Freedom and the dark ground: is the distinction between God's ground and God's existence a structural-ontological breakthrough or theosophical regression?

F.W.J. Schelling, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Within God, distinguish (1) the ground of His existence — the dark, contractive, particular principle that is not yet God himself — from (2) God-as-existing — the universal, expansive, illuminating principle.1 Ground "precedes existence as gravity precedes light." Nature is the ground of God's existence; God becomes God only by overcoming the resistance of the ground.2

Evil is not Augustinian privation but a real positive force, generated when the contractive principle inverts the proper order — when the particular wills itself absolute against the universal. Freedom, the capacity for good and evil, depends on this asymmetry.34 Willing is primal being: groundlessness, eternity, being independent of time, self-affirmation are predicates of will, and only of will.

Sources

  1. The primal ground of existence also continues to be active in evil as health continues to be active in disease, and even the most dissolute and false life still remains and moves within God to the extent that he is the ground of existence.
    Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pp. 103–104
  2. Gravity precedes light as its ever dark ground, which itself is not actu [actual], and flees into the night as the light (that which exists) dawns.
    Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, p. 65
  3. Thus if God had not revealed himself for the sake of evil, evil would have triumphed over the good and love. The Leibnizian concept of evil as conditio sine qua non can | only be applied to the ground so that the latter arouse the creaturely will (the possible principle of evil) as the condition under which alone the will to love could be realized.
    Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pp. 102–103
  4. As long as this part of the Platonic teaching remains in darkness, as it has until now, a definite judgment about this issue is, however, impossible. The preceding reflections clarify in which sense, nonetheless, one could say of the irrational principle that it resists the understanding or unity and order without supposing it to be an evil fundamental being on that account.
    Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pp. 78–79

Where the argument is made

  • Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), Stuttgart Seminars (1810, in Pfau's Idealism and the Endgame of Theory), the Ages of the World drafts (1811-1815, Norman's translation of the 1813 draft)

How the argument was received

The most decisive single move in the authorship. Resolves the Spinozism problem of the identity philosophy by introducing ontological asymmetry within the Absolute. The Boehmean vocabulary is genuine philosophical inheritance, not theosophical ornamentation: the Ungrund, the dark ground, the yearning of the ground for the light, are structural categories of being itself, with God as the limit case. Heidegger's 1936 reading is closer to the truth than Hegel's dismissal of the work as sub-philosophical theology.