Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: History Is Personal
- Prologue: Original Attributes, 425 B.C.–A.D. 1765
- I L'Âge des Ombres, 1765–1790s
- II Textual Salvation from Social Degeneration, 1790s–1808
- 3 Hindu Predecessors of Christ: Novalis's Shakuntala
- 4 Reconcilable Indifferences: Schelling and the Gitagovinda
- 5 Fear of Infinity: Friedrich Schlegel's Indictment of Indian Religion
- III Alternate Idealizations, 1807–1885
- Epilogue: Destinies Reconsidered, 1885–2004
- Conclusion: The Intersection of the Personal, the Philosophical, and the Political
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Reconcilable Indifferences: Schelling and the Gitagovinda
from II - Textual Salvation from Social Degeneration, 1790s–1808
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: History Is Personal
- Prologue: Original Attributes, 425 B.C.–A.D. 1765
- I L'Âge des Ombres, 1765–1790s
- II Textual Salvation from Social Degeneration, 1790s–1808
- 3 Hindu Predecessors of Christ: Novalis's Shakuntala
- 4 Reconcilable Indifferences: Schelling and the Gitagovinda
- 5 Fear of Infinity: Friedrich Schlegel's Indictment of Indian Religion
- III Alternate Idealizations, 1807–1885
- Epilogue: Destinies Reconsidered, 1885–2004
- Conclusion: The Intersection of the Personal, the Philosophical, and the Political
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[Schelling] is the truly creative and boldest thinker of this whole age of German philosophy. He is that to such an extent that he drives German Idealism from within right past its own fundamental position.
— Martin Heidegger, “Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom” (1936)RENÉ GÉRARD NOTES THAT, particularly from 1798 on, with his concept of the Weltseele (World-Soul, or the soul of nature), Schelling was convinced that “modern philosophy was in the process of rejoining ‘primitive’ philosophy.” The system that Schelling was developing in these few years following the composition of his friend Novalis's Hymnen an die Nacht iterates Novalis's theme of the arrival of a new universal religion destined to restore the knowledge of forgotten mysteries and the message of mystical Christianity. Schelling believed that the European skeptical and idealist systems could be brought together in a way that was consistent with Kantian autonomy; in fact he made doing so the goal of his earliest philosophical investigations as is evidenced by the Naturphilosophie he put forth in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, 1797) and System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), both written by the age of twenty-five. For Schelling at this early stage of his development, Hindu philosophy figured as a system of recently rediscovered ancient wisdom that might unlock the problems that beset contemporary European philosophy.
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- The Indo-German IdentificationReconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765–1885, pp. 89 - 106Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010