The Ages of the World
by
by
Jason M. Wirth (Translator)
BlackOxford's review
it was amazing
bookshelves: favourites, german-language, epistemology-language, philosophy-theology, science The Language of the Heart
The Ages of the World is a great mystical treatise that rates with those of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Meister Eckhart (and Spinoza and Seneca depending upon how one views mysticism). As philosophy, it is a self-acknowledged failure. As a documentary of the agony involved in approaching an experience of unmediated reality, it is probably unsurpassed given the more than 20 versions which Schelling obsessively drafted over decades. He knows throughout his experience of accumulating and expressing knowledge that “knowledge consists only in not-knowing.” What more concise statement of his mystical intent could there be?
But the Ages of the World is also an exit from the genre of religious mysticism and and entry into its modern secular replacement, existentialism.* The transition is painful, primarily because it becomes clear through Schelling that the barrier to an appreciation of reality, which mysticism has always attempted to overcome, is precisely the instrument used by science and philosophy in trying to capture reality and tame it: language itself. This is clear in the subjugation of even being itself to its expression:“Being (das Seyn) as such can never be the one that actually is (das Seyende), but for this reason there is no pure being, no empty objective something that has no trace of anything subjective in it.” In other words, what is must be named in order to be seen to be, but naming robs it of its being - a sort of a generalisation of the future Heisenberg Principle in quantum physics.
Language is a virtual reality in which we hide from the terrors of life outside language. The reality outside language is a frightening darkness whose truth we really do not wish to know. Wirth points out: “The danger science brings with it is its implicit identification of simulated reality with true reality.” Language, including the language of science and philosophy, constructs and controls. It imposes order and allows us to tell ourselves stories about a progressively developing past, and a benignly unfolding future. Language is unlimited power. But language has a crack in its power structure. Through language we become aware of a mode of behaviour - love (apparently defined as the submission of one’s will to the interests of another) - which does not employ power and eliminates fear, so making power unnecessary.
Thus Schelling engages in the obviously paradoxical effort to reveal the true “language of the heart.” This is his personal dialectic of contraction into language and subsequent expansion through its negation. Unity, real being which can be identified by the suffering involved, exists only on that passing moment between one version and the next. He wrote, and rewrote, only to begin again and again but never publishing Ages of the World. How could he publish since the language of the heart had the same impulse to power as any other language? But how could he stop writing when both he and the rest of humanity needed to understand what was at stake?
As the translator notes in his introduction: “The importance of his work was something he so deeply felt that he could only be disappointed, over and over, at his inability to articulate it appropriately.” Schelling had the same problem that the ancient Hebrew prophets had: he couldn’t express what needed to be expressed to an audience who didn’t want to hear what he had to express anyway. His own experience demonstrated the bankruptcy of whatever he had to say. Both he and God were trapped in existence. Although he never quite makes it explicit, God’s existence is language itself so that “nothing can exist outside of God.” God has put himself in the hands (and the mouth) of mankind from whence God controls the existence of Man.
Schelling is a name that represents German Romanticism. But that classification masks the depth of the man’s personal reaction to his own intellect. He had been shaped by the Age of Enlightenment, that period during which constraints placed on language by the Church, civil authority, and traditional philosophy had been largely removed. This meant freedom - of speech, of writing, of ideas. Unless, like Schelling, one pushed the conceits of freedom to demonstrate their real effects. At that point it became clear that it didn’t matter very much who was nominally in charge. Language itself was running the show. Again as his translator notes, “As was already clear to [Schelling] as a boy caught up in the fervor of the French Revolution, the political fantasy that a new world order could be established simply by replacing those in power is just that, a fantasy.”
This is a tragedy, the explanation for which is beyond human comprehension. It can only be expressed in mythical terms. The eternal separation in the Christian Trinity of the Father (contraction) and the Son (expansion) who are mediated by the communicative Spirit of Love is one version. Another is that of language as the eternal god Cronos (later to become the eternally-threatening Time Lord of Dr. Who). Language, that is to say Cronos, is the creator of time as the god struggles with primordial nature to generate his own birth. His children are human beings whom he consumes.** We submit to his demands because he promotes our stories of resurrection and eternal life. It is this dialectic of death and resurrection that maintains Cronos’s power. It is the origin of time as well as of the divine becoming.
So Schelling did not abjure Enlightenment. But he recognised that the freedom it generated for ideas had uncovered yet a more fundamental constraint on human freedom which had a remarkable resemblance to Original Sin. Language is an abyss of unfreedom. We are born into it. And we can do nothing to escape it. We cannot even be alone with ourselves since it mediates between experience and reflection: “there are two beings, one that questions and one that answers,” Schelling says with a mixture of pride in discovery and philosophical regret. The true-believer grasps on to language as firmly as any monk did to his doctrine of the Trinity or courtier to his self-interested commitment to the divine right of kings.
What Schelling offers is not a nostalgic return to the old time religion, but a vague hope that love might in some way undermine Cronos’s structure of power in language in a sort of ecstasy of self-surrender. Such has always been the goal of mystics. And the world does not treat them kindly for it. Neither does Cronos who continues to devour them at breakfast.
* Not to mention an anticipation of Darwinian evolution and the not unlikely poetic inspiration for relativity theory and quantum physics a century in the future.
** It is interesting to note Schelling’s critique of the idea of ‘eternity.’ He recognised it as an oxymoron. On the one hand, if time were not part of Creation, it is by definition God. If it is part of Creation, then it has a beginning. Cronos exists as his own dialectic, language consuming itself. It is appropriate therefore that the Egyptian god Osiris is depicted consuming his own tale. Thoth, the divine inventor of writing assisted in the resurrection of Osiris and the subsequent birth of Horus who is a key figure in the justification of pharaonic power. Christianity cuts through the dialectic with its eternal Word, promoting language itself to divine status. The birth of dogmatic religion and idolatrous faith in language.
The Ages of the World is a great mystical treatise that rates with those of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Meister Eckhart (and Spinoza and Seneca depending upon how one views mysticism). As philosophy, it is a self-acknowledged failure. As a documentary of the agony involved in approaching an experience of unmediated reality, it is probably unsurpassed given the more than 20 versions which Schelling obsessively drafted over decades. He knows throughout his experience of accumulating and expressing knowledge that “knowledge consists only in not-knowing.” What more concise statement of his mystical intent could there be?
But the Ages of the World is also an exit from the genre of religious mysticism and and entry into its modern secular replacement, existentialism.* The transition is painful, primarily because it becomes clear through Schelling that the barrier to an appreciation of reality, which mysticism has always attempted to overcome, is precisely the instrument used by science and philosophy in trying to capture reality and tame it: language itself. This is clear in the subjugation of even being itself to its expression:“Being (das Seyn) as such can never be the one that actually is (das Seyende), but for this reason there is no pure being, no empty objective something that has no trace of anything subjective in it.” In other words, what is must be named in order to be seen to be, but naming robs it of its being - a sort of a generalisation of the future Heisenberg Principle in quantum physics.
Language is a virtual reality in which we hide from the terrors of life outside language. The reality outside language is a frightening darkness whose truth we really do not wish to know. Wirth points out: “The danger science brings with it is its implicit identification of simulated reality with true reality.” Language, including the language of science and philosophy, constructs and controls. It imposes order and allows us to tell ourselves stories about a progressively developing past, and a benignly unfolding future. Language is unlimited power. But language has a crack in its power structure. Through language we become aware of a mode of behaviour - love (apparently defined as the submission of one’s will to the interests of another) - which does not employ power and eliminates fear, so making power unnecessary.
Thus Schelling engages in the obviously paradoxical effort to reveal the true “language of the heart.” This is his personal dialectic of contraction into language and subsequent expansion through its negation. Unity, real being which can be identified by the suffering involved, exists only on that passing moment between one version and the next. He wrote, and rewrote, only to begin again and again but never publishing Ages of the World. How could he publish since the language of the heart had the same impulse to power as any other language? But how could he stop writing when both he and the rest of humanity needed to understand what was at stake?
As the translator notes in his introduction: “The importance of his work was something he so deeply felt that he could only be disappointed, over and over, at his inability to articulate it appropriately.” Schelling had the same problem that the ancient Hebrew prophets had: he couldn’t express what needed to be expressed to an audience who didn’t want to hear what he had to express anyway. His own experience demonstrated the bankruptcy of whatever he had to say. Both he and God were trapped in existence. Although he never quite makes it explicit, God’s existence is language itself so that “nothing can exist outside of God.” God has put himself in the hands (and the mouth) of mankind from whence God controls the existence of Man.
Schelling is a name that represents German Romanticism. But that classification masks the depth of the man’s personal reaction to his own intellect. He had been shaped by the Age of Enlightenment, that period during which constraints placed on language by the Church, civil authority, and traditional philosophy had been largely removed. This meant freedom - of speech, of writing, of ideas. Unless, like Schelling, one pushed the conceits of freedom to demonstrate their real effects. At that point it became clear that it didn’t matter very much who was nominally in charge. Language itself was running the show. Again as his translator notes, “As was already clear to [Schelling] as a boy caught up in the fervor of the French Revolution, the political fantasy that a new world order could be established simply by replacing those in power is just that, a fantasy.”
This is a tragedy, the explanation for which is beyond human comprehension. It can only be expressed in mythical terms. The eternal separation in the Christian Trinity of the Father (contraction) and the Son (expansion) who are mediated by the communicative Spirit of Love is one version. Another is that of language as the eternal god Cronos (later to become the eternally-threatening Time Lord of Dr. Who). Language, that is to say Cronos, is the creator of time as the god struggles with primordial nature to generate his own birth. His children are human beings whom he consumes.** We submit to his demands because he promotes our stories of resurrection and eternal life. It is this dialectic of death and resurrection that maintains Cronos’s power. It is the origin of time as well as of the divine becoming.
So Schelling did not abjure Enlightenment. But he recognised that the freedom it generated for ideas had uncovered yet a more fundamental constraint on human freedom which had a remarkable resemblance to Original Sin. Language is an abyss of unfreedom. We are born into it. And we can do nothing to escape it. We cannot even be alone with ourselves since it mediates between experience and reflection: “there are two beings, one that questions and one that answers,” Schelling says with a mixture of pride in discovery and philosophical regret. The true-believer grasps on to language as firmly as any monk did to his doctrine of the Trinity or courtier to his self-interested commitment to the divine right of kings.
What Schelling offers is not a nostalgic return to the old time religion, but a vague hope that love might in some way undermine Cronos’s structure of power in language in a sort of ecstasy of self-surrender. Such has always been the goal of mystics. And the world does not treat them kindly for it. Neither does Cronos who continues to devour them at breakfast.
* Not to mention an anticipation of Darwinian evolution and the not unlikely poetic inspiration for relativity theory and quantum physics a century in the future.
** It is interesting to note Schelling’s critique of the idea of ‘eternity.’ He recognised it as an oxymoron. On the one hand, if time were not part of Creation, it is by definition God. If it is part of Creation, then it has a beginning. Cronos exists as his own dialectic, language consuming itself. It is appropriate therefore that the Egyptian god Osiris is depicted consuming his own tale. Thoth, the divine inventor of writing assisted in the resurrection of Osiris and the subsequent birth of Horus who is a key figure in the justification of pharaonic power. Christianity cuts through the dialectic with its eternal Word, promoting language itself to divine status. The birth of dogmatic religion and idolatrous faith in language.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ February 15, 2020
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