Marcela Garcia

This article considers the way in which Schelling’s late philosophy implies a re-evaluation of the broader project of German idealism. Schelling’s last negative philosophy (in the Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie) is designed as a purely rational science which must exhaust itself. Schelling recurs to Kant to both show the indispensability of the purely rational endeavour and at the same time reveal what is excluded from that project. In this sense, Schelling’s last negative philosophy implies a re-framing of his own early philosophy and of the broader project of post-Kantian German idealism. Specifically, Schelling’s late reading of Kant’s transcendental Ideal sheds light on Schelling’s re-framing of the project of a science of pure reason and illuminates how Schelling’s late system, with its transition from negative to positive philosophy, does not reject the unity of thinking and being, but radically transforms it.

Schelling’s late philosophy is characterized by its division of philosophy into a “negative” and a “positive” approach. After developing positive philosophy, Schelling goes back in his last work (Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie) to a negative philosophy that is to play a critical role within Schelling’s late system by showing pure rationally the limits of pure reason. This critical task requires the failure and crisis of negative philosophy. In the article, I show why Schelling understands his late negative project as a radicalization of Kantian criticism, undertaken by recourse to Aristotle and his notion of actuality. By taking the Aristotelian inspiration into account, I propose a new way of understanding two problems of Schelling scholarship: the need for a late negative philosophy, and the problem of the transition from negative into positive philosophy