Choose from one of the two provided passages. In no more than 500 words describe Schelling’s argument or point in the passage in as plain English as possible (e.g. imagine you’re explaining it to a non-philosophy major). The is due via email Friday, November 12^th, by 5 p.m.
Passage 1
The standpoint of philosophy is the standpoint of reason; its kind of knowing is a knowing of things as they are in themselves, i.e., as they are in reason. It is the nature of philosophy to completely suspend all succession and externality, all difference of time and everything which mere imagination 15 mingles with thought, in a word, to see in things only that aspect by which they express absolute reason. Philosophy, however, does not view them insofar as they are objects of reflection, which is subject to the laws of mechanism and has duration in time. (Presentation of My System 349, §1)
Passage 2
We have left behind everything on which finite understanding is accustomed to insist. We have even cut off all return to the realm of the conditioned by our declaration that philosophy is entirely and completely in the absolute. After all this, it is hardly our intention to allow anything to remain behind which we might use to come back to the conditioned. Since this is so, {we face a double difficulty}: most people will comprehend neither, in general, how we can see so clearly into the absolute that we can ground a science in it—although its possibility surely resides in what we have proved before—nor, specifically, how we intend to draw material for a science from the simply identical and thoroughly simple essence of the absolute. For it will be argued that no science is possible of something that is simply one and ever the same, that something else is required which is not identical, but multiple and differentiated. It will also be argued that even if what is demonstrated be forever and necessarily one and the same, by contrast, that in which unity is demonstrated is necessarily not one, but many—as happens in geometry, where the identical form and absolute unity of space is expressed in the different units of triangles, squares, circles, etc. (Further Presentation 385, §IV)