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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 + 221 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 221 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:21
