Schelling on Myth and Revelation

I’m sharing a rough transcript below of a question I framed for a doctoral student during a presentation yesterday. The student is approaching Schelling’s philosophy as a novel means of interpreting psychedelic experience. 

You point out, with Schelling, that consciousness cannot self-ground. Reflective self-consciousness, let’s say, cannot ground itself. This is because, as Schelling points out, egoic consciousness is a consequence of a process which precedes it. His whole inquiry, like in The Ages of the World and in other texts, is asking: what is the antecedentof this reflective consciousness that makes us feel separate from the world and even from our own souls?

Kant begins with consciousness reflecting on itself and the appearances of objects to it—the thing in itself is unknown, but it’s appearing to us nonetheless, taking the determinate form that our understanding and intuition allows it to. And so, it’s as if in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, conscious self-reflection begins downstream, turned away from the source of the stream, and tries to figure out how its split nature—ego and world—might fit together. But it ends up only being able to construct an apparent world, not a real world. So, Schelling goes back to Kant and says, “Wait a minute. Nature—real Nature—is not even available to you. Nature as a creative living process can’t even occur to you, because you won’t look back to the origins of your own consciousness. You’re thinking of consciousness as the origin. It’s not.”

But how do we go back? This is Schelling’s discovery. He initially begins like Fichte, and then, later, in a way like Hegel, trying to go back logically in a negative philosophical way. But then he comes to realize, with his philosophy of mythology, that human consciousness is a product of myth. And so myth becomes our portal back into this preconscious experience before reflection severed us from reality. And it turns out that that mythic experience is our own human participation in the way that nature created itself. The cosmogonic powers manifest to our humanness as mythic powers, gods and goddesses, and these mythic powers created our consciousness over the course of history.

Mystical empiricism becomes possible again for philosophy as a result of psychedelic experience. We can induce these altered states. And as you were saying, some people can take 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and somehow block the experience. So it’s not necessarily going to give us the opportunity to do mystical empiricism. But if we’re going to lean into that—if we’re able to let go of the reflective ego, and not get stuck in the resistance that can come up as that is taken away from us—then we can do this mystical empiricism. 

And you said that part of the revelation that occurs then is this meta-natal insight, to use Sean Kelly’s term [see Kelly’s chapter in Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof, 2021]. It’s the idea that reality is this kind of eternal birthing process. The Absolute is constantly birthing itself, eternally. Now in every moment, birthing, birthing, birthing. So what my question is, and this is kind of relating to the way in which the psychedelic experience or these mystical experiences—and this is in the literature—they’re ecstatic, but sometimes ecstasy can be profoundly painful, like you’ve been engulfed in flames, you know? And so there’s this positive divine birth metaphor where we’re just dissolving blissfully into the infinite, into the Absolute. But then there’s this other side, which is like divine death: the negative, finitude, which is part and parcel of individuation, in a way. 

I don’t think of the Absolute and the individual as necessarily just simple opposites, in the way that, say, the universal and the particular are opposites. And Hegel actually spells this out quite well: individuality is actually the synthesis of the particular and the universal. The individual is not just a particular. To be an individual, Hegel would say, you really have to have internalized the universal, identified with the universal, so that you’re not just a separate subject anymore. This is where his whole sense of ethical life and of the master-slave dialectic comes into play.

So, my question has to do with death, and the other pole of this process of eternal birth. Everything born must die. And I wonder if death has a place in this meta-natal perspective that you’re offering? Is it just subsumed by rebirth? Or is there something about the moment of death that’s also revelatory?

See also Richard Tarnas and Sean Kelly talking about their edited volume honoring Stan Grof, Psyche Unbound: https://psychedelicstoday.com/2022/02/08/pt291/