| ||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Language Notes
Text: English, German (translation)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Heidegger and Schelling,
By Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Schellings Treatise: On Essence Human Freedom (Series In Continental Thought) (Paperback)
Martin Heidegger (1889 -- 1976) is best-known as the author of a seminal work of 20th Century philosophy,"Being and Time." (1927) Heidegger saw himself as rejecting metaphysical philosophy and as redirecting its questions. In his classroom courses, he frequently engaged in philosophical hermenutics by lecturing in detail on a specific text and trying to understand it from the inside. By all accounts, Heidegger was a charismatic lecturer. His ability to bring seemingly abstract philosophical questions to life, for all their difficulty, inspired many students such as Hannah Arendt.In 1936, Heidegger lectured on a treatise by the German idealistic philosopher Frederick Schelling (1775 -- 1854) called "The Essence of Human Freedom" (1809), itself a highly difficult work of some 90 pages. Schelling had been a college friend of both Hegel and the poet Holderlin. Hegel published his most famous work "The Phenomenology of Mind" in 1807, two years before Schelling's Treatise. In the "Phenomenology" Hegel attacked his friend's version of philosophical idealism for its alleged mystical, intuitive character. Schelling took the criticism hard, and the friendship ended. At the time Heidegger wrote, Schelling had been neglected for many years, even in Germany. Schelling's Treatise remains little read, due to its romanticism and its anthrophomorphism, qualities of which Heidegger was fully aware, in addition to its obscurity. This translation of Heidegger's lectures on Schelling's Treatise dates from 1985 and is by the American philosopher Joan Stambaugh. It is as readable and accessible as this text is likely to be. Philosophers tend not to be the best interpreters of one another's work because their own thought gets in the way. Heidegger is notorious for his idiosyncratic readings of other thinkers to bend them to his own lights. Heidegger's s book on Schelling, while by no stretch a "neutral" evaluation of his predecessor is a sympathetic and plausible account of the Treatise. It aims for and achieves more. Reading Heidegger's lectures, I got the sense of struggling with both Schelling and Heidegger. The text convinced me that something important was being said, however obscurely. As with other Heidegger, much of this book is seeming gibberish. Impenetrable discussions are often followed by passages of great insight and respective clarity. Some of the difficulty may be due to the difficulty of transferring apoken lectures to the printed page. Frequently, after long obscure passages in this book, Heidegger will proclaim in his own voice that the discussion makes little sense. I felt frustrated, but I remembered that while speaking Heidegger probably delivered these really obscure analyses with a tone of irony in his voice that would not communicate to the page. Heidegger in fact appears to be a good as well as a charismatic lecturer. He organizes his material and repeats and summarizes what he has said when he moves from one section to another. He appears to try to make himself understood. The lectures are filled with asides, readily understood examples, and even touches of humor. Heidegger's lectures, which exceed considerably Schelling's text in length, consist of opening remarks, and extended discussion of Schelling's own introduction to his text and a shorter and much more difficult discussion of the "Main Part" of Schelling's Treatise. Why lecture on Schelling's Treatise rather than on a different text? Here is Heidegger's response (p. 11) "We stated that no further explanation was necessary why we have chosen this treatise -- unless in terms of the treatise itself. For it raises a question in which something is expressed which underlies all of man's individual intentions and aspirations, the question of philosophy as such. Whoever grasps this question knows immediately that it is meaningless to ask why and to what purpose we philosphize. For philosophy is grounded only in terms of itself- or else not at all, just as art reveals its truth only through itself." Schelling was a philosopher of absolute idealism. Heidegger rejected absolute idealism although its impact on him was profound. His discussion of the nature of philosophical system building and of the aims of German idealism after Kant are deeply insightful. Schelling's Treatise was intended as both a tribute to and a refutation of the philosophical system of Spinoza. Heidegger thus engages in this work with Spinoza, something he was faulted for not doing in "Being and Time". Heidegger saw himself as a philosopher of questioning and as a philosopher of Being. He engages with Schelling, more than with Hegel, because of the limitedlessness, poetical character of Schelling's thought. Heidegger wants to understand what philosophical Absolutism is, and how, if at all, it comports with freedom. Schelling had thought that the claimed absolutism of Spinoza resulted in fatalism. Heidegger then explores Schelling's treatment of the nature of evil. Philosophical idealism is frequently rejected on these two broad issues among others: 1. it leads to determinism and fatalism and 2. it cannot account for the existence of evil. Heidegger offers a long and in places tortorous account of Schelling's idealism, understanding of human freedom, and understanding of evil. As an absolute idealist, Schelling tried to combine in a difficult way the Absolute and infinite with the individual. Heidegger rejects the absolute, but his own concept of Being appears to me to owe much to it. Heidegger is a philosopher of becoming, human finitude, and approaches to Being. This book is a difficult commentary on a text which, if anything, is more difficult. Early in his study, (p 9), Heidegger quotes his subject as saying "It is a poor objection to a philosopher to say that he is incomprehensible." Readers without a strong background in Heidegger's "Being and Time" and in Kant and his successors will be unduly frustrated by this book. Readers with a passion for philosophical issues will be engaged by this work. Robin Friedman
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heidegger's appropriation of Schelling...,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Schellings Treatise: On Essence Human Freedom (Series In Continental Thought) (Paperback)
For anyone interested in Heidegger and/or Schelling this is a must read (and if you are not interested in Heidegger or Schelling I think you should be). For fans of Heidegger this is an interesting text because as it says on the back cover the courses which this book is based on were given at right around the time of Heidegger's 'turn'. One can see the beginnings of the turn in this work in Heidegger's analysis of the historical development which provided the conditions necessary for the modern concept of 'system'; a concept which guides Schelling's analysis in the freedom essay (Heidegger sees one of the conditions of the modern concept of system in the "predominance of the mathematical as the criterion of knowledge" (pg34) which points towards his later work on technology and enframing). One can also see evidence of the turn in Heidegger's interpretations of the understanding of Being in German Idealism (as freedom or will). Heidegger is definitely beginning to see the historical nature of our understanding of Being (as opposed to simply grounding our understanding of Being in the ahistorical existentials of Dasein).This book will also be of great interest for anyone interested in Schelling because it is a truly profound, and detailed commentary on what I think is probably Schelling's most profound and important work, his essay on the Essence of Human Freedom (for the reader interested in reading Schelling's essay along with Heidegger's commentary I recommend the translation contained in Philosophy of German Idealism: Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling (German Library). I do not speak or read German but I have been told by a professor of mine, who was a Schelling scholar, that the translation in that volume is better than the translation put out by SUNY). Schelling's freedom essay presents a number of interpretive difficulties for the reader. The subject that Schelling is dealing with is inherently difficult (the ontological grounding of human freedom) and Schelling's writing can also be quite obscure at times. Schelling also frames the entire problem in theological language which can be off putting to the modern reader. It is often difficult, I think, for modern readers to take a philosopher seriously when he (or she) begins to describe the inner life of God. On a first reading it often seems as if Schelling is simply making ungrounded assertions in his freedom essay about the nature of the Absolute (or God) and is claiming knowledge for himself which no human being could possibly possess. We, of course, have known since Kant that human reason is incapable of providing us with knowledge of the Absolute as it exists in itself and it often seems as if Schelling is engaging in speculations beyond Kant's wildest dreams in his freedom essay (despite being a post-Kantian philosopher). What Heidegger sees clearly, I think, is that Schelling's essay is as much a work of ontology as it is of theology and Heidegger is able to detach, to some degree, Schelling's ontological insights from his theological language in this work. Heidegger in a sense 'modernizes' and 'demythologizes' Schelling's essay in this work. Heidegger also attempts to follow Schelling's train of thought in order to seek out the motivations behind his thought so that Schelling's claims no longer appear as merely ungrounded assertions about something that is inherently unknowable. One begins to get a sense of the inner movement of Schelling's thought which is much more important than simply appropriating Schelling's assertions without understanding the motivations behind those assertions. Like all of Heidegger's works there are times in this work when Heidegger lapses into a nearly impenetrable obscurity but there are also moments (and quite a few of them) in which he is extremely lucid and clear in his presentations of Schelling's ideas. The rest of my review will be a slightly more detailed summary of the general development that Heidegger traces in this work for those who are interested. I should emphasize that everything I say in this review should be considered very provisional. I am by no means an expert in Heidegger or Schelling so it is possible that a great deal of what I have written will have to revised in the future. The goal of Schelling's essay, according to Heidegger, is to provide the grounds for a philosophical system which encompasses the whole of being and is at the same time capable of integrating human freedom. It is not enough to simply define human freedom (though this will certainly be a part of Schelling's task); one must also "establish the place of this concept in the system as a whole; that is, show how freedom and man's being free go together with beings as a whole and fit into them" (pg19). Why does Schelling's task appear precisely in this form? Heidegger believes that a new interpretation of Being, its determinability and its truth (pg32) arises in the modern period which makes the demand for a system, or the demand that knowledge be presented in the form of a system, an absolute necessity for German Idealism. There are a number of conditions which led to this notion of the system and the demand that knowledge be formulated in terms of the system. I will list what I think were the four most important (out of the six conditions Heidegger lists): "1. The predominance of the mathematical as the criterion of knowledge [which I already mentioned] 2. The self-founding of knowledge in the sense of this requirement as the precedence of certainy over truth [i.e. Descartes's method of radical doubt] 3. The founding of certainty as the self-certainty of the 'I think' 4. Thinking, ratio as the court of judgment for the essential determination of Being" (pg34). Knowledge must be grounded in certainty and certainty is only genuinely grounded in the certainty of the "I think". This ultimately leads to Kant's Copernican revolution in which Being is reinterpreted in terms of what it is possible for human thought to represent (i.e. the ratio becomes the court of judgment for the essential determinations of Being). Reason projects the system before it ever encounters beings, the system is a part of the architectonic of reason itself. As Heidegger writes, "According to Kant, reason posits a focus imaginarius, a focus in which all the rays of questioning things and of determining objects meet, or, conversely, in terms of which all knowledge has its unity. Reason is the faculty - we can say - of anticipatory gathering - logos, legein" (pg37). This presents a difficulty though. There seems to be a contradiction in the idea of a system of human freedom which ultimately led Kant to posit his dualism between the phenomenal and noumenal and which seemed to lead to the impossibility of ever reconciling the first and second Critiques. Kant continued to work on this problem until his death and his third Critique seemed to point in the direction of a reconciliation which was taken up by the later German Idealists. Kant was still working on this problem in the Opus Posthumum which Heidegger quotes and in which Kant was especially concerned with the relation between God, the world, and the human being (the I Myself, or the existential self, or moral self). [As a sidenote: I think the mistake of ordinary theism is to think God as part of the world system which ultimately is a denial of God as Absolute which is why a theologian like Paul Tillich can say that it is just as atheistic to affirm God's existence as it is to deny it] But back to the work under discussion: the system seems to be based on the principle of sufficient reason. The Idea of unifying all knowledge in terms of the principle of sufficient reason is precisely the heuristic Idea necessary to guide the quest for human knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) in the first place even if this goal can never actually be attained. But the principle of sufficient reason (the grounding principle of the system) seems to rule out the possibility of human freedom. From the standpoint of the system human being and human freedom seem to be the great flaw in the diamond (to quote a line from Paul Valery's poem The Graveyard by the Sea; a line that Maurice Merleau-Ponty was especially fond of quoting). Human freedom seems to be precisely what resists the totalization of the system and yet Schelling has set himself the task of providing a system which will be capable of placing human freedom in its place in relation to beings as a whole. Schelling's task is not entirely different from the task of the modern defenders of free-will who attempt to account for the place of human freedom in a world governed by mechanical laws. Modern thinkers are also attempting to think the place of humanity's freedom in relation to being as a whole. Schelling's task is not entirely identical to the modern theorists though. Schelling is less interested in securing a place for humanity's freedom in a world governed by mechanical laws (a vision of the world which Schelling does not share) and far more interested in securing a place for humanity's freedom in relation to the ground of Being as a whole (or God). This is a result of Schelling's pantheism. It is necessary to understand pantheism precisely though. Heidegger writes, "In its formal meaning, pantheism means: pan-theos, "Everything - God"; everything stands in relation to God; all beings are in relation to the ground of beings" (pg68). It is necessary to have something to contrast this view with. Ordinary theism views the relation between God and creation as a relation between an artisan and his product (with the difference that God did not have any pre-existent material to work with and so is the creator of both the material and the form while the artisan is merely the creator of the form). God according to this view is a... Read more ›
9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An insightful but troubled reading of Schelling,
This review is from: Schellings Treatise: On Essence Human Freedom (Series In Continental Thought) (Paperback)
Because it is thoughtful and thurough, as well as the fact that is one of the few book-length treatments of any single Schelling text, Heidegger's text on Schelling's "Freedom Essay" is a valuable book for studying Schelling. But despite its use, this text has significant flaws. First, Heidegger spends far too little time acquianting the reader with Schelling's earlier thought, and it refuses to see the latter period of Schelling's career as anything more than a "silent period." As a result, Schelling's last major published work is open to be interpreted, somewhat misrepresented, and fitted into Heidegger's own philosophical assumptions rather than the development of its author's philosophical insight.Further, the text's final critical assesment of Schelling has very little weight outside of Heideger's own thought...in fact, the criticism is little more than an assertion that Schelling's theological thoughts must be attributed to man rather than any religious or philosphical god. Heidegger tries to preserve Schelling's anthropological insights apart from the foundation they require, but can offer no compeling reason why the one should not be rejected with the other. Thus, this text offers the student two things: a valuable though flawed discussion of Schelling, and a chance to see Heidegger's willingness to present only what is convenient for his appropriation of western philosophy.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
