the inexhaustible fullness of temporality itself. "Ground and existence" are to be conceived in the unity of this primordial movement. This unity of their circling is what is primordial. But we must not take the two determinations out of this circle, immobilize them and set what is thus immobilized against each other in a seemingly "logical" thinking. Here a contradiction undeniably appears. But the origin of this contradiction is still more questionable than its appearance.
The ground is in itself what supports what emerges and binds it to itself. But as emergence from itself existence is what grounds itself on its ground and founds it explicitly as its ground.
Ground and existence belong together. This belonging together first makes their separation and the discord possible which builds up into a higher unity. Thus two dimensions emerge in the essence of "essence," in the constitution of the Being of beings indicated by ground and existence. First that of the primordial temporality of becoming and then, within this, the necessarily posited dimension of self-increasing, respectively falling beneath, self. These movements belong to the inner flow of the essence of Being if we avoid from the outset making the objective presence or the handiness of things the first and sole criterion of the determination of Being. We are protected from this nearly indestructible inclination only if we question this way of being a thing at the right time and dismiss it in its peculiarity.
But in the perspective of this essential connection of ground and existence, the essential possibility of evil, and thus the outline of its ontological constitution, is to be sought. And only in terms of this constitution does it become intelligible why and how evil is grounded in God, and how God is yet not the "cause" of evil. (Compare I, VII, pp. 375 and 399). Schelling states (p. 33): "God contains himself in an inner basis of his existence, which, to this extent, precedes him as to his existence, but similarly God is prior to the basis, as this basis, as such, could not be if God did not exist in actuality."
In the middle part of this paragraph, Schelling clarifies a correspondence to the determinations ground and existence and their reciprocal relationship.
"By analogy, this relationship can be explicated by referring to the relation of gravitation and light in nature. . . ." "Gravity" corresponds to the ground, "light" to existence. Gravity and light belong to the realm of "nature." But precisely for Schelling gravity and light and their relation to each other are not just an image, but gravity and light "are" in their relation of Being and essence , within created nature only a certain expression of the essential jointure in Being itself, the jointure: ground-existence. Gravity is what burdens and pulls, contracts and in this connection what withdraws and flees. But light is always the "clearing," what opens and spreads, what develops. What is light is always the clearing of what is intertwined and entangled, what is veiled and obscure. Thus, what is to be illuminated precedes light as its ground from which it emerges in order to be itselflight. When Schelling calls the reference to the relation of gravity