The Ecstatic Realism of the Late Schelling

This chapter extracts from the philosophy of the late Schelling, a form of realism called ‘ecstatic realism’. After providing an overview of Schelling’s role in the rise and fall of German idealism, it turns to Schelling’s interpretation of kenosis and its corresponding ontology. It shows that the presupposition of Schelling’s ecstatic realism is an idealism that renounces itself, and can only do so because it necessarily asserts itself at the expense of the real. This dynamic defines the paradoxical relation of negative and positive philosophy in Schelling’s late writings and offers an alternative to the either/or of idealism or realism gripping contemporary debates about correlationism.