First Outline of a System of Theory: Schelling and the Margins of Philosophy, 1799-1815 (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling) (Critical Essay‪)‬

1. Knowledge, Fluidity, Theory NATURE, SCHELLING WRITES IN AGES OF THE WORLD (1815), "IS AN ABYSS of the past" (31). (1) Or as Hegel says, in work begun at Jena when he was still close to Schelling, nature is "an alien existence in which Spirit does not find itself," "the Idea in the form of otherness," as "the negative of itself" (3, 13). (2) Schelling's phrase enigmatically conjoins discourses that are foreign to each other: nature, history, and ontology. What results is not natural science, or Natur-philosophie, a science fiction in which nature and spirit find themselves rather than being estranged in each other. One could call it "physiogony," a term used by Coleridge and his follower J. H. Green. Green defines physiogony as a "history of nature" which, as "preface and portion of the history of man," makes the "knowledge of nature" a "branch of self-knowledge" and a part of the history of self-consciousness. (3) As physiogony, Ages would be an attempt at historiography: a genre in which it has been placed by claims that Schelling "invented dialectical materialism." (4) But if Ages aims at a theory of history, it is not history in the anthropological sense intended by Green. Instead, refusing to make the transition from nature to freedom, Schelling offers a psychoanalysis of history through nature, as an "alien existence in which Spirit does not find itself." Or, if as a history of self-consciousness the text should be considered philosophy, it is a history of Being in its historicity that results in a psychoanalysis of philosophy.