Markus Gabriel: Der Mensch im Mythos.

Abstract

With Der Mensch im Mythos we encounter a work of refreshing originality and reassuring depth, from a thinker whose ideas will no doubt be with us for years to come. The leading voice of a new generation of scholars, Gabriel finds in Schelling’s philosophy resources to recast the terms of current debate on the relationship of ontology and epistemology, consciousness and personality, and our relationship to nature – a reframing that places a rehabilitated ontotheology before epistemology, qualifies the autonomy of the subject, and takes seriously the historical development of self-consciousness. Based on his dissertation, the focus of Gabriel’s efforts is Schelling’s Spatphilosophie, which encompasses the final 30 years of this thinker’s lengthy career, and has as its content the last iteration of Schelling’s attempt to “disclose and reveal that which never allows itself to be captured in the concept” (SSW, XI, p. 186), namely “the meaning of the fact of the world” (Schelling, 1972, p. 272). Like all of his iterations, his Spatphilosophie was the integrated whole encompassing the tensive interplay of opposing standpoints, be it of the Real and Ideal, or in this case, positive philosophy and negative philosophy, and philosophy of mythology and philosophy of revelation. How to understand the relationship between these has always been a challenge for the reader of Schelling, and Gabriel proposes an elegant, if stark, interpretive strategy that focuses only on one pair of this opposition, the Foundation of Philosophy of Mythology and Negative Philosophy, found in the eleventh volume of the Samtliche Werke. What emerges from this focused interpretation is a dense and complex work, the essence of which finds expression in the title of an introductory section introducing the three principles that organize this book: „Man in Myth, or Ontotheology, Anthropology, History of Self-Consciousness“ (p. 28). Gabriel convincingly communicates Schelling’s contention that myth, like religion itself, is a historical fact whose pervasive appearance must be accounted for philosophically, on its own terms (§ 11: Mythologie als Tautegorie), without being reduced to a mere allegorical significance or, worse, a primitive form of science. Leveraging Kant against Hegel, e ¬pistamh has limits which must be delineated and respected if practical, positive interests are to be realized. Man in myth is embedded in an historical process, be it of ideas, politics, or consciousness, whose beginnings and purpose he can never know through any theoretical science or transcendental source. According to Schelling history and experience offer the only credible sources for developing a philosophically meaningful response to the question of why is there something, rather than nothing? AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR