Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Early life

Schelling was born in the town of Leonberg in the Duchy of Württemberg (now Baden-Württemberg), the son of the Lutheran pastor Joseph Friedrich Schelling and Gottliebin Marie Cleß. From 1783 to 1784, Schelling attended the Latin school in Nürtingen and knew Friedrich Hölderlin, who was five years his senior. Subsequently Schelling attended the monastic school at Bebenhausen, near Tübingen, where his father was chaplain and an Orientalist professor. On 18 October 1790, at the age of 15, he was granted permission to enroll at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg), despite not having yet reached the normal enrollment age of 20. At the Stift, he shared a room with Hegel as well as Hölderlin, and the three became good friends.

Schelling studied the Church Fathers and ancient Greek philosophers. His interest gradually shifted from Lutheran theology to philosophy. In 1792, he graduated with his master's thesis, titled Antiquissimi de prima malorum humanorum origine philosophematis Genes. III. explicandi tentamen criticum et philosophicum, and in 1795 he finished his doctoral thesis, titled De Marcione Paulinarum epistolarum emendatore (On Marcion as emendator of the Pauline letters) under Gottlob Christian Storr. Meanwhile, he had begun to study Kant and Fichte, who influenced him greatly. Representative of Schelling's early period is also a discourse between him and the philosophical writer Jacob Hermann Obereit, who was Fichte's housemate at that time, in letters and in Fichte's Journal (1796/97) on interaction, the pragmatic and Leibniz.

In 1797, while tutoring two youths of an aristocratic family, he visited Leipzig as their escort and had a chance to attend lectures at Leipzig University, where he was fascinated by contemporary physical studies including chemistry and biology. He also visited Dresden, where he saw collections of the Elector of Saxony, to which he referred later in his thinking on art. On a personal level, this Dresden visit of six weeks from August 1797 saw Schelling meet the brothers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Karl Friedrich Schlegel and his future wife Caroline (then married to August Wilhelm), and Novalis.

In 1793, Schelling contributed to Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus's periodical Memorabilien. His 1795 dissertation was De Marcione Paullinarum epistolarum emendatore (On Marcion as emendator of the Pauline letters). In 1794, Schelling published an exposition of Fichte's thought entitled Ueber die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (On the Possibility of a Form of Philosophy in General). This work was acknowledged by Fichte himself and immediately earned Schelling a reputation among philosophers. His more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (On the I as Principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge, 1795), 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. He contributed articles and reviews to the Philosophisches Journal of Fichte and Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, and threw himself into the study of physical and medical science. In 1795 Schelling published Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), consisting of 10 letters addressed to an unknown interlocutor that presented both a defense and critique of the Kantian system.

Between 1796/97, there was written a seminal manuscript now known as the Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus ("The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism"). It survives in Hegel's handwriting. First published in 1916 by Franz Rosenzweig, it was attributed to Schelling. It has also been claimed that Hegel or Hölderlin was the author.

In 1797, Schelling published the essay "Neue Deduction des Naturrechts" ("New Deduction of Natural Law"), which anticipated Fichte's treatment of the topic in Grundlage des Naturrechts (Foundations of Natural Law). His studies of physical science bore fruit in Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas Concerning a Philosophy of Nature, 1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (On the World-Soul, 1798). In Ideen Schelling referred to Leibniz and quoted from his Monadology. He held Leibniz in high regard because of his view of nature during his natural philosophy period.

In 1800, Schelling published System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism). In this book Schelling described transcendental philosophy and nature philosophy as complementary to one another. Fichte reacted by stating that Schelling's argument was unsound: in Fichte's theory nature as Not-Self (Nicht-Ich = object) could not be a subject of philosophy, whose essential content is the subjective activity of the human intellect. The breach became unrecoverable in 1801 after Schelling published "Darstellung des Systems meiner Philosophie" ("Presentation of My System of Philosophy"). Fichte thought this title absurd since, in his opinion, philosophy could not be personalized. Moreover, in this book Schelling publicly expressed his estimation of Spinoza, whose work Fichte had repudiated as dogmatism, and declared that nature and spirit differ only in their quantity, but are essentially identical. According to Schelling, the absolute was the indifference to identity, which he considered to be an essential philosophical subject.

The "Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie" ("Aphorisms on Nature Philosophy"), published in the Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1805–1808), are for the most part extracts from the Würzburg lectures, and the Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi ("Monument to the Scripture of the Divine Things of Mr. Jacobi") was a response to an attack by Jacobi (the two accused each other of atheism). A work of significance is the 1809 Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom), which elaborates, with increasing mysticism, on ideas in the 1804 work Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion). However, in a change from the Jena period, evil is not an appearance coming from quantitative differences between the real and the ideal, but is something substantial. This work clearly paraphrased Kant's distinction between intelligible and empirical character. Schelling himself called freedom "a capacity for good and evil".

The 1815 essay "Ueber die Gottheiten zu Samothrake" ("On the Divinities of Samothrace") was ostensibly a part of a larger work, Weltalter ("The Ages of the World"), frequently announced as ready for publication, but of which little was ever written. Schelling planned Weltalter as a book in three parts, describing the past, present, and future of the world; however, he began only the first part, rewriting it several times and at last keeping it unpublished. The other two parts were left only in planning. Christopher John Murray describes the work as follows:

Building on the premise that philosophy cannot ultimately explain existence, he merges the earlier philosophies of Nature and identity with his newfound belief in a fundamental conflict between a dark unconscious principle and a conscious principle in God. God makes the universe intelligible by relating to the ground of the real but, insofar as nature is not complete intelligence, the real exists as a lack within the ideal and not as reflective of the ideal itself. The three universal ages – distinct only to us but not in the eternal God – therefore comprise a beginning where the principle of God before God is divine will striving for being, the present age, which is still part of this growth and hence a mediated fulfillment, and a finality where God is consciously and consummately Himself to Himself.

No authentic information on Schelling's new positive philosophy (positive Philosophie) was available until after his death at Bad Ragatz, on 20 August 1854. His sons then issued four volumes of his Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858).