Segall

''You point out, with Schelling, that consciousness cannot self-ground. Reflective self-consciousness, let's say, cannot ground itself. This is because, as Schelling points out, egoic consciousness is a consequence of a process which precedes it. His whole inquiry, like in The Ages of the World and in other texts, is asking: what is the antecedent of this reflective consciousness that makes us feel separate from the world and even from our own souls?

Kant begins with consciousness reflecting on itself and the appearances of objects to it—the thing in itself is unknown, but it's appearing to us nonetheless, taking the determinate form that our understanding and intuition allows it to. And so, it's as if in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, conscious self-reflection begins downstream, turned away from the source of the stream, and tries to figure out how its split nature—ego and world—might fit together. But it ends up only being able to construct an apparent world, not a real world. So, Schelling goes back to Kant and says, "Wait a minute. Nature—real Nature—is not even available to you. Nature as a creative living process can't even occur to you, because you won't look back to the origins of your own consciousness. You're thinking of consciousness as the origin. It's not."

But how do we go back? This is Schelling's discovery. He initially begins like Fichte, and then, later, in a way like Hegel, trying to go back logically in a negative philosophical way. But then he comes to realize, with his philosophy of mythology, that human consciousness is a product of myth. And so myth becomes our portal back into this preconscious experience before reflection severed us from reality. And it turns out that that mythic experience is our own human participation in the way that nature created itself. The cosmogonic powers manifest to our humanness as mythic powers, gods and goddesses, and these mythic powers created our consciousness over the course of history''.

Matt Segall