The German Idealist whose Naturphilosophie made nature a self-developing intelligence parallel to mind, whose System of Transcendental Idealism integrated Fichte's subject and Kant's object in a single architecture, and whose late Positive Philosophy criticized Hegel and introduced themes that would shape Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and existentialism.
schelling
German Idealist philosopher (1775–1854) whose early Naturphilosophie and System of Transcendental Idealism completed the Kantian-Fichtean project from the side of nature, whose middle-period Identity Philosophy proposed an absolute identity of nature and spirit, and whose late Positive Philosophy at Berlin (1841) opened existentialist themes that shaped Kierkegaard, the late Schelling himself, and twentieth-century continental thought.
Life
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born on 27 January 1775 in Leonberg, in the Duchy of Württemberg. His father Joseph Friedrich Schelling, a Lutheran pastor and learned orientalist, ensured the boy received an extensive early education in classical and biblical languages; by the time Schelling entered the famous Tübinger Stift (the Württemberg ducal seminary for the training of Protestant clergy) in 1790 at fifteen, he had completed the academic preparation of much older students.
At the Tübinger Stift Schelling joined the room and the intellectual conversation of two slightly older students: Friedrich Hölderlin and G.W.F. Hegel. The three Stiftler, sharing a single room over several years, immersed themselves in Kant's recently published critiques, in the early Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre, in Spinoza (forbidden reading in orthodox Lutheran Württemberg, which made it more attractive), and in the political news from revolutionary France (the three were Jacobin sympathizers in their student years, with Hölderlin planting a freedom tree in the Stift courtyard). The intellectual collaboration of these years produced a famous fragment now known as Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (The Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism, c. 1796) — a manuscript in Hegel's hand but possibly composed by Schelling or Hölderlin or in collaboration — that sketched the ambitions of the philosophical project the three would each, in different ways, pursue.
Schelling's career advanced precociously. His first major work, On the I as Principle of Philosophy (1795), appeared when he was nineteen; Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism followed the same year. By 1796 he was tutoring Baron von Riedesel's sons at Leipzig and at twenty-three (1798) was called to the chair of philosophy at Jena, then the most prestigious center of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany, on Goethe's recommendation.
The Jena years (1798–1803) were the period of Schelling's first creative explosion. The major works of the Naturphilosophie and of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) appeared in rapid succession. Schelling was the central figure of the early Jena Romantic circle that included Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and the brilliant Caroline Michaelis (then Schlegel, later Schelling). Schelling's relationship with Caroline became increasingly intense; her marriage to August Wilhelm Schlegel was dissolved in 1803, and she and Schelling married a few months later.
The move to Würzburg in 1803 — the new Bavarian university created when Bavaria absorbed the former prince-bishopric — ended the Jena period. The Würzburg years (1803–06) were marked by Caroline's death in 1809 (Schelling was devastated; his philosophical productivity slowed for years) and by his eventual remarriage in 1812 to Pauline Gotter, daughter of a Caroline family friend.
From 1806 Schelling was based in Munich — first as a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, then from 1827 as professor of philosophy at the new Munich university. The major works of the middle and late periods were composed in Munich: the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), the unfinished Ages of the World (drafts of 1811, 1813, 1815), the Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy (delivered 1827, published posthumously), and the late Philosophy of Mythology and Philosophy of Revelation (developed in lectures from the 1820s and published only after his death).
In 1841 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia called Schelling to the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin — the chair Hegel had held until his death in 1831 — with the explicit charge of countering the influence of the radical Young Hegelian school. The inaugural lectures in Berlin (winter semester 1841–42) were attended by an audience that included Kierkegaard (then visiting), Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Engels, Jacob Burckhardt, Alexander von Humboldt, and most of the eminent intellectual world of the German capital. Kierkegaard's letters from this period (especially to his brother Peter) record both his initial high hopes for Schelling's positive philosophy and his ultimate disappointment; Engels published the polemical Schelling and Revelation (1842) attacking Schelling from the Hegelian left. Schelling's Berlin years were less successful than the call had been ambitious; he gradually withdrew from public lecturing. He died on 20 August 1854 at Bad Ragaz in Switzerland, aged 79.
The Philosophical Development
Schelling's thought passed through several distinct phases, more so than most major philosophers. The major periods are conventionally identified as: (1) early Fichtean phase (1794–97), (2) Naturphilosophie (1797–1800), (3) Identity Philosophy (1800–06), (4) Freedom and the Weltalter (1806–20), and (5) Positive Philosophy (1820–54).
The Early Phase and Naturphilosophie
Schelling began as a Fichtean. The early works developed the Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre with greater attention to the absolute self-positing of the I as the ground of all philosophical knowing. But the Fichtean framework, which derived everything from the activity of the self-positing I and made nature merely the I's resistance to its own striving, struck Schelling as inadequate to the reality of nature as such.
The Naturphilosophie of the late 1790s — Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World Soul (1798), First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799) — proposed to derive nature from the same absolute that the Wissenschaftslehre derived the I from. Nature is not the I's product but the I's other; both nature and spirit are differentiated expressions of an underlying absolute that is the ground of both.
The Naturphilosophie was speculative in the extreme: Schelling attempted to derive the basic structures of physics, chemistry, magnetism, electricity, life, and consciousness from a single dynamic principle of polarity (productivity and product, positive and negative, attraction and repulsion). The empirical science of the day was mostly skeptical of the result; subsequent natural science abandoned the Naturphilosophie program. But the conception of nature as a dynamic, self-developing, internally polarized reality whose stages culminate in the emergence of consciousness shaped both German romantic literature and biological thought through the nineteenth century.
The System of Transcendental Idealism
The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), composed at Jena, attempted to integrate the Naturphilosophie with a parallel philosophy of mind. The work is one of the most architecturally ambitious of the German Idealist period. The structure: nature considered from the side of mind (theoretical philosophy: how the I constructs nature in cognition), mind considered from the side of nature (practical philosophy and philosophy of history: how the I realizes itself in the world), and the meeting point of the two in art — the work of art as the place where conscious and unconscious activity coincide, where freedom and necessity meet without contradiction.
The doctrine of art as the organon of philosophy gave the Jena Romantics a philosophical justification for what they had been doing in poetic and critical practice. The work's reception was correspondingly enthusiastic in the Romantic milieu; its eventual abandonment by Schelling himself (in favor of the Identity Philosophy) did not prevent it from shaping the broader cultural movement.
Identity Philosophy and the Break with Fichte
In the years 1801–06 Schelling developed the Identity Philosophy: an absolute that is the identity of subject and object, neither merely subjective (as Fichte's I) nor merely objective (as the natural world), but the indifference-point in which both arise. The break with Fichte was public and bitter: Fichte's review of Schelling's works charged him with abandoning the critical philosophy in favor of an uncritical metaphysics; Schelling replied in print and in correspondence; the friendship was permanently broken.
Freedom and the Weltalter
The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809), often called simply the Freiheitsschrift, is widely considered Schelling's most important single work. The text addresses the problem of evil within an absolute idealism: if the absolute is the ground of all that is, what is the status of evil? Schelling's answer involves a distinction within the absolute itself between ground and existence — between the dark, irrational ground from which the absolute generates itself and the bright, intelligible existence in which it knows itself. Evil is the inversion of these moments in the human will: when the ground (the particular self-will) is asserted against the existence (the universal divine will), what should be subordinate becomes dominant.
The Freiheitsschrift has been read by Heidegger (Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 1936 lectures) and others as the moment at which German Idealism opens onto the existentialist themes — the dark ground, the abyss within the absolute, the irreducible reality of evil — that the subsequent tradition would develop. Slavoj Žižek's The Indivisible Remainder (1996) reads the late Schelling and the Weltalter drafts in psychoanalytic terms as Lacan avant la lettre.
The Weltalter (Ages of the World) drafts of 1811, 1813, and 1815 — none published in Schelling's lifetime — attempted a narrative account of the absolute's self-generation: the past age in which the absolute emerged from its dark ground, the present age of its self-revelation, the future age of its full self-realization. The drafts each break off before completion; the difficulty of the project of writing the absolute's history may itself be the meaning the unfinished texts most clearly communicate.
The Late Positive Philosophy
The distinction between negative and positive philosophy organizes Schelling's late thought. Negative philosophy (which Schelling identifies broadly with Hegel and with his own earlier work) derives what is from the necessary structure of thought; positive philosophy begins from the actuality of what is, the brute that of existence, and attempts to think backward to its grounds. Pure thought, Schelling now argues, can derive the essence of what exists but not the existence itself; existence is given to thought, not produced by it.
The distinction is structurally similar to one Kierkegaard would develop more sharply: that essence and existence are not coordinate but radically distinct, and that the existential is what thought cannot reach. The Berlin lectures presented this distinction as the central critique of Hegelian rationalism; Kierkegaard absorbed the critique even as he found Schelling's positive answer (a positive philosophy completing the negative through revelation and mythology) ultimately insufficient.
Reception
Schelling's reception fluctuated more than that of most major philosophers. The early works dominated the Jena Romantic milieu and shaped European Romantic thought broadly. The Identity Philosophy was overshadowed by Hegel's rise from 1807. The middle and late works circulated relatively narrowly in the nineteenth century outside Schelling's immediate students (the most notable being the Munich Catholic theologian Franz Xaver von Baader and the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov).
The twentieth-century recovery began with Heidegger's 1936 lectures on the Freiheitsschrift and with the publication of the Weltalter drafts in critical edition. Walter Schulz (Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings, 1955), Manfred Frank (Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, 1975), Andrew Bowie (Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, Routledge, 1993), Iain Hamilton Grant, Markus Gabriel, and Slavoj Žižek have produced the principal Anglophone and German recoveries of Schelling as a major figure. The historical-critical edition of Schelling's works — the Akademie-Ausgabe under the Bavarian Academy — began in 1976 and remains in progress (over 40 volumes projected).
Significance
Schelling's importance has three dimensions. As completer of the Kantian-Fichtean transcendental project from the side of nature, the Naturphilosophie gave German Idealism its most expansive philosophy of nature and influenced both Romantic literary and biological thought. As theorist of human freedom and evil, the Freiheitsschrift opened the existentialist themes — the dark ground, the abyss within reason, the irreducible reality of evil — that subsequent continental philosophy would continuously develop. As critic of Hegelian rationalism through the distinction of negative and positive philosophy, the late Berlin lectures shaped Kierkegaard and indirectly the entire existentialist current; the question of the relation between essence and existence that Schelling raised has been continuously debated in continental philosophy ever since.
See Also
Kant · Hegel · Kierkegaard · Heidegger