FOREWORD

The figure of Schelling, prince of the romantics, has been too long overshadowed by that of Hegel, no doubt for more than one historical or doctrinal reason. It is heartening, therefore, to perceive the growing interest in recapturing a realization and appreciation of the unique thought of this most genial thinker, and to welcome with gratitude Werner Marx’s application of his very considerable interpretative skill to this important task.

If the three fellow students at the Tübingen seminary—Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling—swore eternal loyalty to the great ideal of the French revolution, freedom, the remainder of their intellectual and spiritual life was indeed devoted to the development of their individually different visions of its meaning. For the two philosophers the task became that of grasping the nature and reality of freedom within the context of necessity, a necessity laid down in the structure of life and history previously interpreted by means of the teleo-logical ideas of classic Greco-Roman thought and the Hebraic-Christian religious tradition, that entire onto-theo-logical tradition with which in more recent times Heidegger and those who have followed after him have found themselves at one and the same time pervaded and embattled. How is the freedom of the human individual, for the sake of which the revolution was fought and won, possible, if it is embedded in a process, natural on the one hand and spiritually historical on the other, that runs with its own immanent necessity? How can man’s moral, aesthetic, and religious motives retain effective credibility when they are seen as phases within stages of development in nature and history regulated by universal power or law?

This problem of his freedom confronted modern man at the beginning of the modern age and still remains most urgently pressing. The poets and thinkers of the succeeding ages found their signal preoccupations precisely with this question. It is not without interest that Werner Marx discovers his contemporary Habermas embroiled in the difficulties of the matter and finds it useful to project him and Schelling in their mutual confrontations. But before Habermas the decisive movement into fundamental possibilities were made by Hegel and Schelling, the former along the line of the concept, the latter along that of the intuition: Begriff, Anschauung, the two basic directions of movement of the human understanding and, for the different idealisms, of the divine understanding itself in its process.

The concept, being logical, when essentially related to the telos as end, necessarily turns around in its own circle of identity, departing from and returning to itself in an eternal revolution. It was foreordained that Hegel, partisan of the concept, should find his maturest thinking take the form of an encyclopedia, the all-inclusive circular system whose prime significance lies precisely in circling around forever within itself, the system as system. Equally foreordained was it that logic, the essential form of conceptual thinking, should be the dominant mode in which the system’s structure, mechanism, and process should be cast—and that God should be envisioned as the supreme logician.

At the beginning, in the middle, and in the end Hegel was the systematise for whose thought everything found its due place—freedom too—within the concept’s circular rhythm. But the freedom constituted in this system was God’s, not man’s: God’s being by and with himself, his Beisichselbstsein, which man can reproduce only with imperfections and always only within God’s own self-presence. The problem of the reality of the human individual’s finite freedom remains and it is to this problem that Schelling found himself compelled to orient his thought. How can human freedom subsist in relation to the eternal freedom?

If Hegel was the supreme conceptualist, Schelling was the supreme intuitionist. In his latest years Schelling characterized Hegel’s thought as the purely rational and therefore purely negative philosophy, to which he opposed his own as the positive philosophy. If Hegel stayed with the concept in its ringed self-return, Schelling (who even ventured to call himself an empiricist) broke through the ring to recover in intuition the real presence of the existent. God (the Gods) could not be a conceptual circle for him but a living presence, God of the living. In his youth the dominant mode of realization of this presence and the dominant mode of imagining the reality of freedom was that of art, the aesthetic dimension. During the period of transcendental idealism he understood art as the organon of philosophical thought, guided by the philosopher’s intuition rather than by conceptual abstractions. In the middle years Schelling moved from the dominion of art to the dominion of religion while yet retaining the two in the singular union granted by mythology. The first part of positive philosophy had to be the philosophy of mythology. And Schelling looked forward to, yearned for, a new realization of religion by means of a new mythical intuition of truth to recapture the life that had worn itself out in its Christian form.

The path of Schelling’s thought is sometimes described as following through a sequence of stages, from an early Fichtean transcendental idealism and its associated philosophy of nature, through the doctrine of absolute identity, to the philosophy of freedom and then the positive philosophy of religion in its mythological and theosophical character. If there is a real break, it comes most plausibly with the passage from the period of identity to that of freedom. In the period of transcendental idealism and philosophy of nature and in the succeeding period of identity, human life and its processes remained a harmonious part of the playing out of the divinely determined history of revelation and salvation. The aesthetic dimension was eminently suited to this vision, already embodied in the system of transcendental idealism in the image of God as author of a drama in which humans participate not only as actors but also as co-authors. Such an idyllic, optimistic picture was agreeable to a relatively innocent youth but hardly to the man who encountered in life, with growing acuteness, the reality of evil, especially as it is brought about by humans themselves, his own self not excluded. Not man as cooperant with God but man as rebel against God, the finite center that sets itself up against the absolute divine center of love—this is the image that takes shape as Schelling experiences the inescapable education of thought by its intuitional confrontation with itself and its world.

In his writings this transition is perhaps most easily seen in the movement from Philosophy and Religion (1804) to the masterpiece, Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). With the essay on freedom Schelling turns definitively toward the dark reality of man’s difference from God, the difference of existence centered upon the finitude of the human self in its opposition to the centered infinitude of love. The human difference is no part of a mere play of the divinity with its own forms or creations but a real difference grounded in something real within the divinity that nevertheless rebels against its subordination there.

This move is at the same time a move out of the circling system of human reason, which brought to culmination the onto-theo-logical tradition of the West, back into the existential reality of the finite human spirit embroiled in evil’s self-victimization and the struggle against it. Hegel early thought he had encompassed Schelling’s thinking as having the form of speculative reflection, that is to say, the form of the identity of identity and difference. Did Hegel ever come to realize the real possibility of thought that finds itself marked as the difference of identity and difference? With Schelling’s essay on human freedom, that overarching difference, no longer mere speculation nor mere reflection but a fiery existence grounded in the nature of the divine existence, flares into intuitionable presence. With this burning presence the face of evil shows itself plainly to the being who is finitely free and there is initiated a stage of thought, still not completed in our time, in which the inescapable ambiguities of freedom and necessity, evil and the problematic nature of its overcoming, haunt us unceasingly and ever more trenchantly.

ALBERT HOFSTADTER