Tag: F. W. J. Schelling

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The Temptation of Christ. Ary Scheffer (1854)

Part 15 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Phenomenology as Gelassenheit

In our previous installment, we discussed at length Heidegger’s conception of Gelassenheit: “letting beings be” or letting things be “in their restful repose.” A question may have occurred to the reader: how exactly is Gelassenheit reached? What exactly does one do in order to achieve it? (more…)

4,431 words

Meister Eckhart

Part 14 of 15 (Read all parts here)

The Concealment of Concealment

An authentic experience of beings is one that acknowledges that when beings present themselves to us in their meaningfulness, this presencing is always accompanied by absence. Whatever we may learn about beings, something else always holds itself back. We never completely penetrate things to know them in their entirety, thus there is always an element of mystery to beings. (more…)

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Heidegger on a country path, 1966.

Part 13 of 15 (Read all parts here)

The Will is Evil

The foregoing may lead the reader to ask whether Heidegger’s negative will, which gives rise to the metaphysics of presence, is evil. It is difficult to escape this conclusion, especially given that, historically, it issues in the present “dispensation of being,” which is das Gestell (“enframing”), modern technological civilization’s metaphysical conviction that all that exists, including humanity, is nothing more than raw material for exploitation. (more…)

2,767 words

Saturn Devouring His Son – Francisco Goya

Part 12 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Will and the Metaphysics of Presence

By 1941, when Heidegger lectured on the Freiheitsschrift again, he had attained considerably more critical distance from Schelling. Heidegger had come to decisively reject the “anthropocentrism” that had characterized his earlier thought, with its emphasis on “subjectivity,” and thus had ceased to fetishize “the will.” (more…)

The Three Fates by Paul Thumann (1834-1908)

4,742 words

Part 11 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Heidegger’s Critique of Schelling in 1936

Having now given a detailed exposition of the Freiheitsschrift, while simultaneously considering elements of Heidegger’s own exposition, we must turn to certain crucial issues. (more…)

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Part 10 of 15 (Read all parts here)

Final Theological Questions

Now, very late in the essay, Schelling raises new questions. Will evil ever end? If so, how? Does creation have a final purpose or end goal? If so, why is it not reached immediately? (more…)

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Myra Hindley

Part 8 of 15 (Read the whole series here.)

The Spiritedness of Evil

Schelling writes, “As disease is admittedly nothing having essential being [nichts Wesenhaftes], really only an apparent picture of life and merely a meteoric appearance of it – an oscillation between being and non-being – yet announces itself nevertheless as something very real to feeling, so it is with evil.”[1] (more…)

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Part 7 of 15 (Part 1 begins here. Part 6 here.)

The Deepest Abyss and the Loftiest Sky

We are now on the threshold of Schelling’s account of the nature of evil. He argues that in God the two wills – of the ground and of understanding/existence – are conjoined and that the dark will is subordinated to the light will. (more…)

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A young Martin Heidegger.

Part 6 of 15 (Part 1 begins here)

Creation is the Transfiguration of the Dark

Love, according to Schelling, is a principle of wholeness or harmony, drawing all things together. Out of many, it produces a one, a whole. Here, in the first primal stirrings of divine being, love draws together understanding with the will of the ground (the “yearning,” Sehnsucht). A new will is now coming into being. (more…)

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Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler. 1885.

Part 5 of 15 (Part 1 begins here.)

Unintelligibility is the Core of What is Real

It is tempting to think of Schelling’s ground as a “material principle” along the lines of Aristotle’s hulē or Plato’s hupodochē – or, for that matter, the “indefinite dyad” of Plato’s so-called “unwritten teaching” (as reported by Aristotle). This is acceptable so long as we understand that the ground is not a “stuff.” It is a curious combination of void and will – closer to chaos or to the Norse Ginnungagap. (more…)

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Part 4 of 15 (Part 1 begins here)

The Internal Differentiation of God

Schelling now throws us another curve, and it is a major one. All this time we have been speaking of the “immanence” of all things within God. But now Schelling tells us that “the concept of immanence is to be set aside completely insofar as thereby a dead containment of things in God is supposed to be expressed. (more…)

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A young Martin Heidegger.

Part 3 of 15 (Part 1 here. Part 2 here.)

Self-Affirmation as Being

We have seen that Schelling claims “there is no being other than will. Will is primal being [Ursein] to which alone all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence from time, self-affirmation.” We must now look more closely at these “predicates of being.” (more…)

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Part 2 of 15 (Read Part 1 here)

1. Freedom, System, and Pantheism

Schelling begins the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (henceforth referred to as the Freiheitsschrift) by challenging the widespread idea that the existence of human freedom is incompatible with “system.” (more…)