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WHICH INITIATION DOES NOT LEAD ASTRAY
FROM THE TRUE MYSTERIES?
THE LATER SCHELLING’S QUEST
FOR A TRUE METHOD COMPARED WITH
THE PRE-CRITICAL AND CRITICAL KANT
——~o » —_—_
MARTIN Moors
ABSTRACT
My article focuses on the recurrently questioned meaning of an “introduction”
when it is meant to initiate someone into the mysteries philosophically, either
according to their representational content or according to mystagogical
praxis. In particular, F. W. J. Schelling’s Introduction to his Philosophy of
Revelation (Berlin Lectures 1832/33), in connection with Kant’s pre-critical
Nova Dilucidatio (1755), provides the guiding framework of my inquiry.
The thesis of my paper can be formulated as follows: only a positive philosophy
grounded in the maxime cognoscendum - das Seyende selbst - can completely
introduce believers into the mysteries (of being and existence) by which human
reason is somehow already possessed.
For F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854), a genuine initiation into the mysteries
can principally not be the proper initiative of philosophy. The way in
which philosophy, in general, defines its proper practice—an intellectual
discernment led by principles of reflective and abstractive reasoning on,
for instance, the ground of all existence—can hardly be considered a real
initiation. Schelling states:
With regard to ultimate knowledge [höchsten Erkenntnis], the difference between
philosophy and mysteries is such that in mysteries the ultimate knowledge emerged
from an antecedent material or real process, whereas in philosophy knowledge
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