Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854)
Purushottama: Schelling and Sri Aurobindo on Good and Evil
Jason M. Wirth
Chapter Eight of The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time byJason M.Wirth
State University of New York Press, Albany c 2003 State University of New York
We cannot do without the Orient. Open and free communication with it
must exist…..Schelling (1806)1
And to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths. . . ..Walt Whitman
In Mumbai near the Gateway of India, which once welcomed the English to
one of the crown jewels of its empire, for a few rupees, a person can catch an old
boat that travels into the harbor. The Gateway arch is near one of the grandest
historic hotels in India, built in retaliation by the wealthy Parsi J. N. Tata for
allegedly being denied entrance into one of European’s premier lodgings. Mumbai, one of the largest and most congested cities in the history of the earth, is also a city of Hindus and Muslims and is still haunted by the tensions that
erupted during the Partition. It is a city full of temples and mosques as well as
sadhus and sufis. Amidst the complexity of Islam and the countless expressions
of Hinduism, such as Siva, Visnu, Brahma, and Krishna, one also finds Sikhs and
Jains, even Buddhists. Indeed, Mumbai is a vivid reminder that there is no such
thing as an essential India, but rather there are ceaseless Indias, prompting the
question, ”Of whose India are we speaking?” Perhaps this heterogeneity is true of all places, but the extravagant diversity of India emphatically exemplifies it. Yet amidst the wealth of heterodoxy that lacks a clear, general explanatory principle and instead suggests a history of countless layers, one can nonetheless travel into the harbor on an old boat to the island of Elephanta. There, amidst the vendors and rhesus monkeys, one can walk to the ancient caves of Siva. Carved out of a hill, damaged by the gunshots of Portuguese soldiers, these
stone monuments still speak of a unity among difference and difference among
unity.a unity without foundation or true subject, a unity that is a figure for
the play, the lila of difference.
Despite their proximity to a teeming populous, these caves must once
have seemed remote, as if they were the conclusion of some long pilgrimage.
They do not form the center of some city or town, but are located in a peripheral
place. In a way their location is analogous to Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna
to learn to meditate on the great divine secret by first learning to meditate on
the tip of his nose.2 The nose seems like an arbitrary and unimportant location
to begin training oneself to eventually behold the greatest of all mysteries,
and indeed it is. Yet Vishnu is in all things: all things are its avatars, not just
the institutions set aside for holy activities. All of nature.forests and mountains
as well as cities and towns.is the temple. So too are the caves of Siva,
set aside as if they were on the nose of the earth, announcing to guests that
they are now at the center of the world, nay, at the center of nature itself.3
The most prominent figure in the cave is the imposing trimurti or three-faced
Siva. Here one finds the face of the destroyer to one side, the creator to
the other side, and, holding the two together in deep and abiding serenity, its
eyes in the almost closed pose of samadhi, is the preserver. It holds together
creation and destruction, life and death, natality and fatality.the conjunction
that is the unity of a deeper life.
And furthermore, the three faces of Siva.qua faces.are the face, so to
speak, of the Siva that never emerges into visibility, that renders this depiction,
despite its prescience, as yet more strands of Maya. If the hidden face
were to appear, were, so to speak, to reveal itself, creation would not be able to
endure the absolute range of its destruction.4
In this concluding chapter I will meditate upon the trimurti Siva, and I
propose to do so by bringing together two unlikely figures, Schelling and the
early twentieth-century Indian Philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Furthermore,
I will attempt to loosely direct my analysis around their complimentary
readings of the Bhagavad-Gita, looking primarily at Schelling’s discussion of it
in his 1842 Berlin lectures on the Philosophie der Mythologie (chiefly lectures
20.22).5 I will attempt to reinforce Schelling’s reading by looking at
Aurobindo’s magisterial reading in his Essays on the Gita.6 In the background of my analysis is Shankara’s justly famous commentary. This is not to say that
Schelling did not make mistakes regarding his reception of the Indian spiritual
and philosophical tradition, or that I concur entirely with his reading. Rather,
I hope to indicate the richness of Schelling’s opening into these traditions.
Indeed, Schelling knew, via Niebuhr, of the monuments at Elephanta7
and considered them a profound expression of the secret teaching or Geheimlehre of the Hindu tradition, which for Schelling had its most extraordinary articulation in the Bhagavad-Gita. One could even say that this trinitarian monument, as well as the Gita itself, expresses in a culturally unique way Schelling’s own philosophical commitments.
In this figure and in these hymns Schelling found an early revelation of
the doctrine of potencies. In the third version of his proposed but unfinished
magnum opus, The Ages of the World, Schelling gave consummate expression to this doctrine by claiming: “The consciousness of eternity can only be articulated in the phrase: ’I am the one who was, who is, who will be.’” (AW, 263). This phrasing, which was originally to have been the opening words to The Ages of the World, echoes Kant’s observation in the Critique of Judgment that”Perhaps there has never been something more sublime said or a thought expressed more sublimely than that inscription over the Temple of Isis (of Mother Nature): ’I am everything that there is, that there was, and that there will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.’”8
Indeed, as Schelling embarked during his great period of silence on what
he announced in the Philosophy of Religion essay and the Freedom essay as his
positive philosophy, he first turned to a historical study of these words in his
posthumously published addendum to The Ages of the World, “The Deities of
Samothrace” (1815). Here, in his analysis of the mystery religion of the Cult of
the Cabiri, celebrated in antiquity on the Thracian island of Samos, Schelling
discovered an ”insoluble life” (I/8, 367). In this celebration of the Whole of
Life, ”no element can be lacking without the Whole crashing together; of
which the truest statement would be that only together were they born, and
only together can they die” (I/8, 368).9 Schelling went on to ask, ”What if
already in Greek Mythology (not to mention Indian and other Oriental
mythologies) there emerged the remains of a knowledge, indeed even a scientific
system, which goes far beyond the circle drawn by the oldest revelation
known through scriptural evidences?” (I/8, 362) Schelling was to spend the
next four decades investigating these remains.
Already from this early exercise in positive philosophy, one finds a parallel
to the triadic system of Elephanta. Buried underneath the public discourse
on the gods was a secret unity. Ceres, whose Wesen is ”hunger and seeking” and whose earthly expression was Proserpina, the ”origin of external nature,” could also be understood as the creativity of Brahma. Dionysus,
”lord of the spirit world” and destroyer of all forms, is also, perhaps even originally, Siva the Destroyer. Finally, there is Kadmilos (or Hermes), who transcends both lower deities yet mediates between them (I/8, 361). This is
also Vishnu the Preserver, the face that holds together creation and destruction in their simultaneity.
But why had Schelling, the alleged maker of systems, turned to history rather than relying on the abstractions of philosophy? Why get his hands dirty with the singularities of history rather than stick with the clean generalities of
the system? Is history simply examples of what could more cleanly be understood in the abstractions of systemic thinking?
For Schelling history could not be understood or aufgehoben or sublated
into the general. The latter could only be understood in personal terms, and
the personal could only be understood in general terms. But the personal is
not thereby the general, and the general is not thereby the personal. Rather
the two belong together, without resolution, in a third, in what Schelling
called a Wesen, a third that holds together without reconciling opposites. This
third, it follows, can only be thought.only be revealed.in singular ways.
If Schelling’s early philosophy.what he called his gnegative philosophyh.
was an attempt to raise the real, the realm of appearance and nature, up
to the absolute, then his later philosophy, which he called ”positive philosophy,”
reversed the direction, thinking the revelation of the absolute in nature
as history. Unlike many of those around him, Schelling embarked on a writing
of history without sectarian interests and demands. ”What we have
described up until now (insofar as possible) is only the eternal life of the Godhead.
The actual history that we intended to describe, the narration of that
series of free actions through which God, since eternity, decided to reveal
itself, can only now begin” (AW, 269).
In the 1842 Philosophie der Mythologie one can follow Schelling move
through a dazzling series of multicultural analyses, carefully discussing Greek
polytheism, Jewish monotheism, Egyptian mythology, Persian Zororastrianism,
early Chinese thought, and, for our purposes here, Indian mythology and
philosophy.What is immediately striking about Schelling’s analysis of India is
its utter lack of the condescension that typified the nineteenth-century reception
of India, from English colonial interests to Christian proselytizing interests
to Max Mullerfs refusal to visit India. Beyond the Scylla and Charybdis
of exoticism and Orientalism, Schelling found in India one of the world’s
great philosophical traditions.
Certainly Schelling, who had never been to India, had to study its traditions
by critically wading through the many interests that skewed the nineteenth-
century’s reception of India. No doubt his reading of the Upanishads
leaves much to be desired, but he did see something of vital importance in
the Gita.10 Hegel had already dismissed India as historically stalled, as a relic
left behind, schon aufgehoben, in Spirit’s journey to self-revelation. In the
posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel
referred to both the Indian and Chinese philosophical traditions as lacking
“completely the essential consciousness of the concept of Freedom.”11 In his
introductory lectures On the History of Philosophy, Hegel referred to the
”mixed-up” Indian philosophical tradition as belonging more generally to all
of the other Asian philosophies, all of which lack a conscience and individual
morality. They are all stuck in a state of nature. The Indians, furthermore,
tended towards ”a flight to the emptiest abstraction to what is infinite.”12 In
the Rechtsphilosophie, India, ”sunk in the most frightful and scandalous superstition”
(˜248), fanatically turned towards the ”element of pure indeterminacy”
and venerated its void in contemplation. Such a bad infinity kept them
from thinking historically, and hence they were unable to regenerate and
renew their political and philosophical practices (˜5).13 In general, for Hegel,
India has been aborted by the historical activity of the Weltgeist. India has ”no
history” (XI, 99). They are uncomprehending onlookers, left behind by history
and transfixed by pure indeterminacy, or the world-abnegating force of
the negative.
As a corollary to their ahistorical fixation with a bad infinity, the Indians
considered everything to be miraculous, and if that is the case, then nothing
in particular can be miraculous (XII, 498). ”Everything is a god to the Indians”
(XI, 194), and the Indian ”imagination makes everything into a god”
(XV, 397).14 Indeed, to a certain extent, Hegel is accurate in this claim. All
things are finally the avatars of Vishnu and, as such, are good. But rather than
hold this transformation of the mundane against either the Hindu tradition
or Schelling, I would argue that the failure of Hegel to appreciate this point
dramatically distinguishes Schelling from Hegel. Nowhere does one find the
stinginess of Hegel, the ego of the Geist that always survives its own death,
more apparent than in its repudiation of India and, by way of the starkest of
contrasts, the deification not of all things, but of the Prussian state.
The Christian missionaries for their part were often appalled by what
they found in indigenous religious practices. However, Schelling’s primary
access to the Bhagavad-Gita, his most cherished Indian text, came to him
through the translations by two of his former colleagues and friends, the
Schlegel Brothers. August Schlegel, the first husband of Schelling’s beloved
first wife Caroline, was the first German to receive a chair of Sanskrit studies
in Bonn and had translated the Gita into Latin. Friedrich Schlegel, author of
the influential yet problematic 1808 Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier,
with which Schelling was already engaged in the Freedom essay, translated the
Gita into German.
Contrary to the tendency to elevate the West to the status of the only
properly philosophical set of cultures and the true children of the Greeks,
Schelling discovered the Indian heritage buried within the Greeks. ”Perhaps
there are still strongly devout souls who are inclined to derive . . . the
Greek teachings on the Gods from India. One could certainly not refute
such a belief ” (II/2, 465). For Schelling, Greek mythology originated in
India, and hence Greek mythology and, eventually, Greek philosophy
should be considered a flower of South Asia. Indeed, Schelling implied,
correctly I think, that in a profound way, Greece could be thought of as
West Asia. Certainly the assumption about this proximity had long faded,
and Schelling was enthusiastic about reinvigorating the dialogue. In 1808
Schelling wrote to August Schlegel and argued that an entire Academy for
Asian Studies should be founded and that a formal mission should be dispatched
to the East to facilitate these studies.15
I turn now to an analysis of Schelling’s reading of the Indian Hindu tradition
by focusing on his celebration of The Bhagavad-Gita, what Schelling
referred to as ”incontestably one of the most profound and most delicate products
of the Indian spirit” (II/2, 494). I will also refer to Aurobindo, who, so far
as I know, knew nothing of Schelling’s lectures on India, and discuss his reading
of the Gita as a kind of testimony to Schelling’s central insight.
II
One of the most shocking aspects of the Indian philosophical tradition for
many Westerners is its seeming equation of good with evil. If life, whatever it
is, is good, then all things are good and there is no such thing as evil.
When one first considers Arjuna’s plight in the Gita, he seems reasonably
despondent,much in the same way that Hamlet is. If he fights, he must attempt
to kill friends, relatives, and former teachers. If he does not fight, he betrays his
side, the Pandavas and their allies, and allows the crimes of the Kauruvas to go
uncontested. In the Ramayana, Rama was the avatar of the straight and the narrow,
who always did the right thing, who always followed dharma, even when
others did not. Even if it meant living without Sita, for whom he had waged
furious war in Lanka against Ravana and his demonic kingdom, so it was.
But what is the right way for Arjuna? If he fights, he is wrong. If he does
not fight, he is wrong. And so he becomes confused about his dharma, dizzy
in the head, and lies prostrate before his charioteer Krishna. After prompting
him to fight, to value his dharma, svadharma, no matter how imperfectly executed,
over the dharma of another, paradharma, no matter how perfectly executed,
Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, reveals himself in his sublime form
as Kala, time, the world destroyer, the consumer of all, chewing the heads of
mortals in the teeth of his endless heads.
Kala, time, appears.feminized.in Hindu mythology as Kali, her
bloodthirsty tongue dropping down to her chin, a scythe in one hand, the
decapitated heads of mortals in another hand. In former times she demanded
human sacrifice, and today she still exacts the sacrificial decapitation of goats.
She wears a necklace and a belt of human heads and, like Siva, sleeps among
the contamination of the crematoria.
Krishna is able to convince Arjuna to embrace his dharma, and in the battle
sequences that follow the placement of the Gita in the Mahabharata, millions
die in the most horrible ways. Each Indian literary work strives to evoke
a fundamental mood or rasa, which tradition holds are nine in number. How
could it be said that this is a book whose fundamental mood, whose rasa, is
not fury (krodha) or heroism (verya) but s;anti, the peace beyond all peace?
Is this a simple Kantian deontology.that dharma is an absolute duty?
Certainly not. This is not a doctrine of responsibility, which would depend on
a choice between good and evil. In the Gita, indeed in the Vedas as well as the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, there is no such thing as choice or agency.
And more disturbingly, life is somehow always right. At the end of the
Mahabharata, winners and losers are equally returned to the heavens.
Furthermore, a text that renounces the fruit of action, the fruit of karma,
is certainly not utilitarian, which, in any of its versions, demands that we
somehow calculate the Good in the future perfect tense: the goodness of the
result will justify the action. The destruction of the Kauravas does not vindicate
Arjuna’s actions, and the so-called crooked way of Krishna does not claim
that good ends justify corrupt means.
Nor does it make sense to speak of virtue ethics to Hamlet or Arjuna
when the very source of their melancholy is the absence of a mean. Aristotle
knew that the capacity to calculate the mean first of all assumed tuvch, Fortuna,
the luck to have been in a situation that afforded such judgments.What
is the mean between destroying one part of your family or abandoning the
other? Hamlet and Arjuna are like unlucky King Priam whose life Aristotle
claimed lacked the requisite means for eudaimonia.16 One has to be lucky
enough to have a life that admits the possibility of negotiating the best option.
Furthermore, the Gita is clear, and both S:anakara and Aurobindo stress
this, that Arjuna’s tragic lament is itself the result of a more fundamental mistake:
ahamakara, ego sense, egoity, the assumption that the starting point for
the relationship to the Good is gI and mineh or gMine and thine.h What is
good for me in this situation? Arjuna mistakenly assumes that the question of
the Good is the question of his good and then is despondent when nothing
can legitimately be said to be good for him. Svadharma is otherwise than
ahamakara, my good. This is not the Realpolitik of the egofs strivings.
Is this quietism? Certainly not, for Arjuna in his despondency is already
doing nothing, already a passive observer and Krishna is coaxing him into action.
As Schelling observed, the Bhagavad-Gitarecommends action in the most specific
way and is opposed to any gindolent and dull quietismh (II/2, 518).
Nor is it a quietistic moral abandonment in which one does whatever
strikes one and defends such caprices by claiming the prerogative of svadharma:
Well, I was just following my dharma! As Aurobindo insists, it is
expressly not to follow onefs own whims. To the gunripe mindh this is just a
gconvenient excuse for indulging its Asuric propensitiesh (EG, 207).17 One is
utterly possessed, beyond the aequilibrium arbitrii, the choice between opposites,
which Schelling in the Freedom essay called gthe bane of all moralityh
(I/7, 392). As Aurobindo put it: gGod is there not only in the silence, but in
the actionh (EG, 135).
Without responsibility, with the implication of evil with the Good, how
is one to understand Krishnafs counsel? It offers actions without regard to their
fruit, dharma without the suppositions of responsibility (namely, the ego and
its choices). It obviates the possibility of virtuous action, while at the same
time arguing that witnessing life is the highest form of action and knowledge
and is the opposite of standing at the sidelines of life.
Does this not make all things good and therefore also all evil things good?
Does this not imply evil in the very heart of the divine? This was certainly
Friedrich Schlegelfs conclusion and Schelling was quick to object. gBut there
is a total misunderstanding in the judgment of Friedrich Schlegel, who in his
Philosophy of History, cannot express his revulsion [Abscheu] enough that the
Indian consciousness would have included a destructive primordial force, the
principle of evil, the god of death, in the Godhead itself. Not everything
destructive is thereby the same as the principle of evilh (II/2, 445).
Kali belongs to the divine, is a potency of the divine. The destructive force
of Siva is certainly not the totality of his divinity, but nonetheless is inseparable
from his divinity. Vishnu is also the destroyer and Arjuna sees as much
when Krishna reveals himself as Kala, time, the world destroyer (XI: 32), to
which Arjuna, shuddering, but realizing his ahamakara, clasps his hands
together deferentially. Aurobindo insisted on this thought:
It is only a few religions which have had the courage to say without
reserve, like the Indian, that this enigmatic World-Power is one
Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the
world in the figure not only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible
Kali in her bloodstained dance of destruction and to say, eThis
too is the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the
strength, adore. (EG, 42)
Schelling also attempted, both with regard to the Gita and to his own thinking,
to think the destructive force of the Good, which is not an evil part of the Good
but rather belongs to the goodness of the Good. ”If there is a principle, which
is not that of evil itself, which nonetheless consumes the resistant part of human
freedom, then this principle is certainly a beneficent force, a kind of good principle”
(II/2, 445). Kali, Siva the Destroyer, all belong to the Good, otherwise
than evil. As Arjuna shudders before the universal form of Krishna/Vishnu, it is not
because he has seen some horrible demon. He shudders before a vision of the
Good that shatters its exclusive ensconcement in a human good. The Good
shatters ahamakara, my good.no matter how broadly the ”my” is defined,
including its broadest range: ethics. The ethical is not born of the human and
its range. Rather, the human is born of ethics.the Good beyond good and
evil.and its incomprehensible and unprethinkable (unvordenklich) range.
Although both Schelling and Aurobindo hold onto some provisional
account of evil, they do not locate it in the destructive force of Kali. She too
is the mother. As Schelling already reflected in The Ages of World:
If we take into consideration the many terrible things in nature and
the spiritual world and the great many other things that a benevolent
hand seems to cover up from us, then we could not doubt that the
Godhead sits enthroned over a world of terrors. And God, in accordance
with what is concealed in and by God, could be called the
awful and the terrible, not in a derivative fashion, but in their original
sense. (AW, 268)
Like Nietzsche, both Schelling and Aurobindo attempt to think the Good
beyond good and evil. gIt is a higher truth that the distinction of good and evil
is indeed a practical fact and law valid for the egoistic human life which is the
stage of the transition from the animal to the divine, but on a higher plane we
rise beyond good and evil, are above their duality even as the Godhead is
above ith (EG, 207).
How then are we to think this Good beyond good and evil, which
nonetheless does not altogether obviate good and evil, yet at the same time
knows that the Good of good and evil was never good enough?
A clue to Schelling’s answer can be found in his account of the Gita’s relationship
to Buddhism. The Gita itself, the most Buddhist of all Hindu sacred
texts, is able to hold together what is otherwise a disparate aggregate in Hindu
thought. Although Hinduism has always had the various strands that hold the
polytheistic manifold together, it has not always thought them through in
their inner relationship with each other. ”God is many, or more specifically
three, A, B, C, but is not God as A, not as B, not as C, in particular, but rather
just A + B + C” (II/2, 484). Hence, the three gods, the creator, the destroyer,
and the preserver, admit of being considered as three individual gods, not the
three inseparable faces of the same God.18 As evidence of this, Schelling cited
passages from the Vedas as well as the anecdotal evidence of India’s countless
religious sects and devotions.19 In the Gita, however, they are thought together
in their unity. ”Krishna is the highest historical transfiguration [Verklarung] of
Visnuism” (II/2, 463).
There is already some indication of Schelling’s claim in the movement of
the Gita’s argument. In the early hymns, Krishna attempts to reconcile the
Sankhya position, which generally proceeds from a dualistic point of view
(holy and profane, good and evil) and counsels the abandonment of the mundane
world for the holy and wholly other plane. Yoga philosophy, on the other
hand, counsels proper action in this world. Krishna attempts to show that the
way from the world belongs to the way to the world and that the way to the
world involves the way from the world.To get to the world, you must leave the
world, but in leaving the world, you get to the world. Krishna holds these
opposing tendencies together in a third way of being, in a Wesen, so to speak.
For Schelling, Buddhism was a ”heightening of the Visnuism that we
exquisitely recognized in the Bhagavad-Gita” (II/2, 517). In fact, it was so
close to the Hinduism of the Gita that Buddhism ”would be nothing other
than the secret of Indian religion made public and at the same time betrayed.
Hence the bloody hate of the orthodox Indian church against Buddhism. In
Greece, no small amount of hatred by the people followed those who had
betrayed the Mysteries. Buddhism would be to India what the Mystery teachings
were to Greece” (II/2, 496).
Buddhism steals the mystery from its exclusive possession by the Brahmin
caste,20 revealing something publicly, at least to the extent to which it can
be spoken of at all. Buddhism ”always remained something unprethinkable
[unvordenklich] in the Indian consciousness, which was never fully suppressed
within it” (II/2, 506). Schelling observed that in one of the caves at Ellora,
Vishnu is represented as a servant of the Buddha (II/2, 506.507). At the same
time, India’s persecution of Buddhism speaks of India’s dual relationship to
the proclamation of its secret: India both gave birth to Buddhism and persecuted
it (II/2, 510).
Schelling furthermore observed that the Christian missionaries, not
unlike Friedrich Schlegel, were appalled by the Buddhist relationship to the
Good. According to the missionaries, the Buddhists commit two appalling
heresies. Good and evil ”are one and the same thing [einerlei] ” and both have
the same validity [Gleichgultigkeit] (II/2, 503).
Schelling took up both claims, one by one. In the first case, good and evil
are not the same thing, even though they may have an inextricable relationship
in a third. They are not einerlei, they do not belong to the same kind.
There is nothing in the thought of the Good that contains the thought of evil
and vice versa. Nonetheless, there may be a third, a tertium quid, a copula, or
Band that contains both, albeit as opposites, which belong together, without
reconciliation or sublimation (Aufhebung) in a third. Schelling called this third
a Wesen: ”Good and evil are equally wesentlich [or essential], without evil in
any way ceasing to be evil and the good ceasing to be good. There is no development
without the force that holds back and inhibits development and
therefore at the same time resists it” (II/2, 503).21
As for the second claim, the claim of Gleichgultigkeit or equal validity of
moral opposites (good and evil are the same thing, which, furthermore,
implies that no distinction between good and evil can be made and hence that
there is no such thing as good and evil), Schelling offered the following subtle
reflections.
Schelling first argued that ”Evil in the final analysis is nothing other than
the force [Kraft] of the Buddha, which resists creation, which is the very force
that the Buddha subordinated to actual creation. But precisely thereby the Buddha
brought the opposite to actual creation” (II/2, 503). If the Buddha wants to
subordinate all action and all thought to creation, that is, to bring it into some
sort of state of nature, the Buddha must defy nature itself. The natural state for
which the Buddha strives is not a state that one finds in nature. If one found it
in nature, then one would not need to strive for it. Hence, to be natural is an unnatural
thing, and therefore one must in some profound sense be unnatural in order
to be natural. Or one could extend this ineluctable paradox further. It is a good
thing to be beyond good and evil, which, at the same time, is in some way still
to be within good and evil. Yet it is also an evil thing simply to be within good
and evil. This holding together of opposites in intimate proximity does not render
the opposites gleichgultig, for one is depending on value distinctions even as
one attempts to move beyond them.To see all things as good is at the same time
the result of an anterior value judgment. The judgment that gall things are goodh
paradoxically claims to be a better way of seeing.
Secondly, Schelling took up the issue of what in many Indian religious
practices, including Buddhism, stems from Tantric practices and beliefs. Considered
scandalous in most parts of the world, these practices notoriously can
involve techniques by which one encounters objects and people normally considered
odious and abject. Many desperate explanations of these behaviors
(living among the dead in crematoria in houses built of human skulls, sex with
hideous people, etc.), have been offered, including the following ridiculous
accounts: Good, evil, its all the same to me! Or, one has to learn that these
things are bad (as if the starting point were not the abject quality of these rituals)!
Or, one has to get it out of onefs system (as if these ever were in onefs
system and as if one ever wanted to do these things)! Critical to these practices
is the obvious abjectness of the objects themselves.
Although Schelling did not take up the issue of Tantric practices per se,
he indirectly referred to them when he analyzed the missionariesf revulsion at
certain Buddhist practices. Schelling reported that in Sri Lanka (in Schelling’s
time, Ceylon), the Buddhists erected small, chapel-sized ancillary temples,
which the missionaries called ”devil’s chapels” (II/2, 504). Here devotees
encountered the abject side of human life, engaging in distasteful and highly
immoral practices. For Schelling, this too one knows to be good; this too, if
one has the strength, one adores. The Buddhists attempted to combine gthe
two principles, which in the greatest generality can be designated as the real
and the ideal principles, into a unity.into one and the same God.h They
avoided a God that is intermittently good and then evil, or basically good, and
occasionally bad. They knew rather that, as we saw in chapter six, that the
”principle that resists the Good and love” is ”originarily . . . necessary for creation”
(II/2, 504).
Here Schelling returned to the language of the real and the ideal, with the
implication, born out dramatically for example in the Freedom essay, that the
Good is ideal, that which, in being thought, resists comprehension, that whose
ideatum, so to speak, always resists its idea. Yet the ideal, in its irresolvable
silence, can only express itself in the din of the real. The Good can only
express itself as what is not itself, as what is not Good. Hence, the not-Good
is an expression of the Good.
In fact, Schelling already found this insight in the Vedas. ”God is the
truth and God is the great lie” (II/2, 480), although Schelling argued that the
Vedas are not clear about the exact relationship between the Ideal (God qua
the truth) and the Real (Maya, the ggreat lieh of the sensible world).
Although Schelling did not discuss this passage explicitly, the Gita is very
clear about this when Krishna/Vishnu claims that ”I am born by my self-Maya
[a\tama\yaya\].”22 That is, I am only insofar as to be is to be Maya, and therefore
Vishnu is Vishnu only insofar as being itself is always the great lie. Vishnu
is otherwise than nature expressing itself as nature, as if Maya itself were both
Vishnu (the ideal) and the world (the real), the Good and Maya (the proxy of
the Good).23
Schelling linked this ”belonging together” to the Gita’s understanding of
the three gunas, or what Schelling translated as qualities (Qualitaten, Eigenschaften)
and finally potencies. The term literally denotes ”strands,” and
Schelling duly noted that in the Vedas they are likened to the webs of a spider
in which the weaving both comes forth and retracts. ”Everything has its
movement through the proper mixture of the three gunas [Eigenschaften], the
creating, the preserving, and the destroying” (II/2, 481). Maya is the spinning
of the three gunas.24 This may not be the only account of the gunas, but it does
suggest the extent to which Schelling is entering the circulation of the Gita.
Schelling linked Brahman to rajas, the red, fiery pulse and energy
(Tatkraft) of life, the ”fire of passion” and the ”swiftness of decision” (II/2,
449). Rajas is the ”first desire, the passion of creation in Brahman,” and, as such,
Brahman is that which brings forth the ”semblance of Being [das scheinbare
Sein] ” and is hence alienated from his Wesen (II/2, 450). Brahman is the God
that merely posits the semblance of nature. Brahman is the creator, which, in
terms of potencies, Schelling named the A1. Brahman is the magic of nature,
the movement of possibility (Maya = Moglichkeit).
The gun.a of Siva is tamas (II/2, 450), which is often associated with indolence
and inertia and literally denotes darkness. Siva is the force of absolute
light, which is the same as absolute darkness. Siva is the destroyer, time which
reminds all creatures that they do not own their being. In a particularly bold
description, Schelling claimed that the destroyer is the ”God of the universally
orgiastic [des allgemeinen Orgiasmus]” (II/2, 444) and hence, like the late
appearing Dionysus, the freedom of nature erupting from within the facade of
its order and self-possession. As such, Schelling translated tamas not as darkness,
but as Dammerung, dawn or dusk (II/2, 451), the breaking through of
one potency into another potency. This is the bursting forth of the A2.
The gun.a of Vishnu is sattva, the super brightness of white, ”what is real
throughout,” what is ”free of all lack” and hence, lacking all nonbeing, is the
absoluteness of truth. If one can think this not as some empyrean realm
beyond Maya in which the stalwart soul at last finds the great escape of moksa,
but rather as that which knows moksa as a liberated relationship to Maya, then
Vishnu, the transformative consummation of the three gunas (Vishnu as the
belonging together of Brahman, Siva, and Vishnu), can be designated as the A3.
The Gita is able to think clearly through the inner dynamic of the three
gunas, and it describes the gstruggle of the separated potencies as a revolving
wheelh (II/2, 493). This turning wheel has long been a part of Schelling’s
own thinking. His insignia, as we have seen, was the Sphinx pointing to a
revolving wheel, and in The Ages of the World Schelling linked this to the
Orphic origin of the Phanic Dionysus. ”This is that moment that the intimating
primal world marked as the splitting apart of the world-egg by
which they hinted at that closed wheel, that inscrutable movement which
could never be held fast; that moment in which the earthly and the heavenly
first divided” (AW, 242).25
The revelation is not the escape from the wheel but the freedom, even the
love, for the wheel. This is the genius of the Gita. Vishnu is in all things, but
no thing is in Vishnu, ”the being of things in God is asserted but not reciprocally
the being of God in things” (II/2, 494). Vishnu self-expresses as the Maya
of the world, and the world implicates itself in Vishnu. To love Vishnu is not to
love Vishnu as sattva. It is to be free for the strands of being, to love Vishnu as
the wheel of Brahman, Siva, and Vishnu, creation, destruction, and preservation:
Vishnu, when this does not mean the singular potency, but rather
God itself consummated through Vishnu, always appears in pictures
with this revolving, flaming wheel, which one can call the wheel of
the three gunas [Eigenschaften]. In this wheel, one of the gunas is
victorious, then soon another, so that the entire manifold is produced
exclusively through this revolving wheel that Vishnu turns
with his conation and posits in ceaseless movement without Vishnu
being comprehended in this wheel. Hence, the creator is distinguished
in a most specific way from the Maya of which the whole
world consists. (II/2, 493)
To love Vishnu is to be within yet beyond the predicates of nature, unattached
yet engaged. The Sphinx points one towards ”the constancy of inner love,
blessed peace in the movement of the world, under the rotation of time” (I/10,
45). Aurobindo describes this stance as follows:
For while they are filled with the troubling sense of ego and mine and
thine, he is one with the one Self in all and has no “I” or ”mine.” He
acts as others, but he has abandoned all desires and their longings.
He attains to the great peace and is not bewildered by the show of
things; he has extinguished his individual ego in the One, lives in
that unity and, fixed in that status at his end, can attain to extinction
in the Brahma Nirvana. . . . (EG, 96.97)
For Aurobindo, to be free for the wheel is to be ”beyond the grip of the three
gunas, traigunatitya; he is neither sattvic, rajasic nor tamasic” but rather has
the ”superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it”
(EG, 177). It is to love the Vishnu beyond Vishnu through the love of the Maya
of Vishnu. ”Love of the world, the mask,must change into the love of God, the
Truth. Once this secret and inner Godhead is known and embraced, the whole
being and the whole life will undergo a sovereign uplifting and a marvelous
transmutation. In place of the ignorance of the lower nature absorbed in its
outward works and appearances the eye will open to the vision of God everywhere,
to the unity and universality of the spirit” (EG, 321).
For Schelling, this yoga was the becoming inward and sharing in the creative
movment of the wheel of being. In fact, Schelling translated ”yoga,” the
word that describes the many disciplines that Krishna reveals to Arjuna, not as
devotio, as August Schlegel had, nor as Andacht, as another had, not even as
Vertiefung, deepening, as von Humboldt had. Although of the three the latter
came the closest, Schelling chose the marvelous German word Innigkeit, the
moving inward from the periphery of Being to the center of Being (II/2, 448),
returning back to the site of the cision or Scheidung of nature from which
humankind first finds itself in flight.
For Aurobindo, yoga is the awakening of love, of bhakti, love for all of the
creatures of the circle. ”On him is concentrated all his Bhakti . . . not on any
partial godhead, rule, or cult. This single devotion is his whole law of living
and he has gone beyond all creeds of religious belief, rules of conduct, personal
aims of life. . . . This is the God-lover who has the knowledge” (EG, 274). For
Schelling too, this wisdom, this jnana, is more fundamentally the awakening
of love, of philia. Could there not, if one were to engage in a radical rethinking
of the dawn of Western philosophy, be some profound spiritual relationship
between sophia and jnana, philia and bhakti?
Aurobindo, following the Gita, named this belonging together of the
three potencies, Purushottama ”The impersonal Brahman is not the very last
word, not the utterly highest secret of our being. . . . God is an ever unmanifest
Infinite ever self-impelled to manifest himself in the finite” (EG, 124).
Brahman is both the body and the nonbody, both kshara and akshara. ”To see
that we have to look through its silence to the Purushottama, and he in his
divine greatness possesses both the Akshara and the Kshara; he is seated in all
immobility, but he manifests himself in the movement and in all the actions
of cosmic nature” (EG, 125). The secret that once revealed brings forth the
s;anti, the peace beyond peace, that only bhakti, only love, can produce, can be
said in the word Purus.ottama or what Schelling once called early in his thinking,
die Weltseele, the world soul.
At the very end of the Philosophy of Mythology lectures, Schelling claimed
that the aim of philosophy was not preparation for state examinations, but a
vitalization of spirit so that one ”could stand before the tear [der Ris] and be
afraid of no appearance” (II/2, 673). It is to awaken to the dance of God, to
love Maya as the play or lila of the Good. This is the beginning of what
Schelling called ”philosophical religion,” that is, not the capacity to sublimate
the history of religion in a great pantheon of spiritual accomplishments, but
the capacity of reason to trace the unprethinkable life of its Other, the life
always still to come, the life that emerges in ”complete independence of reason”
(I/11, 250).
For Schelling, the aim of thinking is finally, a kind of Nirvana, found, if
rarely, even in philosophy. ”This ocean of becoming is only the outer appearance
of the God that comes forth in separated qualities.” Yet inwardly this
God, like all humans who know Nirvana, who are empty of substantialistic
essence, ”remains, underneath all of the mutability of its external existence,
inwardly equal to itself in deep calm, a heart full of love and affection for creatures”
(II/2, 520). God’s creatures, having passed the test of the separation of
forces, seek to unite with it in its original nothingness and emptiness. This
union in nothingness is the rebirth of what Schelling called in The Ages of the World ”the will that wills nothing” (AW, 239). This uncoercive, philosophical
will can lead the way to that difficult Freedom beyond dogma and creed,
beyond totalizing first principles, where one can love all Indias, all creatures,
all places, and all times.
1. Letter to Windischmannh (18 December 1806), ed. Plitt, vol. 2, 108.
2. (VI: 13) of the Dya\nayoga: ”Holding the body, head and neck erect and
motionless, looking steadily at the tip of his nose, not looking in any direction.”
3. See Wendy Doniger (OfFlaherty), ”The Myths Depicted at Elephanta,” in
Elephanta: The Cave of Shiva, ed. Carmel Berkson, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 27. ”To begin with, Elephanta is on an island; one reaches it by crossing
quite a lot of water. This produces not only a feeling of isolation from the profane
world but a special cosmological situation from the Hindu point of view: for India is
an island (the Rose-apple Island Jambudvipa); and the world is an island, surrounded
by concentric oceans of salt and milk and honey; and the universe is an island, a closed
egg floating in the cosmic waters. Here, therefore, one is at the center of the center of
the center.” See also Charles Dillard Collins, The Iconography and Ritual of S:iva at Elephanta,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
4. There are traditionally four faces. The fifth and utterly hidden face is the face
of absolute transcendence. See Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of S:iva, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 256. For Kramrisch, S:iva is the time beyond time
(272).
5. Although Indian themes are often in the background of Schelling’s thinking,
this is the only lengthy discussion of them.
6. Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872.1950), Essays on the Gita (1916.1920),
(Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1970). Henceforth EG.
7. Cf., II/2, 454.
8. Kant mentioned this in a footnote in section 49 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft
(gVon den Vermogen des Gemutsh), KU, 171.
9. I am using Robert Brown’s translation, The Deities of Samothrace, (Missoula:
Scholars Press, 1974). He has imbedded the standard pagination to which I refer.
10. I would take exception to Jean Sedlarfs remark that gSchellingfs errors on the
subject of Indiah are chielfy gthe result of his willingness to ignore evidence in order to
force Indian religion into his concept of emythologyf and to his inability to think in
other than Christian terms.h Schelling no doubt made mistakes, but his sensitivity to
the central matter of the Gita demonstrates a very different kind of thinker than the
one Sedlar glibly described. India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer, and
their Times, (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982).
11. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill Educational Publishing, 1953), 86.
12. On the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, in On Art, Religion, and the
History of Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 300.01.
13. Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, (Clarendon: Oxford, 1952).
14. See A. Leslie Wilson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1964), 117.20.
15. F.W. J. Schelling: Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, (Bonn: H. Bouvier,
1962), 414.
15. The letter was written August 26, 1808.
16. ”Supreme happiness will not be his if a fate such as Priam’s befalls him”
(1101a). Trans. Martin Ostwald, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
17. Arjuna ”has passed even beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so
all-important to the human soul while it is struggling to minimize the hold of its egoism
and lighten the heavy and violent yoke of its passions” (EG, 173).
18. See the inaugural Berlin lectures where Schelling claimed that ”Vishnu has his
own votaries that exclude those of Siva and vice-versa” (PO, 462).
19. ”Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, considered in their unity, are the Godhead itself.
But considered in their separation (tension), these are three individual beings, which,
because in them only the single godhead exists, can be considered as three gods” (II/2,
484).
20. In this way Schelling characterized Buddhism as an ”attack against the political
existence of the Brahmins” (II/2, 497). ”Buddhism is exquisitely opposed to Brahminism
in that the Buddhists wholly reject caste distinctions” (II/2, 507), something
that had been considered so inviolable that caste climbing would have been considered
a crime. Nonetheless, ”Buddhism is just the secret teaching [Geheimlehre] of the Vedas
made exoteric and public” (II/2, 481).
21. See The Ages of the World: ”Most people would find nothing more natural than
if everything in the world were to consist of pure gentleness and goodness, at which
point they would soon become aware of the opposite. Something inhibiting, something
conflicting, imposes itself everywhere: this Other is that which, so to speak,
should not be and yet is, nay, must be. It is this No that resists the Yes, this darkening
which resists the light, this obliquity which resists the straight, this left which resists
the right, and however else one has attempted to express this eternal antithesis in
images” (AW, 211).
22. See EG, 147.
23. Schelling was also quite clear about this relationship in The Ages of the World:
There is an ”inner unity in which each potency comes out for itself. Hence the day lies
concealed in the night, albeit overwhelmed by the night; likewise the night in the day,
albeit kept down by the day, although it can establish itself as soon as the repressive
potency disappears. Hence good lies concealed in evil, albeit made unrecognizable by
evil; likewise evil in good, albeit mastered by the good and brought to inactivity. But
now the unity of the being thus seems torn and hence each of the opposites stands for
and in itself as its own being. Yet they incline themselves towards unity, or they come
together in one and the same because the negating force can only feel itself as negating
when there is a disclosing being and the latter can only be active as affirming in so
far as it liberates the negating and repressing force. It is also impossible that the unity
of the being could be sublimated. Hence facilitated by eternal necessity through the
force of indissoluble life, they posit outside and above themselves a third, which is the
unity” (AW, 227.28).
24. Schelling argued that the German Moglichkeit is linked both to Maya and the
Persian Magie (magic), from the Magi, the Zoroastrian priests. See II/2, 494.
25. ”It is conspicuous that, in the whole of nature, each single particular nature
commences with the rotation about its own axis and hence manifestly with a state of
inner revulsion. In the greatest things as in the smallest things, in the orbit of planets
as in the partly rotary movements of that world, discernible only with the aided eye,
which Linnaeus presciently calls ethe chaos of the animal world,f the annular drive
shows itself as the first form of life separated into its own self. It is just as if everything
that isolates itself in itself, and hence away from the whole, would immediately thereby
have to fall prey to the inner struggle. At least this remark would shed light on the
forces of the annular drive as belonging to the oldest potencies, which were active in
the first creation and which are not, as the prevailing opinion now has it, forces that
later externally and accidentally supplemented what came to be” (AW, 323). The cosmic
egg also belongs to the Indian heritage of creation myths. In the Brahmanas, a
golden egg emerges out of the continuum of the great chaotic waters. Prajapati broke
out of the cosmic egg and thus time was born. See The Satapatha-Brahmana, IV, trans.
Julius Eggeling, (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1972).
Purushottama: Schelling and Sri Aurobindo on Good and Evil by Jason M. Wirth
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854)
Purushottama: Schelling and Sri Aurobindo on Good and Evil
Jason M. Wirth
Chapter Eight of The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time byJason M.Wirth
State University of New York Press, Albany c 2003 State University of New York
We cannot do without the Orient. Open and free communication with it
must exist…..Schelling (1806)1
And to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths. . . ..Walt Whitman
In Mumbai near the Gateway of India, which once welcomed the English to
one of the crown jewels of its empire, for a few rupees, a person can catch an old
boat that travels into the harbor. The Gateway arch is near one of the grandest
historic hotels in India, built in retaliation by the wealthy Parsi J. N. Tata for
allegedly being denied entrance into one of European’s premier lodgings. Mumbai, one of the largest and most congested cities in the history of the earth, is also a city of Hindus and Muslims and is still haunted by the tensions that
erupted during the Partition. It is a city full of temples and mosques as well as
sadhus and sufis. Amidst the complexity of Islam and the countless expressions
of Hinduism, such as Siva, Visnu, Brahma, and Krishna, one also finds Sikhs and
Jains, even Buddhists. Indeed, Mumbai is a vivid reminder that there is no such
thing as an essential India, but rather there are ceaseless Indias, prompting the
question, ”Of whose India are we speaking?” Perhaps this heterogeneity is true of all places, but the extravagant diversity of India emphatically exemplifies it. Yet amidst the wealth of heterodoxy that lacks a clear, general explanatory principle and instead suggests a history of countless layers, one can nonetheless travel into the harbor on an old boat to the island of Elephanta. There, amidst the vendors and rhesus monkeys, one can walk to the ancient caves of Siva. Carved out of a hill, damaged by the gunshots of Portuguese soldiers, these
stone monuments still speak of a unity among difference and difference among
unity.a unity without foundation or true subject, a unity that is a figure for
the play, the lila of difference.
Despite their proximity to a teeming populous, these caves must once
have seemed remote, as if they were the conclusion of some long pilgrimage.
They do not form the center of some city or town, but are located in a peripheral
place. In a way their location is analogous to Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna
to learn to meditate on the great divine secret by first learning to meditate on
the tip of his nose.2 The nose seems like an arbitrary and unimportant location
to begin training oneself to eventually behold the greatest of all mysteries,
and indeed it is. Yet Vishnu is in all things: all things are its avatars, not just
the institutions set aside for holy activities. All of nature.forests and mountains
as well as cities and towns.is the temple. So too are the caves of Siva,
set aside as if they were on the nose of the earth, announcing to guests that
they are now at the center of the world, nay, at the center of nature itself.3
The most prominent figure in the cave is the imposing trimurti or three-faced
Siva. Here one finds the face of the destroyer to one side, the creator to
the other side, and, holding the two together in deep and abiding serenity, its
eyes in the almost closed pose of samadhi, is the preserver. It holds together
creation and destruction, life and death, natality and fatality.the conjunction
that is the unity of a deeper life.
And furthermore, the three faces of Siva.qua faces.are the face, so to
speak, of the Siva that never emerges into visibility, that renders this depiction,
despite its prescience, as yet more strands of Maya. If the hidden face
were to appear, were, so to speak, to reveal itself, creation would not be able to
endure the absolute range of its destruction.4
In this concluding chapter I will meditate upon the trimurti Siva, and I
propose to do so by bringing together two unlikely figures, Schelling and the
early twentieth-century Indian Philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose. Furthermore,
I will attempt to loosely direct my analysis around their complimentary
readings of the Bhagavad-Gita, looking primarily at Schelling’s discussion of it
in his 1842 Berlin lectures on the Philosophie der Mythologie (chiefly lectures
20.22).5 I will attempt to reinforce Schelling’s reading by looking at
Aurobindo’s magisterial reading in his Essays on the Gita.6 In the background of my analysis is Shankara’s justly famous commentary. This is not to say that
Schelling did not make mistakes regarding his reception of the Indian spiritual
and philosophical tradition, or that I concur entirely with his reading. Rather,
I hope to indicate the richness of Schelling’s opening into these traditions.
Indeed, Schelling knew, via Niebuhr, of the monuments at Elephanta7
and considered them a profound expression of the secret teaching or Geheimlehre of the Hindu tradition, which for Schelling had its most extraordinary articulation in the Bhagavad-Gita. One could even say that this trinitarian monument, as well as the Gita itself, expresses in a culturally unique way Schelling’s own philosophical commitments.
In this figure and in these hymns Schelling found an early revelation of
the doctrine of potencies. In the third version of his proposed but unfinished
magnum opus, The Ages of the World, Schelling gave consummate expression to this doctrine by claiming: “The consciousness of eternity can only be articulated in the phrase: ’I am the one who was, who is, who will be.’” (AW, 263). This phrasing, which was originally to have been the opening words to The Ages of the World, echoes Kant’s observation in the Critique of Judgment that”Perhaps there has never been something more sublime said or a thought expressed more sublimely than that inscription over the Temple of Isis (of Mother Nature): ’I am everything that there is, that there was, and that there will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil.’”8
Indeed, as Schelling embarked during his great period of silence on what
he announced in the Philosophy of Religion essay and the Freedom essay as his
positive philosophy, he first turned to a historical study of these words in his
posthumously published addendum to The Ages of the World, “The Deities of
Samothrace” (1815). Here, in his analysis of the mystery religion of the Cult of
the Cabiri, celebrated in antiquity on the Thracian island of Samos, Schelling
discovered an ”insoluble life” (I/8, 367). In this celebration of the Whole of
Life, ”no element can be lacking without the Whole crashing together; of
which the truest statement would be that only together were they born, and
only together can they die” (I/8, 368).9 Schelling went on to ask, ”What if
already in Greek Mythology (not to mention Indian and other Oriental
mythologies) there emerged the remains of a knowledge, indeed even a scientific
system, which goes far beyond the circle drawn by the oldest revelation
known through scriptural evidences?” (I/8, 362) Schelling was to spend the
next four decades investigating these remains.
Already from this early exercise in positive philosophy, one finds a parallel
to the triadic system of Elephanta. Buried underneath the public discourse
on the gods was a secret unity. Ceres, whose Wesen is ”hunger and seeking” and whose earthly expression was Proserpina, the ”origin of external nature,” could also be understood as the creativity of Brahma. Dionysus,
”lord of the spirit world” and destroyer of all forms, is also, perhaps even originally, Siva the Destroyer. Finally, there is Kadmilos (or Hermes), who transcends both lower deities yet mediates between them (I/8, 361). This is
also Vishnu the Preserver, the face that holds together creation and destruction in their simultaneity.
But why had Schelling, the alleged maker of systems, turned to history rather than relying on the abstractions of philosophy? Why get his hands dirty with the singularities of history rather than stick with the clean generalities of
the system? Is history simply examples of what could more cleanly be understood in the abstractions of systemic thinking?
For Schelling history could not be understood or aufgehoben or sublated
into the general. The latter could only be understood in personal terms, and
the personal could only be understood in general terms. But the personal is
not thereby the general, and the general is not thereby the personal. Rather
the two belong together, without resolution, in a third, in what Schelling
called a Wesen, a third that holds together without reconciling opposites. This
third, it follows, can only be thought.only be revealed.in singular ways.
If Schelling’s early philosophy.what he called his gnegative philosophyh.
was an attempt to raise the real, the realm of appearance and nature, up
to the absolute, then his later philosophy, which he called ”positive philosophy,”
reversed the direction, thinking the revelation of the absolute in nature
as history. Unlike many of those around him, Schelling embarked on a writing
of history without sectarian interests and demands. ”What we have
described up until now (insofar as possible) is only the eternal life of the Godhead.
The actual history that we intended to describe, the narration of that
series of free actions through which God, since eternity, decided to reveal
itself, can only now begin” (AW, 269).
In the 1842 Philosophie der Mythologie one can follow Schelling move
through a dazzling series of multicultural analyses, carefully discussing Greek
polytheism, Jewish monotheism, Egyptian mythology, Persian Zororastrianism,
early Chinese thought, and, for our purposes here, Indian mythology and
philosophy.What is immediately striking about Schelling’s analysis of India is
its utter lack of the condescension that typified the nineteenth-century reception
of India, from English colonial interests to Christian proselytizing interests
to Max Mullerfs refusal to visit India. Beyond the Scylla and Charybdis
of exoticism and Orientalism, Schelling found in India one of the world’s
great philosophical traditions.
Certainly Schelling, who had never been to India, had to study its traditions
by critically wading through the many interests that skewed the nineteenth-
century’s reception of India. No doubt his reading of the Upanishads
leaves much to be desired, but he did see something of vital importance in
the Gita.10 Hegel had already dismissed India as historically stalled, as a relic
left behind, schon aufgehoben, in Spirit’s journey to self-revelation. In the
posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel
referred to both the Indian and Chinese philosophical traditions as lacking
“completely the essential consciousness of the concept of Freedom.”11 In his
introductory lectures On the History of Philosophy, Hegel referred to the
”mixed-up” Indian philosophical tradition as belonging more generally to all
of the other Asian philosophies, all of which lack a conscience and individual
morality. They are all stuck in a state of nature. The Indians, furthermore,
tended towards ”a flight to the emptiest abstraction to what is infinite.”12 In
the Rechtsphilosophie, India, ”sunk in the most frightful and scandalous superstition”
(˜248), fanatically turned towards the ”element of pure indeterminacy”
and venerated its void in contemplation. Such a bad infinity kept them
from thinking historically, and hence they were unable to regenerate and
renew their political and philosophical practices (˜5).13 In general, for Hegel,
India has been aborted by the historical activity of the Weltgeist. India has ”no
history” (XI, 99). They are uncomprehending onlookers, left behind by history
and transfixed by pure indeterminacy, or the world-abnegating force of
the negative.
As a corollary to their ahistorical fixation with a bad infinity, the Indians
considered everything to be miraculous, and if that is the case, then nothing
in particular can be miraculous (XII, 498). ”Everything is a god to the Indians”
(XI, 194), and the Indian ”imagination makes everything into a god”
(XV, 397).14 Indeed, to a certain extent, Hegel is accurate in this claim. All
things are finally the avatars of Vishnu and, as such, are good. But rather than
hold this transformation of the mundane against either the Hindu tradition
or Schelling, I would argue that the failure of Hegel to appreciate this point
dramatically distinguishes Schelling from Hegel. Nowhere does one find the
stinginess of Hegel, the ego of the Geist that always survives its own death,
more apparent than in its repudiation of India and, by way of the starkest of
contrasts, the deification not of all things, but of the Prussian state.
The Christian missionaries for their part were often appalled by what
they found in indigenous religious practices. However, Schelling’s primary
access to the Bhagavad-Gita, his most cherished Indian text, came to him
through the translations by two of his former colleagues and friends, the
Schlegel Brothers. August Schlegel, the first husband of Schelling’s beloved
first wife Caroline, was the first German to receive a chair of Sanskrit studies
in Bonn and had translated the Gita into Latin. Friedrich Schlegel, author of
the influential yet problematic 1808 Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier,
with which Schelling was already engaged in the Freedom essay, translated the
Gita into German.
Contrary to the tendency to elevate the West to the status of the only
properly philosophical set of cultures and the true children of the Greeks,
Schelling discovered the Indian heritage buried within the Greeks. ”Perhaps
there are still strongly devout souls who are inclined to derive . . . the
Greek teachings on the Gods from India. One could certainly not refute
such a belief ” (II/2, 465). For Schelling, Greek mythology originated in
India, and hence Greek mythology and, eventually, Greek philosophy
should be considered a flower of South Asia. Indeed, Schelling implied,
correctly I think, that in a profound way, Greece could be thought of as
West Asia. Certainly the assumption about this proximity had long faded,
and Schelling was enthusiastic about reinvigorating the dialogue. In 1808
Schelling wrote to August Schlegel and argued that an entire Academy for
Asian Studies should be founded and that a formal mission should be dispatched
to the East to facilitate these studies.15
I turn now to an analysis of Schelling’s reading of the Indian Hindu tradition
by focusing on his celebration of The Bhagavad-Gita, what Schelling
referred to as ”incontestably one of the most profound and most delicate products
of the Indian spirit” (II/2, 494). I will also refer to Aurobindo, who, so far
as I know, knew nothing of Schelling’s lectures on India, and discuss his reading
of the Gita as a kind of testimony to Schelling’s central insight.
II
One of the most shocking aspects of the Indian philosophical tradition for
many Westerners is its seeming equation of good with evil. If life, whatever it
is, is good, then all things are good and there is no such thing as evil.
When one first considers Arjuna’s plight in the Gita, he seems reasonably
despondent,much in the same way that Hamlet is. If he fights, he must attempt
to kill friends, relatives, and former teachers. If he does not fight, he betrays his
side, the Pandavas and their allies, and allows the crimes of the Kauruvas to go
uncontested. In the Ramayana, Rama was the avatar of the straight and the narrow,
who always did the right thing, who always followed dharma, even when
others did not. Even if it meant living without Sita, for whom he had waged
furious war in Lanka against Ravana and his demonic kingdom, so it was.
But what is the right way for Arjuna? If he fights, he is wrong. If he does
not fight, he is wrong. And so he becomes confused about his dharma, dizzy
in the head, and lies prostrate before his charioteer Krishna. After prompting
him to fight, to value his dharma, svadharma, no matter how imperfectly executed,
over the dharma of another, paradharma, no matter how perfectly executed,
Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, reveals himself in his sublime form
as Kala, time, the world destroyer, the consumer of all, chewing the heads of
mortals in the teeth of his endless heads.
Kala, time, appears.feminized.in Hindu mythology as Kali, her
bloodthirsty tongue dropping down to her chin, a scythe in one hand, the
decapitated heads of mortals in another hand. In former times she demanded
human sacrifice, and today she still exacts the sacrificial decapitation of goats.
She wears a necklace and a belt of human heads and, like Siva, sleeps among
the contamination of the crematoria.
Krishna is able to convince Arjuna to embrace his dharma, and in the battle
sequences that follow the placement of the Gita in the Mahabharata, millions
die in the most horrible ways. Each Indian literary work strives to evoke
a fundamental mood or rasa, which tradition holds are nine in number. How
could it be said that this is a book whose fundamental mood, whose rasa, is
not fury (krodha) or heroism (verya) but s;anti, the peace beyond all peace?
Is this a simple Kantian deontology.that dharma is an absolute duty?
Certainly not. This is not a doctrine of responsibility, which would depend on
a choice between good and evil. In the Gita, indeed in the Vedas as well as the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, there is no such thing as choice or agency.
And more disturbingly, life is somehow always right. At the end of the
Mahabharata, winners and losers are equally returned to the heavens.
Furthermore, a text that renounces the fruit of action, the fruit of karma,
is certainly not utilitarian, which, in any of its versions, demands that we
somehow calculate the Good in the future perfect tense: the goodness of the
result will justify the action. The destruction of the Kauravas does not vindicate
Arjuna’s actions, and the so-called crooked way of Krishna does not claim
that good ends justify corrupt means.
Nor does it make sense to speak of virtue ethics to Hamlet or Arjuna
when the very source of their melancholy is the absence of a mean. Aristotle
knew that the capacity to calculate the mean first of all assumed tuvch, Fortuna,
the luck to have been in a situation that afforded such judgments.What
is the mean between destroying one part of your family or abandoning the
other? Hamlet and Arjuna are like unlucky King Priam whose life Aristotle
claimed lacked the requisite means for eudaimonia.16 One has to be lucky
enough to have a life that admits the possibility of negotiating the best option.
Furthermore, the Gita is clear, and both S:anakara and Aurobindo stress
this, that Arjuna’s tragic lament is itself the result of a more fundamental mistake:
ahamakara, ego sense, egoity, the assumption that the starting point for
the relationship to the Good is gI and mineh or gMine and thine.h What is
good for me in this situation? Arjuna mistakenly assumes that the question of
the Good is the question of his good and then is despondent when nothing
can legitimately be said to be good for him. Svadharma is otherwise than
ahamakara, my good. This is not the Realpolitik of the egofs strivings.
Is this quietism? Certainly not, for Arjuna in his despondency is already
doing nothing, already a passive observer and Krishna is coaxing him into action.
As Schelling observed, the Bhagavad-Gitarecommends action in the most specific
way and is opposed to any gindolent and dull quietismh (II/2, 518).
Nor is it a quietistic moral abandonment in which one does whatever
strikes one and defends such caprices by claiming the prerogative of svadharma:
Well, I was just following my dharma! As Aurobindo insists, it is
expressly not to follow onefs own whims. To the gunripe mindh this is just a
gconvenient excuse for indulging its Asuric propensitiesh (EG, 207).17 One is
utterly possessed, beyond the aequilibrium arbitrii, the choice between opposites,
which Schelling in the Freedom essay called gthe bane of all moralityh
(I/7, 392). As Aurobindo put it: gGod is there not only in the silence, but in
the actionh (EG, 135).
Without responsibility, with the implication of evil with the Good, how
is one to understand Krishnafs counsel? It offers actions without regard to their
fruit, dharma without the suppositions of responsibility (namely, the ego and
its choices). It obviates the possibility of virtuous action, while at the same
time arguing that witnessing life is the highest form of action and knowledge
and is the opposite of standing at the sidelines of life.
Does this not make all things good and therefore also all evil things good?
Does this not imply evil in the very heart of the divine? This was certainly
Friedrich Schlegelfs conclusion and Schelling was quick to object. gBut there
is a total misunderstanding in the judgment of Friedrich Schlegel, who in his
Philosophy of History, cannot express his revulsion [Abscheu] enough that the
Indian consciousness would have included a destructive primordial force, the
principle of evil, the god of death, in the Godhead itself. Not everything
destructive is thereby the same as the principle of evilh (II/2, 445).
Kali belongs to the divine, is a potency of the divine. The destructive force
of Siva is certainly not the totality of his divinity, but nonetheless is inseparable
from his divinity. Vishnu is also the destroyer and Arjuna sees as much
when Krishna reveals himself as Kala, time, the world destroyer (XI: 32), to
which Arjuna, shuddering, but realizing his ahamakara, clasps his hands
together deferentially. Aurobindo insisted on this thought:
Schelling also attempted, both with regard to the Gita and to his own thinking,
to think the destructive force of the Good, which is not an evil part of the Good
but rather belongs to the goodness of the Good. ”If there is a principle, which
is not that of evil itself, which nonetheless consumes the resistant part of human
freedom, then this principle is certainly a beneficent force, a kind of good principle”
(II/2, 445). Kali, Siva the Destroyer, all belong to the Good, otherwise
than evil. As Arjuna shudders before the universal form of Krishna/Vishnu, it is not
because he has seen some horrible demon. He shudders before a vision of the
Good that shatters its exclusive ensconcement in a human good. The Good
shatters ahamakara, my good.no matter how broadly the ”my” is defined,
including its broadest range: ethics. The ethical is not born of the human and
its range. Rather, the human is born of ethics.the Good beyond good and
evil.and its incomprehensible and unprethinkable (unvordenklich) range.
Although both Schelling and Aurobindo hold onto some provisional
account of evil, they do not locate it in the destructive force of Kali. She too
is the mother. As Schelling already reflected in The Ages of World:
Like Nietzsche, both Schelling and Aurobindo attempt to think the Good
beyond good and evil. gIt is a higher truth that the distinction of good and evil
is indeed a practical fact and law valid for the egoistic human life which is the
stage of the transition from the animal to the divine, but on a higher plane we
rise beyond good and evil, are above their duality even as the Godhead is
above ith (EG, 207).
How then are we to think this Good beyond good and evil, which
nonetheless does not altogether obviate good and evil, yet at the same time
knows that the Good of good and evil was never good enough?
A clue to Schelling’s answer can be found in his account of the Gita’s relationship
to Buddhism. The Gita itself, the most Buddhist of all Hindu sacred
texts, is able to hold together what is otherwise a disparate aggregate in Hindu
thought. Although Hinduism has always had the various strands that hold the
polytheistic manifold together, it has not always thought them through in
their inner relationship with each other. ”God is many, or more specifically
three, A, B, C, but is not God as A, not as B, not as C, in particular, but rather
just A + B + C” (II/2, 484). Hence, the three gods, the creator, the destroyer,
and the preserver, admit of being considered as three individual gods, not the
three inseparable faces of the same God.18 As evidence of this, Schelling cited
passages from the Vedas as well as the anecdotal evidence of India’s countless
religious sects and devotions.19 In the Gita, however, they are thought together
in their unity. ”Krishna is the highest historical transfiguration [Verklarung] of
Visnuism” (II/2, 463).
There is already some indication of Schelling’s claim in the movement of
the Gita’s argument. In the early hymns, Krishna attempts to reconcile the
Sankhya position, which generally proceeds from a dualistic point of view
(holy and profane, good and evil) and counsels the abandonment of the mundane
world for the holy and wholly other plane. Yoga philosophy, on the other
hand, counsels proper action in this world. Krishna attempts to show that the
way from the world belongs to the way to the world and that the way to the
world involves the way from the world.To get to the world, you must leave the
world, but in leaving the world, you get to the world. Krishna holds these
opposing tendencies together in a third way of being, in a Wesen, so to speak.
For Schelling, Buddhism was a ”heightening of the Visnuism that we
exquisitely recognized in the Bhagavad-Gita” (II/2, 517). In fact, it was so
close to the Hinduism of the Gita that Buddhism ”would be nothing other
than the secret of Indian religion made public and at the same time betrayed.
Hence the bloody hate of the orthodox Indian church against Buddhism. In
Greece, no small amount of hatred by the people followed those who had
betrayed the Mysteries. Buddhism would be to India what the Mystery teachings
were to Greece” (II/2, 496).
Buddhism steals the mystery from its exclusive possession by the Brahmin
caste,20 revealing something publicly, at least to the extent to which it can
be spoken of at all. Buddhism ”always remained something unprethinkable
[unvordenklich] in the Indian consciousness, which was never fully suppressed
within it” (II/2, 506). Schelling observed that in one of the caves at Ellora,
Vishnu is represented as a servant of the Buddha (II/2, 506.507). At the same
time, India’s persecution of Buddhism speaks of India’s dual relationship to
the proclamation of its secret: India both gave birth to Buddhism and persecuted
it (II/2, 510).
Schelling furthermore observed that the Christian missionaries, not
unlike Friedrich Schlegel, were appalled by the Buddhist relationship to the
Good. According to the missionaries, the Buddhists commit two appalling
heresies. Good and evil ”are one and the same thing [einerlei] ” and both have
the same validity [Gleichgultigkeit] (II/2, 503).
Schelling took up both claims, one by one. In the first case, good and evil
are not the same thing, even though they may have an inextricable relationship
in a third. They are not einerlei, they do not belong to the same kind.
There is nothing in the thought of the Good that contains the thought of evil
and vice versa. Nonetheless, there may be a third, a tertium quid, a copula, or
Band that contains both, albeit as opposites, which belong together, without
reconciliation or sublimation (Aufhebung) in a third. Schelling called this third
a Wesen: ”Good and evil are equally wesentlich [or essential], without evil in
any way ceasing to be evil and the good ceasing to be good. There is no development
without the force that holds back and inhibits development and
therefore at the same time resists it” (II/2, 503).21
As for the second claim, the claim of Gleichgultigkeit or equal validity of
moral opposites (good and evil are the same thing, which, furthermore,
implies that no distinction between good and evil can be made and hence that
there is no such thing as good and evil), Schelling offered the following subtle
reflections.
Schelling first argued that ”Evil in the final analysis is nothing other than
the force [Kraft] of the Buddha, which resists creation, which is the very force
that the Buddha subordinated to actual creation. But precisely thereby the Buddha
brought the opposite to actual creation” (II/2, 503). If the Buddha wants to
subordinate all action and all thought to creation, that is, to bring it into some
sort of state of nature, the Buddha must defy nature itself. The natural state for
which the Buddha strives is not a state that one finds in nature. If one found it
in nature, then one would not need to strive for it. Hence, to be natural is an unnatural
thing, and therefore one must in some profound sense be unnatural in order
to be natural. Or one could extend this ineluctable paradox further. It is a good
thing to be beyond good and evil, which, at the same time, is in some way still
to be within good and evil. Yet it is also an evil thing simply to be within good
and evil. This holding together of opposites in intimate proximity does not render
the opposites gleichgultig, for one is depending on value distinctions even as
one attempts to move beyond them.To see all things as good is at the same time
the result of an anterior value judgment. The judgment that gall things are goodh
paradoxically claims to be a better way of seeing.
Secondly, Schelling took up the issue of what in many Indian religious
practices, including Buddhism, stems from Tantric practices and beliefs. Considered
scandalous in most parts of the world, these practices notoriously can
involve techniques by which one encounters objects and people normally considered
odious and abject. Many desperate explanations of these behaviors
(living among the dead in crematoria in houses built of human skulls, sex with
hideous people, etc.), have been offered, including the following ridiculous
accounts: Good, evil, its all the same to me! Or, one has to learn that these
things are bad (as if the starting point were not the abject quality of these rituals)!
Or, one has to get it out of onefs system (as if these ever were in onefs
system and as if one ever wanted to do these things)! Critical to these practices
is the obvious abjectness of the objects themselves.
Although Schelling did not take up the issue of Tantric practices per se,
he indirectly referred to them when he analyzed the missionariesf revulsion at
certain Buddhist practices. Schelling reported that in Sri Lanka (in Schelling’s
time, Ceylon), the Buddhists erected small, chapel-sized ancillary temples,
which the missionaries called ”devil’s chapels” (II/2, 504). Here devotees
encountered the abject side of human life, engaging in distasteful and highly
immoral practices. For Schelling, this too one knows to be good; this too, if
one has the strength, one adores. The Buddhists attempted to combine gthe
two principles, which in the greatest generality can be designated as the real
and the ideal principles, into a unity.into one and the same God.h They
avoided a God that is intermittently good and then evil, or basically good, and
occasionally bad. They knew rather that, as we saw in chapter six, that the
”principle that resists the Good and love” is ”originarily . . . necessary for creation”
(II/2, 504).
Here Schelling returned to the language of the real and the ideal, with the
implication, born out dramatically for example in the Freedom essay, that the
Good is ideal, that which, in being thought, resists comprehension, that whose
ideatum, so to speak, always resists its idea. Yet the ideal, in its irresolvable
silence, can only express itself in the din of the real. The Good can only
express itself as what is not itself, as what is not Good. Hence, the not-Good
is an expression of the Good.
In fact, Schelling already found this insight in the Vedas. ”God is the
truth and God is the great lie” (II/2, 480), although Schelling argued that the
Vedas are not clear about the exact relationship between the Ideal (God qua
the truth) and the Real (Maya, the ggreat lieh of the sensible world).
Although Schelling did not discuss this passage explicitly, the Gita is very
clear about this when Krishna/Vishnu claims that ”I am born by my self-Maya
[a\tama\yaya\].”22 That is, I am only insofar as to be is to be Maya, and therefore
Vishnu is Vishnu only insofar as being itself is always the great lie. Vishnu
is otherwise than nature expressing itself as nature, as if Maya itself were both
Vishnu (the ideal) and the world (the real), the Good and Maya (the proxy of
the Good).23
Schelling linked this ”belonging together” to the Gita’s understanding of
the three gunas, or what Schelling translated as qualities (Qualitaten, Eigenschaften)
and finally potencies. The term literally denotes ”strands,” and
Schelling duly noted that in the Vedas they are likened to the webs of a spider
in which the weaving both comes forth and retracts. ”Everything has its
movement through the proper mixture of the three gunas [Eigenschaften], the
creating, the preserving, and the destroying” (II/2, 481). Maya is the spinning
of the three gunas.24 This may not be the only account of the gunas, but it does
suggest the extent to which Schelling is entering the circulation of the Gita.
Schelling linked Brahman to rajas, the red, fiery pulse and energy
(Tatkraft) of life, the ”fire of passion” and the ”swiftness of decision” (II/2,
449). Rajas is the ”first desire, the passion of creation in Brahman,” and, as such,
Brahman is that which brings forth the ”semblance of Being [das scheinbare
Sein] ” and is hence alienated from his Wesen (II/2, 450). Brahman is the God
that merely posits the semblance of nature. Brahman is the creator, which, in
terms of potencies, Schelling named the A1. Brahman is the magic of nature,
the movement of possibility (Maya = Moglichkeit).
The gun.a of Siva is tamas (II/2, 450), which is often associated with indolence
and inertia and literally denotes darkness. Siva is the force of absolute
light, which is the same as absolute darkness. Siva is the destroyer, time which
reminds all creatures that they do not own their being. In a particularly bold
description, Schelling claimed that the destroyer is the ”God of the universally
orgiastic [des allgemeinen Orgiasmus]” (II/2, 444) and hence, like the late
appearing Dionysus, the freedom of nature erupting from within the facade of
its order and self-possession. As such, Schelling translated tamas not as darkness,
but as Dammerung, dawn or dusk (II/2, 451), the breaking through of
one potency into another potency. This is the bursting forth of the A2.
The gun.a of Vishnu is sattva, the super brightness of white, ”what is real
throughout,” what is ”free of all lack” and hence, lacking all nonbeing, is the
absoluteness of truth. If one can think this not as some empyrean realm
beyond Maya in which the stalwart soul at last finds the great escape of moksa,
but rather as that which knows moksa as a liberated relationship to Maya, then
Vishnu, the transformative consummation of the three gunas (Vishnu as the
belonging together of Brahman, Siva, and Vishnu), can be designated as the A3.
The Gita is able to think clearly through the inner dynamic of the three
gunas, and it describes the gstruggle of the separated potencies as a revolving
wheelh (II/2, 493). This turning wheel has long been a part of Schelling’s
own thinking. His insignia, as we have seen, was the Sphinx pointing to a
revolving wheel, and in The Ages of the World Schelling linked this to the
Orphic origin of the Phanic Dionysus. ”This is that moment that the intimating
primal world marked as the splitting apart of the world-egg by
which they hinted at that closed wheel, that inscrutable movement which
could never be held fast; that moment in which the earthly and the heavenly
first divided” (AW, 242).25
The revelation is not the escape from the wheel but the freedom, even the
love, for the wheel. This is the genius of the Gita. Vishnu is in all things, but
no thing is in Vishnu, ”the being of things in God is asserted but not reciprocally
the being of God in things” (II/2, 494). Vishnu self-expresses as the Maya
of the world, and the world implicates itself in Vishnu. To love Vishnu is not to
love Vishnu as sattva. It is to be free for the strands of being, to love Vishnu as
the wheel of Brahman, Siva, and Vishnu, creation, destruction, and preservation:
To love Vishnu is to be within yet beyond the predicates of nature, unattached
yet engaged. The Sphinx points one towards ”the constancy of inner love,
blessed peace in the movement of the world, under the rotation of time” (I/10,
45). Aurobindo describes this stance as follows:
For Aurobindo, to be free for the wheel is to be ”beyond the grip of the three
gunas, traigunatitya; he is neither sattvic, rajasic nor tamasic” but rather has
the ”superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it”
(EG, 177). It is to love the Vishnu beyond Vishnu through the love of the Maya
of Vishnu. ”Love of the world, the mask,must change into the love of God, the
Truth. Once this secret and inner Godhead is known and embraced, the whole
being and the whole life will undergo a sovereign uplifting and a marvelous
transmutation. In place of the ignorance of the lower nature absorbed in its
outward works and appearances the eye will open to the vision of God everywhere,
to the unity and universality of the spirit” (EG, 321).
For Schelling, this yoga was the becoming inward and sharing in the creative
movment of the wheel of being. In fact, Schelling translated ”yoga,” the
word that describes the many disciplines that Krishna reveals to Arjuna, not as
devotio, as August Schlegel had, nor as Andacht, as another had, not even as
Vertiefung, deepening, as von Humboldt had. Although of the three the latter
came the closest, Schelling chose the marvelous German word Innigkeit, the
moving inward from the periphery of Being to the center of Being (II/2, 448),
returning back to the site of the cision or Scheidung of nature from which
humankind first finds itself in flight.
For Aurobindo, yoga is the awakening of love, of bhakti, love for all of the
creatures of the circle. ”On him is concentrated all his Bhakti . . . not on any
partial godhead, rule, or cult. This single devotion is his whole law of living
and he has gone beyond all creeds of religious belief, rules of conduct, personal
aims of life. . . . This is the God-lover who has the knowledge” (EG, 274). For
Schelling too, this wisdom, this jnana, is more fundamentally the awakening
of love, of philia. Could there not, if one were to engage in a radical rethinking
of the dawn of Western philosophy, be some profound spiritual relationship
between sophia and jnana, philia and bhakti?
Aurobindo, following the Gita, named this belonging together of the
three potencies, Purushottama ”The impersonal Brahman is not the very last
word, not the utterly highest secret of our being. . . . God is an ever unmanifest
Infinite ever self-impelled to manifest himself in the finite” (EG, 124).
Brahman is both the body and the nonbody, both kshara and akshara. ”To see
that we have to look through its silence to the Purushottama, and he in his
divine greatness possesses both the Akshara and the Kshara; he is seated in all
immobility, but he manifests himself in the movement and in all the actions
of cosmic nature” (EG, 125). The secret that once revealed brings forth the
s;anti, the peace beyond peace, that only bhakti, only love, can produce, can be
said in the word Purus.ottama or what Schelling once called early in his thinking,
die Weltseele, the world soul.
At the very end of the Philosophy of Mythology lectures, Schelling claimed
that the aim of philosophy was not preparation for state examinations, but a
vitalization of spirit so that one ”could stand before the tear [der Ris] and be
afraid of no appearance” (II/2, 673). It is to awaken to the dance of God, to
love Maya as the play or lila of the Good. This is the beginning of what
Schelling called ”philosophical religion,” that is, not the capacity to sublimate
the history of religion in a great pantheon of spiritual accomplishments, but
the capacity of reason to trace the unprethinkable life of its Other, the life
always still to come, the life that emerges in ”complete independence of reason”
(I/11, 250).
For Schelling, the aim of thinking is finally, a kind of Nirvana, found, if
rarely, even in philosophy. ”This ocean of becoming is only the outer appearance
of the God that comes forth in separated qualities.” Yet inwardly this
God, like all humans who know Nirvana, who are empty of substantialistic
essence, ”remains, underneath all of the mutability of its external existence,
inwardly equal to itself in deep calm, a heart full of love and affection for creatures”
(II/2, 520). God’s creatures, having passed the test of the separation of
forces, seek to unite with it in its original nothingness and emptiness. This
union in nothingness is the rebirth of what Schelling called in The Ages of the World ”the will that wills nothing” (AW, 239). This uncoercive, philosophical
will can lead the way to that difficult Freedom beyond dogma and creed,
beyond totalizing first principles, where one can love all Indias, all creatures,
all places, and all times.
1. Letter to Windischmannh (18 December 1806), ed. Plitt, vol. 2, 108.
2. (VI: 13) of the Dya\nayoga: ”Holding the body, head and neck erect and
motionless, looking steadily at the tip of his nose, not looking in any direction.”
3. See Wendy Doniger (OfFlaherty), ”The Myths Depicted at Elephanta,” in
Elephanta: The Cave of Shiva, ed. Carmel Berkson, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 27. ”To begin with, Elephanta is on an island; one reaches it by crossing
quite a lot of water. This produces not only a feeling of isolation from the profane
world but a special cosmological situation from the Hindu point of view: for India is
an island (the Rose-apple Island Jambudvipa); and the world is an island, surrounded
by concentric oceans of salt and milk and honey; and the universe is an island, a closed
egg floating in the cosmic waters. Here, therefore, one is at the center of the center of
the center.” See also Charles Dillard Collins, The Iconography and Ritual of S:iva at Elephanta,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
4. There are traditionally four faces. The fifth and utterly hidden face is the face
of absolute transcendence. See Stella Kramrisch, The Presence of S:iva, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 256. For Kramrisch, S:iva is the time beyond time
(272).
5. Although Indian themes are often in the background of Schelling’s thinking,
this is the only lengthy discussion of them.
6. Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872.1950), Essays on the Gita (1916.1920),
(Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1970). Henceforth EG.
7. Cf., II/2, 454.
8. Kant mentioned this in a footnote in section 49 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft
(gVon den Vermogen des Gemutsh), KU, 171.
9. I am using Robert Brown’s translation, The Deities of Samothrace, (Missoula:
Scholars Press, 1974). He has imbedded the standard pagination to which I refer.
10. I would take exception to Jean Sedlarfs remark that gSchellingfs errors on the
subject of Indiah are chielfy gthe result of his willingness to ignore evidence in order to
force Indian religion into his concept of emythologyf and to his inability to think in
other than Christian terms.h Schelling no doubt made mistakes, but his sensitivity to
the central matter of the Gita demonstrates a very different kind of thinker than the
one Sedlar glibly described. India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer, and
their Times, (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982).
11. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill Educational Publishing, 1953), 86.
12. On the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, in On Art, Religion, and the
History of Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 300.01.
13. Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, (Clarendon: Oxford, 1952).
14. See A. Leslie Wilson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1964), 117.20.
15. F.W. J. Schelling: Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, (Bonn: H. Bouvier,
1962), 414.
15. The letter was written August 26, 1808.
16. ”Supreme happiness will not be his if a fate such as Priam’s befalls him”
(1101a). Trans. Martin Ostwald, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
17. Arjuna ”has passed even beyond that distinction of sin and virtue which is so
all-important to the human soul while it is struggling to minimize the hold of its egoism
and lighten the heavy and violent yoke of its passions” (EG, 173).
18. See the inaugural Berlin lectures where Schelling claimed that ”Vishnu has his
own votaries that exclude those of Siva and vice-versa” (PO, 462).
19. ”Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, considered in their unity, are the Godhead itself.
But considered in their separation (tension), these are three individual beings, which,
because in them only the single godhead exists, can be considered as three gods” (II/2,
484).
20. In this way Schelling characterized Buddhism as an ”attack against the political
existence of the Brahmins” (II/2, 497). ”Buddhism is exquisitely opposed to Brahminism
in that the Buddhists wholly reject caste distinctions” (II/2, 507), something
that had been considered so inviolable that caste climbing would have been considered
a crime. Nonetheless, ”Buddhism is just the secret teaching [Geheimlehre] of the Vedas
made exoteric and public” (II/2, 481).
21. See The Ages of the World: ”Most people would find nothing more natural than
if everything in the world were to consist of pure gentleness and goodness, at which
point they would soon become aware of the opposite. Something inhibiting, something
conflicting, imposes itself everywhere: this Other is that which, so to speak,
should not be and yet is, nay, must be. It is this No that resists the Yes, this darkening
which resists the light, this obliquity which resists the straight, this left which resists
the right, and however else one has attempted to express this eternal antithesis in
images” (AW, 211).
22. See EG, 147.
23. Schelling was also quite clear about this relationship in The Ages of the World:
There is an ”inner unity in which each potency comes out for itself. Hence the day lies
concealed in the night, albeit overwhelmed by the night; likewise the night in the day,
albeit kept down by the day, although it can establish itself as soon as the repressive
potency disappears. Hence good lies concealed in evil, albeit made unrecognizable by
evil; likewise evil in good, albeit mastered by the good and brought to inactivity. But
now the unity of the being thus seems torn and hence each of the opposites stands for
and in itself as its own being. Yet they incline themselves towards unity, or they come
together in one and the same because the negating force can only feel itself as negating
when there is a disclosing being and the latter can only be active as affirming in so
far as it liberates the negating and repressing force. It is also impossible that the unity
of the being could be sublimated. Hence facilitated by eternal necessity through the
force of indissoluble life, they posit outside and above themselves a third, which is the
unity” (AW, 227.28).
24. Schelling argued that the German Moglichkeit is linked both to Maya and the
Persian Magie (magic), from the Magi, the Zoroastrian priests. See II/2, 494.
25. ”It is conspicuous that, in the whole of nature, each single particular nature
commences with the rotation about its own axis and hence manifestly with a state of
inner revulsion. In the greatest things as in the smallest things, in the orbit of planets
as in the partly rotary movements of that world, discernible only with the aided eye,
which Linnaeus presciently calls ethe chaos of the animal world,f the annular drive
shows itself as the first form of life separated into its own self. It is just as if everything
that isolates itself in itself, and hence away from the whole, would immediately thereby
have to fall prey to the inner struggle. At least this remark would shed light on the
forces of the annular drive as belonging to the oldest potencies, which were active in
the first creation and which are not, as the prevailing opinion now has it, forces that
later externally and accidentally supplemented what came to be” (AW, 323). The cosmic
egg also belongs to the Indian heritage of creation myths. In the Brahmanas, a
golden egg emerges out of the continuum of the great chaotic waters. Prajapati broke
out of the cosmic egg and thus time was born. See The Satapatha-Brahmana, IV, trans.
Julius Eggeling, (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1972).