The Organic Form of Time in Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology

Abstract

How must time be so that consciousness can emerge? As we can infer from the second part of this question, time is concerned here with the conditions for the appearance of consciousness. So, time does not question the fact of the existence of consciousness, but given the latter’s fact, it looks for the grounds on which consciousness could have emerged. But it is not at all obvious what time has to do with the coming-into-being of consciousness. The question somewhat implies that time is one of the conditions for the becoming of consciousness, but it also posits a relation between the very idea of emergence and that of time. If we want to know the conditions in which consciousness can emerge at all, we have to look into the specificity of the relation between time and the conditions for consciousness’ coming-into-being.