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Schelling and the Future of God

2014; Brill; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

1918-7351

Jason M. Wirth,

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel

It seems, at least largely among the world’s educated, that Nietzsche’s prognosis of the death of God is coming to pass. Not only is belief in a transcendent being or a grand, supremely real being (ens realissimum) waning, but also the philosophical grounds that made such objects in any way intelligible are collapsing. In such a situation, despite the recent and quite scintillating renaissance of serious interest in Schelling’s philosophy, his various discourses on the Godhead (die Gottheit) are generally ignored, perhaps with mild embarrassment. For better or worse, however, what Schelling understood by the Godhead and even by religion has little in common with prevailing theistic traditions. Schelling did not take advantage of the great ontological lacuna that opened up with the demise of dogmatism in critical philosophy after Kant to insist on an irrational belief in a God that was no longer subject to rational demonstration. Schelling eschews all dogmatic thought, but does not therefore partake in its alternative: the reduction of all thought regarding the absolute to irrational beliefs in (or rational gambles on) the existence of God and other such absolutes. As Quentin Meillassoux has shown, “by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious.” 1 This gives rise to the reduction of religion and antireligion to fideism. Since both theism and atheism purport to believe in a rationally unsupportable absolute position, they are both symptoms of the return of the religious. In its return, however, such religion is as vague as the opening that permits it. Shorn of rituals or specific theological commitments, we speak in murky and suggestive terms of the “divine,” the “mystery,” etc. Schelling was not and is not a religious reactionary, demanding a return to a dogmatic God at the very moment in which we are finally done with God. Nor was he trying to sneak God back into the conversation amid the collapse of all rationally defensible knowledge of the absolute, repackaging everything as beliefs or practical postulates. In fact, as Schelling complained to Hegel in a letter