The Inception Point: Schelling’s Construction of the ‘System of Times’

This article advocates for a reading of Schelling’s late positive philosophy as fundamentally a philosophy of the inseparability of time and history. This argument is most clearly seen through an analysis of the idea of a ‘system of times’ (System von Zeiten) which Schelling begins in the Weltalter notes but does not fully articulate until the Berlin lectures in the 1840s. The system of times becomes the conditions of possibility and actuality for temporality itself. Through the centrepiece of this ‘system of times’, the article attempts to describe the various aspects of temporality in Schelling’s late-philosophy, focusing on the dialectical structure rooted in the distinction between concept and being, and on the triadic structure of the modality of this dialectic. In relation to the history of philosophy, the paper also details how Schelling’s definition of time as the ‘inception point’ (Anfangspunkt) of all philosophy, given in 1828, marks the continuity between this late system of positive and negative philosophy, to the Weltalter writings which begin Schelling’s ideas of positivity, construed as historical actuality. The article concludes with a description of how this ontological entanglement of time and history, with an idea of knowledge itself as a kind of co-existential narrative, in which reason ecstatically alters itself and reverses the principle of reason from conceptual determination to historical incarnation. The final point made is that this ecstasy necessitates the interrelation of history with mythology, and ultimately links the positive philosophy to Schelling’s earlier idea of Mitwissenschaft.