Schelling and the mystery of life

A review of "Schelling and the End of Idealism"

I'm surprised this book hasn't any reviews. It's a good introduction to and overview of the philosophy (or philosophies, or perhaps anti-philosophies) of F W J Schelling, the German Idealist or Romantic. While not for the general reader, I think college-level students of philosophy should be able to digest it, provided they have some working knowledge of the context (the Enlightenment, the Romantics, etc).

The author sounds sympathetic to Schelling, while being more negative towards Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Schelling's contributions include a strong emphasis on Nature, a discovery of the unconscious or subconscious, an evolutionary perspective, and the realization that evil is real and substantial. This led Schelling away from the more solipsistic and anthropocentric perspective of the Idealists, but also the strong belief in rationality typical of the Enlightenment (including Hegel). Instead, Schelling saw humans as intrinsic parts of a larger web of existence. The rational has its ground in the non-rational/irrational, and philosophy is powerless to explain the ultimate mysteries of creation or our own being. These can only be expressed in mythological form, and the elderly Schelling would therefore embrace a form of Christianity. The real is not “rational” as Hegel assumed, rather it is always larger than what is strictly “rational” or “logical” in human terms. Despite the idea that the rational is grounded on something unconscious and non-rational, Schelling also believed that good and evil are real, and that each soul has freedom to choose between them. To me, this suggests that the unconscious cannot be the *real* ground of existence, since good and evil are presumably conscious!

The similarities between Schelling and Whitehead's process philosophy are striking, but so are the similarities to certain esoteric speculations. Even the evolutionary perspective is compatible with esotericism, if it's viewed as successive waves of “devolution” from the divine ground and “evolution” towards it. The author mentions Schelling's studies of Jacob Böhme and friendship with Franz von Baader, but doesn't pursue these themes further. Too hot? “Schelling and Swedenborg” by Horn and Dole is a book exploring this field further.

If a hard-to-read German (anti-)philosopher will ever experience a renaissance is, at best, questionable. Still, it seems that Schelling stands as a necessary corrective to Kant's peculiar dualism, Fichte's megalomaniacal solipsism and Hegel's optimistic belief that Reason inevitably works itself out in history. In other words, Schelling was an antidote to the Western idea of progress, or rather its hubris, since progress as such is perfectly possible even in Schelling's system, the divine being infinitely fecund and creative.

Of course, if Dale E Snow is right, the consequences of Schelling's failure to complete the system of German Idealism is that philosophy as such might be impossible, presumably a sobering thought to philosophy professors everywhere... The alternatives are myth, revelation and, I suppose, letting go and living the mystery.

The missing link

A review of “The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy” 

This is a series of translated lectures, given in France by a German scholar, dealing with the mystical sources of German Romanticism. It should be read together with “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition” by Glenn Alexander Magee and “Schelling and Swedenborg” by Friedemann Horn. In the lecture, Romanticism is a somewhat broad concept, encompassing Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, amongst others.

Usually portrayed as a strictly philosophical movement, Romanticism was actually heavily influenced by various esoteric, mystical and apocalyptic notions derived from religious traditions. Thus, Fichte's subjective idealism centered on a “divine” Ego is probably inspired by German mystic Master Eckhart. Schelling's speculations about spiritual corporeality and the “evolution” of God owe something to the Kabbala. He also studied Swedish mystic Swedenborg, including the idea that conjugal love could survive the physical death of both spouses. Franz von Baader is prominently mentioned in these lectures, hardly surprising since he was an esotericist in his own right, while acting as the “gray eminence” of German Romanticism. Baader studied Jacob Boehme, Master Eckhart and Saint-Martin (the latter a contemporary).

One thing that always baffled me is the connection to Hegel, whose philosophy at first glance seems very different, in both degree and kind, from anything “occult”. Yet, Hegel was a friend of Baader, who introduced him to the writings of Boehme and Eckhart! The notion that the World Spirit comes to know itself through history is superficially similar to the mystical idea that God comes to know himself through the mystic, but I always felt there must be a missing link somewhere. This book provides two such links: Christian Pietists Johann Albrecht Bengel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Both had developed an evolutionary perspective already before Romanticism. God's revelation evolves, not simply in the sense of new theological truths being revealed through the Spirit, but concretely in and through history. The perspective is apocalyptic: God's redemptive plan will eventually evolve to a point when His kingdom on Earth will be established. To Oetinger, the millennial kingdom was explicitly democratic, egalitarian and socialist. There was even a kind of “dialectic” involved, since God's moves are always countered by Satan's ditto, forcing God to change his plans to attack Satan the better. As evolution progresses, the conflicts between good and evil become more and more violent. Since the battle between God and Satan takes places in history and therefore in society, it's easy to secularize this perspective into a this-worldly plan of evolutionary-apocalyptic salvation. This sounds almost like Hegel…and Marx!

Schelling was also influenced by Oetinger, who attempted to combine the evolutionary apocalyptic with studies of the Kabbala. God or Spirit evolves by becoming more corporeal, eventually creating a kind of spiritualized matter (compare “the resurrection of the body” and “heavenly bodies” in Christianity). This is almost identical to Schelling's perspective. Thus, the various sefira in the Kabbalist system aren't simply conceptually distinct from each other, but actually evolve one by one during a cosmogonic process of God's becoming. A tie-in to Hegel's World Spirit is possible here. It turns out that both Schelling and Hegel had studied at the theological seminary at Tübingen in their youth, a seminary where the writings of Bengel and Oetinger were studied!

I realize “The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy” is a very obscure work about a rather narrow subject, but I found it fascinating, and therefore give it five stars. They were wrong, of course. History is obviously cyclical. :P

The golden age of philosophy

This is the seventh volume of Frederick Copleston's classic "History of Philosophy". It covers what is easily the golden age of philosophy - or at least German philosophy.

Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer are treated at length (Copleston is surprisingly positive towards Hegel). There are also chapters on Marx and Engels, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and the Neo-Kantian movement, plus some lesser known thinkers.

When reading Copleston's overview, I somehow got the feeling that I finally understood Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, three thinkers notoriously difficult to "grok". An illusion? Perhaps, but I like to remain in that state for a while... Besides, it says something about Copleston's ability as a communicator.

Incidentally, Kant is treated already in the sixth volume. But then, his philosophy is pure cant, anyway!

Five stars.

Guilt by association

"Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" is something of a disappointment. The author, Glenn Alexander Magee, argues that the well-known German philosopher Hegel was an occultist and a Gnostic, or rather a Hermeticist (the author defines Hermeticism as different from Gnosticism). If true, this would indeed be quite interesting. Hegel influenced Marx, whose ideology became the official one in the Soviet Union (creatively developed by Lenin, of course). Was the Soviet Union really based on a Gnostic or "Hermetic" philosophy?

Hmmm....

Unfortunately, I don't think Magee really proves his point. Most of the book is simply guilt by association. The book never really delivers. For instance, Magee promises to prove that Hegel was influenced by Hermeticism in his youth, but he is forced to admit that Hegel's teenage diaries contain no entries about Hermetic subjects. Magee brushes this aside with the rather strange argument that "what you talk about every day, you don't write about in your diary". No? Since when? Here, the very lack of evidence for Hermetic influence is dialectically transformed into evidence *for* such influence. Sorry, but that's simply not convincing! Further, the author states that there is no direct evidence for Hegel ever being a Freemason. But since Schelling, Goethe and Fichte were Freemasons, and since Hegel mingled or corresponded with them, therefore... Magee also points out that Hegel and Schelling were friends, and that *Schelling* was influenced by Hermeticism. But Hegel and Schelling parted ways later, since Hegel disliked his friend's philosophy! Further, the author states that Hegel was a friend of Franz von Baader, which is true, but the two gentlemen often criticized each other. Besides, Baader wasn't an unthinking, orthodox Hermeticist.

In plain English, the entire book is nothing but "guilt by association", although positive "guilt", since Magee seems to like the idea that George Wilhelm Friedrich was a Magus. Personally, I don't care either way. I just don't think the case is compelling enough.

I don't doubt that there are similarities between Hegel and Hermeticism (or Gnosticism, if you like). That Hegel studied Jacob Böhme is, of course, uncontestable. He also studied Master Eckhart. Hegel's idea that God needs to create the world in order to realize himself, and that he realizes himself through man, sounds "pretty old hat" to all students of mysticism. So far so good. But is that the end of story?

Hegel's innovation was to claim that God (the World-Spirit) realizes itself through history, and necessarily embodies itself in human cultures and institutions. This historical perspective seems to be lacking from Schelling, for whom Nature was God's embodiment, and it doesn't seem to exist within the Hermetical tradition either, where the individual magus rises himself above everything else, including history. Magee has managed to find only two examples of Hermeticists with some kind of historical perspective, Isaac Luria and Joachim of Fiore, but it's difficult to see any real similarity between their apocalypticism (obviously derived from the Bible) and Hegel's evolutionary perspective.

Why was Marx able to "turn Hegel on his feet"? How could Hegelianism ever be given a secular, left-wing interpretation? Were the left-Hegelians raving mad? I don't think so. When Hegel claimed that the Weltgeist necessarily embodied itself in human institutions with a history, the question automatically arised, what on earth this "World Spirit" could possibly *be*? Isn't it simply a more superstitious, Romantic, pantheistic word for the historical process itself? A historical process propelled forward by *human* spirit? It was Hegel's "grounding" of the Weltgeist that made it possible for the left-Hegelians and Marxists to hi-jack his philosophy. Had Hegel simply said the same thing as Böhme, Schelling or Baader, this would have been impossible!

In other words, Hegel wasn't simply a student of Böhme, and absolutely not an "initiate". He was an innovator, who (dialectically?) pointed forward, to a very different philosophy.

Dreams of a spirit-seer

"Schelling and Swedenborg" is a scholarly monograph on the influence of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg on the German philosopher Schelling.

Before reading this work, I assumed that Schelling was a boring, bland pantheist with a Romantic crush on "nature" (read meadows, hills or something to that effect). In reality, of course, Schelling was a sophisticated thinker who constantly straddled the border between philosophy proper and theology. Eventually, he came to accept the existence of a spirit-world and even a kind of personal God whose highest revelation was "Johannine" Christinianity. For good or for worse, Schelling was strongly inspired by the Gnostic speculations of Jacob Böhme, something he shared with other Romantic thinkers as well. And then, he studied Swedenborg.

The author, Friedemann Horn, seems to be either a Swedenborgian himself, or some kind of sympathetic fellow traveller. He mentions both similarities and differences between Schelling and the "seer of the North". Schelling accepted Swedenborg's idea of spiritual corporeality. I admit that I don't quite understand this notion, but Schelling's point seems to be that spirits aren't a kind of abstract "ideas" or disembodied entities implying complete dualism between spirit and matter. Rather, spirits are in some sense "material" and hence very real, keeping their earthly personalities intact. At death, humans only shed the grossest, physical part of the body - a spiritualized body survives as a vehicle for the immortal soul. (Perhaps he had in mind what others would later call "the astral body"?)

Schelling was also interested in Swedenborg's ideas about heavenly marriage. Swedenborg apparently believed that spouses would be re-united in the spirit-world and continue to live there as husband and wife. Schelling had personal, psychological reasons for embracing both a very concrete personal immortality and heavenly marriage after the death of his beloved wife Caroline.

Other Swedenborgian notions discussed by Schelling include the theory of correspondences, Christology and eschatology. Interestingly, however, Schelling rejected Swedenborg's allegorical view of the apocalypse and resurrection in favour of a more "orthodox" position.

The book also contain more disturbing information, but not about Schelling. Apparently, both Schelling and Franz von Baader believed in a quite literal spirit-world, but Baader took the thing a bit too far, even carrying out bizarre experiments on his own daughter, whom he regarded as demon-possesed! Schelling started to avoid the Baader household after this. (Note that Baader was a well known and important intellectual and political figure in his native Bavaria!)

Obviously, I did some further reading on Schelling after digesting this book! What struck me is that Schelling accepted ideas that were decidedly non-philosophical. How do you philosophically "deduce" the spiritual corporeality of dead people? There seems to have been a tension in Schelling between a genuine religious longing, and demands of a strict philosophical Systeme. His rival Hegel strikes me as a very different kind of person!

"Schelling and Swedenborg" is a very specialized, in-house kind of book. Frankly, it *is* somewhat boring. Nor does it contain any sensational revelations, at least not if Schelling's intellectual evolution is taken into account. I mean, why shouldn't Schelling have read Swedenborg? Still, Horn's book could be of some interest to students of philosophy, theology and theosophy.

Perhaps F.W.J. Schelling at bottom wanted to be...a spirit-seer.