Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

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. □

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling , 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).

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854), German philosopher. In his early years he acknowledged only one reality, the infinite and absolute Ego, of which the universe was the expression. This abstract pantheism was soon modified in favour of his conception of ‘Naturphilosophie’, according to which nature was an absolute being which works unconsciously, though purposively. The problem of the relation of nature to spirit then gave rise to his ‘Identitätsphilosophie’: both nature and spirit are but manifestations of one and the same being, absolute identity being the ground of all things. In his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophy he distinguished three elements in God: (1) the blind primeval necessary being; (2) the three potentialities of the Divine Essence, namely unconscious will (material cause), rational will (efficient cause), and unity of the two (final cause of creation); and (3) the Three Persons who evolve from the three potentialities by overcoming the primeval being. He exercised a profound influence on German thought, and on P. Tillich.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854) German philosopher. His early work, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), attempted to develop J. G. Fichte's science of knowledge alongside a philosophy of nature. His philosophy of idealism, with its stress on the perfection of the Absolute, became the blueprint for Romanticism.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854), German philosopher, whose theories considerably influenced Coleridge's formulation of the poetic Imagination as the reconciler of opposite qualities.