Schelling on the history of philosophy as the philosophy of nature: From time immemorial the most ordinary people have refuted the greatest philosophers with things understandable even to children and striplings. One hears, reads, and marvels that such common things were unknown to such great men and that people admittedly so insignificant could master them. It does not occur to anybody that perhaps the philosophers were also aware of all that; for how else could they have swum against the stream of evidence? Many are convinced that Plato, if he could only have read Locke, would have gone off ashamed; many a one believes that even Leibniz, if he arose from the dead to go to school for an hour with him, would be converted, and how many greenhorns have not sung triumphal songs over Spinozas grave? What was it, then, you ask, that drove all these men to forsake the common ways of thinking of their age and to invent systems opposed to everything that the great mass of people have always believed and imagined? It was a free inspiration, which elevated them into a sphere where you no longer even understand their task, while on the other hand many things become inconceivable to them, which seem very simple and understandable to you. It was impossible, for them, to join and bring into contact things which, in you, Nature and mechanism have always united. They were also unable to deny the world outside them, or that there was a mind within them, and yet there appeared to be no possible connection between the two. To you, if you ever think about these problems, there can be no question of converting the world into a play of concepts, or the mind within you into a dead mirror of things. Long since, the human spirit (still youthful, vigorous and fresh from the gods) had lost itself in mythology and poetic fictions about the origin of the world. The religions of entire peoples were founded on that conflict between spirit and matter, before a happy genius--the first philosopher--discovered the concepts in which all succeeding ages grasped and held firm both ends of our knowledge. The greatest thinkers among the ancients did not venture beyond this contradiction. Plato still sets matter, as an other, over against God. The first who, with complete clarity, saw mind and matter as one, thought and extension simply as modification of the same principle, was Spinoza. His system was the first bold outline of a creative imagination, which conceived the finite immediately in the idea of the infinite, purely as such, and recognized the former only in the latter. Leibniz came, and went the opposite way. The time has come when his philosophy can be re-established...He had in himself the universal spirit of the world, which reveals itself in the most manifold forms; and where it enters, life expands. -Schelling from page 15 of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (2nd ed. 1803). books.google/books/about/Ideas_for_a_Philosophy_of_Nature.html?id=LivpadBub8AC
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 07:57:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015