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Schelling and Onto-theology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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The Schelling revival has never quite reconciled itself to the Swabian’s religious anima. Schelling’s Hegel-critique may now be recognized as something like a proto-deconstruction of Idealism’s ‘paroxysmal’ self-assertion; but, we are told, this ‘anti-logocentric’ kernel has usually to be extricated from a mystical-theosophical shell. Likewise, there may be vast, fruitful depths to Schelling’s stricture that Being is irreducible to thought; nonetheless, Schelling’s “apparently dead theology” is best either forgotten or else ‘translated’ into the lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, Rortyian postmodern pragmatism, etc. The religious concerns of Schelling’s later work are, it seems, little more than an embarrassment for those driving the revival.
Despite profound gratitude towards those (principally Bowie) who have done so much to instigate the current Schelling renaissance, I want to suggest here that we should not be so quick to brush aside, or ‘translate’, Schelling’s theologico-religious interests—for such a dismissal leaves us not just decontextualizing Schelling’s Hegel-critique, but, as well, missing out on a crucial Schellingian contribution to contemporary debate about the question of onto-theology. Schelling’s continuing relevance is more than his blowing open the Hegelian Identity of Thought and Being; it is also his concomitant reinstatement—not merely incidental to but fundamental for his critique of Idealism’s auto-apotheosis—of the ancient Platonic conviction that the divinity ‘is’ epekeina tes ousias, beyond Being or any metaphysical construction.
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References
1 Strictly speaking, the Schelling revival begins with Walter Schulz's Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, Pfullingen: Neske, 1955. My concern here is with the more recent English‐language renaissance, chiefly attributable to Bowie, but also to Dews, Zizek, Pfau, Clark, Sallis and Krell.
2 Bowie, Andrew, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), p.146Google Scholar.
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16 Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol.2, (trans. Haldane, E.S. & Simpson, F.; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p.229Google Scholar.
17 Ibid, p.228.
18 See McCarthy, Vincent, Quest for a Philosophical Jesus. Christianity and Philosophy in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling (Macon, Georgia: Mercer UP, 1986) p. 192Google Scholar.
19 Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, p.277.
20 Schelling, ‘Berlin Lectures’, Wilde & Kimmel, p.45.
21 For Heidegger's comments on Schelling as the culmination of metaphysics, see, esp., Schelling's Treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom (trans. Joan Stambaugh; Athens: Ohio UP, 1985) pp 48–51Google Scholar, p.175 and p.181, and Hegel's Concept of Experience (trans. Gray, J. Glenn; New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p.143Google Scholar.
22 See Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise, p.51: “Philosophy is Ontotheology. The more originally it is both in one, the more truly it is philosophy. And Schelling's treatise is thus one of the most profound works of philosophy because it is in a unique sense ontological and theological at the same time”.
23 Ibid, p.32.
24 Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, pp 192–3.
25 Frank, ‘Schelling's Critique of Hegel’, p.263.
26 Lawrence, ‘Schelling as Post‐Hegelian and as Aristotelian’, p.322.
27 Werke vol.12, p.58; cf. vol.8 (Weltalter) p.240 & p.256; trans, (by Bolman, F., as The Ages of the World, New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 128Google Scholar & p. 144.
28 I should point out that, although it is not my main concern here, the recondite nature of the relationship between positive and negative philosophy has been an obvious point of departure for criticisms of Schelling. See, for example: Beach, Edward, Potencies of God(s). Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)Google Scholar, p.162; Bowie, Schelling and Modem European Philosophy, p.159; Bracken, Joseph, ‘Freedom and Causality in the Philosophy of Schelling’ (New Scholasticism, 50, 1976, pp 164–82), p. 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 See Werke vol. 11, pp 565–70 on the difference between God and idea of God. And note that Schelling had articulated this as early as the Human Freedom essay. See Werke vol.7, p.406 (trans., p.87): “[The Divine Ground] has no predicates except lack of predicates, without its being naught or a non‐entity… [It is) the ‘groundless’ which precedes all basis”.
30 It is because God is supremely free, “the most free being of all”, that He is not the preserve of any single religion, but is revealed in all religions'. “Christianity”, Schelling writes, “is only a phenomenon which I am trying to explain” (Werke vol. 14, p.201).
31 Cf. Werke vol. 12, p.100, and vol.13, p.338.
32 Werke vol. 12, p.58: “das Gott… der an sich nicht gehend, sondem der tauter Freiheit zu seyn oder nicht zu seyn ist, der Ueberseyende, wie ihn auch Aeltere schon genannt haben”.
33 Ibid, p.33: “Gott ist in diesem Sinne auBszlig;er dem Seyn, über dem Seyn, aber er ist nicht bloß an sich selbst frei von dem Seyn, reines Wesen, sondem er ist auch frei gegen das Seyn, d.h. eine lauter Freiheit zu seyn oder nicht zu seyn, ein Seyn anzunehrnen oder nicht anzunehmen.”
34 Ibid, vol. 13, p.256: “Der vollkommene Geist ist über alien Arten des Seyns”.
35 Levinas, , Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Lingis, A.; Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969), p.22Google Scholar.
36 Levinas, , Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (trans. Lingis, A.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), p.xliiGoogle Scholar.
37 Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, p.98.
38 Marion, Jean‐Luc, God Without Being. Hors‐Texte (trans. Carlson, T., Chicago UP, 1991), p.45Google Scholar. Marion acknowledges his debt to Schelling: “Under the title God Without Being we do not mean to insinuate that God is not, or that God is not truly God. We attempt to meditate on what F.W.Schelling called ‘the freedom of God with regard to his own existence’” (p.2). Nonetheless, answering my questions at a public seminar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in February 1997, Marion—although praising Schelling as “one of the few who were brave enough to disentangle God and Being”—maintained that Schelling's “heavy metaphysical language”(Grund or Abgrund, for example) was “the real impeachment to imagine that this [Schellingian] God is free of Being”. I suspect that, in this regard, Marion may overlook Schelling's auto‐undermining of such “heavy metaphysical language”: consider, for example, the change from: Urform (Werke, vol.1, p.87), to ‘excluded’ ground (vol.3, p.408) to ‘included’ (vol.4, pp 253–4), to how we should think of the groundless, rather than primal ground or basis (Of Human Freedom, vol.7, p. 406). All this before we reach the later, positive philosophy.
39 See, for further examples, Werke vol.8, p.343, or vol.11, p.566. See also vol.12, p. 100, note 1, on God's fundamental difference: He is alone (Einsame) and unique (Einzige), separate from everyday, general being (allgemeine Wesen).
40 For example, Werke vol.2, p.39.
41 See, for example, Werke vol.11, p.7, on how Schelling seeks a history of the divine (Göttergeschichte), rather than a theory of the divine.
42 Notice, incidentally, that this notion of the divinity's own process was criticized by Schelling's erstwhile acolyte Staudenmaier, in his 1840 Die Philosophic des Christentums: the idea of God becoming God implied some kind of lack. Staudenmaier also criticized Schelling for allowing freedom to be negated by cosmic process, and for confusing finitude with sin and metaphysics with grace. In his earlier Der Geist der göttlichen Offenbarung (1837), Staudenmaier had already suggested that Schelling deemed revelation ‘necessary’, rather than God's free gift. See O'Meara, Thos., Romanticism and Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame UP, 1982), pp 143–6Google Scholar. O'Meara also outlines the critical reactions of a number of other Catholic theologians—initially inspired by yet later critics of Schelling—including Drey, Kuhn, Möhler and Deutinger.
43 See Werke vol.13, pp 204,261,270. (Cf. vol.7, p.432.) In Schelling's understanding of the theogenic process, the supreme importance of Christianity is that it disrupts the ‘unblissfulness’—Unseligkeit—of pre‐Christian ‘circularity’; we advance from the rotary movement of Mythology (BC) to the rectilinear, eschatological movement of Revelation (AD). See, for example, Werke vol.13, pp 273–4. (See also vol.14, pp 81–86, on how pagan Mythology is a simulacrum of the eternal reconciliation which Christ will provide.) For Schelling, ‘natural religion’ (the shattering and scattering of God's image in polytheism) develops into ‘supernatural religion’ (Petrine and Pauline monotheistic Revelation) and will culminate, in the future, in Johannine freedom; the Schellingian eschaton will see mind and will united in Geist, Petrine (Catholic) and Pauline (Protestant) churches united in the Johannine (the church of the Holy Spirit, of love), and a completed Christology consummating the epochs of mythology and revelation. See Werke vol.14, pp 296–327 (esp. pp 303–10 and 326–7). See McCarthy, Quest for a Philosophical Jesus, pp 163–213, for an extended discussion of Schelling's Christology.
44 Ibid: “Die Erkenntniß des wahren Gottes bleibt daher immer eine Forderung.” See also vol. 12, p.58.
45 For further discussion of Schelling's influence on Bloch, see Colin Harper, ‘Dialectic in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch’, unpublished PhD thesis, Queen's University of Belfast, 1993, esp. pp 81–102.
46 Schelling's conviction that the ‘world‐process’ was yet to be completed is made manifest as early as Die Weltalter, where he gives a Trinitarian conception of the Past as the Father, the Present as the Son, and the Future as the (yet‐to‐come) Spirit (Werke vol.8, pp 310–14). 80 Werke vol.13, p.13.
47 See also vol.11, p.139: “God is at every level in the process of becoming, and yet at every level there is a form of this becoming God. There is one God and yet a progressively developing God.”
48 Marion, God Without Being, p.81.
49 Metz, Johannes Baptist, Theology of the World (trans. Glen‐Doepel, Wm.; London: Burns & Oates, 1969), p.86.Google Scholar