Sean McGrath

This Handbook provides a comprehensive, multi-authored study of Schelling’s thought, its context, and its enormous influence. Divided into four major sections (‘Periods,’ ‘Themes,’ ‘Figures and the History of Philosophy’, and ‘Reception and Legacy’), it is a well-structured guide to Schelling’s work and the ways in which it relates to other thinkers and movements. Key features: Links Schelling to the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, and theology Offers a systematic overview of a thinker whose thought evolved through three main periods Explores the importance of Schelling in the development of German idealism more broadly Updates the English-speaking academic community with current German research on Schelling Responding to Schelling’s renewed scholarly prominence, The Palgrave Schelling Handbook provides a contemporary and authoritative re-consideration of his thought. Within its pages, scholars and researchers will find avenues and inspiration for new work in areas that have been previously underrepresented in Schelling studies. The Palgrave Schelling Handbook is the ideal reference work for advanced philosophy and theology students taking courses on Schelling or German idealism. It will have wide, general appeal to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, political theory, and German studies.

The papers in the following volume are the outcome of a three-year long interdisciplinary research project. The project began with an in-person meeting hosted and funded by the Daimler und Benz Stiftung in Germany in March 2020 (the world was shutting down one nation at a time as we met). During the pandemic we continued to meet monthly online with support from Memorial University of Newfoundland. From the beginning it was the goal of the Working Group on Intelligence (WGI), as we called ourselves, to broaden and deepen the AI debate with a more nuanced understanding of intelligence than is common in cognitive and computer science discussions of AI. We wished to draw on the history of philosophy, ecology, and the philosophy of mind to establish that intelligence is meant in many senses, to use an Aristotelian expression. The clarification of these various meanings is essential to the discussion around the ethics of AI, especially the question concerning the possibility of strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence.

The current hype around AI (machines that can speak and write without thought) shall be taken as an occasion to reflect upon the forgetting of the primordial symbol in late modernity. The primordial symbol, otherwise known as the vague concept (Pierce), is expressive rather than pragmatic, communal rather than private, and productive of sense rather than restricted to a position in a pre-established “chain of signifiers”. Because the development of science and technology depended upon the institution of systems of conventional symbols—clearly defined, ideally univocal, and unvarying or context-free, we have come to forget that primordial symbols are not deteriorated concepts or mere figures of speech; rather they are the very origin of human thinking. In this paper, I shall track the history of this distinction between primordial and conventional symbols as it develops into a minor literature in modern philosophy. I shall have occasion to reference Herder, Schelling, Cassirer, Ricoeur, and Taylor in the course of making the case for remembering the primordial symbol and with it the primacy of the aesthetic, the mythic, and metaphoric over the discursive, the logical, and the scientific.

This paper explores the possible therapeutical applications of Schellingian psychological principles. A Schellingian analysis would enable us to retrieve the largely forgotten heritage of Romantic psychiatry, in particular the dissociationist model of the psyche, which was strategically rejected by Freud and somewhat clumsily revised by Jung, but which has its own intelligibility and applicability. Schellingian analysis would be dissociationist rather than repressivist, and would depart from Freud and Jung in being both a metaphysical and a moral therapy. But the open-ended eschatological nature of the model of the psyche employed would prevent the therapy from dogmatizing or moralizing the inner life of the analysand.

Drawing an analogy with Kant, Carman argues that Being and Time is a transcendental analytic of the hermeneutic conditions of the possibility of intelligible experience. In defense of this thesis Carman makes a well-stated case for the implementation of the phenomenological attitude in the philosophy of mind. Against thinkers like Daniel Dennett, who insist on interpreting consciousness as a thing among things, Carman argues that intentionality, the defining feature of consciousness, can be properly accessed only as it shows itself, that is, from within intentional experience itself. This leads to a solid critique of contemporary analytic interpretations of intentionality, whether objectivistic or subjectivistic. Intentionality is neither objectively explicable nor merely subjective; the phenomenon shows the inadequacy of the objective/subjective distinction. This, according to Carman, is the main contribution of Being and Time: intentionality is only possible on the grounds of an a priori belonging to the world. Being and Time’s archeology of the “situatedness” of understanding breaks with Husserl’s naive Cartesian approach to consciousness, for it shows how the human being always understands things in historical contexts: first, the pragmatic contexts of everyday human activities; second, the social contexts of received beliefs and interpretations. It follows that the analytic of Dasein is utterly unlike the investigation of any natural phenomenon; it requires a sensitivity to historicity typically foreign to metaphysics.

The early Schelling and the romantics constructed the unconscious in order to overcome the modern split between subjectivity and nature, mind and body, a split legislated by Cartesian representationalism. Influenced by Boehme and Kabbalah, the later Schelling modified his notion of the unconscious to include the decision to be oneself, which must sink beneath consciousness so that it might serve as the ground of one’s creative and personal acts. Slavoj Zizek has read the later Schelling’s unconscious as a prototype of Lacan’s reactive unconscious, an unconscious that only exists as the excluded other of consciousness. This reading, though close to the text of Schelling, misses something essential: the unconscious for Schelling is not a repression but a condition of the possibility of life and love.