Abgrund der Freiheit / Die Weltalter

by Slavoj Žižek

Schellings Philosophie der Freiheit und der Weltalter blieben unvollendet, sind aber für ein grundsätzliches Verständnis der Freiheitslehre unverzichtbar und öffnen eine Kritik an Hegels Idealismus. Nach Slavoj Žižek sind in Schellings Analyse bereits die wichtigsten Ausrichtungen der nachhegelschen Gedanken, was Kierkegaard und Marx, Heidegger und die heutigen Dekonstruktivisten betrifft, vorgezeichnet. In Abgrund der Freiheit versucht Žižek Schellings Position weiter voranzutreiben mit einem Kommentar des zweiten Entwurfs von Schellings Werk Die Weltalter. Dieser zweite Entwurf Schellings ist für Žižek die sprachmächtigste und umfassendste Version. Die analytische Basis, von der Žižek dabei ausgeht, ist Lacans psychoanalytische Theorie.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 1997

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Prerna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Repeat after me, "intersection of the perfect and the imperfect is more perfect than perfect itself." Good, now do it another 100 times. If you did it without stuttering, you're not far from being able to tie a cherry stem knot with your tongue (a skill I highly covet) and color me impressed. Despite how much I adore him and how hard I struggle to dissect his texts, Zizek always came across as a highly intellectual jester to me. Perhaps it's all those gestures. I'm not judging him, I'm guilty of rubbing my face vigorously many times while talking in public too. At least Zizek would make a good jester, God help me.

I don't know how well suited I am to write this review since I just read the bit by Zizek and completely skipped the translated Schelling essay. The bit by Zizerk (really, I'm being modest, it's way more than a bit, it's half the book) though was so characteristic of him with all those pop-culture references and philosopher name drops, that I could almost see the gestures if I squinted enough.

So here we are, far away from creation, from the Word that started it all, from the beginning that was not the true beginning, from the vicious gordon-knot like rotary motion, on the brink of madness. Once upon a time (not sure about the 'time' bit here, let's go with once upon a before time) there was a resolution, a movement from a closed system to an open one, that caused the in-itself to split from itself and there was light. And where we are going? What are we hoping to achieve by dredging through this fragile reality? Who knows? And what is here anyway? A formless stain?

Eternity itself begets time to resolve the deadlock it became entangled in. If there's anything I know for certain after reading this book, it's that the writers of the Netflix series Dark read it.

[Erick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second of the three versions of the Ages of the World doesn't really cover new ground as such, but one does get the sense that Schelling was wrestling with how to express these ideas. I notice that he does indeed try to address some of the issues I've mentioned in my review to the first version of the Ages of the World, but I don't find the answers satisfactory. As to my critique that Schelling's positing of contrasting wills being a contradiction that indicates disunity in the Godhead, he says this on page 146 of this edition:

"The opposites are one, which is to say that a unity of both is posited; here = A3. But in spite of this, they are supposed to be actively opposed, or equally active as opposed. Since they cannot be opposed to the extent that they are in unity, they must at the same time be out of unity - that is, separated and each for itself. In other words, there is opposition as well as unity; opposition is free with respect to [gegen] unity, and unity with respect to opposition; or unity and opposition are themselves in opposition. There is nothing contradictory here, for opposition in and of itself is not contradiction. But if the unity of unity and opposition were posited, then contradiction would incontestably be found."

I applaud Schelling's effort to make this work, but his explanation fails to resolve the issue. He seems to be saying that these opposing wills are not opposed to unity as such, but only to each other, which would be like me saying I don't hate people individually, I just hate them in general. Yeah, semantically these two methods of speaking seem to be intending something different, but they are still practically the same thing. One cannot have opposing wills within the Godhead and still maintain unity. Schelling also tries to maintain their unity at the superessential level of the will that wills nothing, but here it is clear that this will is equally opposed to the mode that wills something.

Schelling brings in a number of examples, e.g. the poles of magnets, cold and heat, etc, to illustrate his point about the primacy of opposition. All of these are valid examples to this balancing of opposites within the realm of the created cosmos, but they don't serve to indicate opposition within the Godhead itself. The Pythagoreans had posited the monad and the dyad as the foundation of everything. The monad was a complete unity - obviously, and the dyad is where we have division, such as we find in the cosmos. Schelling is attempting to insert division within the monad itself, which is not only a subversion of what early philosophy held regarding Divinity, but it also subverts Christian notions of unity within the Godhead as well.

I do agree with Schelling about the nature of matter. Platonists and Neo-Platonists had always maintained the opposition of matter to Divinity. Schelling takes the more nuanced view that matter is capable of being spiritualized. I certainly agree with that perspective, but it is also the position of the New Testament as well.

I've only ever listened to interviews, lectures and part of a documentary with Slavoj Zizek. In general I should say that I respect Zizek's ability to weigh different philosophical perspectives and to be able to see their merits. That indicates a fairly good intellect. That being said, he has a tendency to ramble about things that do not appear very relevant to me. His knowledge of film is respectable, but what bearing his film examples have for Schelling is not at all evident to me. His introductory essay was a bit of a chore to get through, but I did succeed in reading the whole thing. When he actually does discuss Schelling directly, he seems to have a good grasp of his thought. He fills his essay with questionable attempts to apply Schelling's thought to film, culture and society. His application doesn't have to be exclusively Schellingian though, so the relevance is not apparent. Opening to any particular part of his essay, one would not necessarily gather that the essay had to do with Schelling at all most of the time.

I've now completed Schelling's late Positive philosophy lectures and all three versions of his Ages of the World. The third version I liked the best, but given my reservations about much of Schelling's theology, I should probably re-read that with a more critical eye. I still give this book around 4 stars. Schelling's thought is always engaging, even when I don't necessarily agree with it.

[Finnegan Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the same way, we see the whole of nature to be equally full of longing; the earth sucks the force of heaven into itself through countless mouths; the seed strives toward the light and air, in order to catch sight of an image, a spirit; the flower sways in the sun's rays in order to pull them into itself as color."
-F.W.J. von Schelling

This was maybe not the best choice as an introductory read to German idealism, but I still had a lot of fun discovering a novel way of thinking about the world. Žižek's psychoanalytic take on the subject seemed to have lots of connections back to everyday life, though I definitely got the sense that I would have gleaned more from it had read something by Lacan first. Schelling's essay is also quite a difficult read, but it was interesting to see how he manages to blend psychology, physics and religion into a cohesive worldview. Given that he was only writing in 1813, I found it surprising that some of his statements seemed to ring true even with regard to more contemporary physics...

[Andrew Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much read this for the Schelling text, and not the Zizek commentary.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schelling arrives at the logic of myth undergirding subjectivity and the cycle of desire and temporal projection as a constitutive origin story of God emerging from the mute "boredom"/"ambiguity" of his indifferent/pre-actualized oneness towards the creation of nature and self-conscious humanity as concrete grasping this unity reflexively, as opposed to un-reflexively, to mixed, and inconsistent(yet still interesting) results. The Zizek essay appended here is ok, if a bit unfocused at points in its thematic development(in comparison with other Zizek writings, it stays focused on Schellings welalter at least).

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schelling’s text is excellent, while Zizek’s essay is easily expendable.