Schelling and Modern European Philosophy:: An Introduction (Migration)
Andrew Bowie
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0415103479
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 Schelling's often misunderstood philosophy and focuses on Schelling's work as an alternative to, and critique of aspects of Hegel's thinking.
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bowie, Andrew, 1952– Schelling and modern European philosophy: an introduction/Andrew Bowie. p. cm. Includes
a ‘theoretical’ question about knowledge, and thus demands the move into the practical realm which is not subject to the determinism of the theoretical realm. Only by achieving the unity of subject and object, Schelling claims, would we finally understand the division that leads to a realm of experience. This position again leads to the renunciation of self-consciousness: Where there is absolute freedom there is absolute bliss, and vice-versa. But with absolute freedom no self-consciousness can
art-work. 48 THE HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS SELF-REFERENCE AND ART For Schelling, as for Jacobi and Hölderlin, it is clear that the Absolute cannot appear as itself, precisely because it cannot become an object. This might again seem an issue only for those interested in metaphysical exertions of the kind Rorty and others think we ought now to have given up. However, though discussions of the Absolute may sound merely metaphysical, the fact is that the problem involved is central even to
Third Critique, where the genius crosses the Kantian divide between the subject and nature in itself by being ‘the talent (gift of nature), which gives the rule to art . . . genius is the innate aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art’ (Kant 1977a pp. B 181–2, A 179). Schelling sees this relationship of nature and mind, unconscious and conscious, as the one place in which the ‘Absolute’ – he uses the term at this point (I/3 p. 615) – manifests itself: As this absolute
appearing opposed to thought, though, the object reveals its dependence upon thought, as the condition of its being known as opposed to thought. The opposition is resolved by the fact that thought and being must, therefore, be the ‘Other of themselves’, in the ‘identity of identity and difference’. There can be nothing which does not involve a relationship to an other, except the Absolute Idea itself, 159 SCHELLING AND MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY which finally reveals the identity that each