Schelling

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Schelling is the most protean of the great German Idealists, a prodigy who built and abandoned one system after another, and in the long shadow of his old roommate Hegel he has been badly underrated. He was in fact profoundly original: the founder of a philosophy of nature as a living, dynamic power, the thinker who set art at the very summit of metaphysics, the author of the deepest treatment of freedom and evil in all of German Idealism, and the pioneer of a positive philosophy of existence that broke with rationalism decades before Kierkegaard and Heidegger made the break famous. Few philosophers have seen so far ahead.

The corpus and how the chat answers. Schelling wrote in German. The standard English translations of his major works, the System of Transcendental Idealism and the essay on human freedom, remain under copyright, and the public-domain English is thin, so this room carries no primary-text corpus. It answers from training knowledge, says so plainly, and cites his works by title. A nineteenth-century English version of his Philosophy of Art and the German originals could join the corpus in a later pass. Expect citations to the System of Transcendental Idealism and the essay Of Human Freedom by title.

Life. Schelling was born in 1775 in Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, and as a youth at the Tübingen seminary he shared a room with two other young men who would change philosophy and poetry, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin. The youngest of the three, he was the first to win fame, a brilliant professor at Jena at the center of early Romanticism while still in his twenties. He taught afterward at Würzburg, Munich, and at last Berlin, where the aging Schelling was summoned to challenge the towering influence of the late Hegel. Through a long career he passed restlessly through several philosophies, always pressing on toward what his earlier systems had left unsolved.

Where to begin. Start with the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) for the early system and the philosophy of art, the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature for the living conception of nature, the essay Of Human Freedom (1809) for the masterwork on evil and freedom, and the late lectures on mythology and revelation for the positive philosophy.

The philosophy of nature. Schelling's first great contribution was to overturn the picture of nature as dead, inert mechanism. Nature, he held, is a living, dynamic, self-organizing power, one productive force unfolding through opposed polarities and rising stages, from matter through life toward consciousness. Nature is visible spirit, he wrote, and spirit is invisible nature; they are not two worlds but two aspects of a single absolute productivity, and mind does not stand over against a lifeless world but is nature come awake to itself. This organic, dynamic vision shaped Romantic science and the whole Romantic feeling for the natural world.

Art as the organ of philosophy. The summit of his early system is a startling claim for art. Tracing in parallel the development of the objective in nature and the subjective in intelligence, Schelling asks where the two are perfectly united, where the Absolute, the identity of subject and object, actually becomes visible. The answer is the work of art. In artistic creation the conscious and the unconscious, the free and the necessary, the ideal and the real come together as nowhere else, so that art, and not abstract reason, is the true organ of philosophy, the place where the Absolute shows itself plainly. No one has made a higher claim for the work of art.

The identity philosophy. At the center of his middle period stands the Absolute as the point of identity, or indifference, where subject and object, ideal and real, are utterly one, prior to every difference, and from which the whole world of distinctions unfolds. It was this that Hegel mocked in a famous jab as the night in which all cows are black, charging that a bare identity could never explain how difference arises at all. The quarrel ended their long friendship. But Schelling's deep instinct, that beneath the split of mind and world there lies an original unity, never deserted him.

Freedom, evil, and the dark ground. His masterwork, the 1809 essay on human freedom, is the most searching treatment of evil in German Idealism. Real freedom, Schelling argues, is not mere self-determination but the genuine capacity for both good and evil, and so evil must be something real and positive, not the mere absence of good. To make this thinkable he distinguishes, even within God, between existence and its ground, a dark and unruly basis, a longing or will in the depths out of which existence and light arise. Drawing on the theosophy of Jakob Böhme, he plants an irrational, willful, dark ground at the root of being itself, and makes freedom the eruption of a will that can affirm the right order of things or invert it. It is a vision of the irrational depths of reality that ran a full century ahead of its age.

Positive philosophy: existence over reason. His final turn was the boldest. The whole rationalist enterprise, Hegel's above all, Schelling came to call merely negative philosophy: it can map the logical structure of what is possible, the essences of things, but it can never explain why anything actually exists, never reach the brute, unprethinkable fact of existence. For that we need a positive philosophy, one that begins not from concepts but from existence itself, from the actual and the historical and the given, from the testimony of mythology and revelation, what reason cannot deduce but can only encounter. With this priority of existence over thought, Schelling struck the note that Kierkegaard, who sat in his Berlin lecture room, and the later existentialists would make their own.

Reception, and adjacent reading. For a century Schelling was read as a mere way-station between Fichte and Hegel; he is now seen as one of the most fertile and forward-looking of all the Idealists. Read now, he is the philosopher of living nature, of art as the key to the Absolute, of the reality of evil and the dark ground of freedom, and of an existence that exceeds all reason. He began from the I of Fichte and the critical philosophy of Kant; he shared a room and then a rivalry with Hegel, who eclipsed him in their lifetime and whom later thought has partly undone; the dark ground of being he drew from the mystic Böhme; and his late priority of existence over reason fed straight into the existentialism of Kierkegaard and, a century on, into the thought of Heidegger, who counted the freedom essay among the peaks of Western philosophy. The questions Schelling pressed, about the life of nature, the reality of evil, and why there is anything at all, have only grown more urgent.