The workshop will focus on the new edition of Jaspers’ monograph, published in 1955: Schelling: Greatness and Doom, as part of the Karl-Jaspers-Gesamtausgabe (KJG). The title alone suggests how ambivalent Jaspers’ relationship with Schelling was. Jaspers regarded Schelling’s insistence on the primacy of the real—of unconceivable being—over all conceptual thought as groundbreaking. By thus revealing the limits of reason, Schelling breaks with the consensus of the idealists and opens up a field of thought that he himself termed “existential philosophy.” In this regard, Jaspers honors Schelling as the “first modern thinker.” But this modernity also implies a “fragility” in Schelling himself, whom Jaspers sees as caught in the conflict between genuine illumination of existence and Gnostic pseudo-science. Schelling’s references to something beyond reason veered here into the irrational and the anti-rational; the philosophical awareness of limits, so convincingly articulated elsewhere, was forgotten, and the philosopher sank to the level of a magician. – Nevertheless, Jaspers was fascinated by Schelling and engaged with his work repeatedly over the course of decades. Schelling’s personality is so appealing to Jaspers also because he was touched by the mystery of great love, which he encountered in the person of Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling. His love for Caroline sharpened Schelling’s sense of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the individual in a way that was inaccessible to other philosophers. These and other aspects of Jaspers’ monograph on Schelling will be presented and discussed at the workshop. The challenges of the editorial process will also be addressed, such as the many passages where the text of the reference edition is corrupted and must be revised in light of available manuscripts as well as the sources cited by Jaspers. The event is open to the public; interested parties are warmly welcome.

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