Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
German philosopher
born , Jan. 27, 1775, Leonberg, near Stuttgart,
Württemberg [Germany]
died Aug. 20, 1854, Bad Ragaz, Switz.
Main
German philosopher and educator, a major figure of German
idealism, in the post-Kantian development in German
philosophy. He was ennobled (with the addition of von) in
1806.
Early life and career.
Schelling’s father was a Lutheran minister, who in 1777
became a professor of Oriental languages at the theological
seminary in Bebenhausen, near Tübingen. It was there that
Schelling received his elementary education. He was a highly
gifted child, and he had already learned the classical
languages at the age of eight. On the basis of his rapid
intellectual development, he was admitted, at the age of 15,
to the theological seminary in Tübingen, a famous finishing
school for ministers of the Württemberg area, where he lived
from 1790 to 1795. The youths at Tübingen were inspired by
the ideas of the French Revolution and, spurning tradition,
turned away from doctrinal theology to philosophy. The young
Schelling was inspired, however, by the thought of Immanuel
Kant, who had raised philosophy to a higher critical level,
and by the idealist system of Johann Fichte, as well as by
the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, a 17th-century
rationalist. When he was 19 years old Schelling wrote his
first philosophical work, Über die Möglichkeit einer Form
der Philosophie überhaupt (1795; “On the Possibility and
Form of Philosophy in General”), which he sent to Fichte,
who expressed strong approval. It was followed by Vom Ich
als Prinzip der Philosophie (“Of the Ego as Principle of
Philosophy”). One basic theme governs both of these
works—the Absolute. This Absolute cannot be defined,
however, as God; each person is himself the Absolute as the
Absolute ego. This ego, eternal and timeless, is apprehended
in a direct intuition, which, in contrast to sensory
intuition, can be characterized as intellectual.
From 1795 to 1797 Schelling acted as a private tutor for
a noble family, who had placed its sons under his care
during their studies in Leipzig. The time spent in Leipzig
marked a decisive turning point in the thought of Schelling.
He attended lectures in physics, chemistry, and medicine. He
acknowledged that Fichte, whom he had previously revered as
his philosophical model, had not taken adequate notice of
nature in his philosophical system, inasmuch as Fichte had
always viewed nature only as an object in its subordination
to man. Schelling, in contrast, wanted to show that nature,
seen in itself, shows an active development toward the
spirit. This philosophy of nature, the first independent
philosophical accomplishment of Schelling, made him known in
the circles of the Romanticists.
Period of intense productivity.
In 1798 Schelling was called to a professorship at the
University of Jena, the academic centre of Germany at the
time, where many of the foremost intellects of the time were
gathered. During this period Schelling was extremely
productive, publishing a rapid succession of works on the
philosophy of nature. It was Schelling’s desire, as attested
by his famous work System des transzendentalen Idealismus
(1800; “System of Transcendental Idealism”), to unite his
concept of nature with Fichte’s philosophy, which took the
ego as the point of departure. Schelling saw that art
mediates between the natural and physical spheres insofar
as, in artistic creation, the natural (or unconscious) and
the spiritual (or conscious) productions are united.
Naturalness and spirituality are explained as emerging from
an original state of indifference, in which they were
submerged in the yet-undeveloped Absolute, and as rising
through a succession of steps of ever-higher order. Fichte
did not acknowledge this concept, however, and the two
writers attacked each other most sharply in an intensive
correspondence.
The time spent in Jena was important for Schelling also
in a personal respect: there he became acquainted with
Caroline Schlegel, among the most gifted women in German
Romanticism, and married her in 1803. The unpleasant
intrigues that accompanied this marriage and the dispute
with Fichte caused Schelling to leave Jena, and he accepted
an appointment at the University of Würzburg.
At first, Schelling lectured there on the philosophy of
identity, conceived in his last years in Jena, in which he
tried to show that, in all beings, the Absolute expresses
itself directly as the unity of the subjective and the
objective. It was just on this point that G.W.F. Hegel
initiated his criticism of Schelling. Hegel had at first
taken Schelling’s side in the disagreement between Schelling
and Fichte, and complete unanimity seemed to exist between
them in 1802 when they coedited the Kritisches Journal der
Philosophie (“Critical Journal of Philosophy”). In the
following years, however, Hegel’s philosophical thought
began to move significantly away from Schelling’s, and his
Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Mind)
contained strong charges against Schelling’s system. To
Schelling’s definition of the Absolute as an indiscriminate
unity of the subjective and the objective, Hegel replied
that such an Absolute is comparable to the night, “in which
all cows are black.” Besides, Schelling had never explicitly
shown how one could ascend to the Absolute; he had begun
with this Absolute as though it were “shot out of a pistol.”
This criticism struck Schelling a heavy blow. The
friendship with Hegel that had existed since their time
together at the seminary in Tübingen broke up. Schelling,
who had been regarded as the leading philosopher of the time
until the publication of Hegel’s Phänomenologie, was pushed
into the background.
This situation caused Schelling to retreat from public
life. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich, where, in 1806,
he was appointed as general secretary of the Academy of
Plastic Arts. He lectured from 1820 to 1827 in Erlangen.
Caroline’s death on Sept. 7, 1809, led him to write a
philosophical work on immortality. In 1812 Schelling married
Pauline Gotter, a friend of Caroline. The marriage was
harmonious, but the great passion that Schelling had felt
for Caroline was unrepeatable.
During the years in Munich, Schelling tried to
consolidate his philosophical work in a new way, producing a
revision that was instigated by Hegel’s criticism. Schelling
questioned all idealistic speculations built on the
assumption that the world presents itself as a rational
cosmos. Were there not also irrational things, he asked, and
was not evil the predominant power in the world? In his
Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesener menschlichen
Freiheit (1809; Of Human Freedom), Schelling declared that
the freedom of man is a real freedom only if it is freedom
for good and evil. The possibility of this freedom is
founded on two principles that are active in every living
thing: one, a dark primal foundation that manifests itself
in carnal desire and impulse; the other, a clearheaded
sensibleness that governs as a formative power. Man,
however, has placed the dark stratum of impulse, which was
meant only to serve the intellect as a source of power,
above the intellect and has thus subordinated the intellect
to the impulses, which now rule over him. This reversal of
the right order is the occurrence known in the Bible as the
Fall from grace, through which evil came into the world. But
this perversion of man is revoked by God, who becomes man in
Christ and thus reestablishes the original order.
Period of the later, unpublished philosophy.
The position developed in the work on freedom forms the
basis of Schelling’s later philosophy, covering the time
from 1810 until his death, which is known only through a
draft of the unpublished work Die Weltalter (written in
1811; The Ages of the World) and through the manuscripts of
his later lectures. In Die Weltalter Schelling wanted to
relate the history of God. God, who originally is absorbed
in a quiet longing, comes to himself by glimpsing in himself
ideas through which he becomes conscious of himself. This
self-consciousness, which is identical to freedom, enables
God to project these ideas from himself—i.e., to create the
world.
Schelling’s appointment to the University of Berlin in
1841 gave him an opportunity once again to develop public
interest in his conceptions. The Prussian king of that time,
Frederick William IV, hoped that Schelling would combat the
so-called dragon’s seed of Hegelianism in Berlin, where
Hegel had been working until his death in 1831. Schelling’s
first lecture in Berlin manifested his self-consciousness.
Schelling declared that in his youth he had opened a new
page in the history of philosophy and that now in his
maturity he wanted to turn this page and start yet a newer
one. Such notables as Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard,
Jakob Burckhardt, and Mikhail Bakunin were in his audience.
Schelling, however, had no great success in Berlin.
Moreover, he was embittered when his lectures were
plagiarized by an opponent who wanted to submit the positive
philosophy of Schelling, now finally disclosed in these
lectures, to the public for examination. Schelling initiated
a legal suit but lost the case. He resigned and discontinued
lecturing.
The content of these final lectures, however, represented
the climax of Schelling’s creative activity. Schelling
divided philosophy into a negative philosophy, which
developed the idea of God by means of reason alone, and, in
contrast, a positive philosophy, which showed the reality of
this idea by reasoning a posteriori from the fact of the
world to God as its creator. Schelling then explained
(referring to his work on freedom) that man, who wanted to
be equal to God, stood up against God in his Fall into sin.
God, however, was soon elevated again as the principle.
During the era of mythology, God appeared as a dark power.
During the era of revelation, however, God emerged in
history as manifestly real in the figure of Christ. Thus,
the complete history of religion should be conveyed through
philosophical thought.
Personality and significance.
Schelling is described as a man of thickset build, and,
according to favourable reports, his high forehead and
sparkling eyes were impressive. Opponents of his philosophy,
however, such as Karl Rosenkranz, a disciple of Hegel, spoke
of a sharp and piercing look. His character was unbalanced.
Schelling has been described as nervous, unpredictable, and
deeply sensitive in his proud fashion. Particularly striking
was his unwavering consciousness that it was his mission to
bring philosophy to a definite completion.
Great philosophical influence was denied to Schelling.
The philosophical situation at the time was determined not
by the few disciples of Schelling but by the Hegelians. The
right-wing Hegelians occupied all of the philosophical
professorial chairs and handed down the tradition of Hegel’s
system. The left-wing Hegelians explained that, even to
suspend Hegel’s system, an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy
was necessary. Thus, in tracing the development of German
Idealism, the early and middle Schelling—that is, the
Schelling who drew up the philosophy of nature and the
philosophy of identity—has been placed between the Idealism
of Fichte, who started from the ego, and Hegel’s system of
the Absolute spirit.
The independence of Schelling and his importance for
philosophy are only now being recognized, and that in
connection with Existential philosophy and philosophical
anthropology, which conceive themselves as counteracting the
philosophy of absolute reason. The later Schelling now turns
out to have been the first thinker to illuminate Hegel’s
philosophy critically. In particular, Schelling’s insight
that man is determined not only by reason but also by dark
natural impulses is now valued as a positive attempt to
understand the reality of man on a level more profound than
that attained by Hegel.
Walter Schulz
