ARTICOLI / Matteo Vincenzo D’Alfonso
Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology. In Light of the Concepts of ‘Realism’, ‘Emergence’, and ‘Documentality’
With reference to Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (PoM) in my paper, I will address three points, namely: To what extent Schelling’s PoM provides us with arguments in favor of 1. Realism, 2. Emergentism and 3. Documentality. Accordingly, in the first section, Reality, I will present Schelling’s PoM as realism, arguing that in mythology Schelling finds the traces of the developing of consciousness, regarded as a real fact. But, as this latter can only be real if having a history, i.e. if emerging from a previous natural status, which is devoid of any consciousness, PoM should be regarded as strongly related to a sort of emergentism. This will thus be the object of the second section, where I will investigate the genetic interpretation of Schelling’s Weltalter proposed by Wolfram Hogrebe (Hogrebe 1989) and suggests that precisely this analysis of the Weltalter explains also why Schelling’s project couldn’t but fail. In fact, against its intention, the Weltalter, as it was trying to explain the rise of semantics together with it the true genesis of our acknowledgment of the world, still remains affected by an idealistic stance and hence couldn’t succeed in becoming positive philosophy. Eventually, in the third section of this paper, Documentality, I argue, that a solution to the problems left open by Schelling’s Weltalter and positively addressed in the PoM is offered by the interpretation of this latter as a contribution to Documentality, a concept which indeed would provide us with an important theoretical framework to understand the hidden presuppositions of Schelling’s PoM and to relate this latter to its realistic and emergentistic character.
