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The ultimate union of light with matter, such that the essence itself becomes completely matter and completely light, occurs in the production of flesh. Flesh is the true chaos of all colors and for just that reason resembles none in particular, but is rather the most indissoluble and beautiful admixture of them all.

What is this flesh? This ultimate unity of light and matter? What possibilities lie within its true chaos?

To orient the question, we begin with the crucial importance Schelling gives to aesthetics. Art is not separable from ontology or a derivative of some true world. It is both the invention and the realization of the truth, the conjunction of the real and the ideal. In a work of art, the hazy relation of person and world is given a weight, craft, a thingness. In a good work, this relationship between the image and the reality is not an empirical one, like a photograph which perfectly depicts that moment in time. The power of art is that its truth has a greater reality than mere experience can provide, conveying the fullness of the thing, its breadth of relations and possibilities, and in that fullness, a glimmer of the universal.

The other importance of art for Schelling is that here we have a human practice which is the most devoted to creation of the new. This is the objective appearance of what we call freedom. Art is where the new flourishes, where it is valued without hesitation. It is where we escape from the law into a union of feeling and thinking that does not distinguish between the two. Anybody can tell the difference between a paint-by-number which follows certain formal restrictions and a genius artist who is able to escape from rules to make something beautiful and yet totally unexpected. Part of this power is our ability to make art that doesn’t correspond to anything that exists:

[T]hat art is free in the production of illusion or of appearance up to the point of empirical truth, proves that here art steps beyond the boundaries of strict regularity —into the realm of freedom, of individuality, where the individual becomes a law unto himself.

So the question of flesh and its chaos is the question of freedom. How to account for our openness to new activity? Who are we beyond the law? Because we are material beings, we have to contend with either the laws of nature or of god. In either case, our hands seem tied. But we also clearly desire something beyond the immediate, we imagine things that are not here and we chase them, often in ways that exceed prediction. The philosophical attempts to address this contradiction is arranged in roughly three camps. There is the camp of volition, free-will, that inside the human being there is something that is capable of willing independently. There is the camp of determinism, that what we call thought is as constrained by physical laws as that stuff which we call matter. And there is the camp of compatibilism, that argues these two are not actually distinct, that while our desires are determined, they are determined in such a way that they do comprise a novel contribution or change to the circulation of matter.

Each of these carries tremendous baggage. The idea of volition, at any level, needs some moment of magical leap from mind to world. If there really is a space that exists outside of physical laws, where sensuous experience escapes its material causes and is allowed to flourish spontaneously, how do did the senses get outside and why would they ever return? On the other hand, determinism requires us to chalk off much of our experience of the world as an illusion. When you think you are willing, that is just a perverse epiphenomena, a hallucinatory mist rising off the swamp of your biological process. This hallucination must somehow be strong enough to thoroughly convince nearly everyone who has ever lived, but also weak enough that it can’t even feed back on those biological urges and alter them. It also erases the brute fact that we have thoughts, that we know we have thoughts, and that we know they are a part of the universe that is unfolding. Lastly, compatibilism amounts to a trivial claim that from one point of view, you are determined, and from another point of view, you are not. The compatibilist keeps the worst of both worlds. Any compatibilist position ends up admitting that our experience of will is an illusion. We might have freedom but that freedom is nothing like what we experience or what we strive for. It is a caused freedom, and our will is still alien from the thing we experience. At the same time, a sleight of hand replaces unfreedom for unpredictability. A subatomic swerve is not a replacement for the independent ability to satisfy one’s own desires.

Schelling’s answer is the classically compatibilist concept: autonomy, the individual’s “law unto himself”.

Genius is autonomous, yet it escapes only external determination by laws, not determination by its own laws, since it is only genius insofar as it actually constitutes the highest law-governed qualities. Yet it is precisely this absolute legislation that philosophy recognizes in it.

For the autonomous individual, we are always subject to the law, but our willing is the ability to impose further constraints, ones which play and interact with natural boundaries. Our drives may be a snarl of unconscious traumas, but if we focus on some of these drives, our preferred compulsions gain in strength while others wither. At the peak, the individual chooses the freedom of the intellect, amor dei intellectualis, amor fati, acknowledging and identifying with the pains and necessities of the world. Later, when Schelling explicitly addresses freedom, the return of the law is even more profound.

Solely because God brought order to the disorderly offspring of chaos and proclaimed his eternal unity into nature, he opposed darkness and posited the word as a constant centrum and eternal beacon against the anarchical movement of the principle bereft of understanding. The will to creation was therefore immediately only a will to give birth to the light and the good along with it[.]

Freedom is the overcoming of Chaos, the principle of evil. In order to be true freedom, to rid itself entirely of this “anarchical movement”, autonomy is transformed into a law that is self-given but is also given by god and the universe. The free subject is the one who volunteers to submit.

It seems like the key to this repeated return of the law would be the second half of the word autonomy, νόμος, the law. Instead, it is the former, αὐτό, the self. Every position on freedom so far outlined returns, again and again, to the same side of the equation: mind, interiority, soul, self. In doing so, it is compelled to reaffirm the stability of the immaterial. A self is no good if it vanishes from moment to moment, but go too far the other direction, let the self harden into an object, and your self will have become a corpse. As long as the self is the point of distribution, we will remain trapped in the play of identity and difference, order and chaos, center and edge, reaffirming autonomy, subject, individual as the authors of activity. We will only return the same sterile contradictions. Identity is a kind of difference, don’t you know. Luckily, we already have a handy concept to get ourselves out of this predictable circuit: flesh, the true chaos.

What is this flesh? It is “the ultimate union of light with matter”. In other words, it is moving stuff. It is animated. Schelling also says it is the chaos of all colors. This is not color like blues and reds smeared together. This color is the eruption of vital movement that occurs when colors are combined and juxtaposed. Flesh is an aesthetic vitality which is expressed most perfectly the movement of the human body, the ecstatic miracle of free vibration.

This word “union” also subtly notes an important feature of the flesh. It is less of a object and more of a location where forces have landed in the right proportion for something to come into existence. That is for flesh in the abstract, in the ideal, but also for the flesh of ordinary experience. Our flesh is the mutual interdependence of distinct pieces and materials. Bones, the tendons, blood, muscles, these overlap without collapsing into a shared identity. Muscle, the exemplary substance of flesh, is the one most evidently made of its own differences, the bundles of sinew, fibrous strands which clench in tandem.

As a location, however, it is not something precisely designated. It is instead a space of response, a space of such density that the introduction of an impetus leads to a result. This result is, however, genuinely novel. Flesh always responds with something new. The impetus or stimulant is therefore not an author or an agent. An impetus might precipitate the consequence but it is not causal in the sense that the consequence reflects the precipitating event. But neither does the effect mimic the the capacities or potencies which make up the flesh. The effect exceeds both the impetus and the tension of the forces which are encountered. In other words, the flesh creates. It gives a new twitch, something that couldn’t be willed by the desires of a conscious agent. Desire of this kind can only pursue a version of what has been perceived by this agent, a version of what already has been.

If this is our flesh, then the question is clear. What kind of freedom is possible if we are able to shed the concept of autonomy, and it attendant prejudices of will and determination?

Schelling has already given us the classical answer with his invocation of the Genius. The genius is not the person who makes the object but an “indwelling element of divinity in human beings.”8 This divinity emerges when the artist is able to align themselves with the indwelling god. This alignment is truth in the higher sense, not accuracy but fidelity, a depiction that gathers the universal essence of being into a particular instance. The genius that passes through the artist looks more or less like mystical experience, where the oracle or shaman or pythoness is a conduit for the outside. Poets are the most eloquent modern examples of this old experience, as they open their mouths and submit their tongues to the Word, letting the poem compose itself from the flows of the logos. Heidegger, deeply influenced by Schelling’s aesthetics, will call this kind of passive genius gelassenheit, the condition of releasing one’s will and letting Being be in its own fullness.

This answer does not look very much like the Flesh. Flesh is not something released. It is tense. Schelling mentions Laocoön as the perfect distribution of “the pain of the body and the greatness of the soul.”9 But is Laocoön in balance? His face is not a man’s face. It is the rupture of a man who is becoming Agony. It is a face only long enough to begin to tear itself off of its own skull, in a last act of freedom that knows the only escape from death by serpents is the sundering of its own form. If autonomy is voluntary submission, this is the freedom of involuntary self-annihilation.

Consider a more recent master of the flesh, Francis Bacon:

We're so saturated with aIl the arts, through aIl the means of reproducing them and seeing them and everything, that the saturation point has come so strongly that one just longs for new images and new ways by which reality can be created. After aIl, man wants invention, he doesn't want to go on and on and on just reproducing the past. […] We can't go on and on reproducing the Renaissance or nineteenth-century art or anything else. You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary.

Or more succinctly: