Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology

FOREWORD

FOREWORD The great Walter Otto once lamented the eventual failure, despite their initial excitement, of Schelling’s Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation (1841–1854). Schelling spoke at a time in which the “spiritual world was at the point of fully losing the sense for genuine philosophy” because “mythos remained in an age in which poesy was lost.”1 Schelling, after a meteoric but tumultuous early career, had largely retired from a prominent role in public life. His career as a philosophical Wunderkind had been tempered by scandals, betrayals (especially by his ascendant former roommate and philosophical companion, Hegel), and tragedies, including the devastating death of his first wife, Caroline, in 1809. The period after his masterpiece , the 1809 essay on human freedom, included repeated announcements of the imminent appearance of The Ages of the World, which, despite many drafts and intense activity, was never finished. Indeed, of its three proposed divisions (the past, the present, and the future), it scarcely escaped the past. “Perhaps the one is still coming who will sing the greatest heroic poem, grasping in spirit something for which the seers of old were famous: what was, what is, what will be. But this time has not yet come. We must not misjudge our time” [XIII 206; works cited at end of foreword]. Schelling published little after the 1809 Freedom essay. There were a few small articles and the confrontation with his Munich colleague Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, which resulted in the 1812 appearance of Schelling’s unjustly neglected defense of his own thinking again Jacobi’s vicious and belligerent attack. This was the last book that Schelling would publish in his lifetime. Nonetheless, Schelling’s ensuing period of long, elected silence was not a period of inactivity. Quite the opposite. This time of reclusion included a series of remarkable lecture courses and public addresses, beginning with his stunning 1810 private lectures in Stuttgart, then the October 1815 public address The vii Deities of Samothrace (effectively beginning the work of positive philosophy via the project of a philosophy of mythology), through to his remarkable lecture courses in Erlangen on his own thinking, on the history of modern philosophy, and including early courses on the philsophy of mythology. In 1826 he received the call to teach at the newly founded Munich University, where he gave several important courses, including those on the General Methodology of Academic Study (continuing to work on themes going back to his early career, including the call for a reinvigoration and enlivening of our approach to studies), the philosophy of mythology, the philosophy of revelation, the foundations of positive philosophy, and the remarkable 1830 Introduction to Philosophy.2 A decade after the death of Hegel, who had held philosophical court in Berlin until his death in 1831, Schelling received the call to come to Berlin, in part to counter Hegel’s enormous shadow. The initial lectures courses, as Mason Richey reminds us in his fine introduction, attracted the likes of Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and Ruge. The lectures were a kind of celebrity event—or perhaps a circus event—as Schelling returned to the limelight supposedly to take on his former friend. However, Schelling had not come to destroy but, as he said in his opening lecture, “to heal.” He then began to unveil the fruits of his active but reclusive years. The lectures largely fell upon deaf ears. Walter Otto was right to insist that in an era when mythology was considered a science, and when science itself was becoming increasingly alienated from its own philosophical grounds, the lectures were doomed to be virtually inaudible, as if Schelling were speaking an unknown language. The lectures were not intended to be a contribution to either theology or the burgeoning discipline of mythology, but, as Schelling claimed at the conclusion of these present lectures, they sought to “expand” both “philosophy and the philosophical consciousness itself” [XI 252]. As such, Schelling’s questions and philosophical sensitivity were utterly out of sync with his time. In fact, in many ways, the lectures still retain their strange, unique voice and concerns, although, in their own unprecedented way, they address the question of difference at the heart and the ground of all history. They are one of the most radical reconsiderations of the nature of historical time, and they anticipate some of the twentieth century’s most penetrating investigations of this question. The inscrutable past—escaping the triumph of the idea— nonetheless lives as the groundless ground...