For the American economist and Nobel Prize winner, see Thomas Schelling.

Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy
F.W.J. Schelling
Name:	Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Birth:	January 27, 1775, Leonberg, Germany
Death:	August 20, 1854, Bad Ragatz, Switzerland
School/tradition:	German Idealism
Main interests:	Naturphilosophie, Natural Science, Aesthetics, Religion, Metaphysics, Epistemology
Influences:	Plato, Böhme, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Jacobi, Herder, Goethe, Hölderlin, Fichte
Influenced:	Hegel, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tillich, Peirce

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (January 27, 1775 – August 20, 1854), later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German Idealism, situating him between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is often difficult because of its ever-changing nature. Some scholars characterize him as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system. Others challenge the notion that Schelling's thought is marked by profound breaks, instead arguing that his philosophy always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between man and nature.

Schelling's thought has often been neglected, especially in the English-speaking world. This stems not only from the ascendancy of Hegel, whose mature works portray Schelling as a mere footnote in the development of Idealism, but also from his Naturphilosophie, which positivist scientists have often ridiculed for its "silly" analogizing and lack of empirical orientation. In recent years, Schelling scholars have forcefully attacked both of these sources of neglect.

Life

Early life

Schelling was born at Leonberg in Württemberg. He attended the cloister school at Bebenhausen, near Tübingen, where his father was chaplain and an Orientalist professor. Three years early, at the age of 15 years old, he then was granted a permission to enroll at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), which normally required their students to reach 20 year old age to enroll. In Stift, he became friends with Georg Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, who were 5 years older than him and his roommates. He studied Church fathers and ancient Greek philosophers and his interest gradually shifted from Lutheran theology to philosophy. In 1792 he graduated from the philosophical faculty, and in 1793 contributed to Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus's Memorabilien; in 1795 he finished his thesis for his theological degree, De Marcione Paullinarum epistolarum emendatore. Meanwhile, he had begun to study Kant and Fichte, who greatly influenced him. In 1794, Schelling published an exposition of Fichte's thought entitled Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (On the possibility of a form of philosophy in general). This work was acknowledged by Fichte himself and immediately made for Schelling a reputation among philosophers. His more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (On Self as principle of philosophy, or on the unrestricted in human knowledge) 1795, while still remaining within the limits of the Fichtean idealism, showed a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more objective application, and to amalgamate Spinoza's views with it.

Philosophy of nature

As a tutor of two youths of an aristocratic family, he visited Leipzig escording those youths and had a chance to attend the lecture of Leibzig University, where he learned the comtemporary physical studies including chemistry and biology and was very fascinated. At this time he visited also Dresden where he saw several collections of Archiduke of Saxen, which he referred later in his thinking on art. .

After two years tutoring those youths, in 1798 at only 23 years of age, Schelling was called as an extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena. He had already contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Fichte and Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and had thrown himself into the study of physical and medical science. From 1795 date the Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (phisolophical letters on dogmatism and criticism) consisting in 10 letters addressed to an unknown "you", both a defense and critique of the Kantian system; from 1797 the essay Neue Deduction des Naturrechts (New deduction of natural law), which anticipated Fichte's treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts(Ground of natural law). His studies of physical science bore fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas to a natural philosophy) (1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (On the soul of world) (1798). In Ideen Schelling referred to Leibniz and quoted from his Monadology. During his natural philosophy period, he highly esteemed Leibniz and his view of nature.

Schelling's time at Jena (1798-1803) put him at the center of the intellectual ferment of Romanticism. Schelling was on close terms with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who appreciated the poetic quality of the Naturphilosophie, reading Von der Weltseele. As the prime minister of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe invited Schelling to Jena. On the other hand Schelling was repelled by Friedrich Schiller's less expansive disposition, and was unsympathetic to the ethical idealism that animated Schiller's work. However Schelling presumably studied Schiller's aesthetic writings: later in his Philosophie der Kunst Vorlesung (Lecture on the Philosophy of Art, 1802/03), Schelling were almost disinterest to Schiller's achievement in literature, but in its "General Part", Schiller's theory on sublime was closely reviewed with a deep respect.

In Jena, Schelling actively wrote and published numeral books and thesis. He was in a good term with Fichte at first, but their difference of thinking - about conception of nature in particular - the gap between their thought were gradually enlarging. Fichte was not pleased Schelling showed a deep interest in nature and gave him advices to focus on philosophy in its original meaning, or what Fichte thought so, that is, transcendental philosophy or his "Wissenschaftlehre". Schelling was optimistic at first toward their differences and thought Fichte would finally understand what Schelling was doing. Schelling thought his nature philosophy as a good enhancement of Fichte's idealism. In 1800 Schelling published one of his most notable works System des transcentalen Idealismus (System of transcendental Idealism, 1800). In this book Schelling placed transcendental philosophy and nature philosophy parallel and it made Fichte unpleasant. Now Fichte was thinking that Schelling worked on a wrong philosophical idea: in Fichte's theory nature as Not-Self (Nicht-Ich = object) couldn't be a subject of philosophy, essential subjective activity of human intellect. Their gap became unrecoverable in 1800, after Schelling published Darstellung des Systems meiner Philosophie (Description of the system of my philosophy). Fichte thought this title absurd, since philosophy cannot be personalized in his opinion. Moreover, in this book Schelling publicly express his estimation toward Spinoza, which Fichte had denied as dogmatism, and declared that nature and spirit were merely different in their quantity, and essentially they are indifferent or identical ("Identitaet"). Now, according to Schelling, the absolute is the indifference or identity, and it is considered to be an essential subject of philosophy.

Schelling also became the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school, who had begun to reject Fichte's thought as cold and abstract. In Schelling's thought, they hailed a personality of the true Romantic type. Schelling was especially close to August Wilhelm von Schlegel and his wife, Karoline. A marriage between Schelling and Karoline's young daughter, Auguste Böhmer, was contemplated by both. Auguste died of dysentery in 1800, prompting many to blame Schelling, who had overseen the treatment. Robert Richards demonstrates in his book The Romantic Conception of Life that Schelling's interventions were not only wise but most likely irrelevant, as the doctors called to the scene assured everyone involved that Auguste's disease was inevitably fatal. Auguste's death drew Schelling and Karoline even closer. Schlegel had removed to Berlin, and a divorce was arranged (with Goethe's help). On June 2 1803 Schelling and Karoline were married, and Schelling's time at Jena came to an end.

In his Jena period, Schelling had a closer relationship with Hegel again. Thanks to Schelling's help, Hegel became a private lecturer (Privatdozent) at Jena University. Hegel wrote a book titled Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie (Difference of the system of the philosophy of Fichte and of Schelling, 1801), and support Schelling's position against his idealistic precedents, Fichte and, not mentioned in the title though, Reinhold. They published a philosophical magazine as co-editors and published papers on philosophy of nature, but Schelling was too busy to keep getting involved into its editing and the magazine was mainly Hegel's publication, growing a different thought from Schellling's. This magazine was abolished when Schelling moved from Jena to Würzburg.

From September 1803 until April 1806 Schelling was professor at the new University of Würzburg. This period was marked by considerable flux in his views and by a final breach with Fichte and Hegel. In Würzburg, a conservative Catholic city, Schelling had had many enemies among his colleagues and the government. He moved to Munich in 1806, where he found a position as a state official, first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences. In 1807 Schelling received Hegel's Phaenomenologie des Geistes (Phaenomenology of the Spirit) and got angry, finding straight satires toward his own philosophical theory. Hegel replied him in a soothing tone, apologizing he intended to mock his followers which lacked the real understandings of his thought, not himself, but Schelling doesn't accept Hegel's words as literal. In the same year, Schelling gave a speech about the relation between the visual art and the nature at the Munich academy of arts, and Hegel wrote a severe criticism about it to one of his friends. After that year, they criticized each other in the lecture rooms and in books publicly until they both died.

Munich period

Without resigning his official position in Munich, he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and seven years at Erlangen (1820-1827). In 1809 Karoline died, just before he published the book Freiheitschrift which was the last book published during his life. Three years later, introduced by Goethe, Schelling married one of her closest friends, Pauline Gotter, in whom he found a faithful companion.

During the long stay at Munich (1806-1841) Schelling's literary activity came gradually to a standstill. The "Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie contained in the Jahrbucher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806-1808) are for the most part extracts from the Würzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi's work. The only writing of significance is the "Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände" (Investigations of Human Freedom), which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften. vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion, 1804). However different from the Jena period works, now the evil is not an appearance coming from the quantitative differences between the real and the ideal, but something substantial. This work clearly paraphrased Kant's distinction between intelligible and empirical character. Otherwise, Schelling himself called freedom "a capacity for good and evil." Schopenhauer's comment on this book was:

All in all, only a small part of that treatise is concerned with freedom; its main content is rather an extended report about a God with whom the author reveals an intimate familiarity, since he even describes for us his origination. It is only a pity that he does not say, even in a single word, how he arrived at this familiarity. The beginning of the treatise consists of a web of sophisms, whose shallowness will be recognized by anyone who is not intimidated by the audacity of the tone.

– On the Freedom of the Will, Ch. IV

The tract Über die Gottheiten zu Samothrace appeared in 1815, ostensibly a portion of a greater work, Die Weltalter (The Ages of World), frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which little was ever written. Schelling planned Die Weltalter as three part books, describing the past of the world, or the age of the being possible or can-being (Das Seinkoennende), the present of the world, or the age of the will-being (Das Seinwollende) and the future of the world, or the age of the should-being (Das Seinsollende). Schelling initiated however only the first part, and rewritten it even several times and kept it unpublished at last. Other two parts were left only in program. It is possible that it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian, and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy of 1822 express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complements to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy.

Berlin period

Public attention was powerfully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, especially in its treatment of religion, than the apparent results of Hegel's teaching. For the appearance of the critical writings of Strauss, Feuerbach and Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the desire found expression in attempts to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realization of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. Among his students there were Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, and Friedrich Engels. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and appreciative audience. The enmity of his old foe, H.E.G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling's apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and suppression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death (at Bad Ragatz, on the 20th of August 1854), when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858).

Philosophy

While of indisputable historical importance, Schelling has often been dismissed as obscurantist or un-methodical.

In his own view, Schelling's philosophy fell into three stages:

1. the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature-- the advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie
2. the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, that is, the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitätsphilosophie;
3. the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposition which is the theme of the Berlin lectures, though its germs may be traced back to 1804.

At all stages of his thought he called to his aid the forms of some other system. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works. But Schelling did not merely borrow, rather, he shaped his materials into one and the same philosophic effort and spirit.

Naturphilosophie

In his Naturphilosophie, Schelling argues Nature must not be conceived as merely abstract limit to the infinite striving of spirit (as it was by Fichte), as a mere series of necessary thoughts for mind. Rather, it must be that and more than that. It must have reality for itself, a reality which stands in no conflict with its ideal character, a reality the inner structure of which is ideal, a reality the root and spring of which is spirit. Nature as the sum of that which is objective, intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear thus as equally real, as alike exhibiting ideal structure, as parallel with one another. Nature and spirit, Naturphilosophie and Transcendentalphilosophie, thus stand as two relatively complete, but complementary parts of the whole.

The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal. The incessant change which experience brings before us, taken in conjunction with the thought of unity in productive force of nature, leads to the all-important conception of the duality, the polar opposition through which nature expresses itself in its varied products. The dynamical series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces; light, with its subordinate processes--magnetism, electricity, and chemical action; organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility.

Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of evolutionary processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness, with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations, develops in its ideal form. The theoretical side of inner nature in its successive grades from sensation to the highest form of spirit, the abstracting reason which emphasizes the difference of subjective and objective, leaves an unsolved problem which receives satisfaction only in the practical, the individualizing activity. The practical, again, taken in conjunction with the theoretical, forces on the question of the reconciliation between the free conscious organization of thought and the apparently necessitated and unconscious mechanism of the objective world. In the notion of a teleological connection and in that which for spirit is its own subjective expression, that is, art and genius, the subjective and objective find their point of union.

Along two distinct lines Schelling is to be found in all his later writings striving to amend the conception, to which he remained true, of the absolute as the ultimate ground of reality. It was necessary, in the first place, to give to this absolute a character, to make of it something more than empty sameness; it was necessary, in the second place, to clear up in some way the relation between the actuality or apparent actuality of nature and spirit (Natur und Geist). Unlike Schelling's fellow philosopher and erstwhile friend Georg Hegel, Schelling did not believe that the absolute could be known in its true character through rational inquiry alone. A transcendent apprehension through artistic creativity, or a mystical intuition through religious experience (especially evident in his writings of, and after, the year 1809), was instead required to realize the reality of the "Godhead" that is the absolute, primal ground of all being.

The briefest and best account by Schelling himself of Naturphilosophie is that contained in the Einleitung zu dern Ersten Entwurf (S. W. iii.). A full and lucid statement of Naturphilosophie is that given by K Fischer in his Gesch. d. n. Phil., vi. 433-692.

Contemporary influence

Schelling was the subject of the 1954 dissertation of the eminent 20th century German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas.

American philosopher Ken Wilber places Schelling as one of two philosophers who "after Plato, had the broadest impact on the Western mind".^[1]

The Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Zizek has written two books on Schelling, attempting to integrate Schelling's philosophy with the work of Jacques Lacan.

Quotations

"Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature."

"History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute." (System of Transcendental Idealism, c.1800)

"Now if the appearance of freedom is necessarily infinite, the total evolution of the Absolute is also an infinite process, and history itself a never wholly completed revelation of that Absolute which, for the sake of consciousness, and thus merely for the sake of appearance, separates itself into conscious and unconscious, the free and the intuitant; but which itself, however, in the inaccessible light wherein it dwells, is Eternal Identity and the everlasting ground of harmony between the two.” (System of Transcendental Idealism, c.1800)

“Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions there is but one answer: Because God is Life, and not merely Being.? (Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, c.1809)

"Only he who has tasted freedom can feel the desire to make over everything in its image, to spread it throughout the whole universe." (Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, c.1809)

"As there is nothing before or outside of God he must contain within himself the ground of his existence. All philosophies say this, but they speak of this ground as a mere concept without making it something real and actual." (Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, c.1809)

"[The Godhead] is not divine nature or substance, but the devouring ferocity of purity that a person is able to approach only with an equal purity. Since all Being goes up in it as if in flames, it is necessarily unapproachable to anyone still embroiled in Being." (The Ages of the World, c.1815)

"God then has no beginning only in so far as there is no beginning of his beginning. The beginning in God is eternal beginning, that is, such a one as was beginning from all eternity, and still is, and also never ceases to be beginning." (Quoted in Hartshorne & Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953, p. 237.)

Bibliography

Selected works are listed below. For a more complete listing, see this page.

• Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794) (On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of Philosophy), Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795) (Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge), Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus (1795) (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism) in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four early essays 1794-6 (1980) translation and commentary by F. Marti, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
• Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft (1797) Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: as Introduction to the Study of this Science (1988) translated by E.E. Harris and P. Heath, introduction R. Stern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800) System of Transcendental Idealism (1978) translated by P. Heath, introduction M. Vater, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
• Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (1802) Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things (1984) translated with an introduction by M. Vater, Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Philosophie der Kunst (1802-3) The Philosophy of Art (1989) Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.
• Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803) On University Studies (1966) translated E.S. Morgan, edited N. Guterman, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
• Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809) Of Human Freedom (1936) a translation with critical introduction and notes by J. Gutmann, Chicago: Open Court.
• Die Weltalter (1811-15). The Ages of the World (1967) translated with introduction and notes by F. de W. Bolman, jr., New York: Columbia University Press. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (1997), trans. Judith Norman, with an essay by Slavoj Zizek, Anne Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
• Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake (1815) Schelling's Treatise on ‘The Deities of Samothrace’ (1977) a translation and introduction by R.F. Brown, Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press.
• Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (probably 1833-4) On the History of Modern Philosophy (1994) translation and introduction by A. Bowie, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

See also

• History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century)
• Perennial philosophy
• Nondualism

External links

• Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Links to texts
• Article on Schelling
• Biography of Schelling at NNDB