Schelling and The Ages of the World
Introduces the most fragmentary and neglected of Schelling’s works without losing sight of a crucial philosophical question
- Explores a central philosophical question: how do things begin?
- Examines little-known texts from Schelling, a philosopher only growing in importance
- Re-evaluates the trajectory of German philosophy in the nineteenth century
What does it mean for something new to begin? Since antiquity, philosophy has struggled to think about real beginnings without reducing them to continuations, repetitions, or hidden necessities. In Schelling’s Ages of the World, Matthew Nini engages with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s writings from 1809 to 1821, showing how this problem of beginning is both enacted and called into question in Schelling’s unfinished project The Ages of the World.
Often dismissed as an abandoned or failed work, The Ages of the World presents a speculative and mythological account of creation that unfolds across past, present and future, simultaneously reflecting on the temporal structure of human existence. Nini argues that the text’s fragmentary, repetitive and esoteric form is not a weakness, but a philosophical achievement. Precisely by resisting completion, Schelling exposes the limits of conceptual thinking when confronted with the emergence of the new.
By reinterpreting The Ages of the World as a sustained meditation on beginning itself, Nini shows how Schelling transforms failure, incompletion and secrecy into tools for ontological questioning. In doing so, he proposes a new way to think through beginnings and a new, unique approach to philosophy.
Abbreviations
Works by Schelling
Prologue
First Part: Odysseys of Freedom
§ 1. The Turn to the Ideal
§ 2. The Beginning is where System and Freedom are One
§ 3. Identity in the Freedom Essay
§ 4. Excursus. The Origins of Schelling’s Theory of Identity
I. The Plato-Kant Lineage
II. The Leibniz-Ploucquet Lineage
§ 5 The Logic of Ground and the Reimagining of Pantheism
§ 6 The Logic of Ground between the Real and the Ideal
§ 7. The Distinction within God between Ground and That-Which-Exists
§ 8. Ground and Understanding, the Forces behind the Process of Creation
§ 9. Ground and the Possibility of Evil
§10 Actual Evil: no Capacity for God without the Capacity for Evil
§ 11. Universal Evil or Human Evil?
§ 12. The Formal Concept of Freedom
§ 14. The Intelligible Deed and its Problems
§ 15. Redeeming the Intelligible Deed? Two Proposals
§ 16. From One to All: The Internal Development of God
§ 17. The Ungrund
§ 18. Intermezzo: Schelling in Stuttgart
§ 19. The System as the Identity of the Real and the Ideal
§ 20. Excursus: Identity as a Theory of Potencies
Figure 1: The Magnetic Line
§ 21. The First Potency as Contractive Force
§ 22. Seyn and Seyendes
the Quest for Personality
§ 23. Freedom, Potency, and the Temporalization of Logic
§ 24. Madness and the Real
§ 25. Clara: Past, Self and Other
Second Part: The Ages of the World
§ 26. The ‘Grand Ruins’ of the Ages of the World
§ 27. The Philosopher’s Secret: Schelling’s Starting Point
§ 28. The Past: 1811
I. Lucid Purity
II. The Emergence of Two Wills
III. Homeostasis and Palingenesis
IV. Struggle and Rotation
V. The Trinity in Crisis
§ 29. The Past: 1813
I. Lucid Purity, Freedom and Contradiction
II. The Two Wills, Revisited
III. The Play of the Potencies
IV. Separation and Decision
§ 30. The Past: 1815
I. The Eternal Past
II. The Rotation of the Potencies
III. The Free Decision to Begin
IV. Krisis, Time, and the Ecstasy of Existence
V. From Decision to Creation
Figure 2: The World-Formula
VI. The Results of 1815: A Brief Account of the Beginning
§ 31. The Deities of Samothrace
§ 32. Thinking the Beginning for Oneself: The Erlangen ‘Initiation’
§ 33. The Macrocosm as the Subject of the Complete System of Philosophy
§ 34. Knowing, Not-knowing, and Ecstasy
§ 35. Two New Versions of the Potencies
§36. The Absolute and its Nemesis
Inconclusive Postscript: ‘How Deep is the Well of the Past!’
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