Abstract
Schelling (1775-1854) in the period of his philosophy of identity sought a first principle of philosophy in his conception of the ‘Absolute’, but postulating such an entity that can be said to be absolutely one and perfect and the only being that exists unconditionally might be taken to come at
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a price: our lifeworld, the world we live in filled with changes, manifoldness, emotions, colors, evil and shortcomings always in a certain way appears as a deficient derivative, and postulating such an Absolute therefore makes it tempting to deny its reality. Doing this seems unintuitive – after all, this reality of shortcoming and change is the only world we perceive – and this objection accordingly presented a problem Schelling during this period became increasingly aware of and progressively grappled with. This eventually culminated in the Freiheitsschrift in 1809 which broke with important tenets of his philosophy of identity and can therefore be said to mark the end of this period in Schelling’s thought.
The essay I have investigated, Philosophie und Religion (1804), should be interpreted in light of this issue. Since it is one of his earliest essays that confronts this problem directly it is of pivotal importance in understanding the development from his middle or second period to his third period of thought. In this essay Schelling postulates an ‘Abfall’, a term with vaguely biblical connotations, to explicate the relation that holds between the Absolute and the finite or sensible world. In my thesis, I have attempted to shed light on what Schelling meant by this term and in what context it is used in accounting for the relation between the Absolute and sensible world. Aside from a description of this theory I have also provided an evaluation of its internal logic and consistency, in order to clarify what weaknesses in the argument might have led Schelling to move away from this conception and adopt different views regarding the relation between the Absolute and sensible reality at later stages in his career, which can add to the understanding of his development as a thinker.
I found out that Schelling conceives of the sensible world as having emerged after an ‘Abfall’ of the objective pole of the Absolute – a copy of the subjective one – out of the Absolute has occurred, which entails that because the objective pole is no longer Absolute the ideas in the objective pole can no longer create Absolutes but start producing conditioned images. I moreover criticized this account of the relation between the Absolute and sensible reality on several grounds. For one, the conditions for applying the predicates ‘freedom’ and ‘equality to the subjective pole’ to the objective pole give rise to contradictions – the objective pole can be said to be both free and unfree prior and subsequent to the Abfall. Secondly, Schelling’s definition of ‘atemporal causality’, a notion on which Schelling’s argument relies heavily, is unfrankly poorly defined. Thirdly, Schelling doesn’t conclusively argue for the existence of several souls as opposed to one and the things Schelling implies about the degree of continuity between the Absolute and the sensible world sometimes seem to be at odds with each other. I furthermore sought to explicate Schelling’s evaluation of and relation to Kant’s thought in 1804 and found out that he views Kant as a cheerful and light-hearted person and seems to endorse Kant’s negative critique of traditional metaphysics but doesn’t endorse Kant’s positive account of the nature of human understanding. Finally, I advanced a rather ‘subjective’ analysis of the essay – what it evokes in me, as opposed to the power and the cogency of the arguments – to advocate why this essay is still intriguing and deserves to be read in the present day, even though few contemporary philosophers would mention Absolutes in their theories or would invoke God as a principle of philosophy.
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