r0b’s Reviews > The History of Continental Philosophy > Status Update

...but to a philosophy that opens itself to history and transformation.’

‘Thinkers such as Bakunin, Burckhardt, Engels, Feuerbach, Humboldt, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Ranke were unified in rejecting Schelling’s dark theolo- gizing. At the same time, they absorbed his implicit materialism, internalized his critique of Hegel, and understood this much of his distinction between “negative philosophy” and “positive philosophy”: the future belongs not to the philosophy of the concept, but to...

‘While Schelling is often presented as if he simply shifted his attention away from nature to the realm of freedom, nothing could be further from the truth. As has been emphasized already, his concern was not simply to think through the possibility of freedom, but to understand that freedom in its finitude – as a specifically human freedom.’

...difficult and yet most characteristic thought: the barbaric principle of nature must itself be comprehended as something contained within God, as the ground of his very possibility.’

‘Behind the cheerful Neoplatonist lurks the tormented Gnostic. If the Aristotelian God is lost in repose, then the God of this universe is something – or someone – else entirely. If nature, contained in God, is the holy and the beautiful, then that same nature, cast forth from God, is the horrific. This thought, shattering enough in itself is merely the prelude for Schelling’s most difficult and yet most...

...and most impressive blossoming of Neoplatonism in the history of Western thought.’

‘...the “night in which all cows are black” has to be read in light of the fact that the system [Hegel] ridicules is one he initially shared with Schelling. Indeed, the very phrase he used had been coined by Schelling, in order to indicate that identity is so far from being a “black night” that it contains within it the full dynamism of nature and spirit. It [Schelling’s system] represents, moreover, the final and...

...It represents, moreover, the final and most impressive blossoming of Neoplatonism in the history of Western thought.’

‘...the “night in which all cows are black” has to be read in light of the fact that the system he ridicules is one he initially shared with Schelling. Indeed, the very phrase he used had been coined by Schelling, in order to indicate that identity is so far from being a “black night” that it contains within it the full dynamism of nature and spirit. It represents, moreover, the final and most impressive blossoming..

‘Schelling assumes that the universe exists in order to express its primordial productivity by giving birth to life – something that it does over and over, and on the most disparate planets and in the most disparate times.
Two centuries earlier, Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for such ideas.’