Exploring the Meaning of History: Events, Responsibility, and the Role of Christianity

and it's meaningful by aiming at something what a name that is are they're at a loss or an eschaton and

they're different but they're both ends and without that directedness there is no meaningful history which means

there's no history so just to say something on those two points very briefly events event fulness events are

that's a big topic and contemporary philosophy and it has something to do with this break through the history but

for the purposes of this talk if that's surprised that is they're not reducible to what preceded them and they also

fulfill that is they make sense of what preceded them and they point ahead to something which

will both surprise and fulfill in the similar way in which it has surprised if fulfilled were preceded it so events

make history narrative oh it makes history a story so I just it's clear that a series of sequences are not

events that just happen to follow each other that have no intrinsic relation to each other team one is not intrinsically

related to T 2 and T 3 in their series of successes but a series of events narrated historically are meaningful and

related to one another the second presupposition maybe you find a little bit more problematic does

history have to be meaningful this I think is probably a difficult one for us because we seem to be comfortable with

the idea of history and the comfortable with the idea of a meaningless universe but I'm gonna stick with this one local

occurrences of meaning are swallowed up by the meaninglessness of the whole if the whole has no meaning then the local

is not really meaningful and what I mean by this is your your cosmologists goes home and he really believes everything

will be swallowed up by heat kind of meaningless accidental end to the meaningless accident which is the

universe but he kisses his wife Denise its damndest pot roast and he bounces his baby on his knee and all of this is

meaningful to him locally and he says that this is enough for him and what I'm saying is that it isn't because

in fact if he thought the matter through there's nothing particularly meaningful about his relation to his wife or his

home or his child with a love that he feels for the family the whole thing is swallowed up in an abyss of

meaninglessness of course Nietzsche said as much in on the uses and abuses of history in his untimely meditations

where he argued that the only way to do history is by lying because if we really saw things as they were we would have to

say there is really nothing meaningful there are no meaningful events there is no real history in the ontological sense

of the word there's only going to be cherry-picking for certain purposes so who you do cherry-pick properly or

improperly it's more or less the other the other figure everything going all right you're missing I'm actually using

the microphone Oh cameras everything that's going on with the work so the other figure is Carl Lewis who in 1949

wrote a very influential book called meeting in history where he examined just this thesis that the history is

eventful time and it's meaningful time or it isn't and we didn't always think this way about history but we began to

think about this way they think this way about history in the Middle Ages and European christened them which gave rise

to the great narratives of modernity which launches the revolutions and science and politics which produced the

modern world and the cult of progress and all that works pretty well until we get to the middle of the 20th century

when that all seems to be some kind of fiction that we've created and at that point were stuck with a commitment to

historical time eventful time so we can't go back to the cyclical universe of the Greeks or some kind of a temper

ality of the ancient world we're stuck with eventful time but we no longer have t loss or eschaton we no longer have the

meaningful time and the end result according to love it is Neil ISM so these are just two places where we find

these precepts articulated outside of showing now shoving didn't always pursue this

thought he was not always a philosopher of history he became a philosopher of history in 1809 in a clumsy fashion we

could say you know exploratory fashion in a confused fashion deliciously confused the freedom essay is and he

really found his foothold in the topic in his lectures on the positive philosophy which was the culmination of

his career in 1831 at which point he endeavoured to construct the philosophy of history that would supply Hegel's so

up and tell then he avoided the whole thing and this is something that I think is important and I want to go into it in

some detail he avoided the whole thing and this was shelling one chuckling one and what did the whole thing by being an

idealist in the strict sense of the term and for shelling an idealist in the strict sense of the term is one who

pursues a purely rational philosophy to its logical culmination which is the denial of eventful time and he thinks

that you see such denialists and platinum to Titus and Heath early certainly develops them over the course

of thousands of pages of pursuing this thesis how did he get there so a little brief run up to shellings and mature

idealism through his nature philosophy he became very famous as a young man for writing treatises on nature one treatise

after another and they earned the recognition of many people including Hegel who wrote his first book on

shellings of nature philosophy and Goethe who said this is so amazing that this got a job so he became the youngest

professor I think the Ministry of Germany up until recently at the University of Vienna because of his work

on nature philosophy and the project in nature philosophy was to counteract the dualism of modern philosophy they

dualism water which you're familiar with standard undergraduate stuff that we can divide

the world into subjects who are free spiritual material and objects which are necessary and material and altered

against us and on this side we have this nature Shelley weighted on this debate whether or not this is accurately

Cartesian an audience of no insignificance that's simply the way with the way we thought about it in the

18th century so Sheldon waited on this debate and he said there's something really wrong with this and this was the

romantic Shelley the romantic showing who enthused about the infinity of nature love the wilderness and so on and

so forth and discovered is unconscious fell in love repeatedly and all of that romantic stuff nature couldn't be just

some spiritless mechanical thing over and against free subjectivity it had to have some of its own integrity it's not

a thought you need to shut all the Romantics argued this they were all towels into each other's beds Novalis

the Schlegel Brothers Karolina Schlegel who shelling stole from his friend marry her so they all they're all into

this stuff they had salons they listen to Beethoven and talked about make sure the infinity without which is reflective

of the identity within itself but Shelley because smart fellow he was made of the logical point and his his thesis

was the following that if we properly understand these two things we can say spirits people's nature but not in a

simple tautological sameness rather to use the biological term they are stereoisomers

they are like mirror images of each other everything on that's on the left or the one side is on the right on the

other side like two heads which are similar but reversed and Sheldon got very specific about what's reversed here

or he does he would put put in many ways with the way that's most helpful for us is that what's implicit in spirit is

explicit in nature and what's implicit in nature is explicit in in spirit sort of kind of play of inside and outside in

the more famous formulation he said that spirit is invisible nature and nature is talked for a long time about that but

think basically about ideology so I know the properties of plants they take up residency in my soul to speak in an

Aristotelian fashion but those properties of plants the essences of plants they're not on the surface of the

plant in the metaphysical sense these essences are what's most concealed and most interior in the in the material

beings and natural beings so that hidden interior of the natural being becomes the exterior of the mind it's what's

most visible in a certain way to mind that she doesn't mean to say that has the material visibility it's not

Material invisible but it's what's most on the surface and similarly the spirit is not entirely transparent to itself

but beneath it is true with all of the forces which are visibly manifest in nature contraction and expansion dries

and struggle and strife all of this is the deep ground of spirit which is of course the unconscious and this was the

beginning of the concept of the unconscious so you have this reversed this reversed image

a small little detour for the Hickey aliens in the room peggle up this he said this is great objective idealism

we're finished with subjective idealism for for pizza the subjective idealists nature is some of the things thrown out

over and against B which is necessary for me to receive for to to activate myself as spirit spirit is nothing other

than overcoming these opposition's so on an epistemological level the scientist bumps up against the thing he doesn't

know and then reduces that thing that he doesn't know to himself by exposing it

to be an intelligible structure or on a political level we go into the Amazon and we find this wild uninhabitable

space and we cut down the trees and we create roads and streets and make it habitable nature that object for fiction

of a subjective idealist is thrown up over and against us for the sake of our own freedom that was Fichte and Hegel

found that too subjective mystic but there was something about shoving solution which Hagel will go on to find

to deceit to teach which table goes on to find two romantic and irrational istic because if you can see in this

equivalence game it's not clear what happens to reason in a robust sense reason in the full sense of the term not

of the understanding which is abstract and reflective but reason which is comprehensive which transcends its

limits in recognizing them so Shelley was to be praised for seeing in nature some kind of inchoate spirit as he would

call petrified intelligence but he was to be corrupted for making it some kind of equivalence to reason such that we

weren't really able to say that reason has some kind of preeminence in this relationship or that spirit in its true

sense must understood as prior to nature even if in the temporal sense nature becomes prior

to spirit Cele creates this possibility of a natural history of Reason which is fully materialistic and he would say

that's actually a good account as well as it's gonna get counters it's a reverse so this kind of equivocation is

no good so Hegel restored the hierarchy and said nature is the medium of spirit nature is

the middle moment that moment of particularity in the Sun during this which invites spirit further to affirm a

true universality a concrete universality a rich unity that includes difference within it or a rich sense of

rationality which does not deny like the intelligence of feeling and the sublimity of nature and the

intelligibility of the world in its own qualified sense so there's a restoration of the hierarchy in Hegel to correct

young shillings enthusiasm for this equal toless now Charlie does not go this direction what he took with where

he goes is in a very surprising direction into what he calls identity philosophy intensely for close to a

decade and the thesis of identity philosophy is the following all relations are oppositional composition

is not just restricted to certain kinds of relations but every relation is oppositional so the relation of a

singular existence to its essence is an opposition danger the existence is singular the essences Universalists

existence is in communicable the essences distributed so on the relationship of a subject to its

predicate is a opposition of all relations or opposition further opposition's are only possible between

two of the same kind you can't oppose to things that are occupying the same logical

space otherwise you just have alternative universes that are not interactive and further this common kind

cannot be oppositional so this is the familiar image we get in the freedom si which the class that I'm teaching that

knows all about because we go to an everyday burn a equals B stands for any oppositional structure it could be the

subject and its objects in intellectual sense it could be the political agent and its ends it could be this subject

than its predicate in the propositional sense so wherever we're saying something is something else we have this structure

of identity and difference that is there are two that there's not tautology there are two things that are being identified

which are different and the question is how is that possible which is a very old question of course the charming says

it's only possibly because of a concealed ground which isn't a mediator it's a concealed ground there are some X

he says which is in one respect a and is another in another respect to B which allows which allows us to identify the

two even though they're different well the question then becomes what is this X it cannot be in the oppositional

relationship to what's on the surface it can't be another officer it can't be opponent to this because then it would

have clearly couldn't be identified with it it could be ground it and similarly can't be opposed to B and it can't be

opposed to others hidden grounds either so we couldn't say for example C equals T deep some other distance by means of

some hidden mediator why because then we'll ask the question about x and y and we end up infinitely reproducing these

grounds so the X has to be undifferentiated simple singular without parts without relations

it sounds like Sh Bradley because it is because FH Bradley is repeating Shepard it is the absolute the unconditioned by

the absolute we don't mean the God of heaven on earth but that which has no conditions because it has nothing it

could be related to its related to nothing enough this absolute we can say certain things we can say it's never an

object it's not cognized in the ordinary way in which we cognize things it can only be immediately apprehended in what

you call the intellectual intuition which really meant you don't have to go outside yourself to see it like a

sensible intuition because it's you in some deep deep sense so the grab the fool understand it's a

very difficult to say what this is but the intuition of yourself is the intuition of the absolute properly

understood it is the the apprehension of it is the dissolution of subject object so if this cannot be articulated in any

kind of propositional form and it's not an item of knowledge in that sense so subject object distinction disappears

ordinary cognition dissolves here's a sentence and just read the other day cognizance of the absolute and the

objective genitive sense is cognizance of the absolute and the subjective genitive sense that is cognizance

cognizance of the absolute as an object is in fact the the absolutes cognizance of myself the eye with which I see God

is a mind which God sees me as Meister Eckhart puts it so the subject is not seeing anything really that is the

absolute that is Intuit in itself now all this sounds very zen-like and it really is it really is and there's so

much work to be done here on the relationship of this form of Schelling's thinking to Eastern thought particularly

adviser in India and to Vienna Buddhism to the zen variety so for example clearly he's

prescribing some kind of negation of ordinary patterns of cognition which doesn't bring us to some special place

but brings us here and now in some much richer more real sense of the word which if that affects the dissolution of

ordinary patterns of cognition and among these ordinary patterns of cognition we must include the cognition of time

there's time dissolves for me for the subject that becomes cognizant of the absolute and thereby no subject the

absolute however is not the union of opposites it's not the Gambian third and this is what in the introduction it is

the night neutral cows are black that's their passage goes well but nothing can be said a chili draws this really

interesting diagram here which in one respects repeats the identity for the denature philosophy another specs add

something to it it's called as magnetic diet and hypo discusses thickness differential so here you sort of have

this right because you can see that these two are the same but they're reversed so what is positive here o is

negative here and what is positive here is negative here or if you like what is explicit here is implicit here and in

potency and what is explicit here and an act is implicit here if an impotency and we could say that spirit in nature or

the real of the ideal and we have our nature philosophy but then he said something he added something to this and

he said the X which underlies that this absolute identity this absolute identity is not the union

of opposites it doesn't bring these things together it is their point of indifference it is indifferent to all

the opposites to which it gives rise but that's a technical term that means it's it's not different from those things

which are different from each other differences then become merely apparent relations are illusory there is no

sequence really there is no time there is no plurality there are no events we return to Parmenides and permanent Ian

Mona and that's where shelling more or less was around 1804 1805 lecture 1 the big

change happens in 1806 he moves to do them I need the friends friend's daughter and he starts having two

seances it's true there were different cultists he gets very involved in Jakob Girma which wasn't news to him because

he was raised in speculative pyatters household he knew all about speculative Pietism but now he wakes up to he finds

it very interesting he writes its father assassinated lunatics and here ends the freedom essay

which is some kind of conceptual metaphysical presentation of Jakob illness theosophy the active lemma is a

17th century shoemaker Lutheran shoemaker who wrote these extraordinary revelations that became foundational for

the German language and for German speculation he invented terms of Halfmoon because he had no to turn to he

was an auto tip-top absolutely fascinating thinking Hanna was very interested in him as well they all work

so this was not unique to be reading bone so so in 1806 1807 he's reading Burma 8009 he rents the freedom essay

and somewhere in there the turn occurs that is the turn to real time or meaningful time or eventful time which

is and the question is this why does he turn into history and the answer is

surprisingly commonplace if not profound is that possible to have a profile on the commonplace at least familiar if

there's no history then there's no moral responsibility but there is moral responsibility

therefore there must be a history and here count becomes extremely important to it particularly the cat who speaks of

this performative logic of testifying to moral responsibility the performance of freedom saying thank you to somebody

making promises in spite of the fact that you have no theoretical justification for thinking yourself of

being capable of promising you nonetheless cannot reasonably deny in your actions that you are you might

think of what time should be morally responsible in the where there's no history well very simply because if

there's no history than there's no there's no individuals who are capable of promising things and making calm

writing contracts and breaking them and so on we're about wearing a permanent Ian monad where there is no sense of

holding anybody accountable for anything because there's no individuality either as showing said at this stage there are

no essential differences only quantitative differences the strange idea that things are not qualitatively

different from each other but they're only quantitatively different but there's more like you turn

off the bass on the one side and the trouble on the other side different kinds of being spirit and

nature but you don't get individuals who are responsible for themselves who are morally accountable and capable of free

actions so then and since there we cannot do not moral responsibility there must be history but the question

then becomes what us what is an ontological status of the historical because up until now we have no terms by

which to invest the historical with the dignity of being real at least celli has no terms and he

explores various options he looks at emanation because he's such a dedicated meal feminist at this time an emanation

won't do because that which emanates from the one is really only apparently real it's really just the infinite in

some kind of illusory form it doesn't have a self standing whatever reality it has it has by virtue of its origin and

not fortune emanates but it has no reality in itself and so forth what's highness I've been correctly understood

there's no history in the eventful sense Sheldon was also unimpressed by this standard Orthodox Jewish Christian

argument that the historical is part of creation which is created ex nihilo by God and set free from God so that things

can happen the reason he doesn't what this argument is that it doesn't explain anything and there certainly is a

conundrum what is the ontological status of creation such that it could be something

other than God this is a Scholastic problem not an easily solved one and there's a tendency to relax back into

some kind of near platonic sense of saying well the reality of of creation is really God and the difference the

creation is just apparently that got more or less says this nothing is really happening it's all just God which of

course leaves us with an inexplicable sense of world sponsibility so the first solution he

shot for in 1809 was crab cocktail X Dale which is a doctrine of creation but not out of nothingness rather under God

itself and the argument is complicated and he won't go into it but God releases some aspect of himself into independence

from him such that the creation has an ontological status but yet one that is different from God it's free of God this

is the whole theme of the freedom se that God Grauman's creation does not preclude the possibility that creation

is free don't only win so if you understood antecedents and consequences to be talking logical or something where

the antecedent could not be truly followed by something different which would be denied consequence so God is

the cops antecedent and creation is the consequence there's no reason really why creation couldn't be considered to be

free but we would have to understand it differently the next Nemo because we need to have some place we have some

source with a positive being of creation and this source is God's ground the groomed the underground or the ground of

God which is in God but other than God this solution is closely related to showing enthusiasm for the tomatoes the

ground is the apparent for the unlimited that which mixed with the form allows for of the plurality so this unlimited

is this sort of dark infinity within the divine personality which grounds a divine personality which is given some

kind of autonomous life outside of itself for the sake of their being something really other than God that's

his solution in 1809 in the in the ages of the world Shelly begins working on a full-blown

account of real history and it goes very badly and he doesn't get very far into it he really fails miserably to create

something that they even come close to Rhonda women Hegel's phenomenology of spirit it's a it's a tour so he doesn't

publish it he starts it over and over and over again he continues hammering away of it over

and over and over again funding abandons the whole thing but just to give you a sense of what it's all about

he he moves from this dynamic model to a triadic model because of course it has to be his third and he speaks of these

three puppies involves a 1 a 2 and 3 where a 1 is now the negative and a 2 is the positive that a 3 is the positive of

the negative the union of opposites simply missing before and this is not doesn't have to be understood in some

kind of esoteric with this is pure potency without actuality spirituality without potency both are abstractions

neither can exist anything that really exists is in some ways in potency in other ways in actuality so the dish for

showing that becomes the interior of God's mind which is in a rotation around itself since none no policy has any

standing over any other that each have people claim to occupy illogical space there's no hierarchy the call of the

Trinity of equal relations for creation to occur one of them has to be cut loose a decision happens and the decision

cause of something very weird to happen which is the first policy emerges into some kind of unjustifiable independence

and it becomes the creation Topsy egg that's where he was trying to go with the ages of the world he found some very

interesting parallels to this in the history of religion particularly in the lurianic kabbalah the idea of god's

infinity being too much for creation to exist and so that the a lot of creation has to be a

contraction of God's being or a negation of God God negates himself withdraws from the scene so that there can be that

space in which something other than himself can occur and not withdraw or Tim tomb is this decision this

unfathomable free decision by rich God makes something other than himself so he he drops that language by the end and

now let me just briefly segue today to the anybody who means of another question the question then becomes well

let's just say this actually happened because there's moral responsibility why did it happen because shelling is not an

obscure test he wants satisfactory reasons so why did this occur why does the absolute cause of permit us and the

solution that he strikes upon in 1809 is wonderful the answer is he does it so that something in particular might exist

not just something other than him because evilman's other than him and he's not so thrilled by that something

specific specifically good at might exists which could not exist if he was the only game in town and that is love

love which heaven understands technically not sentimentally as a certain kind of union between two that

really could be a part do not need each other to exist but in fact are not a part that are really one love is

impossible in a permanent ID and monad the love is impossible in a universe in which only the infinite exists but it

becomes possible in a universe in which there are something other than God that can take account of itself and respond

and so that's more or less his 1809 ads now we don't stop there this is where things get interesting and probably

where I'll start being more schematic this idea that creation is for the sake of love it's not a new idea

it's in fact the logic of the New Testament I don't mean that you know Jesus comes so that we can love each

other I mean it's the launching of the New Testament as the church fathers understood it when they understood Jesus

to be the incarnation of the father who comes into the world so that he can respond adequately to the fogger which

we apparently can't do and the love relationship between the father and the son

now incarnated and identified with humanity with creation becomes the meaning of history and it wasn't done

once and for all we're on the way there which is also at the New Testament it happens in an if there's an inaugural

Ground Zero in 1 AD or 33 nd because it is the crucifixion in the resurrection and that Ground Zero throws us towards a

future unification of the diversity of being permitted by the absolute a unification which will not be at the

expense of any of the freedom and diversity which has flourished but will be by means ship Shami doesn't say he

understands how this is gonna work he just argues that that is the promise that is what we're working towards

so when Sharon turns to the New Testament he finds there a story which argues that history is the revelation of

God and nothing else so history is not the account of kings and queens or the rise and fall of civilizations all those

are partial moments history is the revelation of God that is God creating something other than himself so that he

might be revealed in it and that revelation showing ventures in his most unpopular argument

not a possibility but a fact it's happened and the recognition of the fact is no longer a matter for faith but it

is a matter for reason for reason historically reconfigured in the new key where it has become adequate to the

revelations and this has been happening all throughout modernity because modernity itself is nothing other than

the product of this event and it's for this reason that Christianity is the last religion in the same whether Hegel

argues it's a lot of religion it is the apex of religious history and it will extinguish itself it extinguishes itself

here you like this Pro negotiated it is the religion for less lofty delighted and let you know because Christianity is

intrinsically self secularizing it it's not an accident that it produces modernity French Revolutions charters of

rights and freedoms the emancipation of women on the contrary this is the proper outcome of the event so our reason is in

fact becoming adequate to it and when it does become fully out of but we will no longer need the obscure mediation of the

meaning of history through scholasticism and church theology and so on so that would be philosophical religion he

thinks it's coming he doesn't think he's achieved it but he's laying the groundwork for his final letters

[Applause] and I do agree that the fried sa particular is an invention or something

pension discovery C of an eventful thinking of time right that I don't think I'm sorry versions of the eschaton

Dougie's event coming from the outside but in a sense it's a future all and then the past is no metal whereas that

the past is eventful for were showing right because of the decision right eachother cup of foot before and after

here for right that autonomy so there was that back soon but but why do the tautology development in the beginning

of that I'm from you to move it through I get that history has to be evil everybody writes after hiding ozone

agree that's why the critiques are able is that there's a pretty given meaning to

issue right simplify table for Lucic aliens in the room and some are great but then for ecology is without history

normal responsibility no history is mental thinking of time yes so we kept without a mental thinking you're talking

no moral responsibility all right promise which and without an ability accountability thank you really did that

terrible thing where that wonderful right and I wasn't just you know the absolute sort of making a shadow picture

on the wall right it's not as cute card said the moment has decisive civilians if you read them philosophical fragments

wonderful text forty character prepares the logic of history Christian history with Socratic time he says a long moment

of recollection disappears into eternity because you're recollected what you already knew but the moment when you

answer the call whatever it is keep your promise if you like doesn't disappear into some eternal past it has he says

decisive significance it is it is a singularity which is intelligible of its own not because it repeats something a

fork you know it's so if this is a kind of volunteers target if you like it's kind of it's a really very big robust

metaphysical volunteers over to the sand as you know singulars are the real thing but the singular czar issue not just

atoms are something but individuals acting in time I think what I was trying to get

through the line of thinking that led us from history has to be always already meaningful or will be history which by

mr. Kelly clinging to the mental history which is disrupted without a timeline and therefore to be an event right the

true event is not have a pretty given meaning right no I like this yeah but this is where we get into college our

contemporary events theory right salmon so that's what I'm trying to sorry and that we're showing up eat deaf is not an

event it without meeting no nothing leads to it it doesn't fulfill anything is simply present it's just it's the

last in a series of unconnected now's or now is that are connected efficient causally which you know might be I'm

sure it's enough for Jay but for those of us in want net worth at a deeper sense of significance we would like to

know that you know there's more than efficient causality no I can say a couple things there's a very interesting

logical move there it's not related to the talk to Steve on don't like to put the limits for example so Sheldon will

say okay there's two types of philosophy one is negative philosophy and there's no history for us and it's idealism and

I perfected it and the other is positive philosophy which is the philosophy of history and these two have very

different methodologies but the negative philosophy is the presupposition because the negative philosophy is the

full velocity of reason this is reasons philosophy this is the pure rational philosophies or the concepts articulated

in the negative laws lead are deployed in the positive velocity but in a very curious way because the transition from

the negative pull-off philosophy to the positive philosophy cannot be a logical transition if it was a logical

transition we would still remain within the negative philosophy all the moves with the negative philosophy are

logically so this is announcer with the question of how you set your limits so you can't set your limits from within

negative philosophy from within negative philosophy there are no limits which is why the dialectic of the limits is

articulated by the fictive showing and Hegel is correct there are no real limits logically speaking and nonsense

is not a real limit it's just the absence of logic so so from within so how do you set this limit and this is

the this is the interesting bit it seems that showing has to produce a new kind of logic to articulate this transition

and it's my contention that he invents abduction at that moment to explain this move doesn't call it abduction but first

we'll and it'll become popular as the logic of hypothesis formation but it's the the but by calling abduction we

shouldn't be confused into thinking it's a kind of logical move in the negative sense because if the abduction hinges

entirely on the decision of a person who chooses to the name is universe in a certain way and the facts that he names

are the ones that need to be explained by the abduction so if your universe has something in it called love then the

materialist account is not going to do it abductive lee and if you wish to go

forward with your materialism you're gonna have to say there's no such thing as love which is precisely what Dawkins

said that when you call love is just selfishness in a different form but if there if your universe have something

love then you're gonna need a different kind of thinking about things than what you've been working with hitter do you

need an accountant the hole which will be adequate to it and that account hinges in a very strange way on this

decision that you made to name your universe as one populated by a phenomenon called love

there wasn't logic that told you that somehow you ventured yourself there this I think is the beginning of the

existentialism right I will to be the citizen of a universe in which there's something called love which doesn't mean

to say it's arbitrary but it does mean to say that the universe doesn't give us its names so easily or as two bradleys

to say to me that the facts don't solve the issue the facts are the issue what are the facts and don't tell me that

you're measuring them with a device because you want the facts really are a much more complex kind of interpretive

venture to give names to being and those names create puzzles somewhere there so so showing likes wants to recast you

know the Christian dogma has explanatory answers to well your Shelia's is really not

innocent of that European colonial attitude which we see of course in and Hegel and others he really thinks that

something unique is coming to birth in the modern age out of medieval Christendom into modern Europe he

doesn't believe the first point is that none of that would have happened without the fact of Christianity that's one

thing he wants to say Christianity is a fact you gotta explain it you can't just ignore it and it's intimately bound up

with things that moderns hold very near and dear so that's if you like the fact that leads to the abduction the

Christianity is the last religion I mean we'd have to do some more steps there was something like just clarifying this

distinction a consistent no dyadic and the identity philosophy and then identity okay can you see that

as early I mean already in the freedom essay this rien scription the demand discourse with yes freedom essays the

first introduction of the tribe although he has intimations of her arm so could you say though I mean just as

in business limits that he's already expressing although not explicitly distinction happens to arrive at it

there he cannot proceed further it's showing already triadic anger from again he probably want to say he would he was

okay but he that's that's one of the reasons he created such puzzles because he kept saying well I've been thinking

this all along and you open the books and you see that that's not what he was thinking all along there's no way that

that's true so this rich sense of this trial that structure the three potencies I don't

see it before 1809 others do what you do see is some continuing saying this is not a third that's where he likes to

harbor and so you get the kind of and I think diets have this quality that they always they always issue into the

ineffable because what's withheld is the explanation that which could unite things right so so I think I think he's

a dot I think he well France from bothers and he was a Dietetic thinker and in the nature philosophy denied it

but that's where I see happen and that also explains why he when he speaks about policies in the nature philosophy

he speaks about in a such a different way speaks public and

series of potencies not just a one 8283 but make two four five six seven eight you know without this ordered relation

which becomes so predominant thanks so much my question is related to Peters

follow-up about why Christianity has to be the religion here and why it's not a religion like any other of course I

think that answer something in like the metaphysics of Christ but kind of putting that on pause for a second

instead of spinning the question more positively I would say for those in the room skeptical of Christianity and the

Christian answer and going all the way with Christ and revelation how can we frame Schelling's positive philosophy

through the concepts he presented so eventful time meaning in history freedom more responsibility in such a way that

there's a decisive point then where the person open to these concepts and open to religion can say I'm going to take

Judaism I'm gonna take Buddhism or I'm gonna take some degree esoteric esoteric mix instead and I'm still with shelling

but I'm not a disciple so you're not to be a painter because everybody will come to this church of their own accord

through their own traditions yeah and he's positive philosophy you don't want to accept it that's that's

actually fine with me you'd have to accept the rationality and negative philosophy but the positive philosophy

you actually have the freedom to not take Christianity and you can take Judaism instead yeah yeah I don't really

have the answer to that question but that it has to be true I mean there has to be some way in which this can happen

in a guitar in our confessional purely secular or pluralistic sense which I think it's the same thing but I do think

that it is a humanism here that we cannot go so I think everything might be on the agenda I think we are going to

minggu brewing committed somehow to the human project in some very disturbing ly conservative sense so we're not going to

we're not we're not going in a post human or Andy direction here so insofar as your path

leads you to the aspiration to work to work the unity of humanity and the dignity of humanity in the freedom we're

all over same time but there's no pre-submission a presupposition that everybody booth believes that I guess I

think that's something like we have to say and the possibility for something better or something other do you think

that's also an integral or inert absolutely but not be the humanist time that somehow economy actually in

community do we have to work wouldn't it be possible to redistribute resources somewhere that we all have enough to eat

educate and so on is that a good idea is it impossible not logically politically but if that's the you know if that's if

that becomes about tea box is probably enough actually just to work towards it's not going to utopia but it beats

tourism the hell better than this the situation it doesn't lose points or get to the idea of how like a Christian

concept of holy spirit could meet with a sort of secular humanism like I might call that the presence of Holy Spirit or

something and you might not work something better it's really striking how much of this is in Buddhism that's

what I was an eye-opener for me to see neither fair Saint never if we're kind of working itself through Mahayana

Buddhism probably humanism that would take seriously a few mistakes make sure that

you don't define like every definition will be inadequate because it'll be based on the exclusion of someone who

belongs there even a machine who wakes up and says hey I can do stuff I hop totally with that so that the human is

not going to be defined a Priora on the contrary anyway um I well I found it's really helpful

I I told myself I wasn't gonna ask the question but hey I don't wrench this and it has to do with this issue of

Christianity and so so you know like we said cable on the same thing is telling here seeing Christianity the last

religion and then and the issue for Hegel is this will really ask the question what history I'm sure because

she for Hegel is that Christianity like really identifies but the expression of God so that is a sort of not

philosophical is that it's not the highest form of recognition this but it's the recognition that that the

principles or the universal needs expressions in the finite so there's a you know any anything that's that's

meaningful is this kind of tension between the universal and if expression and that for Hegel is why the domain of

history of such import then it this way history is where you see principles enacted and

and the tension between Amina's a there's a difficulty in enacting them right it was a difficulty in bringing

the universal Matheny you're always going to do it in a kind of flawed way and that's why the figure of conscience

is the most meet the apex the figure of conscience is the one who recognizes that the only way you know love is gonna

exist in the world is if she loves somebody or the only way the good is gonna exist if she does something good

and in doing something good she's gonna do something bad at the same time so so you know cradled history is never over

because like you can't you can't feel to acknowledge the significance that finite as the domain in which anything about

valuable or meaningful is expressed and that finite doesn't come so I just wonder sorry to be alone with it I just

wonder how you know how how would this is this situation of love and diversity and so on would you know the fact that

the shelling talks in terms of history talk to the history in those terms would be if there any commonality between

these two yeah yeah I think first of all I think that the there are no key thinkers that are closer than the lake

shoving and the mature tangle I think the handle of the encyclopedia and I think showing actually did know so I

think that they they they should obviously be study decided I thought and I hope we can do that isn't particularly

cheap eggless philosophy religion so and the other thing I would say then and so this was clearly an effort to give a

different to out narrate Hegel conceding that Hegel had undertaken the right thing now town area that would be one

thing but there there is there's a we could talk about the negative of the positive and Hegel being an idealist

absorbing history into the idealism kind of way that would get a bit too technical I think I see it much more

simply this is really about behavioral showing difference I'm not even sure professor question but Hegel and

Schelling differ on their relief on logic on the relationship with the universal to the individual where for

Hegel they must be one and the understanding of the two separation from each other is abstract and for Shelley

the plainest they never converge so the diet the diet of universal and particular in which drives Plato into

his blog series and makes plato of a thinker of transcendence that remains for we're shoving it as well and it has

all kinds of interesting ramifications feasibly any kind of issue you'd like so that would be that would be one thing

that the other thing is regarding the end of history well the end of history strictly

speaking has come to an end history has come to an end in a sense as that the it hasn't changed itself and

now what we have this is for hey now what we have of course is further confirmations of it but we're not

expecting something new we're not expecting a new religion religion is over and now it's for philosophy to no

longer be the love of wisdom between the science of knowledge which now understands everything that has come but

I understand that it would like to deny there's an end of history for Hegel but I think in a certain sense has to be it

has achieved itself it is over and this is why that sentence that we read today is so important we can stop us to

understand our times we must not miss judge our times John says and I think this is the crux intuitive scheme is

that Shelley believes it hasn't happened that what Hegel is Hagel has jumped the gun and he's he's pretending to know

things that he can't know because that moment hasn't arrived yet a permanent place of stagnation still awaiting the

kind of fullness that Hegel believes has already been achieved