Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture

Schelling and the Revival of Mythology

chapt er S I X Schelling and the Revival of Mythology In the previous chapter I reported on the changes in religious attitudes as reflected in the classical literature of early German Romanticism . In the present one, I shall consider how these changes affectedphilosophy .Therestorationofmetaphysicsenabledphilosophy to discuss subjects which had long been banned from it, such as revealed religion, mythology, art, and poetry. Here I shall exclusively concentrate on the revaluation of mythology in philosophy and its import for religion.1 The decline of metaphysics had begun with French rationalism and British empiricism in the eighteenth century. Persuaded by Hume’s critique of speculative ideas, Kant had closed philosophy to metaphysics altogether: the human mind is incapable of intellectual  75 1. Much of what I write here appears in greater detail in “The Role of Mythology in Schelling’s Late Philosophy,” Journal of Religion 87 (2007): 1–20. 76 Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture intuitions and hence concepts unsupported by sensuous intuitions cannot be rationally justified. One of these concepts was the idea of God. Kant regarded it as necessary for integrating all others within a coherent unity, but he withdrew it, together with others formerly considered essential to metaphysics, from the realm of the properly knowable. The idea of God is an object of faith, not of knowledge. Fichte objected that Kant himself had introduced an intellectual intuition in his theory of the moral imperative, calling it the sole fact of pure reason. Fichte broadened this moral intuition, extending it to the more general awareness that each agent has of himself as acting. On the basis of this indubitable perception of itself, the mind may attain a concept of selfhood as the unconditioned condition of knowledge , indeed, as the point where the ground of it coincides with reality . The main significance of this analysis was that it reopened the way to ontology. Schelling’s Early Philosophy of Myth Few thinkers followed Fichte. Not even his earliest and most intelligent disciple, the young Schelling, proved willing to go the lonely road of pure introspection. He admitted that the access to metaphysics had been restored, yet attempted to remedy his mentor’s one-sided subjectivism by showing that an intuition of nature must complement that of the self. Only a point where nature and self coincide can be called unconditioned or absolute. This correction shifted the issue from selfhood to Being and thereby renewed the metaphysical question proper. Under the influence of Boehme’s theosophy, Schelling’s metaphysical speculation eventually took a clearly religious direction. Traditional philosophy is unable to answer the ultimate question : Why is there something rather than nothing? Yet ever since Plato, myth has assisted metaphysics in speaking about such vitally important subjects, which fall outside the reach of philosophy. The myth alone, according to Schelling, penetrates to the roots of existence . It was man’s first attempt to understand his place in Being. Its significance consists not in an ability to articulate what philosophy is incapable of doing, but in suggesting more than what it actually expresses and thereby inspiring philosophy to move beyond its natural restrictions. In linking ontology to myth and revelation, the mature Schelling lowered his earlier philosophy to a negative preparation for his later “positive” philosophy. The task of this positive philosophy would consist in reflecting on what previously had been revealed. Without revelation, philosophy would remain frozen in an attitude of ignorant expectation. Mythology, in Schelling’s view, formed part of that revelation. The first announcement of a return to what for many centuries had been exorcized from philosophy appeared on a slip of paper handwritten by Hegel, but more likely composed by Schelling. “Until we express the ideas aesthetically, i.e. mythologically, they have no interest for people, and conversely until mythology becomes rational, the philosopher must be ashamed of it.”2 Whoever may have been the author, Schelling certainly was the one who followed up on the program outlined in it. Even in his early System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), the first comprehensive system of idealist philosophy, Schelling mentions that science and poetry were once united by mythology .The new philosophy, once again, requires the myth to bridge the gap between the realms of mind and nature.3 A year later Schelling himself, in his Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Art,4 started work on the myth. He argued...