Reason or Revelation?

Christian Atheism (Pre-Course Series: 2)

The Excess of the Modern Project

The next Philosophy Portal course starts October 20th and focuses on the concept of Christian Atheism. The course will feature classes on German Idealism, Hegelo-Marxism, Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis, Altizer’s Gospel, Žižek’s Philosophy, and Rollins’ Theology. The course will also feature guest lectures from Slavoj Žižek, Peter Rollins, Barry Taylor, and Mark Gerard Murphy. To find out more, or to get involved, see: Christian Atheism.

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The video below is part of pre-course material for the course on Christian Atheism:

In this video:

1. I outline the nature of the main contributors to German Idealism including a specific focus on the young Schelling and his attraction to the new freedom of reason brought about in the works of Kant and Fichte

2. The Early Schelling’s Philosophy of Identity of experience and reality which, on the one hand, explicitly builds on the Kantian transcendental turn in attempting to justify religious experience beyond dogmatism, and on the other hand, finds the problem of fallen man in god-positing and idolatry which reintroduces problems of dogmatism

3. The Middle Schelling’s challenge to standard forms of Kantian correlationism in theorising the nature of the pre-ontological/pre-logical ground of subjects and objects, emphasising the unconscious domain of irrational drives which condition both natural and human history

4. Schelling’s hypothesis of the incommensurability of God as the Absolute identity and the fall of man in finite freedom as the source of evil located in the dark ground of God himself, opening both the conditions of possibility for Christ, and the conditions of possibility for political totalitarianism and distortions of nature in technology

5. Schelling against Hegel: the zero level difference between Schelling and Hegel can be found in the difference of starting point between Life (Schelling) and Logic (Hegel), where Schelling’s formula of being-nothing-becoming has to start with a “living nothing”, a “yearning” and “hunger” to “fill the void”

6. Late Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation” as his final response to the fundamental problem of the German Idealist system building towards the Absolute Idea in the humiliation/despair of reason leading to confrontation with the Absolute Existent and submission to supernatural-divine revelation

Note: in the course itself, this pre-course material will not only be further developed, but also provide us with a foundation for further discussion.