Abstract

The principle of philosophy, Schelling declares in his 1810 Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, is the Absolute or God.1 The terms are brought into close yet ambiguous proximity by this assertion. Yet how are we to think them together? It is far from clear just how the Absolute—the abstract, universal, all-encompassing name Idealism gives to what, most fundamentally, there is—and God, a name with a rather longer life story, are to be related. Are we to take it that the Absolute and God are to be baldly equated? That the one is a mere term of convenience properly understood in the light of the other? That the one is a supplement or corrective that the other is in need of? And who would be the arbiter of...