A young Martin Heidegger.
4,125 words
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…)
Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler
Portrait of Schelling by Karl Joseph Stieler
5,320 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
In the first part of this essay I introduced readers to Schelling, who is one of the first philosophers to react against what Heideggereans have called “the metaphysics of presence”: the hidden will in Western metaphysics that gives primacy to human subjectivity, adjusting our understanding of the Being of beings to the human desire that beings should be completely transparent to us, hiding nothing, and readily available for our manipulation. In response to this, Schelling argues that it is nature, not human subjectivity, that should be the starting point of philosophy. (more…)
A daguerreotype of F. W. J. Schelling from 1848, the first known photograph of a philosopher.
A daguerreotype of F. W. J. Schelling from 1848, the first known photograph of a philosopher.
4,839 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
1. Introduction: A Philosophical Rebel
This essay is a continuation of my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” With Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) we have reached a significant milestone, in a number of ways. Behind us, in our journey toward Gelassenheit, we have Plato, the philosophers of the Middle Ages, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte. Ahead of Schelling we have only two more philosophers to discuss, Hegel and Nietzsche, before we turn to cover in more detail Heidegger’s response to the metaphysical tradition and to modernity. (more…)