On the Shadows of Volition: The Regressive Teleology in the Philosophy of Franz Xaver von Baader
In the obscure recesses of German Idealism resides the deeply mystical and oft-neglected figure of Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841), a thinker whose minerological studies curiously dovetailed with a theological mysticism, producing a system of thought at once rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition and daringly subversive of Enlightenment rationalism. Baader, frequently miscast as a mere footnote to Schelling or envisaged only through his esoteric Christian theosophy, in fact articulates a profound and singular reconfiguration of the will and its operations. The nuanced irony is that while critics and admirers alike have focused on Baader’s theocratic political leanings or his exploitation of Jacob Böhme’s mystical vocabulary, scant attention has been devoted to his conception of “regressive volition,” which represents a metaphysical cornerstone of his broader endeavor to reconcile freedom, evil, and divine causality.
Baader rejects the Cartesian autonomy of the will and instead suggests that to will authentically, one must will regressively—this is his covert assault on Enlightenment notions of unconditioned human liberty. What, precisely, is meant by regressive volition? To answer this, we must descend into the labyrinth wherein Baader’s metaphysics braids theology and theosophy into a potent metaphysical alloy. The will in Baader is not a forward-projecting force tethered to the telos of self-assertion or evolution, but rather a backward, yearning motion—a reversion not into the self, but into the primal ground (Urgrund), wherein resides the archetypal unity of being, knowing, and acting.
In his “Beiträge zur dynamischen Philosophie” (Contributions to a Dynamic Philosophy), Baader remarks: “Der Wille ist nicht, was sich als Ursache begreift, sondern was sich von der wahren Ursache herleiten lässt”—”The will is not that which understands itself as cause but as that which must derive from the true cause.”¹ This enigmatic aphorism resists easy exegesis, but upon closer inspection, it reveals a radical metaphysical position: the will’s very efficacy lies not in its independence, but in its dependence upon what precedes it metaphysically—the divine will or primordial source. Thus, the act of willing that is detached from this regressus is, for Baader, not merely deficient but positively destructive, for it replicates the Luciferian fall—creation unwilling to derive.
This retrograde dynamism in Baader should not be confused with a nostalgic conservatism or reactionary ethics. Indeed, it is a fundamentally ontological movement. The protological essence of any volitional act demands it re-anchor itself in participation with the divine. Therefore, evil, in Baader’s corrigendum to Augustinian privation theory, is not mere absence, but the misdirection of will—willing without regressus, or the unwilled persistence in separation. It is in this sense that both freedom and evil become metabolized in Baader’s system into categories that reflect the degree to which one’s motion coincides with or skirts the primogenial causality.
This notion of regressiveness calls to mind the Neoplatonic doctrine of epistrophe, whereby all emanated beings must return to the One. Yet Baader’s formulation is more theological than metaphysical in structure. The regressive will is not merely a metaphysical pull towards unity, but an ethical imperative—the will that fails to regress is not just metaphysically incomplete but morally culpable. Such an emphasis casts Baader’s concept in sharp contrast to Kantian autonomy, wherein the moral law arises from the rational will’s self-legislation. Baader instead insists on a heteronomous grounding of volition—morality is not authored by the will but discovered in submission to the eternal order. Each act of will is thus a referendum on metaphysical fidelity.
Moreover, Baader’s regressive will anticipates aspects of later phenomenology, particularly its concern with intentionality and givenness. He asserts that willing becomes broken and perverted when it turns exclusively toward the object of desire rather than the ground from which the desire issues. We see here the tentative outline of a proto-hermeneutic: the will becomes legible only when interpreted in relation to its ur-cause. In a sense, the will is a cipher for its antecedent—an inscription of the divine signature refracted through the prism of time and individuality. Yet modernity, in Baader’s tragic diagnosis, has opted to read the inscription backwards, mistaking self-enclosure for self-grounding.
One finds an illustrative metaphor in Baader’s frequent invocation of the magnetic field. Just as magnetism requires polar tension for effectual motion, the will requires anchoring in its polar opposite—the infinite. This analogy between the physical and metaphysical is not incidental, for Baader, trained as a mining engineer, viewed the depths of the earth not merely as geological strata, but as symbolically congruent with the metaphysical substrata of being. Accordingly, spiritual deepening must entail a metaphysical descent—a regression—into one’s archetypal depths. The will, then, is not properly exercised in ascending ambition but in descending recollection; it is salvific memory, not inventive endeavor.
The implications of Baader’s regressive will extend, too, into his political theology. In contrast to the Hegelian vision of history as Spirit’s progressive self-realization, Baader sees history as the agon of dislocated wills seeking reunification with their ur-matrix. Institutions, therefore, must foster such regression rather than promoting autonomy. His preference for hierarchical, sacramental structures—such as the Catholic Church—derives not from authoritarian nostalgia, but from his belief that such structures encode metaphysical recursion within their very liturgies and disciplines. They initiate the subject not into power, but into re-groundedness.
Naturally, such a position renders Baader incompatible with mainstream liberalism or secular metaphysics, both of which predicate themselves on the sovereignty of the individual will as the final legislative authority. For Baader, this modern idea of unconditioned freedom is indistinguishable from metaphysical estrangement. Freedom is authentic only when it is an echo—when it resonates with the Divine Will, and thus moves through an act of hypostatic remembering.
What, then, is the subtle but monumental implication of Baader’s regressive volition? It is that all metaphysical authenticity is a function of retrieval, not invention; truth is not constructed but recollected, willed not forward but backward, into that Eternal Will which alone makes any act of volition coherent and salutary. This is a principle as radical as it is forgotten—a subterranean current that upends both Enlightenment optimism and Romantic individualism. Baader conceives of the will not as the faculty by which man imposes order upon chaos, but as the mystical harp through which the divine breath resounds—provided it is strung not with pride but with humility.
In this light, Franz Xaver von Baader emerges not as a theological eccentric, but as a metaphysical revolutionary whose insights remain unmined—awaiting, as it were, a descent into the spiritual caverns he so fervently explored.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
infernal will, german idealism, teleology, theosophy, divine causality, regressus, metaphysical ethics
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¹ Franz von Baader, “Beiträge zur dynamischen Philosophie,” in *Werke*, Vol. II (Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von Franz Dümmmler, 1851), 197.
² Cf. Jacob Böhme’s concept of the Ungrund, wherein the divine will emerges from the unconditioned nothingness, later transformed in Baader’s model into a meaningful foundation for ethical teleology.
³ See Robert Spaemann, *Personen: Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen ‘etwas’ und ‘jemand’* (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996), who tangentially notes Baader’s influence in redefining will as participation.
⁴ For a critique of Baader’s departure from Kantian ethical autonomy, refer to Friedrich Ueberweg’s *Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie*, Vol. III, where Baader is chastised for his “theocratic undermining of moral self-legislation.”