Chapter 5 - “Exhibiting the particular in the universal”: philosophical construction and intuition in Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity (1801–1804)

Summary

Reflection upon the relationship between the essence, the being, and the form of absolute identity reveals a crucial difference between the essential qualitative indifference of subjective and objective factors in absolute identity considered with respect to its Wesen or essence and the quantitative difference of these same factors that is implicit in its very form or mode of being. The uncompromising abolition of the opposition between thought and being, which is and has always been the goal of both theoretical cognition and practical striving is the starting point of F.W.J. Schelling's new Philosophy of Identity. Philosophy displays the same unity that mathematics does, the unity of the finite and the infinite, of being and of thinking, but it has the more difficult task of intuiting this unity immediately in the essence of the eternal itself and exhibiting it in reason.