bliss cannot but appear as transcendent: as either a paradisal past or a future salvific telos—never now.
Imagine, however, that one would not have to strive for bliss; that the subject, instead of wanting something, could get fulfillment immediately—or not want anything at all. In this state of bliss, the subject would immediately cease to be just that: a subject. If there is nothing to strive for, nothing to negate or overcome, no positions to occupy, possessions to accumulate, or goals to achieve, what would subjectivity consist in? It would amount to simply being what one is. This is precisely absolute freedom: to simply be—without any self-assertion or lack, any further determination, any reason why. The I would become, as Schelling calls it, “absolute”—and thus cease to be an I, a transcendental subject or a subject of striving. As the mere am or is, this state may be termed “absolute being”; as being what it is, this being could only be an “absolute identity”—without any negativity or relation to otherness. As immanent only to itself, absolute freedom cannot become other, cannot transition to negation or any outside. “The absolute,” Schelling insists, “can never be mediated.”6 It is “utterly immanent” and “has no need to go outside itself” (VI, 167). It is an absolute now, without before or after, possibility or actuality: immanently atemporal and amodal.
This kind of radical immanence can only function in and as the absence of a world. It possesses the “absolute power”: the power to “completely annihilate” the world (VI, 122, 104). There are two aspects to this affirmative reduction to Nichts. Firstly, no common measure applies to absolute being (122), so that, from the perspective of the world, the absolute “can be neither object nor not-object, i.e., cannot be anything at all” (101)—can only be a nothingness, “nothing at all (= 0)” (119). Conversely, since the absolute has no place or need for otherness, it is the world that is nothing at all, annihilated immediately by the power of the absolute as the absolutely nothing. This annihilation functions by transporting the philosopher to the zero point that must be thought of as preceding—not following upon—the world. In other words, even though the I always already finds itself in the world, this is not where speculative thought must begin—this is not where Schelling locates the Real. The world is a factually inevitable yet secondary, imposed, negative reality. The zero point of nothingness or bliss is prior to the imposition of the world, annihilating its very possibility.
That is, in fact, why the I strives toward bliss in the first place: because it knows or intuits the world to be forcefully imposed, foreclosing the Real as that which is without negativity or striving—and so seeks to return to it. The temporality of the I’s striving in the world turns out to be one whereby the past is redoubled as the future, the past bliss as future bliss: a utopian loop. As long as the world is there, past and future remain separate, with the world existing precisely in and as this gap. To collapse them—to enact bliss right now—would necessitate a total collapse of the world. Why, then, must the world even be? “The main business of all philosophy consists,” as a result, “in resolving the problem of the being-there (Dasein) of the world.”7 It is with this problem that contemporary theory continues to struggle.
It seems that this problem cannot, however, be resolved other than from within the world. In this, we approach the crux of the issue. At the standpoint of the absolutely Real, there is no world. As soon as the world is there, however, we find ourselves always already in the world. Even if we say with Schelling that, in fact, the absolutely Real is the “essence” of the I or the soul, so that in a more essential sense we are always already nowhere or nothing, prior to the imposition of the world—a fact that the world forecloses—and that the world is therefore an unreal, even illusory thing, this does nothing to make the world go away or cease its violent imposition. At best, it tears us between two “always already”: one blissful, another imposed, with which we still have to engage.
It is, in effect, through this metaopposition that the world is constructed. This tear between the two “always already” itself is (the fact of) the world, existing as the gap within the Real. I am taking the term construction from Schelling’s later philosophy, where it means exhibiting the world speculatively in—or with a view to—the absolute. To put it simply: if absolute identity and freedom are the absolutely Real, then how to think the world? Since there is no world at the standpoint of the absolute, to think the world is to think it as negation of the absolute—a negation of absolute freedom and bliss. In order to construct the world, then, we need not merely absolute being or nothingness, but twoness and division. The world functions by way of dividing and then mediating (bringing into relation or unity). Accordingly, in order to be a “system of the world” without absolutizing the world,8 the system must be a system of oneness and twoness: it must at once annihilate or suspend the world and exhibit or construct it. The twoness is introduced by the fact of the world, a fact that cannot be thought if we remain at the standpoint of the absolute. Once it is introduced, however, the world can only be thought by way of negation and doubling. In other words, if the absolutely Real is without world, and if speculative thinking seeks to think according to the Real and not according to the world—seeks not to make the world into the first—then the only way to think the world is to think it as negative and imposed (vis-à-vis the Real). To think the possibility of the world turns out to think it as necessarily the (negative) way it is. The world cannot, it seems, be thought otherwise than in the very terms that serve to create it: the transcendental knot again.
To construct the world is thus, in the early Schelling, to reconstruct the way it is. But it is also to construct the end of the world. To think absolute being or nothingness as the Real, and to think the world as imposed negatively upon the Real, is to think that which immediately annihilates the world. The world can only be thought as its rejection or end. However, from within the world (where we are as subjects), this annihilation cannot but be thought of as its future (and not immediate) end. The issue is, in other words, how to think the annihilation of the world from within the world—given the fact that the world is there and does not simply and immediately go away.
If the absolutely Real is what annihilates the world, then to do so becomes imperative. In the absolute itself, no imperative could arise; however, from the point of view of the world, the soul’s striving for the absolute translates into the demand of putting an end to the world. “In order to resolve the antagonism between I and not-I,” Schelling says, “nothing else remains except complete destruction of the finite sphere (practical reason).” It is only if “we pierce through these [finite] spheres”—as demanded by the moral law—“that we find ourselves in the sphere of absolute being” (VI, 145). As a result, the question Why is there a world at all? “cannot be resolved except the way Alexander the Great resolved the Gordian knot, i.e., through the canceling-out of the question itself.”9 It is in the cutting of the knot of the world so as to break through to absolute identity and freedom, that the only resolution of the problem of the world consists. The moral imperative “enters, not in order to untie the knot, but to cut it into pieces by means of absolute demands” (VI, 100). To Why must the world be?, the only absolute answer is, The world must not be.
Since, however, the world is there, this absolute demand can only be remediated (from within the world) in terms of a future. The problem is that the canceling-out of the world, its affirmative reduction to nothingness, must be enacted from within the world. In order for the soul to strive toward the end of the world, this end must be configured as possible—become representable as a goal. That which is supposed to annihilate the world becomes thereby a position in the world, a telos or Endzweck toward which the world must be directed. The absolute demand of immediate annihilation is impossible and so gets postponed into a possible future that is, constitutively, never now as long as the world remains. All that the striving toward this future can realistically amount to, then, is a progress of morality, an approximation of the absolute demand: an “incremental approximation to the end goal” (VI, 124). The world is supposed to be, in the end, annihilated, but this annihilation is always not-yet.
