Abstract
When Schelling made his much-anticipated ascent to Berlin in 1841, he confounded expectations by turning to positive philosophy, most pointedly in the form of what he called the ‘philosophy of mythology and revelation.’ This essay seeks to discern what is at stake in positive philosophy, both as such and in relationship to mythology and revelation. What powers of thinking does the turn to the ‘positive’ expose in philosophy as such? In discussing the Berlin lectures, special attention is paid to its roots in Schelling’s remarkable 1815 Munich address, ‘On the Deities of Samothrace,’ as well as to the emerging figure of Dionysos as it develops from the early The Ages of the World drafts to the Berlin lectures. We then turn to the question of what remains of relevance for us today in this positive philosophy.
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- 1.
From F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World [1815, hereinafter cited parenthetically as AW3], trans. Jason M. Wirth (New York: SUNY Press, 2000), xxxvii; SW, I/8: 201: ‘What we call knowledge is only the striving towards ἀνάμνησις [Wiederbewußtwerden] and hence more of a striving toward knowledge than knowledge itself. For this reason, the name Philosophy had been bestowed upon it incontrovertibly by that great man of antiquity.’ Citations of Schelling provide the pagination of the English translation if one exists, although all the present translations are my own, followed by that of the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, vols 1–14, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61), unless a text was not published as part of it. References to the K.F.A. Schelling edition are given by the abbreviation SW, division, volume and page number.
- 2.
F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung: 1841/42 [this is the so-called Paulus Nachschrift or transcript, which will be hereinafter cited parenthetically as PN], second, expanded edition, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 97.
- 3.
Urfassung Philosophie der Offenbarung [hereinafter cited parenthetically as U], 2 vols, ed. Walter E. Ehrhardt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 708.
- 4.
F.W.J. Schelling, The Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 175; SW, II/1: 252.
- 5.
Walter F. Otto, ‘Der Durchbruch zum antiken Mythos im XIX. Jahrhundert,’ Die Gestalt und das Sein (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1955), 221.
- 6.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, division 6, vol. 3, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), 183.
- 7.
‘[R]ather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness [ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν μορφὴν δούλου λαβών, ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος]’ (Philippians 2:7, NIV).
- 8.
‘Wie aber, wenn […] sich schon in griechischer Götterlehre (von indischer und anderer morgenländischer nicht zu reden) Trümmer einer Erkenntniß, ja eines wissenschaftlichen Systems zeigten, das weit über den Umkreis hinausginge, den die älteste durch schriftliche Denkmäler bekannte Offenbarung gezogen hat? Wenn überhaupt diese nicht sowohl einen neuen Strom von Erkenntniß eröffnet hätte, als den durch eine frühere schon eröffneten nur in ein engeres, aber eben darum sicherer fortleitendes Beet eingeschlossen? Wenn sie, nach einmal eingetretener Verderbniß unaufhaltsamer Entartung in Vielgötterei, mit weisester Einschränkung, von jenem Ursystemnur einen Teil, aber doch diejenigen Züge erhalten hätte, die wieder ins große und umfassende Ganze leiten können?’ This is from a forthcoming translation of the Samothrace address by David F. Krell and myself. All citations from the Samothrace address refer to this translation.
- 9.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, second edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 6.
- 10.
‘Darstellung des unauflöslichen Lebens selbst, wie es in einer Folge von Steigerungen vom Tiefsten ins Höchste fortschreitet, Darstellung der allgemeinen Magie und der im ganzen Weltall immer dauernden Theurgie, durch welche das Unsichtbare ja Ueberwirkliche unablässig zur Offenbarung und Wirklichkeit gebracht wird.’
- 11.
One sees this practice preserved in other parts of the world, including the sacred refuge sites of the Hawaiians. If the condemned (those who violated a kapu or taboo) or those defeated in war could make it to a sacred refuge, for example, Pu’ uhonua o Honaunau, now preserved as a National Historic Park on the Big Island of Hawaii, they could receive a new lease on life. Otherwise the sentence was death.
- 12.
‘Ich will nicht Wunden schlagen, sondern die Wunden heilen […] Nicht zu zerstören bin ich da, sondern zu bauen, eine Burg zu gründen, in der die Philosophie von nun an sicher wohnen soll.’
- 13.
‘Die Offenbarung muß etwas über die Vernunft hinausgehendes enthalten, etwas aber, das man ohne die Vernunft noch nicht hat.’
- 14.
‘Was im rein logischen Begriff durch immanente Begrifffsbewegung zu Stande kommt, ist nicht die wirkliche Welt, sondern nur dem quid noch!’
- 15.
‘Gott, der nur Ende ist, der keine Zukunft hat und nicht sagen kann: Ich werde sein! der nur Finalursache, nicht Prinzip ist.’
- 16.
See Michael Vater and David W. Wood’s fine translation of the Fichte-Schelling letter exchange, The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), as well as Hegel’s defense of Schelling’s thinking in this regard in the so-called 1801 Differenzschrift, rendered to English in 1988 by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf as The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977). For the German, see Schelling—Fichte Briefwechsel. Kommentiert und herausgegeben von Hartmut Traub, ed. Hartmut Traub (Neuried: Ars Una, 2001), and Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie, in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968–), 1–92. Schelling broke decisively with Fichte along these kinds of issues. In the 1806 quite severe confrontation with Fichte, Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre (see SW, I/7: 1–126), Schelling attacked Fichte’s inability to think the question of nature outside of the ground of subjectivity and its interests, accusing Fichte of Schwärmerei. The Schwärmer, following Luther’s condemnation of those who, claiming to have seen God, fanatically and uncritically swarmed into sects and schools, know what the ground is, and, in Fichte’s case, posit nature outside of the subject, as something that resists the subject, but which should be brought under the subject’s control. Schelling went on to excoriate Fichte’s thinking as Bauernstolz (SW, I/7: 47), literally the self-congratulatory pride of a peasant who profits from nature without really grasping it. This lopsided and self-serving cultivation is at the heart of a contemporary nature annihilating Schwärmerei. ‘If an inflexible effort to force his subjectivity through his subjectivity as something universally valid and to exterminate all nature wherever possible and against it to make non-nature [Unnatur] a principle and to make all of the severity of a lopsided education in its dazzling isolation count as scientific truths can be called Schwärmen, then who in this whole era swarms in the authentic sense more terribly and loudly than Herr Fichte?’ (SW, I/7: 47). Nonetheless, Fichte’s Schwärmerei—the absolute as die eines jeden Ich—was close to overcoming itself; a single step was required that would have lifted it out of the reduction of the absolute to an idea. ‘Only one more step was required to recognize the essence [Wesen] that is the prior condition of all being [Prius alles Sein]. One had only to leave aside the limitation [of being] to self-positing [Sichselbstsetzens] in order to find the absolute point of evolution [Entwicklung]. Rejecting that limitation, science would have become independent of the subject [Es bedurfte nun nur Eines Schrittes, um das Wesen des Prius alles Seins zu erkennen. Die Beschränkung des Sichselbstsetzens, wie es im Ich erschien, brauchte man nur fallen zu lassen, um den absoluten Entwicklungspunkt zu finden. Dadurch ward die Wissenschaft vom Subjekte unabhängig]’ (PN, 111).
- 17.
‘Fichte faßte den Gedanken, Kants Kritik in eine Wissenschaft des Wissens zu erheben, die nichts mehr als aus der Erfahrung aufnehmen, sondern selbstbestimmend Alles setzen sollte. Dabei verfehlte er aber die freie Stelle, welche die Vernunft haben sollte, gleich von vorn herein, da er zum Anfang ein Sein, und zwar ein unmittelbar gewisses, verlangte. Das konnte nur das »Ich bin« sein. Die Philosophie ward die eines jeden Ich.’
- 18.
F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy [hereinafter cited parenthetically as HMP], trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153; SW, I/10: 151.
- 19.
‘Der schlimmste Mißverstand, der ihr widerfahren konnte, war der, daß sie, nach Analogie anderer Systeme, ein Prinzip habe, vor [von] welchem, als einem selbstwahren, die Wahrheit auf die anderen Teile des Systems abfließe.’
- 20.
Manfred Frank, ‘What is Early German Romantic Philosophy? [hereinafter cited parenthetically as GRP],’ The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 21.
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
- 22.
From the Munich lectures on modern philosophy: ‘Everything can be in the logical Idea without anything being explained thereby, as, for example, everything in the sensuous world is grasped in number and measure, which does not therefore mean that geometry or arithmetic explain the sensuous world.’ There remains that which ‘strives beyond the boundaries’ of reason (Vernunft) (HMP, 147; SW, I/10: 144).
- 23.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xx; Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 3.
- 24.
‘Considered in itself, Nature is like Πενία showing up at Zeus’ feast. From the outside, Πενία was the picture of poverty and extreme need. On the inside, she shut away divine plenitude which she could not reveal until she had wed Wealth, Excess himself, that effusively and inexhaustibly garrulous being (A2). Even then, however, the child wrested from her womb appears under the form and, so to speak, press, of that originary negation. It was the bastard child of Need and Excess’ (AW3, 31; SW, I/8: 244). At the birth of Aphrodite, they celebrated a great feast and Πόρος (literally, ‘way,’ ‘passage,’ ‘resource,’ which Schelling glosses as Reichthum and Überfluß, wealth and excess) became inebriated on nectar and passed out in Zeus’ garden. Πενία (‘poverty’ or ‘need’), showing up to beg, seduced Πόρος and had his child. A philosophical idea is such a child, an intermediary, neither wholly true nor wholly false, settling nothing yet always discovering something.
- 25.
See Manfred Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung.’ Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) as well as Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). ‘Being, the late Schelling will say, is prior to thought (“unvordenklich”). In other words, there is no thought—no real predicate—that can be inserted or presupposed in order to function as a ground for deducing or grasping existence’ (SW, II/3: 227f.; see also 262). GRP, 22.
- 26.
For more on the interrelation of science, art, and religion, see my ‘Nature of Imagination: At the Heart of Schelling’s Thinking,’ The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. Matthew C. Altman (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 457–477, as well as chapter six of my Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015).
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Wirth, J.M. (2016). And Hence Everything Is Dionysus: Schelling and the Cabiri in Berlin. In: McGrath, S., Carew, J. (eds) Rethinking German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53514-6_12
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