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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

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

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (January 27, 1775 – August 20, 1854) 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 erstwhile roommate and 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.

Contents

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, he then enrolled at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he became friends with the Georg Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin. 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 Ficthe's thought entitled Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt. 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 1798, 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.

After two years tutoring two youths of an aristocratic family, and at only 23 years of age, Schelling was called as an extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena in 1798. 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 1796 date the Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus, a critique of the the Kantian system; from 1797 the essay Neue Deduction des Naturrechts, which anticipated Fichte's treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts. His studies of physical science bore fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (1798).

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. On the other hand he was repelled by Friedrich Schiller's less expansive disposition, and was unsympathetic to the ethical idealism that animated Schiller's work. 

Schelling became the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school, who had begun to reject Ficthe's thought as cold and abstract. In Schelling, 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.


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, 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. Without resigning his official position, he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and seven years at Erlangen (1820-1827). In 1809 Karoline died, and three years later 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. 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:

The tract Über die Gottheiten zu Samothrace appeared in 1815, ostensibly a portion of a greater work, Die Weltalter, frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which little was ever written. 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.


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 Identitatsphilosophie;
  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 tself 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 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 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 absolute reason 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 in which the actuality or apparent actuality of nature and spirit


The briefest and best account in 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

Present-day Buddhist philosopher Ken Wilber places Schelling as one of two philosophers who "after Plato, had the broadest impact on the Western mind" and who set out in Western philosophy, the paradigm of Spirit unfolding through Nature, over time, towards "God-in-the-making". As such, Schelling (he states) sees beyond the empirical-rational world-view, and the romantic-nature world-view, to a nondual synthesis of primal self-knowing: "In the ultimate dark Abyss of the ... primal ground or Urgrund, there is no differentiation but only pure identity." He describes Schelling's "key insight" as being that "the Spirit that is realized in a conscious fashion in the supreme identity is in fact the Spirit that was present all along as the entire process of evolution itself. All of Spirit, so to speak, is present at every stage, as the process of unfolding itself." Schelling's pivotal role is discussed and assessed by Ken Wilber in his book A Brief History of Everything, taking up much of chapter 17 (pp. 297 - 308). He adds that after Schelling and Hegel, their views were popularly overlooked in favor of a return to modernity (reflected in the popular saying "Back to Kant!").


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.  






Quotation

"Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature"



Bibliography

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


References





See also



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