Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis by Teresa Fenichel

Author:Teresa Fenichel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351180139
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

His description of a beginning before the beginning already includes what can only come after—difference and life—just as he goes on to depict the primal will as already divided between self-absorption (indifference) and self-seeking (tension).15 It is not that Schelling is limited to a narration of the past distorted by the biases of the present; rather, it is only through this retroactive structure that he can enact and come to know the contradiction of eternal beginning. The Absolute Past is not—until, of course, it was.

In the language of the book’s 1815 draft that which will have become the Absolute Past―the pulsation of potencies that withdraw from and contract being―are already differentiated; but it is a differentiation that itself can only want existence, that must remain in the mode of craving and non-presence: A1. The transition to the Absolute Present, to expression, revelation and development, is thus both a re-organization of the relation between the potencies (where A1 lets be A2 as that which ought to have being) and an actualization of the potency of expression or differentiation: A2. But the lingering mystery of the differentiation and unity of these potencies in and as creation, in and as the cision separating Absolute Past from Absolute Present, is ultimately ascribed to free decision (albeit through a necessary union of God’s nature and spirit): A3. This eternal decision for self-revelation is itself a desire for the beginning—a desire that cannot have a beginning. Existence erupts as an orientation toward, and delimitation of, what no-longer-is:

But precisely that one commences and one of them is first, must result from a decision that certainly has not been made consciously or through deliberation but can happen rather only when a violent power blindly breaks the unity in the jostling between the necessity and the impossibility to be. But the only place in which a ground of determination can be sought for the precedence of one of them and the succession of the other is the particular nature of each of the principles, which is different from their general nature which consists in being equally originary and equally independent and each having the same claim to be that which has being … It is now clear that what is posited at the beginning is precisely that which is subordinated in the successor. The beginning is only the beginning insofar as it is not that which should actually be, that which truthfully and in itself has being. If there is therefore a decision, then that which can only be posited at the beginning inclines, for the most part and in its particular way, to the nature of that which does not have being.16

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