Kierkegaard’s opposition to and use of Schelling

Søren Kierkegaard’s relation to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is one of critical opposition and theoretical usefulness: Kierkegaard rejects Schelling’s account of suffering and frustrated creativity in God, yet the book draws on Schelling’s idea of primordial self-withdrawal to identify a missing stage in Kierkegaard’s explanation of anxiety, prohibition, and the Fall. The result is not a simple reconciliation of their positions, but a revision of Kierkegaard’s sequence in which contraction precedes the law and helps explain why prohibition can bring relief.

Kierkegaard on Freedom and the Fall

Kierkegaard describes anxiety as the dizziness of freedom when the spirit confronts its own possibilities. In this account, the subject seeks support in finite things and freedom appears to succumb; only when freedom rises again does it recognize itself as guilty. The interval between the two moments is a leap that science cannot explain. The book treats this temporal distinction as essential: the initial retreat into finitude is not yet the Fall proper, which occurs with freedom’s guilty return and the associated appearance of sexuality and sensuousness as sinful.

This account gives the Fall a more complicated structure than a single lapse from innocence. Freedom’s withdrawal and its later return are distinct moments, and guilt belongs to the latter. But, in the book’s reading, Kierkegaard’s explanation moves too quickly from primordial repose to prohibition. It does not account for what happens between them or for why the subject would need prohibition in the first place.

Schelling’s Missing Mediation

The proposed missing stage is Schelling’s Zusammenziehung: a primordial contraction or self-withdrawal. The book contrasts Kierkegaard’s rejection of Schelling’s reflections on moods and states in God, divine suffering, and the creative birth pangs of the deity with the relevance of contraction to human subjects. Kierkegaard insists on God’s absolute transcendence and mocks the comparison between God’s frustration and that of Mr. Müller. The argument does not require applying such human predicates to God; it retains Schelling’s conceptual move as an account of subjective formation.

Primordial repose, on this reconstruction, is first interrupted by contraction, which gives the subject’s being its density. Contraction produces a deadlock in which the subject sabotages its own impetus. The book describes this deadlock through the Lacanian concept of the sinthome: a minimal formula of the subject’s consistency, through which the subject becomes a creature proper. Anxiety at this stage is not yet anxiety about freedom’s open possibilities; it is the dread of being too close to the very formation that holds the subject together.

Prohibition, Desire, and Anxiety

This added stage changes the function assigned to prohibition. Drawing on Freud and Jacques Lacan, the book argues that prohibition does not disturb an otherwise complete state of paradisiacal innocence. Instead, it resolves a terrifying deadlock by externalizing an obstacle that was already internal to the subject. What had been an impediment within the subject is recast as an external barrier, and desire proper takes shape as the desire to overcome it.

The revised sequence distinguishes three forms of anxiety: the joyous anxiety of nothing accompanying primordial innocence; the deadening dread produced by overproximity to the sinthome; and the anxiety of freedom, encountered in the abyss of what the subject can do. Schelling’s contraction therefore supplies more than an additional term in a sequence. It explains how the subject is formed, why an internal impasse arises, and why an external prohibition can be experienced as relief while also opening the field of desire.

Opposition and Theoretical Significance

Kierkegaard and Schelling remain opposed over the application of suffering and frustration to God. Their relation in the book is therefore not a claim that Kierkegaard simply adopts Schelling’s theology. Rather, a concept Kierkegaard mocks in its theological use becomes useful when redirected to human subjectivity. The contrast lets the argument retain Kierkegaard’s emphasis on freedom’s leap while challenging the speed with which his account moves from repose to prohibition.

The correction also alters the meaning of guilt and obedience. Once prohibition organizes desire around an external obstacle, freedom becomes entangled with the law and its transgression. Withdrawal into the constraints of law can be understood as a defense against the desire to transgress, rather than as spontaneous submission to an independent rule. Schelling’s idea thus helps the book recast the Fall as a structured sequence of contraction, deadlock, prohibition, and freedom, while preserving the irreducible leap at the center of Kierkegaard’s account.