Schelling’s Autogenetic Absolute and the Transformative Power of Love: Questioning the Sources of a Moving System

Abstract

Among the philosophies of German Idealism, none is more often described as marked by internal tensions than Schelling’s, which nevertheless retained, throughout his life, the ambition to be a system. This claim (and its discussed “failure”)2 may be considered one of the most striking controversies, not only particular to Schelling’s reception but to his own thinking. The tensions that the present article aims to interrogate concern the form and the essential content that the Schellingian system had taken on by 1809.

Keywords: love, freedom, absolute, identity, difference, system, pantheism, processuality, doctrine of potencies, evil