As with Fichte, the issue of freedom cuts across the whole of Schelling’s work and its innumerable frames of reference. The Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (originally published in 1797, hereafter Ideas) begins with the statement, ‘Philosophy is throughout a work of freedom’; his more Fichtean work The System of Transcendental Idealism early on asserts that ‘freedom is the one principle on which everything is supported’; in 1809 he published his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom; and, according to Michael Vater, all of Schelling’s later work, from the 1815 Ages of the World to the lectures on mythology and religion of the 1840s to 1850s, show him to be ‘in search of a principle of freedom and actuality not confined to and determined by reality as merely conceived’.

In this light, the long-standing Anglo-American tendency to associate Schelling primarily with the philosophy of art or a poetic vision of nature, wrongly separates him from the ideological anxieties of liberalism and nineteenth-century social philosophy. As with Fichte, the question that plagued Schelling was once more how to fit individuality and unity, freedom and structure together into a convincing post-Enlightenment philosophy of man. As his biographer Gustav Plitt noted, ‘the goal of his whole life’s work was the ethical renewal of the people’. When Schelling received a summons to Berlin in the 1840sto take up the chair of philosophy which Hegel had occupied at his death ten years earlier, the Prussian government hoped he would be able to stem the threatening rise of Hegelianism amongst the Berlin students. However, the announcement of his lecture course on ‘The Philosophy of Revelation’, for all its orthodox and Christian overtones, in fact sent out a message to the youthful intelligentsia of Europe that Schelling had something epoch-making to reveal. He now promised to unveil the ‘positive’ philosophy of actuality, which the previous phases of idealism had only transcendentally critiqued. It was this expectation that drew a spectacular array of auditors, including the young Kierkegaard, Friedrich Engels, Jakob Burkhardt and Mikhail Bakunin, all of them hoping to hear how idealism’s philosophy of freedom could be made real.

1. We will now enter the way of times …

2. [T]he true in history is not in the present …

The last chapter concentrated on Schelling the metaphysician. It explored the way in which he wrestled with notions of the system, of ‘wholeness’ and the ‘absolute’, in an attempt to make them permeable or even subservient to ideas of selfhood, individuality and freedom. Ultimately, in order to secure these terms of freedom and self-development, he shifted decisively away from idealist apprehensions of objectivity and casual connection, towards a paradigm in which the ‘absolute’ was necessarily and foundationally displaced from presence (though somehow also operative within it) being either latent within the world or obscurely beyond it. This move effectively establishes an idealism of the unconscious. But in the Ages of the World, the latent and the beyond are also both modes of the book’s explicit subject, time: latency as the past or as the future still to arrive. The opening of the text itself attempts to make a new start in metaphysics by revealing it to be a mode of historical inquiry: ‘Why … has it been impossible until now that philosophy – which is history with respect to its name and content [that is, ‘history’ from Greek ιστορια, knowing by inquiry] – be history with respect to its form as well?’

If Schelling’s interest in the genesis of life proved to have ulterior motives, so his concern with the past and history is not historical in the usual sense of the term. Schelling was not interested in gathering historical information about either the progress of civilisation or the organic differences between civilisations and epochs, and though his later philosophy of the 1840s centred on a structural investigation of classical and pre-classical mythology, its motive, as we shall see, was not strictly historiographical. Indeed, the psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, in his major study of Schelling, gave a shortlist of methodological implications of the term ‘history’ which were absent from Schelling’s work. These include ‘historical knowing of the world’ and ‘the possibility that something that becomes historically lost, can become present again’.

Despite the plethora of writings devoted to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, the publication of a collection of original scholarly essays on this great book is a rare event.

This volume brings together a broad range of prominent philosophers writing in English, from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, so giving a sense for the current state of English-speaking scholarship in the field. Most do not limit themselves to close textual exegesis, but rather treat fundamental themes and aims of the work as a whole, freely discussing their philosophical importance.

This chapter aims to make a limited exegetical point about the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), and then to trace its consequences for Nietzsche’s argument about the historical transformation that produced our current altruistic morality. The textual point is this: the priests who figure importantly in Nietzsche’s story are intended to be unambiguous instances of the noble character type; they are not to be understood as slaves, or as inhabiting any ambiguous, intermediate type between noble and slave. My claim is not new. At least in the context of the first essay, it is a fairly straightforward textual observation, and it has been marked by commentators (more or less) in passing, with a fair frequency (see e.g. Deleuze [1962] 1983: 126; Nehamas 1985: 121, 120–26; Migotti 1998: 755–56; Ridley 1998a: 44–45; May 1999: 46; Wallace 2007: 122–24; Conway 2008: 33). More importantly, Bernard Reginster (1997) relied on the observation to do crucial argumentative work in his path-breaking account of ressentiment in GM, I, which lies in the background of the interpretation I will offer here. Nevertheless, there remains a tendency to overlook the nobility of Nietzsche’s priests. Our students routinely make the mistake, and even insightful readers of Nietzsche are occasionally drawn into it.

The reasons for oversight here are not far to seek. Classifying the priests as nobles can seem anomalous, given a common account of what is on offer in the first essay. The standard story – it is so standard that it amounts to what “everybody knows” about GM, I – begins from Nietzsche’s claims about a “slave revolt in morality” (GM, I, 7, 10, et passim). Altruistic morality is supposed to have arisen through a revolution against a previously existing “noble pattern of values” that glorified the typical character traits of some privileged class. According to the story, those who were devalued under the “noble” values – the weak, the dispossessed, the “slaves” – resented the privileged class, but, being weak, they lacked the means to strike back at the nobles in any direct way. Eventually, they found a way to revenge themselves indirectly, by undermining the basic pattern of values under which the noble way of life was glorified. The resulting “slave revolt” replaced noble values with something close to our current altruistic morality – a set of values demanding respect for the interests of others and equal consideration for all. Morality as we have inherited it is therefore to be understood as a “slave morality,” invented in pursuit of this program of “revaluation” (GM, I, 7) and motivated by the vengeful desire to deprive nobles of any good conscience in the enjoyment of their privileges and characteristic virtues.