„Time as the Temporalization of a Promising Future in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy“, aus: Zeit und Gott. Mythos und Logos der Zeit im Anschluss an Hegel und Schelling, Paderborn 2008.
Translated into English by Oliver Wieters, 7 February 2022
Excerpt
V. Time as the Temporalization of a Promising Future in Schelling’s Positive Philosophy
Gemälde von Joseph Karl Stieler, 1835
1 The Question of the Saving God as the Pivot of Schelling’s Philosophy
At the end of the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy (Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie), Schelling makes the following remark regarding Hegel:
For the Contemplative Science leads only to the God who is end, therefore, not the real one, only to that which is God in its essence, not to the actual one. With this merely conceptual (ideelle) God, the I would about then be able to calm down if it could remain in contemplative life.
The „conceptual God“ (XI, 569) as the result of the „Negative“ Philosophy is the God of „Contemplative Science“, i.e., the God of the philosophers and, with reference to the text of the Philosophy of Revelation (Philosophie der Offenbarung, PhdO), the God of the mysteries. He is not the living God who is able to save, but the God of human thought or human self-insurance. He is not the God who delivers from death and the effects of the human Fall of Man, i.e., the evil; He rather veils both death and the reality of evil. The starting point of Schelling’s problem indicated here is expressed very insistently in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Revelation (Einleitung in die Philosophie der Offenbarung):
For when I consider the deeds and effects of this freedom on a large scale […] this world of history presents such a desolate spectacle that I completely despair of a purpose, and, therefore, of a true reason for the world. […] It is precisely he, man, who drives me to the last desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?
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