Absolut göttlich. Zu Metaphysik und Religion in Schellings Spätphilosophie

With Schelling's later philosophy, the rationality in German idealism bids a farewell to the attempt of its last justification. In the reality of an absolute reason, rationality cannot affirm its own reality. Rationality indeed achieves the aim of being linked to an absolute, but whose reality as a creative freedom eludes the conceptualising reaching out of the rationality ("negative philosophy"). However, the possibility of this rationally ungraspable reality, as understood by rationality, liberates to create a theoretically non-enforceable change of perspective ("religion"), which is nonetheless not to be denounced as irrational. Afterwards, the "unlocked" rationality is able to diagnose the world in the view of the creative freedom of the absolute ("positive philosophy"). This is what Schelling's later philosophy demonstrates: a theory of the absolute can create scope for uncertainty, which is expressed in phenomena such as ambivalence, coincidence and indecipherability. In so doing, Schelling anticipates what 'the modern' likes to lay claim to in its self-characterisation, which is, indeed, contrary to the theological and absolutist theoretical considerations of German idealism. Different, however, from other representatives of post-idealism, Schelling locates 'the other' of rationality not strictly as being on the other side of rationality (danger of irrationalism) but links the insight into the other of rationality with the selfenlightenment of rationality. The other of rationality is its absolute reason. This reason is original creativity and creative freedom: the freedom from and through which everything is. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]