Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION I. Describing Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s thought is a tricky enterprise. A pedigreed and clichéd philosophical tradition holds that philosophy is “the love of wisdom and knowledge,” by which one generally means the pursuit of things true and rational by the philosophical bureaucrats of knowledge, by those dedicated to rendering their domain truly academic. Stubbornly, love and her promiscuous cousin passion seldom buckle to knowledge, truth, and rationality, and only a few philosophers equal the attention Schelling lavishes on the love of and passion for knowledge. One result of embracing this juxtaposition of affect and intellect is that his thought often travels the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom. Although Schelling’s road of philosophical excess leads him astray at times, it is obvious from meticulous weighing and adducing of evidence, factual and historical erudition, and stringent argumentation that his thought’s refusal to sacrifice feeling for knowledge does not indicate that he abandons rationality, truth, and knowledge. Rather, as the living principle of the objects of inquiry animates his investigations, this entails that Schelling’s philosophical thought is related to its object such that thinking “not so much forces, but induces it to open the sources of knowledge that are hidden and still concealed in itself. For our endeavor to discern and be alive to an object must (one still has to repeat it) never have the intention of imputing something to it, but rather only of inducing it to giving itself to be known” [XI 4; works cited at end of introduction]. Schelling, alternately branded a mad Rationalist, Idealist, or—worse still!—a Romantic, demands a research program whose empiricism and materialist aspects attracted Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and Arnold Ruge (who attended at Marx’s prodding) to his Berlin lectures, among which is this Historical -critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1842). Already in the first lecture this disposition has methodological consequences, in that the xv philosophical views are required to erect themselves in light of the nature of the objects, not to the contrary. Those methodological consequences are still fully manifest in lecture 10, where Schelling chides his era’s version of the world’s Francis Fukuyamas, the purveyors of a simplified, extorted, prearranged philosophy of history: “Nothing is accomplished with the empty and cheap formulas of Orientalism, Occidentalism . . . or in general with a mere application to history of schemas taken from elsewhere” [XI 232]. Indeed, these mythology lectures not only are rich in concepts and their development but also offer a full engagement with both the ancient mythological world’s historical detail and a broad swath of the scholarly literature available during Schelling’s era. Precisely Schelling’s rigorous conscientiousness of balance among passion, conceptual abstraction, and factual detail led the underappreciated Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel to remark pithily—when he was guest lecturing at the State University of New York-Binghamton, and on the occasion of his preparation for an article on Schelling’s late works—that for Schelling “life is the criterion of truth.” Now, paradoxically, life can display severe obstinacy and even an antithetical relation to truth, a situation deriving substantially from the fact that life is alternately messy, abject, exhilarating, beautiful, fun, boring, not easily classifiable, sublime, unpredictable, flabbergasting—that is, alive. On the other hand, truth is purported to be clean, demarcatable, digestible, and comprehensible—at least in the mode of the correspondence theory of truth, or in truth’s classificatory mode, or as viewed through the prism of its logical underpinning. For Schelling, life being the criterion of truth is another expression of the embracing of the juxtaposition of affect and intellect. This expression manifests Schelling’s assimilation of Spinoza’s own claim about the union of affect and intellect: “[H]e who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Schelling absorbed this contention but augmented it by claiming that pain and suffering are universal, the point of passage to freedom, and the “path to glory.” This potent mixture endows his thought with a most unusual philosophical comportment toward error. “Error . . . is not a complete lack of truth, but rather is itself simply the inverted truth” [XI 74]. If the motto and foundational principle of the terrorism and absolutism of the Grand Inquisition was that “Error has no right!” then the philosophically unusual generosity of Schelling’s thought counters with a vigorous defense of error. Hence the trickiness and difficulty in explaining his thought. With respect to his thinking, one should not mistake the...