Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

German philospher

• Born: January 27, 1775
• Birthplace: Leonberg, Württemberg (now in Germany)
• Died: August 20, 1854
• Place of death: Bad Ragaz, Switzerland

Schelling contributed to the development of German Idealism and to the rise of German Romanticism. His later ontological and mythological speculations, though unpopular among his contemporaries such as G. W. F. Hegel, have influenced modern existentialism and philosophical anthropology.

Early Life

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (SHEHL-ihng) was the son of Joseph Friedrich Schelling, an erudite Lutheran pastor. In 1777, his family moved to Bebenhausen near Tübingen, where his father became a professor of Oriental languages at the theological seminary. Schelling was educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen, apparently destined for the ministry by family tradition. A gifted child, he learned the classical languages by the age of eight.

From 1790 to 1792, Schelling attended the theological seminary at Tübingen, where he met Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, the great Romantic poet. The Tübingen Evangelical Theological Seminary, located in the buildings of an old Augustinian monastery, is idyllically set over the Neckar River on a cliff, ensconced in green hills, with a view of the snow-topped craggy Alps in the distance. Good friends while students at Tübingen, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin were partisans of the French Revolution and spent many hours discussing philosophy: the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza, the pure concepts of Immanuel Kant, and the Idealist system of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

For several years after finishing at Tübingen, Schelling was a tutor for the sons of a noble family in Leipzig. He was a precocious and passionate thinker and progressed more quickly in his career than the older Hegel. His first published philosophical work was Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1795; on the possibility and form of philosophy in general). This text was followed by Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (1795; of the ego as principle of philosophy) and the article “Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus” (1796; philosophical letters on dogmatism and criticism).

The basic theme of these works is the Absolute, which Schelling interpreted not as God but as the Absolute ego. This ego is transcendental and eternal and can be experienced through direct intuition, which Schelling defined as an intellectual process. In 1798, at the exceptionally young age of twenty-three, Schelling became a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, where Hegel taught as an unsalaried lecturer between 1801 and 1807, and where in October, 1806, Napoleon I defeated the Prussian army and thus conquered Prussia, the most powerful state in Germany.

Life’s Work

Schelling’s life’s work as a philosopher and teacher began at the University of Jena, the academic center of Germany. At Jena, he became a colleague and friend of the famous Fichte, at the time Germany’s leading philosopher. Fichte, who had been one of Schelling’s idols, had read and strongly approved of Schelling’s early philosophical work. Schelling and Hegel, both Idealist philosophers, coedited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie. Even though Hegel was five years older than Schelling, he at this time was thought of as Schelling’s disciple; his first book compared the philosophies of Schelling and Fichte.

Jena at this time was also the center of German Romanticism, and in nearby Weimar, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German dramatists and poets, were at the height of their careers. Schelling knew both and was profoundly influenced by the Romantic movement. German Romanticism, in turn, was influenced by Schelling’s philosophy, which emphasized the importance of the individual and the values of art. German Romanticism and Schelling’s Idealist philosophy are both characterized by the “inward path” to truth, the quest for the totality of experience, and the desire for unity and infinity. Schelling’s career falls into two periods: the first, from 1795 to 1809, and the second, which was less productive but no less significant, from 1809 to 1854.

Schelling’s peers at Jena—Goethe, Schiller, the Romanticists Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, the writer/critic Ludwig Tiech, and Hegel—constituted a close group of friends who strongly influenced one another’s work. For convenience, Schelling’s philosophy can be divided into four stages: the subjective Idealism or his work before Jena; the philosophy of nature; the philosophy of identity; and the philosophy of opposition between negative and positive. The two middle stages belong to his first period of productivity, while the fourth stage belongs to his final period. The second stage, his most famous and influential, began with his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Nature (1797; partial translation as Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature , 1871).

In opposition to Fichte’s idea of the world as a product of ego, Schelling on the one hand argues that the world of nature is as important as the ego and on the other finds a common ground between the two in the essence of matter, which he defines as force. In his Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (1798; on the world soul, a hypothesis of advanced physics for the interpretation of the general organism), Schelling argues that the interpretation of the unity of nature was the basic aim of science and thus that the object of scientific study was force, of which mechanical, chemical, electrical, and vital forces were merely different manifestations.

This theory is similar to the unified field theory sought by Albert Einstein and now being convincingly proposed by modern physicists such as John Hagelin. In 1799, Schelling published another book on natural philosophy, defining force as pure activity. He believed that nature realized itself in finite matter through an infinite self-referral that never reached completion. This theory he considered parallel to Immanuel Kant’s idea of reason forever striving toward an unattainable absolute.

While in Jena, Schelling became engaged and eventually married under bizarre circumstances. Through his friendship with August Schlegel and his charming wife, Caroline, the daughter of a professor in Göttingen and one of the most intellectually gifted women in German Romanticism, Schelling became informally engaged to Auguste Böhmer, Caroline’s sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage. Auguste, however, died in 1800, and Schelling was later held partly responsible for having treated her illness on the basis of his amateur medical knowledge and his impetuous self-confidence—a common trait among the Romantics. This tragedy created a bond between Schelling and Caroline, who had already felt a mutual attraction. In 1803, through the aid of Goethe, Caroline obtained a divorce from Schlegel and married Schelling. The three remained friends in true Romantic style, but the intrigue surrounding the marriage renewed allegations of Schelling’s role in Auguste’s death, causing him to leave Jena and join the faculty at the University of Würzburg.

At the height of his second stage, Schelling published System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800; Introduction to Idealism , 1871), his most mature and systematic philosophical statement, in which he attempts to unite his theory of nature with the theory of knowledge developed by Kant and Fichte. In defining human consciousness as pure self-activity in opposition to the not-self, Schelling built a theory involving three stages: a movement from sensation to perception, perception to reflection, and reflection to will. This movement connected knowledge and its object. Schelling believed that since concepts cannot exist without their objects, knowledge consists of a meeting of self, object, and process, or of knower, known, and process of knowing—a view also espoused by the Vedic philosophy of India. The transcendental idealism of this book was the one area in which Schelling influenced the mature philosophy of Hegel, especially his theory of the dialectic.

In 1806, Schelling was called to Munich to be an associate for the Academy of Sciences and the secretary of the Academy of Arts. Later, he became the secretary of the philosophical branch of the Academy of Sciences. These were government sinecure positions that gave Schelling extra time for research and allowed him to lecture in Stuttgart. Around this time, he became increasingly interested in aesthetic theory and lectures on the philosophy of art. He believed art to be an organic whole that was served by its parts and moved teleologically toward a specific purpose. This purpose was not pleasure, utility, knowledge, or morality but rather beauty, which Schelling defined as the infinite actualized within the finite. He held that human intelligence in philosophy is abstract and limited, whereas in art it awakens to itself and realizes its unbounded potential. Because it reconciles nature and history and is the aim of all intelligence, art is the highest philosophy.

Schelling’s third stage of thought, the philosophy of identity, proposes that the production of reality arises not from the opposition of intelligence to nature but rather from the identity of all objects in the Absolute. The identity of nature and intelligence has its source in reason, defined as an infinite field. In describing Schelling’s absolute theory of unity between subject and object, Hegel wittily compared it to the night, “in which all cows are black.” Schelling’s theory of absolute identity was a type of pantheism, holding nature to be inseparable, even if distinguishable, from God. Here Schelling derives from the mystic Jakob Böhme. Because the essence of God is will, He can be apprehended only by means of will—that is, in action—and not by means of mere rational comprehension.

During this period, Schelling published Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809; Of Human Freedom , 1936), in which he distinguishes between two aspects of God: perfection and the ground of being. Evil is the ground that teaches humankind the difference between good and evil, and which is therefore a necessary stage in the development toward perfection.

In 1809, Caroline died prematurely. Schelling was so distraught he did not publish another book for the rest of his life and entered the final, existential phase of his career. He first propounded his positive philosophy of this period in Die Weltalter (1913, written in 1811-1813; partial translation as The Ages of the World , 1942), a work that consisted of three volumes, one of which is Philosophie der Mythologie (philosophy of mythology).

In The Ages of the World, Schelling describes the history of God as the divine principle expressed in human history, especially in religion and myth. God is the eternal nothing, the ungrounded basis necessary for the ground to exist. By alienating himself from himself through his own oppositional nature, God the Absolute creates the possibility of his relative opposite, which Schelling defined as freedom. Freedom is both the cause of the fall from the Absolute and the trace of the Absolute after the fall. Whereas a negative philosophy developed the idea of God by means of reason alone, Schelling’s positive philosophy developed this idea by reasoning backward from the existence of the created world to the existence of God as its creator.

Significance

The two phases of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s career were distinctly different. His second, more despondent, phase consisted of his last philosophical period, stretching across forty-five years from 1809 to 1854, in which he saw his significance as a German Idealist decline. Failing to revive his influence against Hegelianism in Berlin in 1841, he became melancholic and pessimistic, a condition he tried to surmount by developing a system of metaphysics based on Christian revelation and a personal God. Hegel’s great philosophical influence was denied to Schelling, whose early and middle periods—his philosophy of nature and philosophy of identity—fell between Fichte’s Idealism and Hegel’s system of the Absolute spirit.

Nevertheless, over the past century Schelling’s independence and importance to philosophy have become more apparent. In its concern not only with the nature of reality but also with the fact of its very existence, Schelling’s philosophy bears a strong, if suggestive, resemblance to modern existentialism. In Philosophie der Mythologie, Schelling ventures into the field of philosophical anthropology by arguing that humanity, as the embodiment of freedom and creative intelligence, is the essence of the world, which finds expression in mythmaking and religion, humanity’s most profound activities. He explored the moods of sadness associated with humanity’s being in the world. Like Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Schelling sought to express the ineffable poignancy of human existence, anticipating the notions of existential anxiety and psychoanalytic resistance to cure. Schelling, however, was convinced that despair was denied the last word on human existence by the revelation of God.

Bibliography

Brown, Robert F. The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the Works of 1809-1815. London: Associated University Presses, 1977. A comprehensive analysis of Schelling’s ontology and doctrine of God as influenced by Jakob Böhme’s mysticism. Deals with philosophical and theological problems, such as the immutability of God, and the stages in which Schelling incorporates Böhme’s ideas. Contains bibliography of German and English secondary texts.

Distaso, Leonardo V. The Paradox of Existence: Philosophy and Aesthetics in the Young Schelling. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2004. Examines the development of Schelling’s philosophy from 1794 to 1800, focusing on his ideas about the relationship of the Absolute to Finiteness.

Esposito, Joseph L. Schelling’s Idealism and Philosophy of Nature. London: Associated University Presses, 1977. Analysis of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and its influence on nineteenth century science. Also traces the influence of Schelling’s Idealism in America and provides a modern vindication of objective Idealism against those who criticize Schelling for the lack of a guiding vision. Contains selected bibliography of secondary sources, mainly in German.

Marx, Werner. The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom. Translated by Thomas Nenon, with a foreword by A. Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Explores Schelling’s conception of history as the relationship between freedom and necessity, then compares this conception with the contemporary theory of history developed by J. Habermas, showing how the latter first renounces and then proceeds to incorporate the categories of the former. Also treats Schelling’s self-intuition compared to Hegel’s phenomenology and interprets Schelling’s notion of human freedom.

Schelling, F. W. J. The Ages of the World. Translated with an introduction by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman. New York: AMS Press, 1942. Schelling’s text is preceded by a seventy-nine-page introduction, in which Bolman analyzes the twofold nature of Schelling’s philosophy, discusses reality and nature in his development through 1812 and his interests after 1812, and then interprets The Ages of the World. Ends with a synoptic outline taken from the original manuscript.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. System of Transcendental Idealism. Translated by Peter Heath, with an introduction by M. Vater. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. Schelling’s most mature and complete philosophical statements and one of his few works translated into English. Concerns the relation between self and object in his transcendental Idealism. Good introduction that compares Schelling to Fichte, Hegel, and other philosophers and discusses the relationship between the self and consciousness.

White, Alan. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983. White covers Schelling’s entire fifty-year career in terms of the history of modern philosophy, lucidly arguing that Schelling attempted to produce a system of freedom. Schelling is shown to identify problems with freedom and evil not treated by Hegel. Contains selected annotated bibliography.

Wirth, Jason M. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Analysis of Schelling’s philosophy, including his ideas about the crisis of truth, the primacy of the good, and the nature of time, art, and evil. Wirth maintains that Schelling was a belated contemporary of several twentieth century philosophers, such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Collection of essays examining Schelling’s philosophy, including his ideas on religion and the quest for authenticity, his relationship to Kant, and his place among twentieth century philosophers.