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Schelling's Mystical Platonism: 1792–1802. By NaomiFisherOxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 248 pp., ISBN : 9780197752883

Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Naomi Fisher's Schelling's Mystical Platonism offers one of the most compelling (and highly readable) interpretations of Schelling's early writings (1792)(1793)(1794)(1795)(1796)(1797)(1798)(1799)(1800)(1801)(1802).Its key premise is that from his student days in Tübingen (1792) through to the early years of his identity philosophy (1802), Schelling espoused a mystical form of Platonism.Although Fisher concludes her analysis with the year 1802 and Schelling's dialogue Bruno, she contends that this mystical Platonism illuminates the whole of Schelling's thinking and can be found even in his later works (12).What is genuinely novel about Fisher's bookand its most important contributionis the fact that it offers a coherent and substantive framework by which to interpret Schelling's writings in this period (and potentially beyond), and thereby discern unity across (apparent) variety.In contrast to the majority of work on the early Schelling, Schelling's Mystical Platonism argues that Schelling is working out of a unified vision, and the seeds of this vision were sewn in his early encounter with Plato and Platonism in Tübingen.This is a vision that, Fisher contends, frames not only Schelling's most evidently Platonist work (i.e., Bruno), but also his earliest publications, including On the I as a Principle of Philosophy (1796), the Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795-6), his work in the philosophy of nature (in particular, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature [1797] and the Introduction to the First Outline for a System of a Philosophy of Nature [1799]), the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), as well as his first forays into the so-called identity philosophy, Presentation of My System (1801) and Further Presentations (1802).By describing and explicating this vision, how it emerged through Schelling's encounter with Platonism, and how it can be found across these works, Fisher presents a critical challenge to the widely accepted view that Schelling, as Hegel famously put it, underwent his education in public.On Fisher's view, Schelling's encounters with Spinoza, Jacobi, Kant, Fichte, and Reinhold were determined by these early insights, such that he never simply adopted Spinoza's or Fichte's perspectives, but integrated them into his own, already formed Platonism.In turn, his distinctive contributions to German idealism lie precisely in the fact that he furnished novel, Platonist-inspired responses to the questions posed by Kant's, Fichte's and Spinoza's systems.In this way, the book carries forwardand to some extent brings to fruitioninsights of earlier scholars: Michael Franz's (1996 and 2012) works on Schelling in Tübingen, which established the extent of Schelling's interest in Plato and Platonism, and, in English Frederick Beiser's (2002) claim that the German romantics and idealists were, ultimately, Platonists.What this means, for both Beiser and Fisher, is not what we take Platonism to be today, i.e., a dualism between the world of ideas and the world of appearances, but its very opposite.For Fisher, in particular, the relation between the ideasor, more specifically, the "one" or the absoluteand their manifestationsi.e., the "many" or the individual objects, is one of grounding.This means that the absolute is neither fully transcendent (as a dualist would have it), nor fully immanent (as a Spinozist would have it), because no finite object can fully embody the absolute.As such, Fisher contends, the absolute is both the source of all individual beings ("it gives rise" to them), and their end (insofar as all objects aim to more fully embody the "one") (35; 188).
DOI: 10.1111/ejop.70054
Author: Dalia Nassar
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417290105
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