Research Seminar: Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics 6/10/2022

Blind force: Christianity is the liberation from blind force, this is what Christ did: he freed
humankind from blind force. But there is blind force, not original sin, but an effect of original
sin. The ancient world is the world in which blind force rules. The Greeks caught this fate.
Things you can’t scape from. Even Gods can’t scape from blind force. If something is
determined by faith, even the gods can’t do anything about it. Myths tell us something about that.
Things come about anyway, even though you try to avoid them. This is what tragedy is made of.
We will see that this is already a late state in Schelling’s philosophy in Philosophy of
Mythology. There’s no solution but an increasing awareness of what one’s world is made of.
This is what happens in Greek art and poetry, mostly in the tragedies. All of this goes away. The
tragic world is the ancient world.

In Christianity this cease to exist as well. This doesn’t mean that evil doesn’t exist anymore, but
it’s different somehow. So, Christ brought this about and one must understand this literally to
understand the history of Christianity.

Reason: Schelling rejects rationalistic approaches to religion, but he also rejects emotivism
(when he mentions Jacobi).

What’s the problem with a rationalistic approach?

Detachment from reality. If it was so, religion would have the same origin as geometry. But this
is not the case. Religion has a fundamental importance in people’s life. People have to take a
stand.

If in pure reason you only have an idea of a perfect reason, out of that very idea no existence
claim would follow. In that respect Schelling agrees with Kant. No a priori proof of the
existence of God can take place. Previous modern philosophies have a purely rationalistic
approach to religion, and Kant was right in criticizing the ontological proof of the existence of
God. In that sense there is no philosophical religion.

Emotivism or Kant’s practical turn are very similar but emphasize a more existential
significance. Feelings can be deceptive. Appeals to feeling don’t establish anything secure in
regard to what caused these feelings. Perhaps one persuades oneself that one had a religious
experience because one had these feelings. Schelling is not convinced by Kant’s practical or
moral approach to religion or to God. That could be a fiction.

Exoteric and esoteric religion in Greek mythology:

Exoteric has to do with the mysteries: hypothetical reconstruction about the mysteries. Cause we
don’t have much information about them.

Historical knowledge and what he emphasizes is the irreducible nature of history. The
contingency of history that cannot be reduced to an a priori theory. So, there might be historical
necessity (and there are many historical necessities according to Schelling), but they are of a
different nature than rational necessities. This is also an answer to the question about Schelling’s
difference in relation to Hegel, that is, Christianity’s irreducible historicity. If you don’t
understand Christ, you don’t understand history at all. Results in a distorted rationalistic view of
history. He wants to salvage freedom from this logical/rationalistic necessity. If there’s freedom,
there will be contingency. Everything is post hoc: you have the fact first and then you can go
back to it and interpret it. Even creation was not done through necessity, for it was God’s free
decision. There can’t be no a priori account of creation. God’s goodness didn’t make creation
necessary.

Mediation is an indeterminate concept here, not the Hegelian dialectic concept. It’s not in the
rationalistic fashion.

Methodology: purely rational philosophy as the grounding of his investigation. This will
eventually lead to the doctrine of monotheism. This is the way he will start. But then he will be
testing his rationalistic/negative approach with documents of religious history. Already
philosophy of mythology is positive, has to do with positive philosophy. He has to contrast the
rationalistic and logical affirmations with reality, with history, with documents. He needs
empirical confirmation. Big issues: interplay between negative and positive philosophies.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presentations:
The presentations of both the 17/11 and 24/11 on the set of lectures have to be based on the
ideas, questions, problems, concepts, interesting things, that come up to me when reading the
text. I can choose the approach; I can choose on which areas of the text I wish to focus on and
talk about.

Texts based on the presentations:

Write a summary of the presentation based on my reading and the discussion following the
presentations. That way I can discard questions or problems that maybe are not as relevant as
previously thought; or insight from classmates and professor might allow me to view different
perspectives that I had not considered before. For these summaries I don’t need to use secondary
bibliography.

Text formalities:
The summary for each presentation should be between 300-500 words. So, between 1 side or 2
sides of a page each. I can hand in both summaries as a single text within one week after the
second presentation on the 24/11.

Course requirements + Final Paper

Having completed these tasks, I will have fulfilled the requirements of the Research Seminar for
this semester. I will only be missing the third text/presentation which will be about the outline of
my final paper. My final paper can be about the topics I work on in the assigned lectures. In this
case, I must use some secondary bibliography.