ABSTRACT
In his ground-breaking theory of tsimtsum, meaning literally 'contraction', Luria attempted to square the circle of the creaturely status of things, simultaneously different from God and yet linked to him by the very fact of creation. Tsimtsum, God's self-reduction, was to account for this paradox and present nothingness not as a divine attribute but as his first creative act. Scholem's description of Lurianic tsimtsum accentuates the moment of God's kenotic self-effacement. The best way to demonstrate the crucial difference between Hegel and Schelling — which here serves as the synecdoche of the difference between the first truly modern philosopher of the World and the last premodern philosopher of the Absolute — is to compare their respective interpretations of tsimtsum. Just like Schelling, Hegel also uses two versions of tsimtsum — self-withdrawal as self-offering and as self-concentration — but in the reversed sequence, which gives the first one both priority and superiority.
