Schelling and The Ages of the World

Introduces the most fragmentary and neglected of Schelling’s works without losing sight of a crucial philosophical question.

What does it mean for something new to begin? Since antiquity, philosophy has struggled to think about real beginnings without reducing them to continuations, repetitions, or hidden necessities. In Schelling’s Ages of the World, Matthew Nini engages with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s writings from 1809 to 1821, showing how this problem of beginning is both enacted and called into question in Schelling’s unfinished project The Ages of the World. Often dismissed as an abandoned or failed work, The Ages of the World presents a speculative and mythological account of creation that unfolds across past, present and future, simultaneously reflecting on the temporal structure of human existence. Nini argues that the text’s fragmentary, repetitive and esoteric form is not a weakness, but a philosophical achievement. Precisely by resisting completion, Schelling exposes the limits of conceptual thinking when confronted with the emergence of the new. By reinterpreting The Ages of the World as a sustained meditation on beginning itself, Nini shows how Schelling transforms failure, incompletion and secrecy into tools for ontological questioning. In doing so, he proposes a new way to think through beginnings and a new, unique approach to philosophy.