Revealing Reason’s Limits and Rebuking Heidegger: Schelling’s Late Thoughts on God and Religion

Abstract

Heidegger’s critique of the history of modern philosophy as an ontotheology remains influential. Although a latecomer to modern philosophy, Heidegger reads Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s philosophy as ontotheological, even if Heidegger considers Schelling to make attempts to move beyond this tradition. In this paper, we revisit and reassess Heidegger’s critique of Schelling with a focus on the latter’s later work. Heidegger names three problematic aspects in Schelling’s philosophy, namely a lack of a radical distinction between ground and existence, a notion of God as a subject, and an overemphasis on the systematicity of thought. We argue that Heidegger fails to recognize Schelling’s important innovations in rethinking the ground, the divine subject and the nature of systematic thought. As such, Schelling makes important strides beyond the problematic aspects of modern philosophical thought. The point of this contribution is to tease important insights from Schelling, rather than rehash or re-interpret Heidegger’s critique of Schelling.