The German idealist and romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) developed a metaphysical system based on the philosophy of nature.

Born in Württemberg on Jan. 27, 1775, the son of a learned Lutheran pastor, F. W. J. von Schelling was educated at the theological seminary at Tübingen. He became friends with two older classmates, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin, and shared their ardent support of the French Revolution. Schelling read widely in the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. His first two treatises, Ü ber die Möglichkeit einer Philosophie überhaupt (1795; On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General) and Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie… (1795; On the Ego as Principle of Philosophy), were influenced by Fichte's philosophy of the Absolute Ego. Indeed Fichte's critics mockingly referred to Schelling as the "street peddler of the Ego."

Philosophy of Nature

In the second phase of his thought Schelling turned against Fichte's conception of nature. He then claimed that nature was not a mere obstacle to be overcome through the moral striving of the subject. Nature rather was a form of spiritual activity, an "unconscious intelligence." This organistic, vitalistic conception of nature was developed in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas toward a Philosophy of Nature), in Von der Weltseele (1798; On the World Soul), and in several works on the physical sciences published between 1797 and 1803. Schelling's brilliance was quickly recognized; owing to J. W. von Goethe's influence, he gave up his position as private tutor and assumed the rank of full professor at Jena. He was only 23 years old.

Jena was the center of German romanticism. This prestigious circle included Ludwig Tieck, the folklorist; Novalis, the poet; Friedrich and August von Schlegel, the translators of Shakespeare; Caroline, August's wife; and in nearby Weimar, Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Schelling was briefly engaged to Caroline's daughter by her first marriage, but she died under mysterious circumstances. His affection quickly turned to Caroline, a woman of tremendous wit and intelligence. In 1803, after divorcing Schlegel, Caroline married Schelling.

In 1800 Schelling published the most systematic statement of his philosophy, System des Transzendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism). In this work and in Darstellung meine Systems der Philosophie (1801; An Exposition of My System), Schelling argued for the absolute identity of nature and mind in the form of reason. Although this third turn in Schelling's thought was probably influenced by Hegel's philosophy, it earned him only Hegel's scorn.

Munich Period

From 1803 to 1806 Schelling taught at the University of Würzburg. In 1806 he was appointed secretary to the Academy of Arts at Munich, a post that allowed him to complete his most interesting work and to lecture at Stuttgart. During this period his most important work was the Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809; Of Human Freedom). Schelling's emphasis on human freedom - "the beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom" - anticipates the major concerns of contemporary existentialism.

In just 14 years Schelling's kaleidoscopic philosophy had undergone several shifts. Hegel uncharitably remarked that Schelling "carried on his philosophical education in public." Schelling was, however, a rigorous thinker, although he never constructed a complete metaphysical system. Schelling wrote eloquent and impassioned prose, liberating German philosophy from its turgid, jargonistic style.

Later Period

Schelling's wife died in 1809, and that same year marked the rising prominence of Hegel. These two events dampened Schelling's philosophical enthusiasm and self-confidence. Schelling was remarried in 1812 - to Pauline Gotter, a friend of Caroline's - but did not publish another book in the remaining 42 years of his life. From 1820 to 1827 he lectured at Erlangen, and in 1827 Schelling became a professor at Munich. Extremely bitter about the success of Hegel, he accepted a post as Prussian privy councilor and member of the Berlin Academy in order to quell the popularity of Hegel's disciples, the so-called Young Hegelians.

To combat further the influence of Hegel, Schelling lectured at Berlin for 5 years. His lectures on mythology and religion signaled the last stage in his thought, the opposition of negative and positive philosophy. God cannot be known through reason (negative philosophy), but He can be experienced through myth and revelation (positive philosophy). This relatively neglected aspect of Schelling's philosophy has aroused considerable interest among today's Protestant theologians. Never regaining his early prominence, Schelling died on Aug. 20, 1854, at Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.

Schelling was called the "prince of the romantics." With his immense charm, wit, and radiant spirit, he endeared himself to the coterie of intellectuals known as the German romantics. With them he celebrated, in both word and deed, the vision of artistic genius and the principles of organicism and vitalism in nature.

Further Reading

A short critical biography is in James Gutman's introduction to his translation of Schelling's Of Human Freedom (1936). Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (7 vols., 1946; rev. ed., 7 vols. in 13, 1962), provides a thorough exposition of Schelling's thought. Other accounts of the development of Schelling's later philosophy are in the introduction to Schelling's The Ages of the World (a fragment of Die Weltalter), translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman (1942), and in Paul Collins Hayner, Reason and Existence: Schelling's Philosophy of History (1967). Recommended for the background of idealism and romanticism are Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), and Eric D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling (1960).

Additional Sources

Seidel, George J. (George Joseph), Activity and ground: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Hildesheim; New York: G. Olms, 1976.

Snow, Dale E., Schelling and the end of idealism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

White, Alan, Schelling: an introduction to the system of freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

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Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (Leonberg, 1775-1854, Ragaz), was educated at the Tübinger Stift, where Hölderlin and Hegel were among his friends. In 1797 he published Ideen zur Philosophie der Natur in which he established himself as an exponent of Nature philosophy, and in 1798, on the advice of Goethe and Fichte, to whom his intellectual development was indebted, was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Jena University. He soon established contact with the early Romantics (see Romantik) A. W. and F. Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis, to whom his tract Von der Weltseele (1798) commended itself. In 1803 he married the divorced wife of A. W. Schlegel (see above), and moved to a chair at Würzburg University which he occupied until 1806.

Schelling attempted a systematic philosophy superseding that of Fichte. The Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799) was followed by System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), linking the duality between the empirical self (ego) with the non-ego, as conceived by Fichte, in synthesis in art. The consummate function of aesthetics is further discussed in Philosophie der Kunst (1809, containing lectures of 1802-3). Schelling's Darstellung meines Systems im Ganzen (1801) remained unfinished, but its central idea that speculative and imaginative thought could form a basis for scientific study and thus yield objective knowledge compatible with scientific knowledge appealed to the Romantic frame of mind. In establishing the thesis of identity equating Nature and Spirit (termed by him Indifferenz von Natur und Geist) he laid the foundation of his ‘objective Idealism’; it gave an appearance of detachment to views which essentially constituted a subjective pantheism. Nature, he considered, is visible Spirit, and Spirit is invisible Nature.

Before he was 30, Schelling was drawn into paths which were more mystical than philosophical. The Roman Catholic theologian F. X. Baader, whom he met in 1806, and the writings of J. Böhme influenced his thought in Philosophie und Religion (1804) and Philosophische Untersuchungen über die menschliche Freiheit (1809, reissued 1950). This second phase of his development took place in Munich, where from 1806 until 1841 he was General Secretary to the Akademie der bildenden Künste before being invited by Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to Berlin University; the King hoped that Schelling's more clearly religious thought would change the tone of the philosophy taught in the Prussian capital (an expectation that was not realized). In Berlin Schelling completed his theosophic writings, Philosophie der Mythologie (1842) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (1854). Schelling's pantheism gave way to another form of theism, which had some influence on writers of the mid- and late 19th c. The dualism, so happily resolved, recurs in the distinct concepts of the existence of an Absolute Spirit and of a Being which is God. The Absolute Spirit is the Will and Creation its manifestation, evolution proceeding through the interdependence of God, man, and the inscrutable Will.

Schelling appears to have had an attractive personality and a persuasive and stimulating utterance. He is generally regarded as more poet than philosopher. He did in fact write poetry, which was collected and published by Erich Schmidt as Gedichte in 1913, and he was at one time believed to be the author of Nachtwachen. Von Bonaventura. Schelling's Sämtliche Werke (14 vols.), ed. K. F. A. Schelling, appeared in 1856-61; a revised edition of 1927 ff. (12 vols.) was reissued in 1958-60.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775-1854) The principal philosopher of German Romanticism. Schelling was born in Leonberg, and educated at Tübingen, where he was a contemporary of Hegel and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Schelling became professor at Jena in 1798, and for some years collaborated with Fichte. In 1803 he married Caroline, the divorced wife of August Schlegel, to whose daughter (who died, possibly because of Schelling's attempts at medicine) he had previously been informally engaged. In keeping with the spirit of Romanticism Schelling's early work, particularly the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), stresses force, self-consciousness, the unfolding dynamic spirit inherent in all things, and the moral striving after unattainable ideals. It is in the emphasis on art and aesthetics that Schelling is at his most impassioned: it is in art alone that abstraction is put aside, nature and history reconciled, and full self-consciousness attained. The ‘philosophy of identity’, expressed in Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), holds the absolute identity of nature and intelligence, knower and known, and is an important bridge between Kant and Fichte on the one hand, and Hegel on the other. After Caroline died in 1809, Schelling produced no more books, but turned his attention more to mythology and religion. In the final phase of his life he voiced a mystical, personal, and sombre philosophy recognized as anticipating similar notes in existentialism.

(frē'drĭkh vĭl'hĕlm yō'zĕf fən shĕ'lĭng) , 1775–1854, German philosopher. After theological study at Tübingen and two years of tutoring at Leipzig, he became in 1798 a professor at Jena, where he helped found the romantic movement in philosophy. There he was closely associated with August and Friedrich von Schlegel and J. G. Fichte, from whom he drew apart when he left Jena for a professorship at Würzburg in 1803. He later taught at the Univ. of Berlin. Schelling's early essays were a development of the Fichtean science of knowledge, though in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797, tr. 1988) he had already differed somewhat in holding that nature cannot be subordinated to mental life. The difference between the forces of nature and mind must be only a matter of degree or level, and the problem of knowledge is absorbed in the ultimate unity of mind and matter in the Absolute. In his later period, Schelling maintained that history is a series of stages progressing toward harmony from a previous fall and that differences are aspects of this development. He argued that God also partakes of this process of development; that deity, to have personality, must hold within itself the limiting factors that define personality. Schelling's essay Of Human Freedom (1809, tr. 1936) anticipated existentialist themes, including that of individual freedom seen as the capacity to determine one's own essence. Among Schelling's other works is Die Weltalter (1854; tr. by Frederick Bolman, The Ages of the World, 1942).

Bibliography

See E. D. Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling (1971); A. White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (1983); W. Marx, The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling (1984).