The fascination issuing from Schelling’s metaphysics is due to the circumstance that his excavating thought reaches strata in which beings are no longer rooted, but all roots decompose: it reaches an abyss for reason which is nevertheless also its presupposition since it must precisely keep its distance from it. From this conception, there shines a modernity we have not yet reached. Schelling, namely, keeps equally much distance from the naïve optimism of rationalist reason and from the escapist pessimism of relativist reason. He offers instead the theory of a rationality that has the property of being necessarily, rather than contingently, endangered. Without this danger it would lose the energy of its self-maintenance, but it must at the same time keep this energy source at a distance. What gives reason its force is not its home, but rather a presupposition to be recollected and avoided at the same time. Rationality, in essence, is at risk of losing both its distance from the origin and its contact with it. The modernity of this perspective is this: we may henceforth call a behaviour rational that remains just as aware of its presuppositions and that cannot be recouped directly from them.