On Ontology of Love: Reading Schelling's Clara

Lenart Škof (Science And Research Centre Koper)

ABSTRACT:

Schelling's work Clara (written in 1810) is without doubt one of the most rare and precious events in the history of philosophy and literature. Having Clara as its main character – in the very core of the German Idealist period, and written only 18 years after Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – this text of Schelling's is worth most careful reading. Clara is a text on a life worth mourning and, in our opinion, the first philosophical text in the history of Western thought entirely dedicated to the forgotten ontology of love. In this lecture we will show that in Clara’s words on life, its grievability, and death, we are witnessing the most tender attempt of inaugurating an ontology of love – indeed the archaic, eternal and highest order of love, being even stronger than death.