Schelling's fragile God
pp. 411-420
in: Jeanine Diller, Asa Kasher (eds), Models of God and alternative ultimate realities, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
As Heine noted, God finally appeared to Schelling in 1804 in his book Philosophy and Religion: "Here philosophy stops with Herr Schelling, and poetry, that is to say, folly begins." Schelling's folly was his attempt at an "ontotheology" (culminating in his late philosophies of mythology and revelation) from the standpoint of the Absolute or God, as if written on the edge of the "originary abyss." It represented the first step of a radical new approach in resolving the problem of the manifestation of the finite world and human freedom by asking not how Man becomes divine but how God becomes human through freedom—a freedom that as fragile as the God who is defined by it. As Sartre would later write, "it is through man that fragility comes into being." It is through Schelling's ontotheology that fragility comes into the Absolute or God.
