Schelling, seine Bedeutung für eine Philosophie der Natur und der Geschichte: Referate und Kolloquien der Internationalen Schelling-Tagung, Zürich, 1979 [Book Review]

This volume contains the papers delivered at the International Schelling Conference in Zürich, 1979, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Schelling’s death. The theme of the conference, as enunciated by the editor, was “taking Schelling seriously.” It is Hasler’s view that our age, which has learned by experience that both idealism and materialism are dead-end world-views, has much to learn from the philosopher who early in his career insisted that the human is just as much a natural being as a spiritual one, and who late in his career attempted to make human freedom the determinative power in history, both on a human and on a cosmic scale. Accordingly, the conference was organized around two themes, nature and history, and was divided into three colloquia, the first considering Schelling’s early philosophy of nature, its relation to empirical science, and its philosophical significance. The second colloquium considered the large theme of Schelling’s view of history, and discovered three crucial transitions in his career-long meditation on that theme, a turn from the interpretation of freedom as human reason to a scheme wherein freedom pertains to divine history, the territory of mythology and revelation, a turn from an idealistic approach to history towards a materialistic one, and a general transition from absolute philosophy to a philosophy of finitude. A third colloquium, devoted to Schelling’s political philosophy, confined itself to the period of his collaboration with Hegel in Jena. While Hasler acknowledges the superiority of Hegel’s political philosophy, especially in his concrete grasp of economics, jurisprudence and politics, he notes that both philosophers entered upon the path of philosophy through their respective attempts to criticize religion as an ideological power. I will mention here only those articles which state new views in Schelling scholarship or which would be particularly of interest to students of Hegel.