The Ages of the World (1811)

F. W. J. Schelling, Joseph P. Lawrence

Description

In 1810, after establishing a reputation as Europe's most prolific philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling embarked on his most ambitious project, The Ages of the World. For over a decade he produced multiple drafts of the work before finally conceding its failure, a "failure" in which Heidegger, Jaspers, Voegelin, and many others have discerned a pivotal moment in the history of philosophy. Slavoj Žižek calls this text the "vanishing mediator," the project that, even while withheld and concealed from view, connects the epoch of classical metaphysics that stretches from Plato to Hegel with the post-metaphysical thinking that began with Marx and Kierkegaard. Although drafts of the second and third versions from 1813 and 1815 have long been available in English, this translation by Joseph P. Lawrence is the first of the initial 1811 text. In his introductory essay, Lawrence argues for the importance of this first version of the work as the one that reveals the full sweep of Schelling's intended project, and he explains its significance for concerns in modern science, history, and religion.
Translator's Introduction: The Ecstasy of Freedom

1. The Ages of the World (1811) Introduction

2. The Ages of the World (1811) Book One: The Past
Part One
Part Two

3. Notes and Fragments: To the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past

4. Notes and Fragments: To the Second Book of The Ages of the World: The Present

Glossary
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of religion

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438474076
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Ages of the World
(1811)
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
The Ages of the World
Book One: The Past
(Original Version, 1811)
Plus Supplementary Fragments, Including a Fragment from Book Two (the Present) along with a Fleeting Glimpse into the Future
F. W. J. Schelling
Translated and with an Introduction by
Joseph P. Lawrence
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854, author. | Lawrence, Joseph P., 1952– translator, writer of introduction.
Title: The ages of the world : Book one : the past (original version, 1811) plus supplementary fragments (1811–1813), including a fragment from Book two (the present) along with a fleeting glimpse into the future / F. W. J. Schelling ; translated and with an introduction by Joseph P. Lawrence.
Other titles: Weltalter. English
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027704 | ISBN 9781438474052 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474076 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ontology.
Classification: LCC B2894.W42 E5 2019 | DDC 193—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027704
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Monument for Auguste Böhmer, 1814 (based on a design of F. W. J. Schelling dated April 25, 1811)
Contents
Translator’s Introduction: The Ecstasy of Freedom
1. The Ages of the World (1811) Introduction
2. The Ages of the World (1811) Book One: The Past
Part One
Part Two
3. Notes and Fragments: To the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past
4. Notes and Fragments: To the Second Book of The Ages of the World: The Present
Glossary
Index
Translator’s Introduction
The Ecstasy of Freedom
And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because they don’t need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart.
—William Faulkner, Go Down Moses
I.
In the twelfth chapter of Book XI of the Confessions , Saint Augustine famously referred to a jester who, when asked, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” replied facetiously, “he was preparing hell for those who dare to ask such questions.” Given that The Ages of the World ( Die Weltalter ) did dare to ask the question, one might consider the morass into which Schelling subsequently sank, in which he spent many years writing and rewriting a text that he never deemed publishable, as evidence that the jester was wiser than Augustine realized. There are certain questions, we are told often enough, that philosophy is not supposed to explore. Believing positivists and atheists say this just as decisively as do believing Christians—and for many of the same reasons. One wants to know, after all, what one thinks one knows, so much so that even philosophers find themselves unsettled by questioning that is truly radical. The fact that the Weltalter ended in failure might suggest that Schelling’s hubris was punished just as Augustine’s jester said it should be. If his goal was to show how primal nature could give birth to a self that actually merits the lofty title of “God,” he failed to accomplish it, try as he might. Imagining the contractions through which God was to give birth to himself was simply too much to bear: “For man helps man; even God helps him. But nothing can assist the primal being, lost in its terrifying solitude. It has no choice but to fight through its chaotic condition alone and by itself ” (WA 43). 1
This, the image of a not-yet God himself undergoing hell, represents the only possible solution to the problem of why God would allow so much suffering in the world. To the degree that we are where God was , the affirmation of our need to suffer is a function of God’s own self-affirmation. 2 The idea is coherent and, well understood, grants genuine solace (why would one ever want to pray to a god so “perfect” as to be incapable of empathy?). Even so, applied to the Father, it has consistently been rejected as heretical—despite the fact that the purported Son of God (and “no one can know the Father except through the Son”) was himself horrifically crucified, abandoned in his time of greatest need, and cast into hell. If Christianity has had to declare the very heart of Christianity heretical, it is presumably because its truth is too heavy to bear. Schelling’s great accomplishment is that, in an effort to philosophically ground a Christianity that would finally be Christian, he actually took the burden of such truth on himself.
Eighteen-eleven was the year of his solitude, when, still in mourning after the death of his wife Caroline, he completed his first version of a text that he was condemned to write and rewrite for much of the following decade. It is in many respects the strangest version of what has always been regarded as a strange project: an exploration of the primordial past, the disclosure of the hell that God had to climb out of in order first to become God, a hell that those any less than divine still have to struggle with. 3 What makes this version stranger than the later versions is that, unique among philosophical texts, it seems to have been written solely from the heart, and, just as those ancient scriptures that Faulkner calls “His Book,” written for the heart. It is the work of a man in deep sorrow who expresses his hope that the anger and hatred so generally evoked by suffering can be transformed into compassion and love. Not that the text is void of argument or logic. Indeed, it represents Schelling’s first clearly stated intent to develop a logic of his own. 4 But what a strange logic, one that ties the very act of predication to the mysteries of the dark ground, whereby “x is y” really means, “that which is x is that which is y.” Sheared of predicates of its own, the ground of unity (“that which is”) is ensnared in darkness, where it is mysteriously joined to the heart. To speak (or sing) 5 its truth is to lighten its burden through “the generation of sound and meaning out of an interior so full that it can no longer remain in itself ” (WA 57).
Many commentators have referred to the Weltalter not simply as a failure, but as the most spectacular failure in the history of philosophy. It is easy to see why. In 1810, after having earned the title of Europe’s most prolific philosopher, Schelling began working on the project, which he conceived as his magnum opus, to be delivered in three separate books, The Past , The Present , and The Future . He initially planned to have the work published in its entirety by Easter 1812, a date chosen to signal that his book about time is always also a book about the mysterious dialectic of death and resurrection that makes time possible. By Easter of the previous year, it appeared that he was well on schedule, having asked his publisher to set into print the version of The Past found here. During the interim, while the publisher did the hard work of deciphering Schelling’s handwritten manuscript and setting the type for the printing, Schelling began work on The Present (a sizable fragment of which is included in this volume). Unfortunately, apparently while working on the corrections of his proofs, he decided to rescind the publication and start over from the beginning. It was a pattern that kept recurring for the rest of the decade. During the same years that Hegel, his erstwhile friend and collaborator, was fast gaining renown, Schelling remained stuck on the first of his three books, quite as if he himself had become ensnared in the great revolving wheel of the past that he struggled to depict. According to Horst Fuhrmans, one of the few scholars to have completed a thorough examination of both of the Schelling archives (in Munich and Berlin), some twenty completely different drafts of The Past could be found, together with scores of scattered fragments. 6 What they all attempted to disclose was, mythically construed, the history of God’s becoming. Forged in the painful contractions of primordial nature, god-Cronus, driven by alternating waves of fear and greed, devours his children. But when the gentle son steps forth, even old Cronus becomes gentle (and for the first time truly the Father), 7 affirming the world in what we still celebrate as the act of creation. Philosophically construed, what Schelling was looking for was a compelling alternative to the mechanical conception of time as something stretched out into infinity, with neither beginning nor end. His purpose in illuminating the abyss of the past was to uncover the origin of time itself. In the same way, his projected goal for a third book on the absolute future, one that he never even started to write, was to reveal the end of all things: time so fully articulated that it would serve as a mirror for the lucid purity of eternity. Caught between these poles is, of course, the world we now experience, the subject of what was to have been hi