Life versus Being: Schelling’s Conceptualization of God

Abstract

The quote in the epigraph makes it clear that, starting from the Freedom Essay, Schelling considers the category of life to be the most appropriate for describing God. Opposed in the quoted passage to the notion of being, this category replaces that of absolute identity, which had informed his earlier system. Deeply influenced by Spinoza, in the system of identity, Schelling had conceived God or the Absolute as the absolute identity of the real and the ideal, as an eternal and non-becoming essence (Wesen), absolutely simple and indivisible—as that which is entirely devoid of potencies. Absolute identity is itself conceived as an all-encompassing womb within which particular beings are differentiated—beings that do not exist in and of themselves, but only insofar as they participate in absolute identity. The characterization of God as absolute identity therefore implies a fundamentally ontological and ontotheological conception: God is “Being itself (das Seyn selbst) … necessarily eternal and immutable”

Kewords: F.W.J. Schelling, philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, life, being, freedom, God, actuality, Aristotle, Jacobi