front cover of The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World
The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World
Slavoj Zizek and F.W.J. von Schelling
University of Michigan Press, 1997
In the last decade, F. W. J. von Schelling has emerged as one of the key philosophers of German Idealism, the one who, for the first time, undermined Kant's philosophical revolution and in so doing opened up the way for a viable critique of Hegel. In noted philosopher Slavoj Zizek's view, the main orientations of the post-Hegelian thought, from Kierkegaard and Marx, to Heidegger and today's deconstructionism, were prefigured in Schelling's analysis of Hegel's idealism, and in his affirmation that the contingency of existence cannot be reduced to notional self-mediation. In The Abyss of Freedom, Zizek attempts to advance Schelling's stature even further, with a commentary of the second draft of Schelling's work The Ages of the World, written in 1813.
Zizek argues that Schelling's most profound thoughts are found in the series of three consecutive attempts he made to formulate the "ages of the world/Weltalter," the stages of the self-development of the Absolute. Of the three versions, claims Zizek, it is the second that is the most eloquent and definitive encompassing of Schelling's lyrical thought. It centers on the problem of how the Absolute (God) himself, in order to become actual, to exist effectively, has to accomplish a radically contingent move of acquiring material, bodily existence. Never before available in English, this version finally renders accessible one of the key texts of modern philosophy, a text that is widely debated in philosophical circles today.
The Abyss of Freedom is Zizek's own reading of Schelling based upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It focuses on the notion that Lacan's theory--which claims that the symbolic universe emerged from presymbolic drives--is prefigured in Schelling's idea of logos as given birth to from the vortex of primordial drives, or from what "in God is not yet God." For Zizek, this connection is monumental, showing that Schelling's ideas forcefully presage the post-modern "deconstruction" of logocentrism.
Slavoj Zizek is not a philosopher who stoops to conquer objects but a radical voice who believes that philosophy is nothing if it is not embodied, nothing if it is only abstract. For him, true philosophy always speaks of something rather than nothing. Those interested in the genesis of contemporary thought and the fate of reason in our "age of anxiety" will find this coupling of texts not only philosophically relevant, but vitally important.
Slavoj Zizek is the author of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, and most recently, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. Currently he is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Judith Norman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
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front cover of The Romantic Absolute
The Romantic Absolute
Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804
Dalia Nassar
University of Chicago Press, 2013
The absolute was one of the most significant philosophical concepts in the early nineteenth century, particularly for the German romantics. Its exact meaning and its role within philosophical romanticism remain, however, a highly contested topic among contemporary scholars.  In The Romantic Absolute, Dalia Nassar offers an illuminating new assessment of the romantics and their understanding of the absolute. In doing so, she fills an important gap in the history of philosophy, especially with respect to the crucial period between Kant and Hegel.
            
Scholars today interpret philosophical romanticism along two competing lines: one emphasizes the romantics’ concern with epistemology, the other their concern with metaphysics. Through careful textual analysis and systematic reconstruction of the work of three major romantics—Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling—Nassar shows that neither interpretation is fully satisfying. Rather, she argues, one needs to approach the absolute from both perspectives. Rescuing these philosophers from frequent misunderstanding, and even dismissal, she articulates not only a new angle on the philosophical foundations of romanticism but on the meaning and significance of the notion of the absolute itself.
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front cover of SCHELLING & SWEDENBORG
SCHELLING & SWEDENBORG
MYSTICISM & GERMAN IDEALISM
FRIEDEMANN HORN
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 1997

In this groundbreaking study, Friedemann Horn documents Friedrich Schelling's intense personal engagement with Emanuel Swedenborg's theological works, an engagement fueled to a considerable extent by the untimely death of two women whom Schelling loved. In Swedenborg's vision of the spiritual realm, Schelling found an invaluable resource that supplied an underpinning for his own romantic idealism. Horn details the linguistic similarities in the writings of the two philosophers and shows how, particularly in Clara and the Stuttgart Lectures, Schelling employs the ideas of the "seer of the North."

The scholar will find suggestive contacts with Goethe, Wagner, and Franz von Baader, and with a theosophical tradition whose importance may have been overshadowed by Kant's scathing criticism of Swedenborg. In giving access to that undercurrent, Horn provides a unique and neglected view of nineteenth-century thought.

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front cover of Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
On Essence Human Freedom
Martin Heidegger
Ohio University Press, 1985

Heidegger’s lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1936 on Schelling’s Treatise On Human Freedom came at a crucial turning point in Heidegger’s development. He had just begun his study to work out the term “Ereignis.” Heidegger’s interpretation of Schelling’s work reveals a dimension of his thinking which has never been previously published in English.

While Schelling’s philosophy is less known than that of the other major German Idealists, Fichte and Hegel, he is one of the thinker with whom Heidegger has the most affinity, making this study fruitful for an understanding of both philosophers. Heidegger’s interpretation of On Human Freedom is the most straightforward of the studies to have appeared in English on the Treatise, and is the only work that is devoted to Schelling in Heidegger’s corpus. The basic problems at stake in Schelling’s Treatise lie at the very heart of the idealist tradition: the question of the compatibility of the system and individual freedom, the questions of pantheism and the justification of evil. Schelling was the first thinker in the rationalist-idealist tradition to grapple seriously with the problem of evil.

These are the great questions of the philosophical tradition. They lead Schelling and, with him, Heidegger, to possibilities that come very close to the boundaries of the idealist tradition. For example, Schelling’s concept of the “groundless”—what reason can no longer ground and explain—points back to Jacob Boehme and indirectly forward to the direction of Heidegger’s own inquiry into “Being.” Heidegger’s reading of Schelling, especially of the topics of evil and freedom, clearly shows Schelling’s influence on Heidegger’s views.

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front cover of Voegelin, Schelling, and the Philosophy of Historical Existence
Voegelin, Schelling, and the Philosophy of Historical Existence
Jerry Day
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In this important new work, Jerry Day brings to light the need for an extensive reinterpretation of the mature philosophy of Eric Voegelin, based on Voegelin’s published and unpublished appreciation for nineteenth-century German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling.
Schelling, whom Day maintains was one of the most important guides to Voegelin’s mature philosophy of consciousness and historiography, has been described as the father of several disparate movements and schools of continental philosophy—chief among them being “Hegelian” idealism and existentialism. This characterization implies that Schelling was a scattered thinker with little or no appreciation for philosophy as a disciplined inquiry into the nature of human affairs.
Voegelin was critical of this portrayal of Schelling. He argued that it lacked proper sensitivity for the impressive extent to which this giant of continental thought was able to rise above the “creed communities” of his time and recover the abiding concern of mature philosophers everywhere: the philosophia perennis. Those who claim that Schelling was scattered have failed, according to Voegelin, to appreciate the nonideological breadth of this great philosopher, misled by the splinter movements and schools that arose from mere fragments of his thought. In truth, Schelling founded no school and launched no movement. Instead, he reasoned with the disciplined integrity and wonder of a “spiritual realist.”
Day argues that Voegelin was a fine interpreter of Schelling, particularly during the decisive years when the central orientation of Voegelin’s mature thought was beginning to take hold—between the writing of his History of Political Ideas and its eventual transformation into Order and History. Day gathers an impressive array of evidence to interpret Voegelin’s little-known support for Schelling’s achievements, while offering detailed analyses and helpful summaries of a vast body of literature that has yet to be translated into English.
Day’s partial agreement with Voegelin’s uncommon assessment of Schelling provides him with the point of departure that leads to one of this book’s most distinctive contributions to contemporary thought. It has the rare ability to help clear the way for philosophical realists to make peace with many of their contemporaries, giving them further grounds for accepting the strongest anthropological and psychological insights of recent continental philosophy, while helping them to avoid its tendencies toward nihilistic despair or fideistic historicism.
By reading each philosopher through the eyes of the other, Day provides an analysis that will be illuminating for Voegelin scholars and Schelling scholars alike. The book will also appeal to readers with more general interests in the history and development of continental philosophy, political theory, and comparative religion over the past century.
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