Religija ir kultūra ISSN 1822-4539 eISSN 1822-4571
2017, vol. 20–21 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Relig.2017.11
University of Turin
Turino universitetas
8 Via Verdi St., 10124 Turin, Italy
emilio.corriero@unito.it
Summary. It is starting from the role recognized and attributed to nature by Schelling and Nietzsche that one understands the renewed relationship between being and time at the basis of the possibility for the new beginning of Western philosophy, prophesized by Heidegger in 1936. For both, the possibility of the very future passes by the necessary redemption of the past (that is an extreme liberation from its conceptual hypostatization) through a form of love for the All, which is possible to recognize only with a philosophy of nature that is able to show the “unprethinkable” ground of being and its eternal dynamics as potential potentiae. Only on the basis of this potentia potentiae of the “unprethinkable” past, the “coming event” of the future becomes possible, as well as that renewed relation between time and being, which permits a new beginning for Western philosophy.
Keywords: nature, freedom, future, Nietzsche, Schelling.
Santrauka. Pradedant nuo vaidmens, kurį gamtai pripažįsta ir priskiria Schellingas ir Nietzsche’ė, yra suprantamas atnaujintas būties ir laiko santykis, tapęs 1936 metais Heideggerio pranašautos naujos Vakarų filosofijos pradžios galimybės pagrindu. Abiejų filosofų požiūriu, pačios ateities galimybė apeina būtiną praeities atpirkimą (tai yra visišką išsilaisvinimą iš jos konceptualaus hipostazavimo) per meilės Visybei formą, kurią galima atpažinti tik iš gamtos filosofijos, galinčios parodyti savo neapmąstomą / neatmenamą (unvordenkliches) būties pagrindą ir jo amžiną dinamiką kaip potentia potentiae. Tik remiantis neapmąstomos / neatmenamos praeities potentia potentiae yra įmanomas ateities „ateinantis įvykis“ ir atnaujintas būties ir laiko santykis, sudarantis naujos Vakarų filosofijos pradžios galimybę.
Pagrindiniai žodžiai: gamta, laisvė, ateitis, Nietzsche, Schellingas.
Received: 21/1/2019. Accepted: 14/3/2019|
Copyright © 2018 Emilio Carlo Corriero. Published by Vilnius University Press
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
When Martin Heidegger prophesises the possibility of a new beginning for Western philosophy, after the failures of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Friedrich Nietzsche (Heidegger 1971: 31), he maintains that the new beginning must derive from the very understanding of the reasons for such failures. He does not fully specify what it consists of – though it is evident how he considers his thinking perfectly capable of such “news” – he rather alludes to the underground reasons (to discover and understand) determining the end of a certain philosophical tradition and accompanying Schelling and Nietzsche up to their respective speculative peaks and subsequent collapses.
In Schelling, as in Nietzsche, what impedes the definition of a complete system of knowledge surely lies in the surplus of Wollen with respect to ratio aiming to grasp and describe reality. It is in that Wanting which is completely resolved in reason that they both recognise that dynamic of being, which resists the imposition of concepts that include everything at once. In the wanting that returns onto itself, but is always able to open up to new horizons of thought, there actually lies the fundamental reason for the failure of Western philosophy and its possible, desirable neuer Anfang: a new beginning that is not resolved in a sole theoretical solution, since the “new beginning” is first and foremost the possibility of ein neues Denken, but a new thinking that can have multiple results and manifestations and takes effect from the renewed relationship between being and time, insisting, in particular, on the latter and thinking of the former not as an inert noun but rather in a verbal sense, as suggested by Franz Rosenzweig (see Rosenzweig 1925). The “new thinking” is able to live in the relationship between time and being, as being always and only occurs in time, in its temporality, and a thought that wishes to speak adequately of being cannot of course isolate it into a concept, caging and immobilizing what it always becomes, making time a simple dimension where it is possible to take a snapshot that displays its meaning: philosophy is not simply a “knowing” that nails its object so it can discuss it; rather, philosophy is “love,” a “tension” toward “wisdom,” where one must, as Schelling states in his Erlangen Vorlesungen, understand wisdom (Weisheit) as a knowing that is also – mainly – practical: in this sense, new thinking, in that it appears in full continuity with the etymological origin of the word philo-sophy, cannot of course be realised in a “new” conceptual articulation; rather, it should make itself concrete, practical, it must live in the tension to wisdom and effectively be in practice, as only here can it perform that overcoming which it resuggests realizing; on the other hand, in just recognizing the surplus of Wollen with respect to ratio, this deep reason for the double shipwreck of rational science announced in Schelling and Nietzsche as a possibility for overcoming, one already reaches the necessary ethical reconsideration of the theories.
When, in 1936, Heidegger speaks of a new beginning for Western thinking, he must have in mind the cultured being in its occurrence, that is, being as an event (Ereignis); after all, his philosophical production, following the so-called “turn” (die Kehre), as he himself admitted, revolves around the concept of Ereignis. However, it is not correct to think of Heidegger’s “prophecy” as held alongside Schelling and Nietzsche, limiting it to a consideration of almost biographical character, as if Heidegger’s thinking were the only one to set out into the open furrow of that double crisis, and only therein would the sole possible new start for Western philosophy be completed. What Heidegger prophesizes really regards Western thinking in general, in that after Schelling and Nietzsche (especially after the latter, if we look at the history of effects), a philosophical season opens that cannot do without rethinking the time-being relationship and which finds its most significant – and controversial – “synthesis” in relation to the becoming character of nature, but above all with science, which investigates it with continued success.
If the approach of a new form of Naturphilosophie, for example with Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, is set as the attempt to think “philosophically” about the becoming of nature (where it is still possible), a progressive exhaustion of philosophical tension appears to play out in the philosophy of science. In some ways, philosophy as knowing, or rather as merely rational science, actually dies out in science; it could not be otherwise. In the face of the successes of science, philosophy is reduced to repeating it, if anything trying elegant rhetorical formulations that do not however modify anything of the results that science continues to deliver; here one spontaneously thinks of how dismissively Schelling writes his introduction to Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature regarding such a “philosophical” attitude, when he states that nothing is more disheartening for philosophy than the attempt to expound the results of science philosophically. Nor can philosophy think, with a conservative, retrospective attitude, of resorting to the more comfortable humanistic culture, appealing, for example, “to poets” for the search for another “foundation,” in the hope of dissolving it as an “artistic” (f)act but lacking that tension toward wisdom it should constantly be admiring. Here one would still and always live within a separation that inevitably is nihilistic. Philosophy as art is not an alternative to philosophy as Wissen, if art is taken as a flight from the rational rather than a practice “founded” on the tension toward wisdom, that is, on liberty itself. In Schelling and Nietzsche, philosophy is rediscovered as a tension toward wisdom, and art is recognized and completed as a creative act that continues the “productivity” of nature itself in its “products” and so remains perfectly faithful to the inspiration that is the property of philosophizing.
Science does not obliterate philosophy; in fact, philosophy can learn a lot therefrom. Philosophy is hardly terminated by contemporary Wissen-schaft and its results, which put the foundations of classical reasoning themselves into crisis. Philosophy does not die with science; if anything dies, it is philosophy exclusively understood as Wissenschaft: what enters crisis and dies is the philosophical project that intended to perform in the rationalism of German Idealism, meaning the systematic project for a rational “knowing,” which intends to describe being in its totality, mostly resolving its becoming in the movement of the Concept itself; deep down, what dies is the misunderstood negative philosophy, which dares to grasp All in the progressive synthetic definition of potency-to-be and does not care for the (logical) groundlessness that presides over existence, characterizing the abysmalness (and un-prethinkableness) of becoming of nature; but in its successes, science manages to show (negative) philosophy the unsustainability of its position and the reason that states and considers it; and with science, that passage to positive that Schelling prepares is performed and realized in practice, “philosophically,” as the inevitable result of reason that instigates its own limits, and recognizes it as possible starting from the “willingness” exceeding reason.
What enters crisis with Schelling and Nietzsche per philosophica documenta is repeated and highlighted in the results of contemporary science – with even greater effectiveness, if possible: the model and foundations of classical reason enter crisis, and the risk philosophy runs into is a flight into irrationalism, since this crisis of reason seems unable to resolve itself in a rational “synthesis” that is more capable than the one that yields, as it requires an inversion beyond the limits of reason itself: what Schelling calls an ecstasy of reason, that is, reason exiting its “place.”
With the crisis of reason, announced philosophically in the systematic limits of Schelling and Nietzsche and produced concretely with the continued successes of contemporary science, philosophy still keeps its most intimate meaning: indeed, it is not simply science (Wissenschaft, as German Idealist thinkers, among others, define it), so cannot be confused with it and become extinct with it; nor is philosophy just the aspiration to knowing (be it scientific or not). It is something more: it is the tension toward “wisdom,” which is more clearly different with respect not only to knowing but also to wisdom itself; the proprium of philo-sophy lies precisely in that tension, in that continuous effort toward wisdom that is never “perfect,” complete knowing, but actually coincides with liberty itself, never objectifiable from the sole Subject we belong to.
Wissen, which is completed in science, has the merit of leading (negative) philosophy up to its very limits, which are of course not the limits of the knowable but the limits of reason, which “objectifies” what it intends to know and ends up separating thought and action irredeemably. It is possible to go beyond those limits, unless you conserve a classical rational setting, since it is not recognized as part of the same Subject that creates itself while knowing – as occurs for Schelling with Naturphilosophie, where philosophizing on nature means exactly creating nature itself (Schelling 1799: 5) – but simply as a subject that demands to objectify what it wishes to know and recognizes itself in action, always within a contraposition. In contemporary science, the “from being to becoming” passage is progressively completed, from negative philosophy (Wissen) to positive philosophy (Weisheit), in that it is realized as a knowing that is also practical and creates actively participating in/from the Subjectivity of nature. But while Science acts the passage without the need to establish it “rationally,” philosophy must recognize and document it and so seek its legitimate theoretical foundation. As tension to wisdom, (positive) philosophy is foremost designed for the overall “theoretical foundation” of the Positive.
Nietzsche’s position in this regard does not constitute a problem, as his “gay” Science does not demand the presence of God (or rather foundation), and the passage to “positive” is reassumed in the continual aspiration to the Overman as a figure alluding to the future connected to the Dyonisiac past of nature. But for Schelling, the problem is more complicated, since the idea of God remains indispensable, and the relation with “positive” cannot do without historical Revelation. In Nietzsche, the “Godless, redeemed” nature of The Gay Science completes the “Death of God” and is, as an abyss (not foundation) of the past, able to constitute the (not metaphysical) “presupposition” to overcome the passive, nihilistic condition that believes in the “metaphysical foundation.” In Schelling, the question is not so simple, as for him the dynamic process of nature ends with implying and introducing the need for “creation,” and the positive is not taken into the chaotic dynamism of nature but the becoming relationship with God. It is in the same philosophy of nature that one “philosophically” reaches the need to recognize an original creative act. In the Naturphilosophie of Schelling, the passage from negative to positive philosophy was completed within its phases. As it turns to the foundation of the existing in general, Naturphilosophie is primarily a positive philosophy in that it recognizes a “free act” of creation as an indemonstrable presupposition for its natural process: it does introduce God.
Schelling’s early nature-philosophy already stressed the need to eliminate the “concept” of original being (Schelling 1799: 11), moving from the unconditioned of being itself and indeed recognizing in this conditioned something “positive,” free, and unfounded that would later be described as a free initial act of becoming-being. The description of the dynamic process, in that it in some ways placed the original act of the unconditioned into parentheses, limiting itself to building material, still ran the risk of presenting the development of nature as a necessary, mechanical process. From this, one understands how such a philosophy, however speculative in method, could still appear as a form of negative, or simply ideal, philosophy, having as its object the Potency-to-be and not the positive of the becoming Existent. However, in Einleitung in die Philosophie of 1830, reconsidering the relationship between the philosophy of nature and the “positive,” Schelling specifies how Naturphilosophie, despite not being (completely yet) positive philosophy, constitutes its, so to speak, “natural border,” since it excludes original being as a concept and recognizes it as a free act. Philosophy of nature takes into account the existence of an eternally becoming world but recognizes it with a free start conferring liberty to all its manifestations (as we can see in the final lessons in philosophy from 1844, where the constructing material completes and realizes that foundation of the “positive” which remained but an ideal in the other attempts in Munich and Berlin).
All nature tells us that it does not exist in any way through a purely geometrical necessity; in it there is not only pure reason, but personality and spirit [...]. Creation is not an actual circumstance, but an act (Schelling 1809; SW, I/7: 396).
In Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, the text where Schelling investigates liberty starting from its “natural roots,” he breaks the “circle of necessity” (Schelling 1989: 71) that early philosophy of nature illuminated but was not yet able to break and interrupt and imposes the thinking of a free (unconditioned) start of creation that will later be taken up and developed in Weltalter, and yet again in the attempts to establish positive philosophy.
But since it is not yet understood metaphysically, creation is introduced and explained by Schelling as “merely accidental” (hence free), and God is never described as an “initial” position but as free “becoming” that is accompanied from the start of being. Here, one really must think of God outside of an ontological conception, recognizing God’s becoming and admitting, as a presupposition for God Itself, the “abyss of the past” – already always won and overcome in God – that is nature.
It is precisely starting from the role recognized and attributed to nature by Schelling and Nietzsche that one understands the renewed relationship between being and time at the basis of the possibility for new thought and hence a new beginning for Western philosophy starting from these two authors.
The combination of Schelling and Nietzsche, proposed, for example, by Karl Löwith in his 1935 book, passes exactly through the affinity he spots between the original living (das Urlebendige) in the Weltalter of Schelling and the doctrine of its eternal return in Nietzsche. Though Schelling’s description is directly involved with a “cosmogonical construction,” while the doctrine of the eternal return is presented as an extreme possibility faced after the death of God. Hence, it is presented as an extreme possibility in history or, if we like, at its climax, what Nietzsche presents in Dionysus’s mirror (WzM, fr. 1067) to clarify that the “nature” of the world, given back to the “return,” has a lot in common with the abyss of the past, eternally returning onto itself from the original living described in the Weltalter of Schelling. Löwith states:
To speak with Nietzsche the original primordial living being [...] is something complete-in-itself and completely-rounded, concluded and brought to an end, containing in itself, in equal measure, the original power that destroys and creates. “Prime nature” is a continuous cycle, a rotary movement without stopping, start or end. Original being wants nothing but itself, it is a being-in-itself (Löwith 1935: 151).
Similarly, for Schelling – as Löwith states too – “original, primigenial being has nothing that precedes it and nothing outside itself, so it must develop purely by itself and of its own volition.” In both cases, the abysmalness of nature, its continual revolving, is ordered by a will (Wille zur Macht for Nietzsche, pure Wollen for Schelling), which is always able to activate a new start freely.
Superficially reading, it may seem there is a substantial difference between the conception of nature proposed by Schelling and that suggested by Nietzsche. While the latter seems to describe a chaotic, rule-free nature, Schelling is clear in stating that the necessary revolution of nature, though still lacking freedom of the start that comes in later, responds to the wanting-it-itself “not without laws but according to only one law”: a law which we know anticipates the one to profile itself successively as the organic scheme of freedom after the start. But on closer inspection, Nietzsche also recognizes to the returning movement of Dyonisiac nature a sort of “law” at the moment he makes it clear that the image he shows in Dionysus’s mirror is nothing but “will to power,” that is, what the intellect can say about the world as will to power: a Chaos des Alls – just as the general character of the world described in The Gay Science (fr. 110) – which is not an absence of rule, since the “law” of that Chaos is precisely the returning onto itself that the will to power describes. In fact, the will to power is a willpower toward a higher, continuous will: self-conservation (Selbsterhaltung) and continuous development (Potenzierung) are the objectives leading willpower and, at the same time, the effects it produces within a returning “dynamic” that guarantees the eternal willpower (conceptually repeating the eternal Mögen of Schelling), starting from which every “free” new start is possible.
The will, which for Schelling as for Nietzsche, lies at the base of the “nature” that precedes every start is the same will that is harbored at the bottom of man’s soul. Schelling’s cosmogonical description harks straight back to the Mit-wissenschaft (cum-scientia) of creation present in man: the past of nature that precedes the free start of being is the same abyss of past that is harbored at the depth of man. In this sense, even the Nietzschean “decision” for eternal return can only be based on an original Mit-wissenschaft: to lead everything back to Dionysiac becoming, accepting the extreme possibility of the eternal return, one needs an “awareness,” an original Dionysian knowledge; one must be able to recognize oneself as a tension toward a wisdom removed by acting and continuing in practice toward the future.
The Dyonisiac past to which Nietzsche exhorts is what man in his modern condition has lost in nihilistic drifting and what should now be regained. “The highest elevation of awareness of one’s power [Kraft-Bewußtsein] in man is what creates the superman” (Will to Power, No. 1060): the superman is the Typus who puts forward the renewed, hoped-for relationship with the world as Chaos des Alls, but the Übermensch is also – especially – the sign of a freedom already present in the need for that incessant becoming commanded by that will to power, a sense of becoming hidden in that blind returning that should be reawakened in the aspiration to the future, able to convert the past of nature from “foundation” to “presupposition”: what makes up the redemption and “Godlessness” of nature announced by the death of God, which must, for Nietzsche, be continued and pursued “philosophically” (which also means ethically) in the tension to the Übermensch.
Indeed, how can a man make himself eternally becoming? If he can, the faculty of realizing himself as becoming, which is the freedom to start, must reside therein. But Nietzsche does not hesitate to describe this freedom as conditioned by the dusk of the individual himself, as separated and distinct from the becoming of All. By virtue of a superior awareness, man is free to start anew, but only deciding for himself the death of his universal condition. If the individual subject does not die, in no way can he pose himself as Übermensch: in his Kraft-Bewußtsein, man notices the will (to power) that equates him to the All, but to start anew and freely, he must give in to that will, he must make will to power for himself; so he must abandon will as “his” faculty, to merge therein that essence which binds him and equates him to the becoming All. For Nietzsche, within the will to power lies the possibility to pass to the “positive,” in will resides the net that connects man to All, in will dwells the possibility for every form and start that is produced in the Chaos des Alls and so, still in (only apparently “his”) will, man finds access to the de-cision from himself, that is, the “freedom” of a new start that returns man and his reason to the becoming of the will to power in continual tension to the Übermensch.
Despite all the differences that remain between the “positive” of Schelling and the “positive” of Nietzsche, for the philosopher of Leonberg, too, as one again reads in Lesson XXIV of Exposition of Purely Rational Philosophy, it is will that plays a central role in making possible for man that exiting from himself that allows him to consider the existing “positively.”
Access to positive philosophy is guaranteed by an act of will that exceeds the limits of thinking, since in that act the original, free act of creation repeats itself: precisely an unprethinkable start which, for Schelling (as for Nietzsche, too), presupposes a “past” that excludes the idea of a creatio ex nihilo and yet confers freedom to the wheel of the creation of nature. Without that free start, the abyss of the past would be like an eternal, necessary returning of a will that which always and only wants itself, actually excluding any novitas: the past of the Weltalter is nature necessary in God. It needs a freedom that is external to itself to start and hence place the necessary nature as a past on which the present and future are founded. The free decision allows the absconditus God to reveal itself, that is, to make Itself history. Otherwise, It would remain necessity and abyss.
In the act of will, which for Schelling allows the passage from negative philosophy to positive philosophy, man lives and acts that original Mitwissenschaft of creation described in the Weltalter. The profound difference between the “positive” of Nietzsche and the “positive” of Schelling lies in recognizing to the act of will, which makes it possible and accessible, a different effect: while for Nietzsche, through the will to power, man rediscovers the Chaos (des Alls) in himself starting from that reassigned sense of becoming as infinite (theoretical but also practical) tension to the Overman, for Schelling, via the act of will, the free inversion to “positive” is performed, he recognizes himself as an integral, active part of a sole (unobjectifiable) Subject – and in this the difference from Nietzsche is not so great – but mainly, one recognizes the “positive” as an expression and development of a very precise history that is completed with the Revelation; outside of that, one cannot, for Schelling, talk of a “positive.” This conserves the thought of a free creation by a post-metaphysical God, escaping a characterization of an ontotheological type, hence not being like a “steadfast foundation,” but like a becoming that proceeds in tandem with free creation on the basis of an original decision that makes the (initially) inert, abysmal past of nature the presupposition for the present and future of the revelation. And for Schelling, the Revelation is something very precise:
By Revelation, all we mean is Christianity. Indeed, the Revelation of the Old Testament is Christianity only as presentiment and prophecy, and is only understood in Christianity or through it. Now, the actual content of Christianity is entirely the Person of Christ; this is together the link of the Old and New Testament. Indeed, the final, own content of the Old Testament is the Messiah. One can then say: in a philosophy of Revelation we mean only, or eminently, understanding the Person of Christ (Schelling 1841-42; SW, II/4: 35).
For Schelling, the positive is totally resolved in Revelation, and its philosophical content consists of understanding the person of Christ, while we can say that the positive for Nietzsche lies in the redemption of the past, in the tension to the Future, in regaining the Chaos des Alls, removed and veiled by the Apollonian will to power, possible in the continual aspiration to the Overman.
Perhaps one may maintain that for both of the thinkers positive philosophy consists of welcoming the being as the becoming and so as time, or rather of a “new thinking” that stops responding to Ist-fragen to become one with historic becoming in acting: for Nietzsche, it means putting into practice an act to live and continue the tension to the Overman, and for Schelling, a practice to align itself to the Revelation of Christ and hence conform with the love of God for Its Son and for men. For both, the Law to build upon as a guide to practice is Love, and for both, the possibility of the future passes by the redemption of the past through a form of love for the All.
As Stéphane Mosès suggests in his work Système et Révélation. La philosophie de Franz Rosenzweig, the Star of Redemption in some way repeats the steps of Ages of the World by Schelling, describing the past as an unprethinkable time of the Urwesen preceding creation, the present as the time of revelation, and finally, the future as the era of redemption that is completed in man’s acting. Rosenzweig probably believed that in Schelling, revelation would resolve the time of creation and redemption into one, but one may surely state that in love for the created and the other one responds, in Schelling too, to the love of the creator that is revealed. Love passes through the three times, redeeming the inert past that precedes the free creation of the start, freeing to the becoming of the future. As is obvious, there is no creation to save in Nietzsche, nor is there a revelation to narrate, yet we can still rebuild an articulation into three times on the basis of the redemption of the past to which Nietzsche refers with the eternal return of the same: the past of the Dionysiac Urwesen, which precedes the Apollonian separation and the false, nihilistic unifications produced should first be saved by a work of unmasking that is reassumed in the death of God, as present of our époque, and successively redeemed in acceptance of the eternal return of the same and in the continual tension to the future of the Overman. Here, too, what saves and redeems the past is a love for All, which is in Schelling made manifest in the free act of creation and in the revelation where God gives humanity Its Son, and in Nietzsche, it is completed by welcoming and loving the eternity that accepts the return and from which one can still wish to have children, that is, generate the future of the Overman.
The past is known [gewußt], the present cognised [erkannt], the future foreseen [geahndet].
The known is narrated [erzählt], the met portrayed [dargestellt]; the foreseen prophesised [geweissagt] (Schelling SW, I/8: 199).
As one reads in the introduction to the Weltalter, the future is foreseen, and the foreseen is prophesized. Now, prophecy cannot but be based on an “occurred event”: it is on the basis of the “occurred event” of creation – or of the start – that the “coming event” is prophesized as a realization or a (re)appropriation of an Ereignis that “merges” on the already occurred, on its unpossessable freedom.
Both Schelling and Nietzsche exclude a beyond that precedes the Existing. The creatio ex nihilo is flatly excluded, and this means that that non-differentiable past of nature, that abyss of past, is in itself capable of a dynamic to activate the start freely. The non-differentiable presupposition is not the simple surplus of a positum: it is actually dynamis, or, if we want to use an expression of Schelling from Berlin, it is potentia potentiae: an abysmal depth that guards in itself the faculty to start, to activate a contraction to trigger the becoming-God and hence creation. On the basis of this potentia potentiae of the unprethinkable past, the “occurred event” of creation and revelation is possible – as is the “coming event” of a future which is so only in that it “merges” on the pre-supposition (on the abyss of the past) and frees it, actually redeems it, from its necessary, needful inertia. The “coming event,” or the events that will occur, are so in that they are realized in the reciprocal appropriation of time and being by means of love for the All: redemption is only possible when the being is free from time as its “cause” and when time is in turn redeemed by the being as its “dimension.” In time-being, or rather, in becoming, that redemption is completed in the way that was, for Schelling, prefigured in the Weltalter as the aspiration to realize a “future objective exposition of science (philosophy)” in the form of the greatest poem of nature. It can embrace, in the link of the link, in the love for All that is the Copula, “what was, what is, what will be,” and which was actually, for Nietzsche, announced in the “historic” decision – as matured after the “death of God” – for the eternal return of the same, only possible through love for eternity, the only mother from whom, for Nietzsche, one may desire children to come – as we can read in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In both cases, the future event is prophesized on the impossible foundation of a natural past redeemed in the freedom of the start and recuperated in the moment of every decision to act which that start “recalls” as its known past and “continues” with love as its foreseen future as all still to be (re)created.
Heidegger, M. 1971. Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Löwith, K. 1935. Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Widerkehr des Gleichen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Nietzsche, F. 1999. Kritische Studienausgabe. Eedited by G. Colli, M. Montinari. Berlin–New York: De Gruyter.
Nietzsche, F. 1996. Der Wille zur Macht. Stuttgart: Kröner [WzM].
Rosenzweig, F. 1925. Das neue Denken, in A. Mayer et al. (Eds.), 1984. Franz Rosenzweig Gesammelte Schriften, III Bd., Zweistromland. Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken. Berlin: Springer: 139–161. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6065-7_6
Schelling, F. W. J. 1856–1861. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cotta [SW].
Schelling, F. W. J. 1799. Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. Jena/Leipzig.
Schelling, F. W. J. 1809. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit.
Schelling, F. W. J. 1841–1842. Philosophie der Offenbarung.
Schelling, F. W. J. 1989. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Edited by W. Ehrhardt. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.