human. Man is a created being, not an absolute one, and indeed an extraordinary stage and place within creatures creating themselves. We must define this stage and place.
With this intention, the movement of becoming of nature creating itself had to be followed in its essence. The result was: nature comes to a boundary which consists in the fact that it never comes to itself.
Although nature emerges to the manifold of the stages of formation and sequences of becoming within itself, the band which unified these formations always remains itself bound to what is bound. The species does not emerge as a law for itself in order as this emergence to ground a higher being in existence. Are there other beings which are not nature? The sole being of this kind that we know of is man.
Thus in him the principles are different. They are indeed the same principles, but their way of being a principle is different.
But why is self-willed elevation itself evil? I n what does the malice of evil consist? According to the given new determination of freedom, freedom is the faculty of good and evil. Accordingly, evil proclaims itself as a position of will of its own, indeed as a way of being free in the sense of being a self in terms of its own essential law. By elevating itself above the universal will, the individual will wants precisely to be that will. Through this elevation a way of unification of its own takes place, thus a way of its own of being Spirit. But the unification is a reversal of the original will, and that means a reversal of the unity of the divine world in which the universal will stands in harmony with the will of the ground. In this reversal of the wills the becoming of a reversed god, of the counterspirit, takes place, and thus the upheaval against the primal being, the revolt of the adversary element against the essence of Being, the reversal of the jointure of Being into the disjointure in which the ground elevates itself to existence and puts itself in the place of existence. But reversal and upheaval are nothing merely negative and nugatory, but negation placing itself in dominance. Negation now transposes all forces in such a way that they turn against nature and creatures. The consequence of this is the ruin of beings.
By way of clarifying malice Schelling mentions disease. Disease makes itself felt to "feeling" as something very real, not just as a mere absence of something. When a man is sick, we do say that he "is not quite all right" (dass ihm etwas "fehle") and thus express the sickness merely negatively as a lack. But this: "Why is he not quite right?" ("Wofehltes?") really means "What is the matter with him, something which has, so to speak, gotten loose from the harmony of being healthy and, being on the loose, wants to take over all of existence and dominate it?" In the case of sickness, there is not just something lacking, but something wrong. "Wrong" not in the sense of something only incorrect, but in the genuine sense of falsification, distortion, and reversal. This falsification is at the same time false in