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A SOLID FOOTHOLD Jerry Day: Voegelin: Schelling, and the Philosophy of Historical Existence. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 300. $49.95.)
Readers of Voegelin's 1989 Autobiographical Reflections will have noted that Voegelin's encounter with Schelling, some forty years before, changed the way he approached "the materials." Many later commentators have made reference to this remark, and then pressed on to consider one or another aspect of Order and History, Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness, and so on. The assumption governing this procedure seems to be that we are all familiar with the contents of the twelve large volumes of Schelling's writings and so the connection between whatever Voegelin found in Schelling and his abandonment of a work that he had been writing for the previous six years or so was obvious. Of course, we are supposed to think, Voegelin read Schelling and then had to re-do the eight-volume History of Political Ideas. What could be more obvious!
The problem, of course, is that Schelling's philosophy of history and/or philosophy of consciousness went through several versions. In his youth he was the Wunderkind of German philosophy-and even then he was notorious for changing his mind. Thus that there is a great deal of truth to Hegel's crack, that Schelling carried on his education in public, in his books. He then fell into silence in his middle years and was thoroughly eclipsed by Hegel. And at last, as an old man, he gave a famous and highly publicized lecture series in Berlin. Notwithstanding the influence he later had on Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, the lectures were generally viewed as a flop.
So the first and most obvious question is: who is this Schelling that is alleged to have influenced Voegelin? To be more precise, which Schelling? The early, middle, or late Schelling? And how did Schelling's influence work? What insights did Voegelin adopt or adapt? Prior to Jerry Day's book, no one has acknowledged the importance of these questions, let alone tried to answer them.
Schelling is not an easy philosopher to read or to understand. Fortunately, Voegelin relied on one of the more accessible of Schelling's books Oie Weltalter, which was translated in 1942 as The Ages of...