Schelling’s beginnings

Abstract

The present essay pretends to trace the effort made by Schelling to rewrite the history of the ideal by introducing a prehistory of the real as a brute may-be prior not only to conceptual thinking, to the unity of consciousness and the history of man, but prior to both being and the being of God. Schelling’s monotheism translates into a philosophical monism partly inspired by the rediscovery within German idealism of Aristotelian dynamics. Above all is the One, and in the beginning was the word; but whereas the One is simple indifference, the word is a complex thing, an act of identity here understood as a unity reconciling what was formerly torn apart. As a unity, which, exterior-wise, is wholly one, identity presents an icon of the original model, but as an interior-wise split unity (A=A), it bears witness of time. Thus, if we consider the origin as oneness, and the actual beginning as identity, a division must have occurred in between. Schelling’s conclusion mirrors the above-mentioned proposal: in the actual beginning was identity because in a potential pre-beginning was difference. From eternal indiffe- rence to recreated eternity, and in between time.