Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities by Amos Morris-Reich & Dirk Rupnow

Ideas of 'Race' in the History of the Humanities by Amos Morris-Reich & Dirk Rupnow

Author:Amos Morris-Reich & Dirk Rupnow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham


As this statement shows, unpacking Schelling’s theory of mythology and, as we shall see, its notion of race, involves making sense of his theory of the potencies. While space does not allow for a full elaboration of this theory, the following section will highlight some of its most important components, contrasting Schelling’s position with that of his major rival G. W. F. Hegel.

Hegel, Schelling and the Theory of Potencies

Like Schelling, Hegel felt compelled to come to terms with the diversity of human religious experience while mediating the relationship between philosophy and Christian revelation. The core of his approach was outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and then developed at much greater length in his lecture series on the philosophy of religion, which he delivered four times between 1821 and 1831. 28 Yet ultimately Hegel subsumed both myth and revelation under the larger category of “representation” (Vorstellung), maintaining that their true content could only be grasped philosophically by means of the “concept” (Begriff). In other words, religious narratives and symbols were necessary but imperfect forms for conveying rational ideas, whose content only became fully manifest once humanity had reached a properly (Hegelian) philosophical standpoint. This theory accorded well with Hegel’s vision of history as the progressive self-revelation of a rational absolute. To be sure, this unfolding was a dialectical rather than linear process, such that reason incorporated even the apparently irrational (in art, religion etc.) through the logic of sublation. But Hegel’s philosophy still resembled a kind of Bildungsroman, in which reason overcomes a series of hurdles before reaching a mature state of free self-consciousness.

Much of Schelling’s late philosophy can be seen as a rejoinder to Hegel’s version of idealism. 29 In particular, while Hegel stressed the workings of a rational absolute in the phenomena of nature, religion and history, Schelling highlighted the significance of the irrational, pointing to those aspects of the world that seemed unruly, even chaotic. 30 Nature, in particular, offered numerous examples of beings that corresponded in no way to our sense of order or divine purpose. “What is the purpose,” he asked hypothetically,of these forms of animals, which look to us in part fantastic, in part monstrous, in whose being, by which for the most part no goal can be divined, we would not believe if we did not see them before our eyes? What purpose in general is there in the great unseemliness in the actions of animals? What purpose in general is there in this entire corporeal world? 31



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