The Schelling revival has never quite reconciled itself to the Swabian’s religious anima. Schelling’s Hegel-critique may now be recognized as something like a proto-deconstruction of Idealism’s ‘paroxysmal’ self-assertion; but, we are told, this ‘anti-logocentric’ kernel has usually to be extricated from a mystical-theosophical shell. Likewise, there may be vast, fruitful depths to Schelling’s stricture that Being is irreducible to thought; nonetheless, Schelling’s “apparently dead theology” is best either forgotten or else ‘translated’ into the lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, Rortyian postmodern pragmatism, etc. The religious concerns of Schelling’s later work are, it seems, little more than an embarrassment for those driving the revival.
Despite profound gratitude towards those (principally Bowie) who have done so much to instigate the current Schelling renaissance, I want to suggest here that we should not be so quick to brush aside, or ‘translate’, Schelling’s theologico-religious interests—for such a dismissal leaves us not just decontextualizing Schelling’s Hegel-critique, but, as well, missing out on a crucial Schellingian contribution to contemporary debate about the question of onto-theology. Schelling’s continuing relevance is more than his blowing open the Hegelian Identity of Thought and Being; it is also his concomitant reinstatement—not merely incidental to but fundamental for his critique of Idealism’s auto-apotheosis—of the ancient Platonic conviction that the divinity ‘is’ epekeina tes ousias, beyond Being or any metaphysical construction.