Schelling and Parallels to Fall From Grace Myths

[Jiva]

It truly has certain resemblances to Nietzsche. It was already Heidegger who thought Schelling as a kind of pre-Nietzsche. Also Nietzsche´s distinction of appolonic and dionysian has some connections to Schelling´s will of the ground and will of love. Yet Nietzsche is a strict atheist while Schelling´s main point is to save religious intellectual thinking. Nietzsche is also an extreme relativist, while Schelling, although a kind of perspectivist too, does believe in absolute truth. Unsystematically it could be said that Nietzsche aimed beyond good and evil but Schelling tried to conceive "good beyond good and evil".

While Nietzsche may have been an atheist, I don't think he intended to destroy religious methods of thinking as he mentions “Brahminism” and Islamic philosophy quite favourably. Nietzsche also accepted there was some determinism based on our biology and inherited terminology and concepts, similar to Wittgenstein's later and much more detailed analysis.

Perhaps Nietzsche's hated pseudo-scientific constructs could be seen as explorations aiming for a state roughly analogous to absolute truth beyond good and evil. Although, as far as I can tell, Nietzsche viewed this as a cumulative evolutionary concept rather than an individual psychological possibility.

I recently started reading Slavoj Žižek's The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, so when I've finished it I can provide a review/summary if anyone is interested. I'm not sure how much I'll understand as Žižek refers to a variety of philosophers and psychologists I've never read (especially Lacan), but I can give it a go. I've only read the first 20 or so pages, but Žižek has already quoted the section Noesis quoted .

Žižek has also quoted from Schelling's Die Weltalter/The Ages of the World which I haven't read. However, a section that has been referenced referred to a contraction of god as the beginning of creation, which is basically identical to the Tzimtzum of the Kabbalah.

[Wyrmfang]

I recently started reading Slavoj Žižek's The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, so when I've finished it I can provide a review/summary if anyone is interested. I'm not sure how much I'll understand as Žižek refers to a variety of philosophers and psychologists I've never read (especially Lacan), but I can give it a go.

I would be interested to hear your summary once you have finished the book. Personally I found it very difficult, and it is one of the very few books in recent years I never finished. Zizek is one of those irritating thinkers who truly have a lot to say but are so famous that they don´t bother to express their points in a dense and clear manner.

[Jiva]

Well, I read through Žižek's book and found it very hard too, especially the second section which dragged on for what seemed like an age.

The first and second section seemed to be an attempt to retrofit the three stages of Schelling's philosophy into a Lacanian template. As I've never read any Lacan (aside from Wikipedia pages) my ability to provide a summary here is significantly hampered, but I viewed it as an attempt to impose an insurmountable duality onto Schelling's non-dualistic philosophy. However, some parts is simply couldn't understand, while other parts unnecessarily complicated matters I already understood. The large variety of references Žižek utilises doesn't help either as to explore them all would take months and probably years.

What is also noticeable later on is an artificial separation Žižek constructs between the modern and pre-modern eras, as if both stages of Western civilisation had minimal interaction with each other. I think this attitude is most pronounced in the third section when Žižek seems to indirectly equate “eastern philosophy” with a stereotype of hippy New Age beliefs: a simple union of the male and female principles. In doing so he also accuses Jungian psychology of being an impotent regression to these irrational pre-modern beliefs. While criticising Jung's negative opinion of the modern era is valid in my opinion, reducing Jungian psychology, “eastern philosophy” and pre-modern beliefs to such a simplistic and ultimately largely erroneous stereotype is disingenuous. I see them as talking about similar ideals, just with a different language.

However, while these are pretty serious cons, there are a lot of pros too. In analysing Schelling from a more personal point of view, Žižek brings Schelling's philosophy even closer to psychology after Kant and the Enlightenment effectively split the two subjects. In my opinion this analysis also contradicts another of Žižek's criticisms of Jung: that he equates the microcosm with the macrocosm. Nevertheless it is still interesting, particularly when it is extended to political beliefs such as Marxism, Fascism and democracy. Naturally, Žižek interprets the proposed palingeneses of Marxism and Fascism differently: progression for the former, impotent regression for the latter. It seems that this would make sense according to Schelling's third stage of philosophy as presented by Žižek.

The third section on quantum physics was fascinating for me, particularly Žižek's interpretation of the double-slit experiment, as this is probably one of the most important problems/ideas I've ever read about. In fact, this section is where Žižek presents ideas that approach the occult: that the original symmetry of the universe is broken when things come into being and also that a regression/descension to this original state is impossible. However, he never really approaches the occult idea of progression/ascension.

An odd paradox of the book is that Žižek is more understandable when he is talking about subjects he presumably isn't as educated in. For example, the sections where Schelling is discussed in isolation or when Schelling is discussed with quantum physics are easily the most coherent. It is only when Lacan and a huge range of other disparate sources are analysed in conjunction with Schelling or each other that the book becomes incoherent.