The Indivisible Remainder (4)

On Freedom, Time, and the Unconscious

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition.

p. 16: The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason.

p. 18: Anti-Fichtean here is Schelling's assertion of a radical split--an ontological incompatibility, even--between consciousness and freedom, in clear contrast not only to Fichte but also to the commonplace association of freedom with consciousness ('I decide freely when I make a conscious choice, whereas an unconscious decision is by definition no decision at all, but something blindly imposed'). In a sense Schelling is 'more Fichtean than Fichte himself': while he fully endorses Fichte's thesis according to which the very essence of man is his own act, he does not confine this act to self-consciousness but situates it in terms of the real kernel of man's being which precedes consciousness--man contracts his very being, his eternal character (in the double meaning of the verb which is crucial for Schelling: to harden-condense-concentrate into a consistent form of being and to get infected with being) by means of an unconscious primordial act of decision.

p. 20: The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground, that it has acquired a distance towards its Ground and can now 'make free with it', and that the 'chain of being' is broken--that is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity--it stands for the suspension of the temporal chain of (sufficient) reasons-causes, for the leap from the enchainment [Verkettung] of finite, determinate entities into the abyss of their primordial origin, of the 'source of things'.

In the experience of freedom, in the vortex we perceive for a brief moment when we confront a groundless act of freedom, we 'rejoin the Absolute'--that is, we re-establish contact--our identity even--with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures. Man is directly linked to the Absolute in so far as he occupies a unique place among created things: what re-emerges in him (and in him only) is a 'possibility-potentiality of being [Seinskonnen]' which does not immediately collapse into actuality. Other actually existing entities do not relate to possibility as such; in them, a possibility is simply realized; man only relates to possibility as such--for him, a possibility is in a sense 'more' than actuality, as if the actualization-realization of a possibility somehow already 'betrays' or 'devalues' it. This opposition, of course, coincides with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an unfree entity simply is, it coincides with its positive actuality, whereas (as Schelling asserts, announcing thereby the existentialist problematic) a free being can never be reduced to what it is, to its actual, positive presence--its 'project', the undecidable opening of what it might do or become, its 'want-to-be', is the kernel of its very existence.

pp. 21-22: The key to this enigma of the primordial deed is that 'it is done eternally [for all time], i.e. it is eternally [at any time] already done, therefore past'. What is thereby resolved is the tension between eternity and the singularity of the act: how can an act, unique by definition, a happenstance, be eternal? What is done eternally (in the sense of remaining, in its very withdrawal, the eternal foundation of the present, not just something disappearing in the recess of the past) must be eternally (at any time always-already) done, and is therefore inherently past--that is, it has to belong to a past which was never present. This is what the predicate 'unconscious' designates: a past which, although it never existed, persists as a durable foundation of the present. The paradox of such an 'eternal past' is constitutive of time: there is no time without reference to a past which was never present--that is to say, temporality, in its original dimension, is not a single line of events that runs from the past through the present to the future, but involves the tension of a relationship to an act which, precisely in so far as it was never present, in its very withdrawal, is always here as the (past) foundation of the present.