From thatness to Umkehr : the transition to positive philosophy in the late Schelling

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of the transition from Schelling’s negative to positive philosophy. The standard interpretation, based primarily on Schelling’s Berlin Introduction, centres on pure thatness or unprethinkable being – pure existence devoid of conceptual determination. I argue this interpretation needs to be revised for two reasons. Philosophically, it renders Schelling vulnerable to the ‘myth of the given’: as Sellars and McDowell have argued, a non-conceptual given cannot play any epistemic role, let alone ground the transition to positive philosophy. Philologically, recent scholarship reveals that Schelling moved towards a different conception of the transition. For an account that better reflects Schelling’s mature understanding, we should look to the final lecture of the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy. Here the transition is grounded not in pure thatness but in an existentially motivated act of will. This reversal (Umkehr) reorients the self, establishing a transformed standpoint rather than a new conceptual starting point. Avoiding the myth of the given, this alternative account is both more philosophically robust and more faithful to Schelling’s final conception of the transition.