General Introduction

Abstract This introduction outlines Schelling’s concept of bliss (Seligkeit) as antagonistic to the negativity of the modern world, and as emerging from the post-Enlightenment, post-Revolutionary landscape of crisis. It argues that Schelling’s metaphysics refracts in a singular way the co-imbrication of Christianity, modernity, and bliss, as well as the tension between bliss and theodicy at the heart of the Christian-modern trajectory. It then stages two contrasting scenes that help to illuminate the stakes of Schellingian bliss: the foreclosure of bliss through endless postlapsarian toil in Immanuel Kant and the Romantic scene of a non-alienated oneness with nature that leaves possibilities unused in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Theodor Adorno. Finally, the introduction sketches, via Hans Blumenberg and Sylvia Wynter, the problem of theodicy in Schelling as grappling with the negativity, suffering, and evil inherent in the world, including the systemic evils of global Western-centric modernity such as colonialism, racialization, and enslavement.