The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION I do not at all expect to be judged according to prejudices and provisional remarks alone. Whoever seeks to listen to me, listens to the end. It could very well be that in this case he would find something completely different from what, commensurate with his existing and somewhat narrow opinions, he expected to find. (II/3, 143) THE SINGULARITY OF F. W. J. SCHELLING We would all do well to heed the words of advice Schelling offers his Berlin audience in 1842. As anyone who has ever wrestled with his works can attest, doing justice to the philosophical complexity of this original thinker is a huge challenge. The first and most obvious hurdle in conveying his philosophical views is simply Schelling himself: a child prodigy whose scholarly career spanned more than sixty years, he was at the center of, and yet outlived, both Romanticism and German Idealism. Over these many decades, the prodigious scope of his writings covered a wide spectrum of interests that reached from the natural sciences of physics and chemistry, biology and medicine , to philological work on myth and the history of religions; from aesthetic theory and criticism, to the work for which he is best known—philosophy and theology. In each of these fields, his works sparked intense interest and even sharper debate and controversy. By the time he arrived in Berlin, in the very twilight of his career, all these works lay behind him. In addition, over the few decades preceding his belated yet triumphant assumption of Hegel’s old position , Schelling had hardly published anything that would shed light on the ongoing development of his philosophical system. Yet, through at times almost stenographic notes of his lectures, various accounts of his new positive philosophy had made their way into the public arena, thereby providing material upon which all interested parties could base their opinions, be they accurate or, as Schelling terms it, “somewhat narrow” (II/3, 143). 1 2 Grounding of Positive Philosophy As Schelling makes clear in the words cited above, expectation plays a crucial role in the shaping of such opinions. Supported by the Vorverständnis of our unavoidable prejudice, the very act of expectation itself assumes its object to be predictable in that our anticipation seems, as if by habit, to aim at forming an interpretation that will confirm and conform to past experience. In this way, the schema of continuity and its benefit of predictability absolve us from having to risk encountering what is unexpected and new. As he made clear very early in his career, Schelling finds such a monochromatic view of life, in which one longs for a predictable and risk-free world, unattractive on several levels, for not only does such a philosophy make “history a mere illusion ,” but it condemns all of us to a life under the “law [of]…iron necessity,” an existence whose ultimate outcome,according to Schelling,can only be a life of complete and utter “boredom” (I/1, 472). This antipathy toward boredom expresses one of the defining characteristics of Schelling’s philosophical work, namely his contention that reason is incapable of exhaustively parsing the exuberant dynamic of existence. The “first impression [that this]…so highly contingent thing we call the world [makes on us]…can in no way be an impression of something that has emerged through the necessity of reason.”1 That there is a world at all,and that this world has precisely this vibrant explosion of life in all of its ongoing differentiation, communicates to Schelling a truth of existence that precedes the application of reason’s web of order and necessity. “In every respect” he writes, “the world looks much less than a product of pure reason. It contains such a preponderant mass of that which is not reason, that one could almost say that what is rational is what is accidental.”2 What is not accidental, what appears to Schelling as much more essential to life than reason and thinking, is desire and action. In the Berlin lectures, he repeatedly stresses this obvious yet all too frequently overlooked fact that since thinking is not action, logic cannot be the author of history. Rather, only those beings free to act enjoy a history; a fact demonstrated by “the acts and deeds of exceptional individuals,” which, for Schelling, are “something that cannot be comprehended through reason alone” (II/3, 143). Necessary but not sufficient, reason loses its power to explain when confronted with the...