The Structure of the External Revelation in Metaphysics of J.G. Schwarz

Abstract

J.G. Schwarz was a professor in the Moscow University and the only profes­sional philosopher among the freemasons of the Catherin’s time. His name is well known among the researchers of freemasonry and rosicrucionism, but his philosophical legacy is almost not investigated. The materials from the relevant literature until the recent time are synoptic and based on two short texts which are the fragments of his lection course and the curriculum vitae. All these texts take in account just a few of the brightest sides of Schwarz’s philosophical out­look. The paper for the first time picks out five elements of Schwarz’s philo­sophy: two types of the Revelation, three types of cognition, intermediate human nature, the metaphysics of light. Finding out of the stable conceptual boundings between the revealed elements is performed by clarification what place among the common ideas of Schwarz is occupied by theory that the first external Reve­lation resulted as an origin of three initial sciences – agriculture, control of fire, writing. This reconstruction shows that Schwarz’s legacy tends to overcome its eclectism and stands on the preliminal stage of self-contained philosophical sys­tem formation. Juxtaposition of the derivated results and Kant’s theory of tran­scendental schematism makes possible to describe Schwarz’s metaphysics as the naturalistic transcendentalism, to demonstrate its congeniality to the era and to argue for the influence of Schwarz to the further development of Russian idealism.