I like to think that The Ages of the World, was Schelling's attempt at re-creating the Platonic Timaeus but through a Christian lens. Instead of the Platonic-Demiurge artfully constructing the cosmos, it is God, going through the motions with a little Kabbalistic charm. 1/
The Jewish Mystical tradition plays a huge part in Schelling's organic cosmos, God negates himself or contracts inward (shrouding himself into the Darkness) (Tzim/Tzum) in order to form a receptacle from this space. It is here where Nature's powers can emerge and form, 2/
and this is the greatest lesson from Schelling, that the origins of Reason are formed from Unreason, and that the primordial chaos where these principles are coalescing and rotating, unfolding and folding together: create order, form and law. 3/
However ... what would the beginning of all beginnings be to human consciousness? How can we philosophize about something that isn't intuited but lies dormant in our subjective interiority. (4/5).
If Humanity was not inherently alive to perceive and intuit such unconscious origins then what? How is this knowledge accessible to philosophy as a science? These are the central question of the Ages of the World (5/5).
