Chapter 4 - Schelling’s Prophetic Spinozism

Summary

Also Schelling – by 1802 a declared Spinozist – altered his methodology, adding to it a phenomenological dimension. In 1807 he portrayed the philosopher as an artist singularly gifted with an intuitive sense for nature as issuing from the Oneness of the Absolute, equally substance and subject. Jacobi attacked him for this. Chapter 4 details Schelling’s ensuing controversy with him but is otherwise dedicated to Schelling’s seminal Freedom Essay (1809). In the essay Schelling again portrayed the philosopher as a divinely inspired artist. He now conceived his work, however, as one of remembering the event at which God manifests himself in the form of a world that reflects in its manifold the internal economy of the divine being. This event is shrouded in the human unconscious but can be brought to light through the philosopher’s imaginative representations. The warrant for these is that they resonate with humankind’s belief, embodied in mythology, that its history is also the history of God’s realization in space/time. Schelling was thus adopting a rich metaphysical position, the direct contrary of Fichte’s ontological quietism, which the monism the two shared nonetheless also made possible. Evil comes up as an important issue for Schelling