This extraordinary volume presents the earliest existing draft of F. W. J. Schelling’s The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) from 1811, translated and introduced by Joseph P. Lawrence. It is a document of immeasurable significance for those who would understand not just Schelling’s philosophical evolution and the epoch of German Idealism, but also the deeper metaphysical questions of time, being, and the genesis of divine and human freedom. Schelling, who at the dawn of the nineteenth century had already gained renown as one of the most prolific and innovative philosophers in Europe, conceived The Ages of the World as his magnum opus, a grand, three-part exposition that would recount, in a philosophical narrative, nothing less than the entire history of being, from the eternal “past” before creation, through the “present” condition of the cosmos, and onward to the “future” that would complete the divine and worldly revelation of all things. Yet the work’s fate is one of prolonged struggle, continuous drafting, repeated collapse, and eventual fragmentation. Over multiple decades, starting in 1811 and continuing into the 1830s, Schelling wrote and rewrote The Ages of the World before ultimately abandoning it as impossible to complete. It thus stands as both a “failure” and a milestone, a text that more than any other reveals the transitional moment in his thought, as well as an extraordinary tension that subsequent interpreters, including Heidegger, Jaspers, and Žižek, would find decisive for the history of philosophy.
Schelling initially prepared the 1811 draft, which one might consider the first in a trilogy of attempts to write The Ages of the World, for publication. However, after receiving the proofs from his publisher, he unexpectedly withdrew his consent to print the work. The same drama played out again in 1813 with a second draft, only for Schelling to rescind publication a second time. Finally, after Schelling’s death, it was his son who edited and released the most substantial 1815 version, the “official” third draft, but with intrusive editorial revisions, added headings, and suspicious omissions. For nearly two centuries, this 1815 version, readily available and translated, overshadowed the earlier attempts—attempts known only indirectly, or from fragments, or through incomplete philological reconstructions. The result was a skewed perspective, both narrowing and simplifying the complexity of Schelling’s intentions. Only relatively recently have these earlier drafts begun to see the light of day in reliable critical editions, restoring to us the rich multiplicity of Schelling’s efforts and the strangeness of his unachieved ambitions.
Horst Fuhrmans, one of the few scholars to have thoroughly investigated the long-lost manuscripts, reports that there were around twenty different drafts, scattered fragments, and variations for The Ages of the World, most of them concentrating on “the past,” the first of the projected three books (The Past, The Present, and The Future). But the physical history of these manuscripts is itself tragic. During World War II, the Munich archive housing them was incinerated by Allied bombing in 1944, destroying countless precious folios. Were it not for the preliminary work of Manfred Schröter, who had transcribed and prepared the early drafts for his 1946 edition, we would have had no access at all to the 1811 and 1813 versions. Schröter’s editorial labors saved these drafts, albeit in a posthumous manner.
Since then, the 1813 version, published and translated into English by Judith Norman in 1997, as well as the 1815 version, translated by Jason Wirth in 2000, have given scholars a comparative foothold. Yet the first 1811 version, the initial attempt in which Schelling wrestled most directly and boldly with the legacy of his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom from 1809, had remained unavailable in English. Readers who know Schelling only through his early Identity Philosophy or through the heavily edited 1815 Weltalter have been deprived of the crucial missing link. It was precisely this link that Slavoj Žižek, in his now famous commentary on the 1813 version, identified as key to understanding Schelling’s entire place in the lineage from classical metaphysics to modern existential and psychoanalytic thought. Now, the urgency of having the 1811 draft in English—an urgency that Wirth and others have repeatedly underscored—is finally answered by Joseph Lawrence’s new translation and critical introduction.
Lawrence, himself a seasoned Schelling scholar, approaches his task as more than a mere translator. He acknowledges, with admirable candor, the impact that his interpretation of Schelling’s system—its logical architecture, its theological resonances, its metaphysical daring—has had on his translation choices. Such openness is refreshing, for it allows readers to engage with the text on a level that recognizes interpretation as integral to bringing Schelling’s often peculiar German into living English prose. The translator does not conceal the presence of these interpretative steps. Instead, he situates them in the introduction, openly discussing the challenges of rendering crucial technical terms such as Sein/Seiendes, Lauterkeit, Scheidung, and others that resist easy correlation with standard English philosophical vocabulary. He chooses to introduce sectional divisions, add roughly thirty-five elucidatory footnotes, and at times to explain Schelling’s source materials and conceptual lineage. While one might question, from a purist editorial standpoint, whether these additions tilt the balance toward interpretive license, it cannot be denied that Lawrence’s interventions often illuminate the text. They allow the English-speaking reader to move more confidently through the labyrinth of Schelling’s metaphors—images of divine pregnancy, organic growth, cosmic tension, and ecstatic transfiguration—without losing sight of conceptual rigor.
This 1811 version differs markedly from the 1815 text. The latter, after all, was edited by Schelling’s son, who introduced headings and possibly even stitched together disparate passages, leaving a rough patchwork that readers have always found somewhat confusing. By contrast, the present translation brings forward a draft prepared by Schelling himself for publication, but then withdrawn at the last minute, leaving it relatively free from later editorial tampering. We thus have a version that is thought to represent more authentically the first full sweep of Schelling’s plan to articulate the “past” of the world, that is, the eternally primal condition of God and nature before any stable cosmic order. The 1811 draft resonates profoundly with the atmosphere of mourning and loss that had entered Schelling’s life after the death of his beloved wife Caroline in 1809. Many scholars have speculated that this personal tragedy deeply influenced the tone and difficulty of the Weltalter project. The Ages of the World can be read as Schelling’s philosophical attempt to descend into the abyss of being, to imagine the Godhead struggling to birth itself, haunted by a nostalgia for something irretrievably lost and simultaneously haunted by a promise of something not yet achieved. The tension between the timeless eternal, the chaotic dynamism of a primordial becoming, and the emergent structures of reality that we inhabit points toward a metaphysical drama of unprecedented subtlety, one that no philosopher before Schelling had dared to fully embrace.
In this vision, time is not simply linear and certainly not just a form of human intuition as Kant would have it. For Schelling, time is organic, surging forth as the divine tries to reconcile eternity with freedom, necessity with contingency, darkness with light. The Ages of the World is intended as a grand narrative: first The Past, the epoch of pure potential and inner torment in which God must first come to know himself; then The Present, the stable though conflict-laden order we currently experience; and finally The Future, the still-hidden consummation that would reconcile all contradictions. Schelling’s failure to complete the entire work (he never even fully started The Future) should not be seen as mere misfortune, but as intrinsic to his philosophical aims. Even Heidegger would later note that the unfinished state of The Ages of the World is deeply significant, as if Schelling, at the very limits of conceptual articulation, recognized a fundamental impossibility in stabilizing that which, by nature, is the process of ongoing becoming.
Schelling sets out to reconstruct nothing less than the primordial unfolding of all reality, seeking to describe how God’s life, nature’s evolution, and the emergence of spirit and freedom interlink in a grand narrative of time. Unlike many philosophical treatments that begin from fixed concepts or from a self-evident principle, Schelling insists that genuine philosophical knowledge must be earned by a journey inward, requiring that we look back to a time before time, and forward to a future beyond all familiar horizons. The central goal is not merely to establish a system of concepts, but to unveil a dynamic process—an organic development—through which God and the world come into actuality.
In these fragmentary sketches, Schelling portrays time not as an empty container or a simple sequence of events, but as a living organism, one that has ages, epochs, and potencies. He rejects the commonplace notion that time is merely a subjective form or a linear series of now-moments. Instead, time for Schelling bears within it deep qualitative differences: a genuine past that stands before the world’s creation, a present that we inhabit, and a future that transcends the limits of our current existence. These three great epochs—The Past, The Present, and The Future—together form The Ages of the World, and each embodies a distinct mode of God’s revelation and self-becoming.
In Schelling’s vision lies the conviction that what we call “reality” emerges through struggle and contradiction. The beginning of all things is not a static perfection or a fully articulated God calmly residing in eternity. Quite the contrary: eternity before creation is pure potential, utterly free and indifferent to any definite being. Schelling repeatedly stresses that the highest principle cannot be grasped as a simple “thing” or a determinate “being.” It is rather like an unfathomable ground, a lucid purity of essence that neither wills nor negates. This primordial purity is not a being, not a nonbeing, but a “will that wills nothing.” It is a freedom so absolute that it stands above all determination, and thus initially it can do nothing for itself. Without an external impetus, it would remain lost in silent bliss, or rather in a neutrality so absolute it cannot show itself outwardly.
Thus, from eternity itself, a negating principle emerges. This principle works like a contraction, a hunger or need that stirs in the infinite indifference, forcing it to break open and differentiate itself. Out of this tension and negation, something like a first potency arises: a beginning where God, not yet God as we understand Him, is compelled to move toward self-revelation. In Schelling’s account, the divine life is not accomplished from the start; rather, God becomes God. The divine essence, which first lay hidden in utter purity, must undergo a process of self-actualization through nature and history. Just as a seed must break its husk, so the highest principle must divide itself and give birth to manifold stages of existence in order to truly appear as God.
Nature, in this story, is not a finished product or a mere stage set for human action. Instead, it is the primordial battlefield where the forces of contraction and expansion struggle. Nature encloses, resists, and conceals, acting as a dark, inward force that tries to hold everything back. At the same time, the essence or being within seeks to emerge, to spread itself outward and become manifest. Through their interaction, a first epoch—the primal past—unfolds, during which the conditions for stable existence are created. The world’s present condition, with its relatively stable laws and structured forms, is the result of a long sequence of upheavals, conflicts, and transformations. What we see as an ordered cosmos was once a chaos, tamed not by mechanical necessity but by the gentle persuasion of higher principles seeking self-expression.
Yet the present, as stable as it may seem, is only the midpoint of a longer journey. The world’s future cannot be deduced mechanically from its past; it must be divined, for the future holds the consummation of all that has begun. If the first epoch established nature and the second gave birth to spirit and freedom, then the future promises an even higher unity—a unity that does not negate diversity, but rather redeems it. While eternity hovered at the beginning, overshadowing everything, the actual project of time has been to create an image of eternity within the world, a state in which contradiction is overcome, not by erasing differences, but by weaving them into a richer and more vibrant harmony.
Later Schelling refines these insights, speaking of potencies: the first potency corresponds to the ground of being, dark and contractive; the second potency is the unfolding of essence or true existence; and the third potency is the unity that arises from their interaction, the soul that harmonizes the first two. These three moments—like three interconnected thoughts—cannot be separated; they form a single indivisible process. The key term “potency” signals that nothing is ever static or finished. Each potency develops from the one before it and passes into the one after it, keeping the divine life in continuous motion. Thus, the world is understood as a ceaseless dynamic act (in actu continuo), each moment pregnant with the next.
The result is a grand narrative that overturns simplistic ideas about an unchanging God or a world locked into eternal repetition. Schelling’s Ages of the World demands that we think of eternity and time together, of God not as a static supreme being but as the very movement by which the supreme comes to be. The past is not merely what lies behind us, but the foundation of all becoming, a dark womb from which life and spirit have emerged; the future is the open horizon where the divine finds its perfected reflection. Time itself is the medium in which God’s essence grows clear, the workshop in which the highest freedom and love become real.
This shows Schelling striving to give form and language to something inherently elusive: the eternal creation of God, world, and humanity through the organic stages of past, present, and future. For Schelling, philosophical science must tell the story of this unfolding, not in cold abstractions, but through a dialectical poetry of becoming that links the deepest mysteries of the divine life to the ongoing drama of nature and spirit. It is an extraordinary vision, one that sees in every passing moment a hint of primordial darkness and an intimation of absolute light, and in the whole, an eternal epic of time that reveals God to Himself and to us.
The 1811 draft thus shows the first and perhaps purest attempt to carry the logic of his Freedom essay of 1809—where Schelling boldly proclaimed that God must actualize himself through suffering, contradiction, and an inner struggle with a dark, ungrounded remainder—into a systematic narrative of world-genesis. This draft is likely closest to the spirit of Schelling’s earlier philosophy, still glowing with Romantic fervor, still anchored in the nature-philosophy and the idea that the divine must undergo a real temporal process. Later drafts, particularly the 1815 one, move toward a more explicitly Trinitarian structure and a somewhat more theologically orthodox tone, perhaps under the influence of changing intellectual climates and personal pressures. The 1811 version, however, stands at the threshold between the earlier nature-centered metaphysics of identity and the later so-called “positive philosophy” of revelation. It is the text in which Schelling’s philosophical heart is most visibly torn and searching, in which his metaphysical desire is most palpable, unimpeded by editorial refinements and subsequent rationalizations.
Lawrence’s introduction, extensive and carefully prepared, situates the work historically: it outlines the reception of The Ages of the World, explains the tragic destruction of the Munich manuscripts, the editorial decisions of Schröter, the role of Fuhrmans’ investigations, and how the three main known drafts (1811, 1813, and 1815) differ. Readers who expect a simplified “map” of the argument will not find it here. Lawrence assumes a certain philosophical competence from his audience, understanding that The Ages of the World cannot be reduced to a tidy summary. He justifies his editorial choices and points to major thematic concerns, notably the exchanges between modern science, history, and religion that Schelling foreshadows. Indeed, Schelling’s attempt to think primordial time is relevant not only for understanding the progress of German Idealism but also for modern debates about cosmology, the meaning of history, the nature of freedom, and the limits of metaphysics.
While Lawrence’s introduction does not systematically contextualize this draft within the entirety of Schelling’s oeuvre or within the entire history of Western philosophy (he does not provide a ready-made map of the transition from Schelling’s earlier to later thought), he does offer a fresh perspective, focusing on the significance and contemporary relevance of Schelling’s nonmechanical conception of time. He is especially concerned with disputing Žižek’s psychological reading of Schelling and with emphasizing that The Ages of the World is not merely a precursor to psychoanalysis, Marxism, or existential philosophy, but possesses its own philosophical originality. Thus, the reader is invited to explore the logic, myth, theosophy, natural science, and revelation that animates Schelling’s text. The translator’s footnotes occasionally raise critical remarks or link Schelling’s language to older mystic traditions and newer scientific intuitions, bridging epochs and disciplines in a manner that Schelling himself would likely have applauded.
This English translation of the 1811 draft of The Ages of the World is therefore much more than a mere philological recovery. It is a gateway into the richest conceptual experimentation in Schelling’s career, a moment in which he tried to give shape to what Žižek terms the “vanishing mediator” that links classical metaphysics (from Plato through Spinoza) to post-Hegelian existential and hermeneutic thought. Without reading this draft, one cannot fully appreciate the complexity of Schelling’s philosophical development or understand why, even after decades of labor, he could not finalize The Ages of the World. For the text’s failure is not one of incompetence but of a radical honesty before the mystery of time and becoming. As readers, we stand now better equipped than ever, thanks to Joseph Lawrence’s painstaking translation and contextualization, to confront this mystery ourselves, to venture into the twilight of Schelling’s metaphysical imagination, and to witness how he sought to unfold eternity into narrative, unity into difference, and pure freedom into the living tapestry of world-history.
In doing so, we encounter a Schelling who is at once lyrical and rigorous, philosophical and mythopoetic, confident yet anxious about the adequacy of philosophy to its object. The Ages of the World, in its 1811 incarnation, demonstrates how Schelling, after losing Caroline and having written his Freedom essay, plunged into the metaphysical abyss, striving to articulate a systematic account of how God and the world emerge out of a timeless purity into the drama of time. It is a work forever incomplete, but in its incompleteness it reveals the essential truth Schelling discovered: that the deepest matters—time, freedom, God’s becoming—cannot be fully grasped by a closed system. Instead, they demand an openness, a careful interpretive generosity, and a readiness to accept that the world’s ages, including its primordial past, remain both knowable and unfathomable, both narrated and still in the process of unfolding.
This volume is indispensable for Schelling scholars, students of German Idealism, historians of continental thought, and any philosopher or theologian concerned with the problem of time’s reality and God’s self-manifestation. After centuries of waiting, English readers now have before them the earliest and most challenging attempt by Schelling to write his great philosophical epic. If “the past becomes known, the present recognized, and the future divined” is Schelling’s motto for this entire project, then, with this 1811 draft now in our hands, we can at last begin to know that past in its own authentic voice, to recognize anew the present challenges of philosophy, and perhaps to divine a future understanding of being that, inspired by Schelling’s venture into the Ages of the World, we have yet to imagine.
Simon Gros 
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