Peter Dews’ Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel undertakes a rare kind of reconstruction: it treats Schelling’s late, notoriously recalcitrant system as a philosophically accountable project whose guiding distinctions, inferential pivots, and historical narratives can be made explicit without being flattened into mere intellectual biography or reduced to a set of anti-Hegelian gestures. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it uses the confrontation with Hegel as a systematic instrument: Dews reads Schelling’s “late philosophy” as a continuously reworked attempt to force Idealism to acknowledge its own internal limit, and to convert that limit into method—thereby reopening the question of freedom, contingency, and historical meaning at the level of metaphysical form itself.
The outer framing already expresses, with a restrained explicitness, what the argument will later articulate at full stretch. The preface is neither a neutral autobiographical threshold nor a merely institutional acknowledgment; it functions as an orientation to a research situation in which Schelling’s late philosophy remains, in the anglophone domain, a largely uninhabited territory, while Hegel’s dominance has produced interpretive habits whose very success becomes an obstacle. Dews’ first point is methodological: it is difficult to understand Schelling’s occasional direct criticisms of Hegel, especially those lodged in later lecture contexts, without a grasp of the late system’s architecture and inner necessity, and this architecture is itself intelligible only where one compares Schelling and Hegel “along a broad front,” rather than treating polemical passages as decisive. The declared restraint on secondary-literature clutter belongs to the same strategy: the interpretive field has often remained narrow because what remains unclarified is not an isolated exegetical quarrel, but the systematic background that would make such quarrels determinate. Even the epigraphic gesture—Tennyson’s image of philosophies as clashing tides in narrow seas, with a “true Deep” withheld from the noise—quietly anticipates a central motif: the suspicion that “furious formalism,” even where it is internally brilliant, can simulate comprehensiveness while leaving the deepest matter outside the achieved form. The dedication and the workmanlike apparatus of terminological guidance similarly prefigure a dual concern: a need for conceptual exactness, and a refusal to treat exactness as identical with closure.
Dews begins, with deliberate historical patience, by situating the book in the aftermath of the anglophone “return of Hegel,” a return that initially took a decisively deflationary direction, especially in the “non-metaphysical” and “normative” readings of Hegel. The point here is not to rehearse a generic dispute about metaphysics, as though the only question were whether it is permissible; rather, Dews treats the twentieth-century attempt to make Hegel acceptable under broadly neo-Kantian constraints as having produced a distortion in the very space in which Schelling could appear. If German Idealism is framed as an essentially epistemological project about the self-constraints of norm-governed justification, then Schelling’s abiding conviction—that normative questions remain entangled with ontological ones, and that one must seek a point at which “ought” and “is” are internally connected—will appear as a relapse into “romantic” or speculative excess. Dews’ polemical sharpness is directed less at particular scholars than at a philosophical mood: a posture that treats ontology as either dispensable or inherently suspect and, by doing so, forces the historical figures themselves into an anachronistic schema.
This initial setting of the stage already carries a key thesis that will later become technically elaborated: the confrontation between Schelling and Hegel concerns the status of potentiality as an ontological category. To say this, in Dews’ register, is to say something far stronger than that Schelling “values contingency” more than Hegel. It means that an ultimate metaphysics that identifies truth with the self-completion of rational necessity risks eliminating the worldly sense of a future that remains genuinely open—open in the robust sense that it can be settled by agency and history, rather than merely exhibited as a late-coming recognition of what was implicitly fixed. Dews therefore frames the comparison as a diagnostic of modernity’s philosophical self-understanding: modernity cannot live by inherited authority, and yet it cannot plausibly live by reason alone if “reason alone” is itself construed as a self-enclosed a priori mechanism. The book’s narrative arc will show repeatedly that, for Schelling, reason’s self-sufficiency belongs to the very phenomenon that requires critique, because it tends to reproduce, at a higher level of conceptual sophistication, the compulsions from which emancipation initially sought to escape.
To begin to see why the confrontation must be approached at system-level, one has to grasp Dews’ reconstruction of Schelling’s long path into his late position. The early and middle materials are not presented as mere preludes or discarded errors; they function as experimental stations in the emergence of a set of constraints that Schelling eventually accepts as binding on any philosophical system that would speak truthfully about freedom and existence. The trajectory Dews traces—through the philosophy of nature, the identity philosophy, and the hard-won shift in the understanding of freedom—establishes a decisive point: Schelling does not “add” history, myth, and revelation to an otherwise rational metaphysics as external ornaments; rather, he arrives at them as what becomes visible after the inner limits of purely rational system-building have been pressed to the point of self-exposure. In this sense, the late system is less a “turn” away from philosophy than a reconfiguration of what philosophy must count as its own matter.
The confrontation with Hegel begins in earnest where both thinkers expose themselves to the question of how a priori thinking is related to being. Dews insists that one cannot reduce this to an epistemological concern about conditions of objectivity; for both Hegel and Schelling, the stake is objective idealism, the claim that thought and being are internally connected, and that a philosophy adequate to this connection must be able to say what “being” means where it is not merely the inert opposite of thought. Yet Dews’ central claim is that Schelling’s late system is shaped by a refusal to let the identity of thought and being become a simple identity of content. The identity must remain an identity in difference, and the difference cannot be downgraded to a merely perspectival feature of finite knowledge. The system must therefore contain, within its own method, a distinction between a domain in which thinking can articulate necessity and a domain in which being confronts thinking as irreducible facticity—a facticity that is neither irrational residue nor a mere limit-sign, but a structural feature of existence itself.
This is the point at which Schelling’s late distinction between “negative” and “positive” philosophy becomes, in Dews’ hands, something more than a classificatory scheme. “Negative philosophy” is not simply “rational philosophy,” and “positive philosophy” is not simply “empirical philosophy.” Rather, the negative is the domain in which thinking, through a priori reflection, unfolds the necessary structure of possibility; it is a science of the forms of being insofar as they can be generated and connected through the inner movement of concepts. The positive begins where that movement reaches a limit that it cannot internalize without losing the very meaning of existence: existence includes a prius—a “before” in the order of intelligibility—whose actuality is not derivable from any concept, and whose presence therefore cannot be legitimated in the same manner as the necessary structure of possibility. Schelling’s late “positive” project is thus framed by a peculiar demand: it must interpret what, by definition, cannot be inferred a priori, and yet it must do so philosophically, without collapsing into dogma, mere historical reportage, or theological assertion.
Dews makes this basic operation as explicit as possible by focusing on the way Schelling distinguishes two forms of negation of being, and by showing that this distinction is where the confrontation with Hegel becomes metaphysically concrete. Schelling repeatedly differentiates the contradictory negation of being from the contrary negation, drawing on Aristotle’s handling of potentiality and actuality and using the Greek terms mē on and ouk on to mark the difference: one negation expresses sheer nothingness, the total absence of being; the other expresses a mode of non-being that still carries within it the possibility of being some entity. Dews’ key point is that the metaphysical dispute hinges on whether the “not-being” implied by the beginning of pure thinking can be understood as a distinctive negative mode of being—a mode that remains within the sphere of potentiality—or whether it must be collapsed into the empty alternation of “being” and “nothing” that, in the opening of Hegel’s Logic, is said to be logically indistinguishable and thus compelled into movement. Schelling’s objection is not a complaint about the elegance of Hegel’s opening; it concerns the ontological cost. If the “not” at the beginning has only the sense of total nullification, then the sense of potentiality as may or may not be is displaced by a necessity of logical unfolding; freedom becomes, at best, a re-description of a process whose necessity is already fixed by the self-movement of the concept. Dews repeatedly brings the issue back to the same pressure-point: a philosophy that has no ultimate place for potentiality will struggle to do justice to freedom in the sense that matters to finite agents, namely the ability to settle, through action, how the future will be.
Here the book begins to show one of its most characteristic methodological virtues: it exposes how a seemingly local technical choice—the formal status of negation in the beginning—ramifies into a comprehensive picture of nature, spirit, religion, and history. Dews’ reconstruction of Schelling’s negative philosophy is presented with a careful economy: the negative system is immense, and Dews refuses to drown the reader in detail for its own sake; yet he insists on showing enough of its internal generative logic to make plausible why Schelling can view it as both indispensable and insufficient. The negative system begins from pure being-ness as the inaugural possibility of all that there is. Here one encounters Schelling’s term Potenz (in late contexts best captured as potentiality): being-ness must become potentiality in order to be the potentiality of determinate being at all. Yet this immediately generates a tension: if potentiality fully actualizes itself as objective potentiality, then it is no longer potentiality in the strong Aristotelian sense; it becomes a causal mechanism that must necessarily be activated under conditions, rather than a capacity that can equally be or not be. Schelling therefore builds into the heart of the negative system a dialectic of resistance: pure being pushes back against its total actualization, asserting necessity against the rampant actualization of possibility. The point, as Dews insists, is not to tell a myth about cosmic forces; it is to articulate a logic of modality that allows the world’s structure to contain both necessity and possibility without reducing one to a disguised form of the other.
It is here that Dews’ account becomes deliberately entangled: the negative system’s initial “instantaneous shift”—a move that occludes a certain non-being of pure potentiality—already signals that the negative enterprise begins by presupposing what it cannot, by its own method, secure. In Dews’ shorthand, the shift indicates that what appears as “being” in the negative beginning is always already a being that has passed through a transformation: the beginning is never an absolutely simple given. This is why the negative system can reach systematic completion and yet, in doing so, produce the very evidence of what it excludes. The “Idea,” as the completed system of a priori categories, becomes for Schelling precisely the site where the system’s self-sufficiency is most seductive and most dangerous. Dews underscores Schelling’s occasional generosity toward Hegel here: Hegel’s pushing of negative philosophy to its limit helps Schelling to recognize that his own earlier identity philosophy was, in effect, a form of negative philosophy. The completed transparency of the a priori, precisely because it “has no need to become anything further,” indicates the existence of what lies beyond its horizon: the totalizing claim points toward what has been excluded. In this sense, negative philosophy, in its truth, “strives” beyond itself; it produces, by its own internal success, the demand for a transition into another sphere.
The transition is Schelling’s decisive methodological invention: the passage from negative to positive is not an optional supplement that one may or may not add depending on taste; it functions as the enactment of liberation within philosophy itself. Dews emphasizes that, for Schelling, negative philosophy “triumphs” in positive philosophy precisely insofar as it frees thinking from necessary content, thereby setting the positive outside itself and opening toward it. The theme of liberation thus acquires a structural status: philosophy becomes, in its proper movement, a self-transcending practice that recognizes its own compulsion to necessity as itself a form of unfreedom. The book’s narrative gradually makes clear that, in Schelling’s late standpoint, the deepest philosophical danger is a relapse into compulsion within the very domain that presents itself as the highest freedom, namely pure rational system. What looks like the liberation of thought from all dependence can become the most refined form of captivity if it forgets the difference between the necessity of concept and the facticity of being.
At the core of Schelling’s positive philosophy stands a term that Dews treats as the key to the entire architecture: the “pure Daß” (the German word is retained to avoid misunderstanding), meaning the sheer fact that something exists at all. This “that” is not a propositional content; it is not the “that” of a statement. It is the sheer thereness of existence, which Schelling also names through a cluster of expressions—“un-pre-thinkable being,” “blind being-ness,” and “contingently necessary existing-ness”—each crafted to indicate a being whose actuality cannot be inferred from anything conceptually prior to it. Dews’ reconstruction insists on a crucial nuance: un-pre-thinkable being is un-pre-thinkable, which means that it is prior to thinking in the order of justification, and yet it remains post-thinkable. The positive philosophy exists to accomplish this post-thinking: to interpret how this prius manifests itself through transformations in nature, in the history of consciousness, and in anticipations of the future. The “positive” is therefore a hermeneutic enterprise that remains philosophical, because it is guided by a systematic hypothesis about the structure of being, even though its matter is historical and contingent rather than purely a priori.
Dews develops the technical metaphysics of this prius with a striking strategic move: he introduces a comparison with Sartre. The intention is not to import existentialism into Schelling, nor to evaluate Sartre as an authority. The function is heuristic: Sartre’s image of the “decompression” of being-in-itself provides an entry-point into Schelling’s own account of how an absolutely sheer actus can nevertheless undergo a retroactively intelligible transformation into modal structure. Sartre’s being-in-itself is “without reason,” and Sartre struggles to explain how a spontaneous upsurge of intention could occur in what is defined as non-intentional. Schelling avoids this particular incoherence by refusing to explain decompression as a causal event; he allows it only as a retrospective intelligibility, because the conditions for the distinction between ground and consequent do not yet exist at the absolute beginning. What matters, for Schelling, is that nothing prevents the emergence of the modalities of being out of the pre-modal blankness of blind existing-ness.
In one of the book’s most technically dense sequences, Dews reconstructs Schelling’s claim that pure being cannot be potentiality “in advance,” and yet it can come to be that-which-is-able-to-be after it is. The actus must precede; but once actus is, it can find itself presented with the possibility of being otherwise, without active contribution on its part. Schelling’s formula “Let us assume that this occurred” is pivotal: it illustrates how the positive philosophy begins through a hypothesis that neither pretends to be deductively compelled nor collapses into arbitrariness. The “blindness” of being at this level, as Dews stresses, means radical pre-conceptuality, and it does not prevent being from being reconfigured, from another angle, as pure potentiality. Dews translates this shift as a change in genitive: from “the being of possibility” to “the being that belongs to possibility.” What is expressed in this shift is the originary fusion of contingency and necessity: the “contingently necessary existing-ness” is a unity in which contingency is necessity and necessity is contingency, while existing-ness is the copula that both unites and is the unity of both.
This is where Dews integrates, without fetishizing, Schelling’s late modal triad. The decompression of blind existing-ness yields three basic potentialities that become the ontological template for the world. The first is primordial possibility, an “infinite being-able-to-be,” which is forced, initially, to actualize itself as possibility as such. Yet this actualization triggers an internal countermovement, because un-pre-thinkable being is necessary being, and necessity must assert itself against the instability of pure actualized possibility. The second potentiality expresses this assertion of necessity as a “potentiated” form: a pure static being as a mode of possibility that restrains and forms. The third is a mediating potentiality, “that-which-ought-to-be,” which participates in both, hovering freely between them in a manner Schelling names “spirit,” because it can relate to being-able as being and to being as being-able. Dews’ phrasing emphasizes that this is not a romantic glorification of spirit; it is a metaphysical claim about mediation: without a third potentiality that is neither the necessary nor the possible outcome of the clash between the first two, the system would oscillate endlessly without progress toward determinate being. Mediation therefore belongs to the very possibility of a world, and spirit is, in late Schelling, the very form of the future, the ontological potentiality by which reconciliation is already at work in the world as a pressure and a task.
This metaphysical core becomes, in Dews’ narrative, the lens through which Schelling’s critique of Hegel gains its full sharpness. If Hegel’s Logic is read as a system in which the rational necessity of the concept fully determines the meaning of actuality, then the status of potentiality becomes precarious. Dews does not deny that Hegel speaks of freedom; he treats the question as: what freedom can mean in a world in which the “space” for potentiality in the strong sense has been absorbed into the necessity of self-relating negation. Schelling’s complaint is not that Hegel fails to value the ethical; it is that Hegel’s fundamental operation equates freedom with the logical unfolding of self-relation, so that freedom becomes a property of the concept’s movement rather than an ontological condition of a world that includes genuine openness. The danger, on Schelling’s reading as reconstructed by Dews, is that the rational system itself becomes an avatar of compulsion: an internally perfect process that mirrors, at the level of thought, the compulsive structures of mythological consciousness, precisely because it is “tautegorical,” self-referential, and unaware of the difference between the self-necessitation of thinking and the event-character of existence.
At this point the book’s architecture begins to display its own internal “displacements,” in the sense the user requests: the problem of thinking and being, initially treated as an abstract metaphysical dispute, is gradually displaced into the domain of religious consciousness and historical liberation, where the same structure reappears in transformed guise. Dews’ argument is that both Hegel and Schelling regard a theory of religion as indispensable to understanding the history of consciousness; yet they diverge dramatically on the nature of religion’s transformations. For Hegel, religion is a moment within spirit’s dialectical self-comprehension, culminating in a form of reconciliation whose truth is finally grasped philosophically. For Schelling, religion—especially Christianity as revelation—marks a decisive rupture in the history of consciousness, a transition from a mythologically saturated cosmos to a historical world oriented toward the future. In this rupture, the late metaphysics of potentialities reappears as a historical hermeneutic: human consciousness is shaped by the tension and interplay of the potentialities, and “advances” in freedom are fragile, liable to relapse into new compulsions.
Dews’ reconstruction of Schelling’s theory of mythology is exemplary of his overall method, which could be called a systematic hermeneutics under ontological constraint. Mythological figures are “tautegorical,” meaning that they are self-referential expressions of cosmic-psychic powers rather than representations that refer to something else and thus become candidates for empirical belief or disbelief. Mythology, accordingly, is not primarily a set of false propositions awaiting enlightenment correction; it is a mode of consciousness in which humans are tools of a process they do not oversee, serving it without comprehension, while experiencing its products as necessities that permit no doubt. This necessity is practical and affective: myth can enforce dread, compel sacrifice, generate practices experienced as morally repugnant, and drive communities into actions that appear as demanded by powers exceeding them. Dews emphasizes Schelling’s proto-psychoanalytic resonance here without converting him into a nineteenth-century Freud: the point is structural. “Blind products of consciousness” become immediately practical, and the incapacity to “objectify” such representations mentally results in deeds and rituals as the site where consciousness expresses what it cannot master conceptually. Mythological consciousness thus appears, in Schelling’s term, as ecstatic: consciousness is outside itself, alienated in the very forms by which it relates to the world.
The crucial displacement occurs when Dews shows that Schelling reads modern rationalist forms of consciousness as capable of reproducing this ecstatic compulsion in a new guise. “Natural reason,” in the post-Cartesian world, can become dreamlike and inexorable, a structure that carries forward the illusion of self-sufficiency while remaining driven by a hidden compulsion. Here the metaphysical critique of Hegel is integrated into a broader genealogy: the identification of freedom with logical self-unfolding is treated as the most momentous modern relapse into a compulsive form, because it transforms the aspiration to emancipation into the internal necessity of a system that declares itself complete.
This genealogical dimension culminates in the book’s concluding articulation of what Dews calls Schelling’s “affirmative genealogy.” The term designates a careful balancing: the analysis of distortions, compulsions, and concealed determinants does not hollow out the meaningfulness of striving for freedom in the very act of explaining why freedom fails. Genealogy, in the debunking sense, risks a totalizing self-undermining: if every act of self-determination is a disguised effect of hidden forces, the standpoint from which critique is undertaken evaporates. Schelling’s late system avoids this by building into the world’s ontological structure a reconciling pressure: the potentialities remain implicitly one, and this implicit unity exerts an emancipatory tendency even within the deepest compulsion. Freedom, in finite form, is haunted by blind being and can succumb to necessity; yet no resurgence of blind being can finally abolish freedom, because potentiality did not precede the original actus and therefore cannot be overcome by it. The metatheoretical upshot is decisive: genealogy becomes affirmative because it remains oriented toward liberation as a real ontological possibility and a practical task, rather than dissolving liberation into a mere epiphenomenon of sub-personal mechanisms.
The culmination of Dews’ reconstruction is therefore not an interpretive “verdict” on whether Schelling is right and Hegel wrong in some global sense. It is a clarification of the space of disagreement, and of why the disagreement matters. Hegel’s system exhibits an enormous power: it can portray reason as fully at home in the world, capable of reconciling the apparent opposition between necessity and freedom within the self-development of spirit. Schelling’s late system exposes the cost of this reconciliation when it is achieved through the exclusion of the event-character of existence and the strong sense of potentiality. Schelling’s late division of philosophy into negative and positive, as Dews reads it, is therefore a proposal about philosophical method under the pressure of freedom: the a priori can and must be pursued to completion, and in that very completion it must discover its own boundary, opening onto a hermeneutic of history, religion, and future-directed agency that cannot be reduced to conceptual necessity. In this sense, the book’s final clarification concerns philosophy’s orientation to the future: Schelling’s “spirit” is not merely a postulate or a regulative ideal; it is the ontological potentiality of the future, already at work as the striving to reconcile possibility and necessity, contingency and form, without abolishing the tension that makes freedom intelligible at all.
Simon Gros 
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