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64 Voegelin and Schelling on Freedom and the Beyond Steven F. McGuire 3 Do you ask to be conscious of this freedom? But do you also consider that all your consciousness is only possible via your freedom and that the condition cannot be contained in what is conditioned? —F. W. J. Schelling, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen Unlike the thought of some of the other philosophers in the continental tradition, Eric Voegelin had relatively good things to say about the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. In fact, late in his career, Voegelin attributed the breakdown of his History of Political Ideas to his work on Schelling, thus indicating that Schelling’s thought played a pivotal role in Voegelin’s own development. As Voegelin recalls in his Autobiographical Reflections , it was “while working on the chapter on Schelling, [that] it dawned on me that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences.”1 Thus, Voegelin’s work on Schelling occasioned one of his most important insights and contributed to a reconceptualization of his project that would eventually result in its appearance as Order and History, his magnum opus. The positive impact that Schelling’s philosophy had on Voegelin’s work is further illustrated by Voegelin’s praise for Schelling in his early chapter on him. Voegelin states that Schelling’s philosophy is “one of the most important points of orientation for a modern philosophy of human existence,” and he credits Schelling with establishing a philosophy of order amid the disorder of his time on a “new level of consciousness.” At another point, Voegelin refers to Schelling’s Potenzenlehre, his doctrine of potencies, as “perhaps the profound- Voegelin and Schelling on Freedom and the Beyond 65 est piece of philosophical thought ever elaborated.” In light of these remarks, it should not be surprising that an awareness of the importance of Schelling’s thought for Voegelin has begun to attract attention in the literature.2 Yet one would be hard-pressed to show that Voegelin carried on a lifelong dialogue with Schelling. For one, as Jerry Day notes, most of Voegelin’s published remarks on Schelling are highly critical: Voegelin often categorizes Schelling as one of the modern intellectual Gnostics contributing to the derailment of modernity. Moreover, although Voegelin recognized the influence of Schelling on his own development, there seems to be little to suggest that Voegelin ever returned to Schelling in order to reconsider his philosophy. There is evidence that he had intended to include his early chapter on Schelling in the final volume of Order and History without significant revision, but, for whatever reason , he never did.3 In any event, such an inclusion would not have amounted to a reengagement with Schelling’s philosophy. Thus, despite his high praise for Schelling, Voegelin seems to have abandoned Schelling as a conversation partner during his most productive decades. Voegelin’s reasons for excluding Schelling from Order and History may well always remain unknown.Certainly,it would be too cynical to suggest thatVoegelin never returned to Schelling because he was aware of the extent to which such a move would have required him to alter his philosophical course. The case can be made, however, that a philosophical change of course is exactly what would have been the result if Voegelin had returned to Schelling. In other words, a critical study of Voegelin and Schelling side by side reveals that a reconsideration of Schelling’s philosophy could have helped Voegelin to overcome certain difficulties in his own philosophy that remained until the very end. This is because Schelling’s philosophy is better able to deal with a constellation of issues related to the question of how we are aware of a reality that transcends consciousness . More specifically, Schelling’s position has three advantages. First, it is less susceptible than Voegelin’s to the charge of subjectivism that has often been directed against the latter. Second, it is better inoculated against the tendency of consciousness to reduce that which is beyond it to an object. Third, it is better able to answer certain questions that arise from Voegelin’s analysis of consciousness (for example: How do we know the Beyond as beyond? How do we recognize truth as truth?). Schelling’s philosophy has these advantages because Schelling recognizes that, just like the source of order in reality, our participation...

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