On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the history of European philosophy. In it, F. W. J. Schelling surveys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. The lectures trace the path of philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, to Hegel and Schelling's own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, (...) Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. This is the first English translation of On the History of Modern Philosophy. In his introduction Andrew Bowie sets the work in the context of Schelling's career and clarifies its philosophical issues. The translation will be of special interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and theologians. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a (...) strict peer-review process. The book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

On the History of Modern Philosophy is a key transitional text in the history of European philosophy. In it, F. W. J. Schelling surveys philosophy from Descartes to German Idealism and shows why the Idealist project is ultimately doomed to failure. The lectures trace the path of philosophy from Descartes through Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, to Hegel and Schelling's own work. The extensive critiques of Hegel prefigure many of the arguments to be found in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, (...) Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. This is the first English translation of On the History of Modern Philosophy. In his introduction Andrew Bowie sets the work in the context of Schelling's career and clarifies its philosophical issues. The translation will be of special interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and theologians. (shrink)

Este artigo tem a intenção de mostrar as interpretações que Schelling e Nietzsche fazem acerca da arte trágica. Diante dessas duas filosofias, tenta-se aproximar alguns pontos de coincidência entre o pensamento dos dois filósofos. Por um lado, Schelling se preocupará em superar a dicotomia liberdade/necessidade para que, enfim, possa afirmar a liberdade. Por outro lado, Nietzsche visa superar o pessimismo e, após tal superação, afirmar a vida. Assim, faz-se notável o fato de que os dois filósofos (...) encontram, na arte trágica, um caminho extremamente positivo, pois ambos os pensadores promovem uma superação e afirmação. (shrink)

This essay explores the ways in which the idiosyncratic onto-theogony of Friedrich Schelling's 1815 version of The Ages of the World anticipates Gilles Deleuze’s equally idiosyncratic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. As I argue, Schelling’s work presents a sophisticated theory of being and time, a complex account of the genesis of actuality from within a differentiated transcendental field, and a reworking of the doctrine of Ideas, all of which together project a conception of reality (...) as eternal recurrence strikingly similar to the one Deleuze draws out of Nietzsche’s scant and elliptical writings on the subject. (shrink)

Any religious worldview, understood in the sense that ‘life has a purpose’, has to face the problem of evil. The problem of evil has been particularly intensively discussed in the Aristotelian–Scholastic–Christian tradition. The most popular solution has been to deny that anything truly evil actually exists. It is hard to conceive why an omnipotent and perfectly good God would allow evil to appear. Yet, Western culture has been and still is full of imagery of absolute demonic evil. I suggest that (...) this strained dialectic could be best approached by radically rethinking the nature of evil and the theological context in which it has traditionally been thought. In his middle period works, Friedrich Schelling offers a pantheistic framework which gives extensive resources for thinking about evil. Schelling’s account is well balanced and innovative at least in two respects. It does not explain away the inscrutable presence of evil, but it neither completely renounces theoretical speculation of the origin of evil. Second, Schelling’s metaphysics anticipate Nietzsche’s fundamental critique of the ‘life-denying’ character of Western metaphysics and ethics. However, while sharing much of the critical aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, unlike Nietzsche, Schelling does not end up in atheism and moral relativism. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel, and Schiller. Always a champion of Romanticism, Schelling advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, which maintained aesthetics and the creative imagination to be of the highest value. At the same time, Schelling's concerns for the self and the rational make him a major precursor to existentialism and phenomenology. Schelling has exercised a subterranean influence on modern thought. His diverse writings (...) have not given rise to a system or school of thought; rather, individual philosophers have been influenced by the resonance of his ideas and their influence on contemporary ideas and movements. The New Schelling brings together a wide-ranging set of essays which elaborate the connections between Schelling and other thinkers - such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan - and argue for the unexpected modernity of Schelling's work. (shrink)

Abstract:Despite his ridicule of Schelling, Nietzsche’s thought is in much greater proximity to Schelling’s philosophy than he realized. This essay explores this surprising and mutually illuminating relationship and concludes by arguing that this unexpected resonance exposes a sensibility, both fundamental and practical, to approach the reigning ecological crisis.

"Der Philosoph und Kunsttheoretiker Dieter Jähnig hat einen bemerkenswerten Text, eine Art Summe seiner Forschung zum Verhältnis zwischen Philosophie und Kunst vorgelegt. Bemerkenswert ist dieser Text aus mehreren Gründen, zum einen, weil er - mit Schelling und Nietzsche - zeigt, dass Kunst nicht zum Objekt gemacht werden darf, sondern selbst eine Quelle des Weltverstehens und der Zeitkritik ist, zum anderen, weil er - mit Platon, Schelling und Nietzsche - in souveräner Weise den mimetischen Charakter der Kunst (...) nicht als Nachahmung, sondern als schöpferische Form des Lebens darstellt. Schließlich zeigt Jähnig im Blick auf Kants dritte Kritik, dass die Kunst der Philosophie Grenzen setzt. Das Stichwort hier ist "Freiheit nicht als Selbstbestimmung sondern als Gunst". All dies sind Schlaglichter einer gedanklichen Helligkeit, die kein anderer mir bekannter Text auf das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Philosophie wirft. Jeder an Philosophie und Kunst Interessierte, ob als Studierender oder Lehrender oder einfach Leser, sollte diesen Text kennen". [Wilhelm Vossenkuhl]. (shrink)

The work of the later Schelling seems antithetical to that of Nietzsche: one a Romantic, idealist and Christian, the other Dionysian, anti-idealist and anti-Christian. Still, there is a very meaningful and educative dialogue to be found between Schelling and Nietzsche on the topics of reason, freedom and religion. Both of them start their philosophy with a similar critique of the Western tradition, which to them is overly dualist, rationalist and anti-organic. In response, they hope to inculcate (...) a more lively view of reality in which a new understanding of freedom takes center stage. This freedom can be revealed and strengthened through a proper approach to religion, one that neither disconnects from nor subordinates religion to reason. Religion is the dialogical other to reason, one that refreshes and animates our attempts to navigate the world autonomously. In doing so, Schelling and Nietzsche open up new avenues of thinking about freedom, reason and religion. (shrink)

Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F W J Schelling as a major European philospher in his own right. _Schelling and Modern European Philosophy_, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion. Dr Bowie traces how central ideas and conceptual strategies in the work of philosophers as diverse as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Davidson relate closely to (...) class='Hi'>Schelling's often misunderstood philosophy and focuses on Schelling's work as an alternative to, and critique of aspects of Hegel's thinking. (shrink)

Review article on Philipp Höfele's book "Wollen und Lassen: Zur Ausdifferenzierung, Kritik und Rezeption des Willensparadigmas in der Philosophie Schellings" (Freiburg: Alber, 2019). The book demonstrates why Schelling is not an uncritical predecessor of Nietzsche and the will to power, as Heidegger alleges. Instead, Schelling displays an ambivalent attitude toward willing—affirming it in some forms, critiquing or rejecting it in others. Above all, Schelling’s thought on the will has many layers of complexity: it includes not only (...) a variety of forms of willing, but also “fringe phenomena” like non-willing or Gelassenheit that are ordinarily placed in opposition to will. Moreover, Schelling’s philosophy of will is distinctive in not conceiving willing and letting-be as either-or alternatives, as Heidegger tends to do. Especially in the late lectures, Schelling brings them together, showing how non-voluntary phenomena like Gelassenheit make an authentic willing possible. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a severe critic of German Idealism, but what exactly is the relation between his thought and theirs? Papers from leading specialists in Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche contribute to a clearer understanding of the differences and affinities between Nietzsche's philosophy and that of his predecessors.".

When Emmanuel Levinas writes (in the preface of Totality and Infinity) that Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung is “a work too often present in this book to be cited,” he effectively names his debt to F. W. J. Schelling as well, for Rosenzweig’s work was a sustained attempt to carry to completion Schelling’s great philosophical fragment, the Weltalter. Scholars of Levinas have explored Levinas’s relationship to Schelling, but I confess that, as a Schelling scholar, I knew (...) nothing of this connection until rather recently. I credit above all the energetic work of Jason Wirth for helping me see its importance — and more generally the importance of reading Schelling in the context of recent work in continental philosophy. None of this has been easy. The very thing that Schelling and Levinas have in common, their resistance to the implicit solipsism of overcoming mystery with clarity, make them poor candidates for quick appropriation and comparison. Indeed, Schelling anticipated Nietzsche by openly mocking the scholars who make it their business to “appropriate and compare.” Mockery and ridicule is, ofcourse, not Levinas’s way of going about things. Even so, he too is so relentless in his polemic against the totalizing desire to know that he forces his reader to pause and question just what a proper scholarly response to his work might be. As such, the very first result of taking up the question of Schelling and Levinas might be that we are forced to set aside the scholarly mask, testimony of one’s acquiescence to the order of the same, in order to step forth as the human beings that we are. Whether this is an act of humility or of arrogance is not at all clear. Dispensing with the pretense of knowledge takes a kind of boldness on our part — for what but knowledge might give us a claim to the attention of others? (shrink)

When Emmanuel Levinas writes that Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung is “a work too often present in this book to be cited,” he effectively names his debt to F. W. J. Schelling as well, for Rosenzweig’s work was a sustained attempt to carry to completion Schelling’s great philosophical fragment, the Weltalter. Scholars of Levinas have explored Levinas’s relationship to Schelling, but I confess that, as a Schelling scholar, I knew nothing of this connection until rather recently. (...) I credit above all the energetic work of Jason Wirth for helping me see its importance — and more generally the importance of reading Schelling in the context of recent work in continental philosophy. None of this has been easy. The very thing that Schelling and Levinas have in common, their resistance to the implicit solipsism of overcoming mystery with clarity, make them poor candidates for quick appropriation and comparison. Indeed, Schelling anticipated Nietzsche by openly mocking the scholars who make it their business to “appropriate and compare.” Mockery and ridicule is, ofcourse, not Levinas’s way of going about things. Even so, he too is so relentless in his polemic against the totalizing desire to know that he forces his reader to pause and question just what a proper scholarly response to his work might be. As such, the very first result of taking up the question of Schelling and Levinas might be that we are forced to set aside the scholarly mask, testimony of one’s acquiescence to the order of the same, in order to step forth as the human beings that we are. Whether this is an act of humility or of arrogance is not at all clear. Dispensing with the pretense of knowledge takes a kind of boldness on our part — for what but knowledge might give us a claim to the attention of others? (shrink)

One project of philosophical research which would likely prove of little profit is a history of philosophy the epochs of which are the greatest philosophical jokes. Although philosophers have always said innumerable funny things, notable sources of humor have been few and far between: Socrates, though not Plato, Nietzsche, though not Zarathustra, and more recently perhaps Bernard Williams or Jacques Derrida. The most a scholar can usually hope for is a clever barb punctuating pages of deathly earnestness. Such is (...) the case with Hegel: although occasionally possessed of a biting wit, his sense of humor was hardly world-historical. Modernity, although many other things, simply isn't very funny. Schelling, however, had the good fortune to be the victim of Hegel's greatest jest. An "Absolute" such as Schelling's, Hegel says, would be the night in which all cows are black.". (shrink)

ResumenEn el presente artículo haremos un breve recorrido por la historia de la metafísica del siglo XIX, partiendo del giro que se produce en la concepción del ser en el pensamiento de Schelling, más concretamente, en su ensayo sobre la libertad (1809). Schelling aparece como el fundador de la nueva metafísica, una metafísica que entiende el ser como voluntad, concepción que subyace al pensamiento de Schopenhauer y Nietzsche. Redescubrir la filosofía de Schelling como la fuente inspiradora (...) de cierto pensamiento filosófico más allá de la figura imponente de Hegel nos permitirá enriquecer nuestra visión de la historia del pensamiento filosófico del XIX.Palabras claveIdealismo alemán, Historia de la Filosofía, Metafísica, Voluntad, siglo XIXAbstractIn the present article we’ll go on a very short walk through the history of metaphysics during 19th century, setting off at the «turn» in the concept of being that took place in Schelling’s thought, more concretely in his essays on liberty (1809). Schelling appears to us as the founder of a new metaphysics, one in which being is understood as will, concept which underlies Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s thought. Rediscovering Schelling’s philosophy as the source of inspiration for these thinkers, beyond the impressive figure of Hegel, will allow us to enrich our vision of history of philosophical thought during 19th century.Key wordsGerman Idealism, History of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Will, 19th century. (shrink)

Since the seminal 1955 habilitation by Heidegger's pupil, Walter Schulz, it has become an open secret that Schelling's philosophy, more than that of any of the other German Idealists, is an immediate antecedent to Heidegger's thought. For this reason, it is all the more fascinating that to this day research is still lopsidedly concerned with the interpretation of Heidegger's reading of Schelling's Freedom Essay and that a thorough and overarching investigation into the idealistic inheritance of Martin Heidegger's thought (...) remains wanting. The same applies to the debates that Heidegger's students began in the twentieth century. The traditions of modern nature ethics and the criticism of technology, which derive from Schelling, were interpreted and mediated through Heidegger to his students Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, and Günther Anders. This essay attempts to delineate some of the basic features of a more bilateral or dialogical relationship between these two philosophers and to more fully appreciate Heidegger's relationship to German Idealism in general and Schelling in particular. (shrink)

En este artículo se pretende realizar un análisis del origen filosófico de uno de los puntos clave que cambiaron los cimientos de la metafísica moderna a partir de la aportación de la noción de filosofía de naturaleza de Schelling, que conlleva a abrir desde el idealismo alemán una concepción alternativa de las relaciones entre la finitud y el Absoluto a las llevadas a cabo por Fichte y Hegel. Su filosofía de la naturaleza inaugurará toda una corriente de pensamiento que (...) incluirá tanto gran parte de la filosofía de Spinoza como el discurrir estético del Sturm und Drang alemán. Posteriormente, y previa enorme reflexión del tótem ineludible de la filosofía crítica kantiana y ruptura con la fichteana, la importancia de su legado filosófico no hará más que crecer, ya que de la influencia sus escritos participarán, de manera más o menos explícita, pensadores como Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud o Heidegger, e incluso llegará hasta el siglo XXI de la mano de gran parte de los autores de la denominada época posmoderna, como Deleuze o Zizek entre otros. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche's reference to Ernst Chladni in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ (1873) could easily be overlooked as a casual analogy. Yet it emerges from a systematic engagement with the nascent field of acoustics. Chladni was among the discipline's founding fathers, having honed the application of rigorous empirical testing to sound and music. His name is most enduringly associated with the discovery of the 'sound figures', which rendered sound visible for the first time. To produce them, (...) Chladni scattered sand onto a metal sheet. A note was then emitted by playing a violin bow against its side. The resulting oscillations prompted the sand to settle in a range of symmetrical patterns. The natural beauty of the shapes made them quite famous. Yet they also represented a mystery. Though the formula for calculating the oscillation of single strings was reliable, it could not easily be reconciled with oscillation in two dimensions. In lieu of an explanation, the sound figures became the object of speculative attention. Their existence posed a difficulty for the quantitative ontology of rationalist metaphysics. The inheritors of Schelling, for example, saw in the sound figures an undeciphered language of nature. But Nietzsche was implacably opposed to this position: for him, nature contains no inherent meaning, no rational order, and no divine teleology. The ‘book of nature’ was at best an anthropomorphic projection, and at worst a theological dogma. Thus reframed, Chladni's sound figures confront us not with the infinite mystery of nature, but our own cognitive impotence. The following essay therefore elaborates the provenance of Nietzsche's sound figure analogy: a rare intersection of scientific experiment and speculative philosophy. (shrink)

Despite Carl Jung’s stated debts to Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, this paper articulates a more profound yet silent intellectual partnership between Schelling’s philosophy and analytical psychology. Schelling’s metaphysics navigate the aporias Jung often encounters in his psychology; Jung provides Schelling’s metaphysics with a therapeutics and mode of being in the world. This paper reads the actants’ dynamism in Schelling’s First Outline and the potencies' work of yearning in the 1815 Ages of the World forward to (...) Jungian metapsychology, which thinks Schelling within a topography of the non-Freudian productive psyche. I end by developing the Romantic metasubject as the non-Freudian subject emerging from this ideational countertransference. (shrink)

This book provides the English-speaking world with a comprehensive account of the still largely unknown work of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology and revelation. Its achievement, however, is not archival but philosophical, elucidating the relation between Schelling and onto-theology. It explains how Schelling dealt with the problem of nihilism and onto-theology well before Nietzsche and Heidegger, arguing that Schelling surpasses onto-theology or the philosophy of presence a century prior to Heidegger. Overall, the author provocatively suggests that (...) Heidegger is perhaps Schelling’s genuine heir and by comprehensively interpreting Schelling’s multifaceted late lectures he analyzes issues as diverse as the Ancient relation between thinking and Being, the Medieval debate between voluntarism and intellectualism, the overcoming of modern subjectivism and German Idealism as well as many themes in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This book provides the English-speaking world with a comprehensive account of the still largely unknown work of Schelling's philosophy of mythology and revelation. Its achievement, however, is not archival but philosophical, elucidating the relation between Schelling and onto-theology. It explains how Schelling dealt with the problem of nihilism and onto-theology well before Nietzsche and Heidegger, arguing that Schelling surpasses onto-theology or the philosophy of presence a century prior to Heidegger. Overall, the author provocatively suggests that (...) Heidegger is perhaps Schelling's genuine heir and by comprehensively interpreting Schelling's multifaceted late lectures he analyzes issues as diverse as the Ancient relation between thinking and Being, the Medieval debate between voluntarism and intellectualism, the overcoming of modern subjectivism and German Idealism as well as many themes in contemporary philosophy. The presentation is systematic rather than thematic, following Schelling's ages of the world through the Past, Present and Future. The results are daring, departing from the half-century long canonical reading of the late Schelling since Walter Schulz. This book is valuable for Schelling-scholars, historians of philosophy and theologians alike. (shrink)

Nietzschean reminiscences of Schelling? The title seems to suggest either that Schelling can remember forward to Nietzsche or that some more positive reminiscence of Schelling lies hidden in Nietzsche’s work. Perhaps there is something like a forward-looking remembrance. Perhaps every thinker looks forward to those few who will pick up the thread of his or her thinking—not as the “unthought” of that thinking, but as the very thread that Ariadne ravels and allows to trail behind (...) her. Perhaps too there is something in Nietzsche’s work that demands a more sympathetic and protracted response to Schelling than the response Nietzsche appears to offer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 501-519 [Access article in PDF] Nietzsche and Early Romanticism Judith Norman Nietzsche was in many ways a quintessentially romantic figure, a lonely genius with a tragic love-life, wandering endlessly (through Italy, no less) before going dramatically mad, taken by his gods into the protection of madness (to quote Heidegger's epithet on Hölderlin, one of Nietzsche's childhood favorites). 1 (...) But this is to be a romantic in an uncapitalized manner, and has nothing to do with the literary movement of Romanticism, a movement from which, as is well-known, Nietzsche distanced himself loudly and vigorously. Nietzsche famously follows Goethe in his verdict that Romanticism is a form of sickness and classicism a form of strength, and commentators, for the most part, have accepted this self-description. 2 That is, they do not blithely identify Nietzsche with that nineteenth-century artistic movement, whose proponents include Victor Hugo, Eugene Delacroix, and Richard Wagner. 3But Romanticism is a plural phenomenon. When Goethe made his famously dismissive remark, he was clearly not talking about Hugo and Wagner; he meant Romanticism in an earlier incarnation. Commentators have been less reticent about finding all sorts of affinities between Nietzsche and some of these earlier movements. In particular Nietzsche is frequently and positively compared to Jena Romanticism (also known as early Romanticism), a movement whose principal figures included August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, and the writings they published in the 1790s, principally in the journal, Athenaeum. It is this romantic movement that will be the focus of my paper. Jena romantics, while Grecophile, had nothing to do with Rousseauean primitivism (they were well aware that their image of the [End Page 501] Greeks reflected contemporary fantasies more than historical reality), they had no cult of the genius, and they did not valorize emotion above reason. 4 What was central to their movement was profound skepticism about the viability of traditional attitudes towards truth, an intellectually rigorous theory of art that gave particular weight to playfulness, fragmented writing, the notion of literary irony, a sense that the philosopher ought to be or become more of an artist (though not a genius)—and, correlatively, that philosophy is or ought to become more artistic. All of which sounds decidedly Nietzschean. Romanticizing Nietzsche While Nietzsche himself never makes the connection, he never explicitly distances himself from the authors of Jena romanticism in the way he does from later romantic figures. 5 Indeed, he barely mentions the Jena romantics by name and probably never read Friedrich Schlegel, the figure most closely associated with this romantic movement. 6 As such, there is certainly space for commentators to argue for a close if tacit intellectual connection between Nietzsche and Jena romanticism; indeed, one commentator speaks of a fundamental affinity, 7 another calls Nietzsche the last romanticist, and yet another claims that "[Nietzsche's] story makes sense only when read in the larger context of his Romantic predecessors' history." 8It is undeniable that Nietzsche came out of a philological tradition inaugurated by the Schlegels (and developed by Schelling) which juxtaposed the Dionysian and the Apollinian in Greek tragedy. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, "an entire tradition of academic philosophy (which, on his own initiative, Nietzsche had joined) revolved around precisely this opposition." 9 At least in [End Page 502] his earlier works Nietzsche's view of the Greeks was influenced by (if not predicated on) the scholarly research and interpretative theories of figures associated with Jena romanticism. How profound and enduring this influence might have been is an interesting question, but not one I will explore at present. I will not discuss the influence of the Jena romantics in their scholarly capacity as classical philologists, but rather focus on any impact they may have had as philosophically minded literary critics during the 1790s. Similarly, I will not look at The Birth of Tragedy but rather focus on claims made concerning the romantic tendencies of Nietzsche's later work. A body of scholarship has been building which claims that the critical theories of Jena... (shrink)

In der genannten Epoche werden Grundentscheidungen gefällt, welche die Fundamentalfrage der Philosophie, die Seinsfrage, in die Krisis führen, in den Nihilismus unter ontologischem, metaphysischem, epistemologischem, axiologischem Aspekt. Den Extrempositionen der Systemdenker Hegel, Schopenhauer und Schelling erwachsen in den Hegelkritikern Feuerbach, Br. Bauer, Marx und Stirner Kontrapositionen, die das Wahrheitsproblem der Beliebigkeit unterstellen. Kierkegaard klagt unter existentiellem Aspekt das Problem der Wahrheit ein. Nietzsche überholt durch Abschaffung der Wahrheit alle Positionen,was seinen Standort in der europäischen Denkgeschichte ausmacht und als (...) Ergebnis der problemgeschichtlichen Analysen zu charakterisieren ist. Die Rückgewinnung des Vernunfthorizontes setzen erst die Problemdenker N. Hartmann und M. Heidegger ins Werk durch kritische Erneuerung der Seinsfrage. (shrink)

Extrait : Toute la doctrine de Nietzsche repose sur la conception et l'adoration d'une sorte de déité métaphysique qu'il appelle la puissance. À la volonté de vie que Schopenhauer avait placée au coeur de l'être, il substitue « la volonté de pouvoir et de domination ». Nous retrouvons, dans cette idée de puissance en déploiement, la vieille notion romantique dont s'étaient nourris tous les littérateurs depuis Schlegel jusqu'à Victor Hugo, tous les philosophes depuis Fichte, Schelling et Hegel jusqu'à (...) Schopenhauer. Des forces qui se répandent sans autre but qu'elles-mêmes ou pour des buts qu'il leur plaît de poser, n'est-ce pas l'idée fondamentale par où le romantisme s'oppose à l'intellectualisme classique, aux notions d'ordre, de loi, d'harmonie, d'intelligibilité et, en un seul mot, d'intelligence? La puissance de l'orage et de la tempête qui tourbillonne sans raison, la puissance de l'océan qui se soulève sans rien atteindre, la puissance de la montagne... (shrink)

In the English-speaking world it is not clear that any of the later Schelling's critique of Hegel haseverdirectly been part of serious philosophical debate, though its indirect effects, via the work of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and others, are oftenunconsciouslypresent in contemporary debates. How this fact looks in terms of a Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy is a question that would require more space than I have here. What I want to suggest is that the confrontation with (...) Hegel of the later Schelling, as well as some aspects of the earlier Schelling, open up conceptual issues which are present in contemporary philosophical reflections on modernity and post-modernity. This happens, however, in ways which have hardly become common currency in these reflections. The basis of my argument is the re-interpretation of Schelling's arguments by Manfred Frank.The main philosophical impetus behind the post-modern is the idea that the attempt to establish any essential identity between being and thinking, of which Hegel is usually seen as the classic representative, must be regarded as a metaphysical dream from which we must awaken, if we are not to miss the possibilities of the new time in which we are living. In this view the illusion of identity threatens to block our access to the diversity available if we realise that this illusion must be renounced. If it is true that the history of Western metaphysics consists in the attempt to articulate the presence of the infinite within the finite, then such arguments can be seen as making a certain degree of sense: once philosophy has achieved this articulation the consequence can seem to be a closure in which the new always reveals itself as ultimately the old. (shrink)

Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In _Continental Idealism_, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz. Redding begins by examining Leibniz's dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's views of (...) space and time consequently shaped his own 'transcendental' version of idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel on the one hand and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz. _Continental Idealism_ offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy. (shrink)

Beginning with an examination of the relationship between Hegel and Goethe, Löwith discusses how Hegel's students, particularly Marx and Kierkegaard, interpreted--or reinterpreted--their master's thought, and proceeds with an in-depth assessment of the other important philosophers, from Feuerbach, Stirner, and Schelling to Nietzsche.

The recent publication of Heidegger’s 1936 lectures on Schelling’s essay on human freedom reveals yet another point of transition along the way from Being and Time to the later works on language and poetry. It brings to light an influence on Heidegger almost as weighty as his reading of Hölderlin and Nietzsche in that same decade, an influence hitherto only hinted at in published works. It now appears that Heidegger’s essays on identity, on grounding, on being, all bear (...) the imprint of a dialogue with Schelling, that he discovered in the latter thinker a valuable prototype of his notion of being. If the reader is not aware of the direction of Heidegger’s own thought, the 1936 lectures on their own reveal little of the dialogue. Schelling’s Investigations is a difficult and obscure work, and Heidegger confines himself to close textual work, with care and insight bringing even the most obscure passages out of allegory into lucid philosophical statement. The lectures are a triumph of pedagogy, the most careful attempt to date to read Schelling as an ontological thinker. Yet their smooth surface, scholarly poise, and objectivity leave hidden a question of real interest: Why should Schelling, commonly thought a weak link to Hegel or the first symptom of “existentialist” anti-Hegelian reaction, be of interest to Heidegger the philosopher? And why, in particular, should this most exotic of Schelling’s works, touched by the influence of theosophists like Boehme, be accepted by Heidegger as one of the crucial moments of the West’s historical thinking through of being? (shrink)

Beginning with an examination of the relationship between Hegel and Goethe, Löwith discusses how Hegel's students, particularly Marx and Kierkegaard, interpreted--or reinterpreted--their master's thought, and proceeds with an in-depth assessment of the other important philosophers, from Feuerbach, Stirner, and Schelling to Nietzsche.

With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, there emerged two controversies related to the responsibility of philosophical ideas for the rise of German militarism. The first, mainly journalistic, controversy concerned the influence that Nietzsche’s ideas may have had on what British propagandists portrayed as the ruthlessly amoral German foreign policy. This soon gave way to a second controversy, waged primarily among academics, concerning the purportedly vicious political outcomes of German Idealism, from Kant through to Fichte, (...) class='Hi'>Schelling, and Hegel. During the autumn of 1914, and at the cusp between the two controversies, Moritz Schlick was to deliver a lecture series on Nietzsche’s life and work at the University of Rostock. Responding to both debates, Schlick penned an introduction in which he sought to defend philosophy against all those who would embroil it in warfare. Schlick offers a series of arguments defending Nietzsche against his accusers. He also argues that, though their contributions to the History of Philosophy often amounted to no more than ‘beautiful nonsense’, the German Idealists’ philosophical views cannot be held responsible for the rise of German nationalism. Finally, Schlick mounts a general defense of the search for truth, both in philosophy and in Wissenschaft, as a type of activity which presupposes peace. Though Schlick’s metaphilosophical views change, as this paper shows, he remains constant both in his favourable appraisal of Nietzsche, as well as his separation between politics on the one hand, and both philosophy and Wissenschaft on the other hand. (shrink)

MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY PRESENTS A PECULIAR PUZZLE to the historian of ideas. For most of the early modern period, philosophers throughout Europe had allied themselves with the Enlightenment in its self-proclaimed struggle against dogma, superstition, and ignorance. Yet beginning in late eighteenth century Germany, this situation began to change—so much so that by the early decades of the twentieth century, Germany had become the undisputed home of the philosophical Counter-Enlightenment. If today the most celebrated Counter-Enlightenment figures hail from France or (...) Italy, that should not obscure the fact that the ideas of such authors as Derrida and Foucault, Vattimo and Virilio descend directly from the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger. All of these theorists are united in their opposition to the Enlightenment and what they see as its detrimental social and political effects in the modern world. Moreover, all of them deny the core assumptions of the Enlightenment: the possibility and goodness of rational discourse dispelling darkness and mystery from human life. Hence, their writings tend to take the form of deconstructive commentaries on seminal texts from the Western philosophical and literary traditions or radically critical analyses of the social and intellectual practices common to the post-Enlightenment world. Above all, these works claim to show that what might superficially appear to be examples of disinterested argument and rational impartiality in those texts and practices are, instead, attempts at violating, marginalizing, delegitimizing, and dominating the “other”—with the “other” defined as the nonrational, unusual, different, or abnormal dimensions of human life and experience. The role of the Counter-Enlightenment theorist is to liberate the “other” from its subjugation at the hands of reason by exposing the myriad ways in which all supposedly enlightened discourses and practices are themselves permeated by the “other” and thus always one step away from collapsing under the weight of their own incoherence. In other words, Counter-Enlightenment philosophy seeks to expose reason’s own inevitable and fatal dependence upon unreason. (shrink)