura through
Marx's Capital to the work of Lacan' (Zizek 1996: 7).
That a fundamentally dualist ontology should emerge from a materialist reading of Idealism echoes precisely the project Kojeve incited his
audience - Lacan amongst them - to pursue in his Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel (1969: 215n).
All further references to Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke (1856-61), will be
given as a roman numeral (indicating volume) and page.
Schelling's account of ungrounding is repeated by Deleuze in Difference
and Repetition, where he writes 'grounds can only be assigned in a world
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THE TRUTH OF ZIZEK
already precipitated into universal ungrounding' (1994: 202). The tradition of what Deleuze calls 'transcendental volcanism' (1994: 241)
extends from Plato's Statesman through Schelling and the geologist
Heinrik Steffens, to Heidegger and Deleuze.
Zizek is overt in his claim that, as regards the problematic of freedom,
the solutions of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and even Kant, are structurally
the same, consisting in a 'perversion or inversion' of the 'proper' relationship (1997b: 10-12) between the 'symmetrical polarity' of the potencies' (1997b: 7). It is this that Zizek calls 'ungrounding', or the
'Grundoperation of German Idealism' (1996: 76).
Not universally so, however: Eric Alliez has recently suggested the utility
of a re-evaluation of Fichteanism as a strategy for exploring the
Deleuzian legacy in contemporary philosophy. See Alliez, The Signature
of the World (2004: 30n).
See the recently aired A Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Zizek 2006a),
wherein he accomplishes this feat.
There are three principal Weltalter drafts: 1815 (VIII), 1811 and 1813 (in
Manfred Schroter's SW Nachlassband, cited as Schelling 1946). Zizek
1997 prefaces Judith Norman's translation of the 1813 draft (Schelling
1997), while Jason Wirth has retranslated Frederick de Wolfe Bolman's
version of the 1815 draft (Schelling 2000). Additionally, Siegbert Peetz
has published a transcript of Schelling's 1827-28 lectures entitled
System der Weltalter (Schelling 1998), while Klaus Grotsch's WeltalterFragmente (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2002) contains drafts from the period 1810-21.
98