The Ages of the World - the title of the book already announces the novelty of Schelling's project. It is first of all a meditation on time. But it is also a reflection upon the world, not restricted to the four senses to it given by Heidegger in Being and Time. Time, moreover, as age, and in the plural. And, as Derrida already remarked, concerning the "of" there are three possible ways of reading it. But then there is still another layer, the "The" at the very beginning, which is a mark of singularity given to something which is pluralized - a dynamic contradiction.
Schelling walks on a thin thread which separates dogmatic mysticism from critical transcendentalism. He fall into neither, instead choosing to articulate the instability of this borderline itself. To read such a text with the knowledge that it is an incomplete project, a question never to have been fully answered by one author, stirs one's blood. This is a crazy text, its ambition is nothing less than a reconstruction of the entire trajectory of the world. It is a book of Genesis, but not a creation myth. It speaks not of God but of the idea of God, what this idea is, how it comes to be, where it takes being, its relation to being, its comportment towards being, etc. The project is abruptly interrupted with Schelling's death, and only the "Past" is given voice. "Present" and "Future" might be possible chapter headings, but given the novelty of the title - "age" - perhaps a different word might be appropriate. But maybe these are mere labels, especially since the "Past" is nothing like the usual or Heideggerian sense of what is "past" or "anterior."
If Heidegger's Being and Time describes the ontological dance prior to the disclosure of being, Schelling's Ages extends such a carnival to the entirety of what can be captured by the term "being." Being is not only "being-in-the-world" but also "Godhead," "nature," "spirit," as well as "that which has being" and the two senses of being as Seyn and Wesen. It is not merely the quasi-transcendental horizon of worldhood, of meaning, but also the 'meaningless' stirring in the abyss, as well as the absolute stillness of the highest free being. Indeed, Schelling's work aims to construct or logically articulate a system of freedom, a world that is not reducible to mechanical, chemical, biological, and logical laws. This project is, perhaps more significantly, an attempt therefore to extend thought to its outer limits, where there is no more air, nothing else on which thought can feed itself. Schelling never uses the word "thought" to designate the essence or being of that which he describes, but for this very reason this lack is all the more suggestive.
Schelling announces his standpoint in the "Introduction" when he writes thus:
[A]ll knowledge must pass through dialectic. Yet it is another question as to whether the point will ever come where knowledge becomes free and lively, as the image of the ages is for the writer of history who no longer recalls their investigations in their presentation. Can the recollection of the primordial beginning of things ever again become so vital that knowledge, which, according to matter and the meaning of the word, is history, could also be history according to its external form? And is the philosopher able to turn back to the simplicity of history, like the divine Plato, who, for the entire series of his works is thoroughly dialectical, but who, at the pinnacle and final point of transfiguration in all of them, becomes historical? ... It seems left open to our age to at least open the way to this objectivity of science (xxxix, SUNY, italics mine)
If "age" and "history" are taken to be different names for time, then the key to interpreting Schelling's way of thinking seems to be to locate the "image" of time as a non-figurative, non-pictoral presentation which will come on the scene as a new center. The aesthetic consciousness that is Schelling's mind here takes itself to be free to re-write its own past according to which "image" interests it more. If an after-image is more interesting, more tasteful, then this will claim priority over that which is "prior" to it temporally in the successive sense of the word. Schelling forces his reader in the Ages to imagine this new temporality, one which perhaps no longer takes the Kantian "time-substance" as its inevitable transcendental-logical presupposition. And the beginning of this new time only appears as a result of its successor:
[W]hat is posited at the beginning is precisely that which is subordinated in the successor. The beginning is only the beginning insofar as it is not that which should actually be, that which truthfully and in itself has being. If there is therefore a decision, then that which can only be posited at the beginning inclines, for the most part and in its particular way, to the nature of that which does not have being (13)
To "have" or to "not have" being are two categories unique and distinct from "being" and "non-being." It is towards the former two that I will turn in my next Memo in order to start reading this fragmented work.
