Passages from Schelling's Die Weltalter, translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman Jr:
"… philosophy, which would explain everything… had to accept as explanation precisely this incomprehensibility, this active opposition toward all thought, this dynamic darkness, this positive inclination to obscurity. But it would have preferred to do away altogether with the inconvenient, to dissolve the unintelligible entirely into reason or (like Leibniz) into representation."
"Since there thus is an incessant urge ["Drang"] to be, and that primal essence nevertheless cannot be, it remains in a state of perpetual desire ["Begierde"], as an incessant seeking, an eternal, never quieted passion ["Sucht"] to be. Hence the old expression is valid: Nature seeks itself and does not find itself (quaerit se natura, non invenit)."
"Since that first potency therefore unites in itself opposing powers, of which the one always longs for the outside, the other presses back toward the inside, hence its life is also a life of vexation ["Widerwartigkeit"] and dread ["Angst"], since it does not know which way to turn and so falls into an involuntary, revolving motion."
"The past a weighty concept, known to all and yet understood by few… Only the man who has the power to tear himself loose from himself (from what is subordinate in his nature), is capable of creating a past for himself. This same man alone enjoys a true present..."
"True eternity is not that which excludes all time, but that which contains time (eternal time) subjected to itself. Real eternity is the overcoming of time, as the significant Hebrew language expresses victory (which it places among the first attributes of God) and eternity by one word (naezach)."
"The power of understanding is exhibited not when madness is absent but when it is mastered."
"... then it becomes clear what a terrible thing, about which we had no perception during life, was suppressed by this magic spell of life. And what was but now the object of reverence or love, becomes an object of fear and the most terrible horror. When the abysses of the human heart open up in evil, and those terrible thoughts come forth which should be eternally buried in night and darkness, only then do we know what lies in man with reference to possibility, and how his nature in itself or left to itself is really constituted."
"Everything depends upon comprehending that unity in God which is at the same time duality, or, conversely, the duality which is at the same time unity…. But the concept of that unity, which, because it is a voluntary one, just on that account encloses a duality, is completely foreign to our era."
"... this point of transfiguration often lies almost sensuously perceptible in the most corporeal things."
"Here, too, the creative power can ascend only from the lower to the higher, until it gradually has raised up the very innermost and most hidden power of darkness from the depths. Such [powers] are then the purest, keenest, and most godlike spirits."
"All that comes to be can only do so in discontent; and as dread is the basic feeling of each living creature, so is everything that lives conceived and born only in violent conflict. Who could believe that nature could have created, in rest and peace, or otherwise than in the most violent antagonism of powers, so many kinds of strange products in this terrible external confusion and chaotic inner mixture, where it is hard to find anything just by itself, but all are interpenetrated and ingrown with other things? Are not most products of inorganic nature visibly children of dread, of terror, even of despair?"
"... the nature existing in this conflict struggles as in heavy dreams which, because they are from [mere] being, arise from the past. With growing conflict, those nocturnal births soon pass like wild phantasies through that nature's interior, and in them for the first time it experiences all the horrors of its own nature. The predominant feeling that expresses the conflict of tendencies in being, when there is no knowing which way to turn, is that of dread [Angst]."
"[There is no greatness] without a continual solicitation to madness which, while it must be overcome, must never be completely lacking."
"... a world which is nothing but an image, indeed, an image of an image, a nought of nought, a shadow of a shadow; men who are also only images, only dreams of shadows..."
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Passages from Heidegger's Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, translated by Joan Stambaugh:
"Being in general, must be more primordially conceived in order for evil to be comprehensible in its own being and thus introduced into the system, thus making a system of freedom possible…"
"As a lack, it is true that a lack is a not-being-present. Nevertheless, this absence is not nothing. The blind man who has lost his sight will argue vigorously against the statement that blindness is nothing existent and nothing depressing and nothing burdensome. Thus, nothingness is not nugatory; but, rather, something tremendous, the most tremendous element in the nature of Being."
"Nature now does not yet mean what we alone experience immediately as nature, but signifies a metaphysical determination of beings in general and means what belongs to beings as their foundation, but is that which does not really enter the being of the self. Rather, it always remains what is distinguished from the self."
"God's becoming cannot be serialized in individual segments in the succession of ordinary time. Rather, in this becoming every thing is simultaneous."
"In the concept of manence (manere), of remaining, the idea o f mere objective presence, of rigid presence, is contained if no other determination is added to transform it. Immanence thus leads to the idea of things being lifelessly contained in God, just as the skirt hangs in the closet. Rather, the only concept appropriate to the being of things is that of becoming."
"... the not-yet remains. There remains in God the eternal past of himself in his ground. The afterwards and soon are to be unders tood here in an eternal sense. The whole boldness of Schelling's thinking comes into play here. But it is not the vacuous play of thoughts of a manic hermit, it is only the continuation of an attitude of thinking which begins with Meister Eckhart and is uniquely developed in Jacob Boehme."
"This primal longing moves in anticipation like a surging, billowing sea, similar to the matter of Plato, following some dark, uncertain law, incapable in i tself of forming anything that can endure."
"This interpretation of thinghood, however, is also a presupposition for correctly understanding what Schelling is trying to say in the statement that the being of things is a becoming. He does not mean that platitude that all things are continuously changing. Nor does he mean that external ascertainment that there is nowhere at all in the world a state of rest and things really do not have being."
"But the (real) Word, pronounced, exists only in the unity of light and darkness..."
"We find such prefigurations in nature: the strange and chance element of organic formations and deformations, what incites horror, the fact that everything alive is approaching dissolution. Here something appears which has been driven out into selfish exaggeration and is at the same time impotent and repulsive."
"A golden mountain is possible, but this kind of possibility has no real being-possible in the sense that it inclines forward to the making possible of the possible and thus is already on the way to realization. Where evil is possible, it is also already operative in the sense of a throroughgoing attraction of the ground in all beings."
"And even in the terror of evil an essential revelation occurs. For in its craving for self-consumption, the self-craving of malice mirrors that original ground in God, before all existence as it is for i tself completely s triving back into itself, and this is the terrible in God."See also:
***To raise the dead— &/or evidence for the villainous affair, the tale of family disonour, Romish church's pact with the devil (considered the greatest outrage against sense and decency, to be plagued and pestered, though solemnly ratified, à Dieu rien n'est impossible, menteur avéré, nom d'un chien):
"Although Greek names were sometimes applied to the church modes and the principle of diatonic octave scales is found in both systems, certain significant discrepancies seem to belie any direct historical connection. Most conspicuous is the different meaning attributed to the names of the Greek octave species and of the church modes. Comparing the two systems provides a plausible explanation: medieval theorists apparently assumed wrongly that the Greek octave species were named in ascending rather than descending order. The Greek octave species Dorian (E–E), Phrygian (D–D), Lydian (C–C), and Mixolydian (B–B) thus appeared in the church modes as Dorian (D–D), Phrygian (E–E), Lydian (F–F), and Mixolydian (G–G)," (from
"Mode," entry in Brittanica, by Mieczyslaw Kolinski);
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