(Makes Schelling's dialogue Bruno readily accessible to th...)
Makes Schelling's dialogue Bruno readily accessible to the English-language reader, with valuable commentary on the work itself, which details Schelling's account of his differences from Fichte.
(In Philosophy and Religion, Schelling raises the question...)
In Philosophy and Religion, Schelling raises the question of how philosophy can come to terms with the failure of approaching the highest principle of being, the Absolute (or God), rationally.
Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom
(Taking Edmund Husserl's dictum to heart yet finding in it...)
Taking Edmund Husserl's dictum to heart yet finding in it a new direction, The Things Themselves is an attempt to return philosophy to the world and, in so doing, know ourselves and our place in that world anew. The book deals with the myriad ways in which a phenomenological approach to philosophy can inform commonplace experiences and understanding.
(The book sets out an ordered system of the arts - music, ...)
The book sets out an ordered system of the arts - music, painting, sculpture, narrative, poetry, and tragedy - based on the precepts of German Idealism.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was the German idealist and romantic philosopher. He developed a metaphysical system based on the philosophy of nature.
Background
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born on January 27, 1775, in Leonberg, Germany. He was the son of Joseph Friedrich Schelling and his wife Gottliebin Marie. Schelling’s father was a Lutheran minister, who in 1777 became a professor of Oriental languages at the theological seminary in Bebenhausen, near Tübingen.
Education
Schelling was a highly gifted child, and he had already learned the classical languages at the age of eight. Schelling was educated at the cloister monastic school of Bebenhausen, near Tubingen, where his father, an able Orientalist, was chaplain and professor. In 1783 - 1784 Schelling studied at a Latin school in Nürtingen and became a friend with Friedrich Hölderlin, who was five years his senior.
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. In 1792 he graduated in the philosophical faculty. 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.
In 1798 Schelling was called to a professorship at the University of Jena, the academic center 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 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 September 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 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 a man in Christ and thus reestablishes the original order.
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.
Schelling's 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.
Views
Some historians and scholars of philosophy have classified Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling as a German Idealist, along with J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel. Such classifications obscure rather than illuminate the importance and singularity of Schelling’s place in the history of philosophy. This is because the dominant and most often limited understanding of Idealism as systematic metaphysics of the Subject is applicable more to Hegel’s philosophy than Schelling’s. While initiating the Post-Kantian Idealism of the Subject, Schelling went on to exhibit in his later works the limit and dissolution of such a systemic metaphysics of the Subject. Therefore, the convenient label of Schelling as one German Idealist amongst others ignores the singularity of Schelling’s philosophy and the complex relationship he had with the movement of German Idealism.
The real importance of Schelling’s later works lies in the exposure of the dominant systemic metaphysics of the Subject to its limit rather than in its confirmation. In this way, the later works of Schelling demand from the students and philosophers of German Idealism a re-assessment of the notion of German Idealism itself. In that sense, the importance and influence of Schelling’s philosophy has remained "untimely." In the wake of Hegelian rational philosophy that was the official philosophy of that time, Schelling’s later works were not influential and fell onto deaf ears. Only in the twentieth century when the question of the legitimacy of the philosophical project of modernity had come to be the concern for philosophers and thinkers, did Schelling’s radical opening of philosophy to “post-metaphysical” thinking receive renewed attention.
This is because it is perceived that the task of philosophical thinking is no longer the foundational act of the systematic metaphysics of the Subject. In the wake of the "end of philosophy," the philosophical task is understood to be the inauguration of new thinking beyond metaphysics. In this context, Schelling has again come into prominence as someone who in the heyday of German Idealism has opened up the possibility of philosophical thinking beyond the closure of the metaphysics of the Subject. The importance of Schelling for such post-metaphysical thinking is rightly emphasized by Martin Heidegger in his lecture on Schelling of 1936. In this manner, Heidegger prepares the possibility of understanding Schelling’s works in an entirely different manner. Heidegger’s reading of Schelling in turn has immensely influenced the Post-Heideggerian French philosophical turn to the question of "the exit from metaphysics." But this Post-Structuralist and deconstructive reading of Schelling is not the only reception of Schelling. Philosophers like Jürgen Habermas, whose doctorate work was on Schelling, would like to insist on the continuation of the philosophical project of modernity, and yet attempt to view reason beyond the instrumental functionality of reason at the service of domination and coercion. Schelling is seen from this perspective as a "post-metaphysical" thinker who has widened the concept of reason beyond its self-grounding projection. During the last half of the last century, Schelling’s works have tremendously influenced the post-Subject oriented philosophical discourses. During recent times, Schelling scholarship has remarkably increased both in the Anglo-American context and the Continental philosophical context.
Quotations:
"To achieve great things we must be self-confined...mastery is revealed in limitation."
"Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature."
"All rules for study are summed up in this one: learn only in order to create."
"The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth."
"There is in every man a certain feeling that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means become such in time."
"Architecture, in general, is frozen music."
"The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigor and ethical meaning."
"The failure to invest in civil justice is directly related to the increase in criminal disorder. The more people feel there is injustice the more it becomes part of their psyche."
"Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?"
"Mastery is revealed in limitation."
"One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is mythology deprived of its vitality, bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form."
Personality
Schelling has been described as nervous, unpredictable, and deeply sensitive in his proud fashion. His character was unbalanced. Particularly striking was his unwavering consciousness that it was his mission to bring philosophy to a definite completion.
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.
Physical Characteristics:
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.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Writers
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Connections
Auguste Böhmer was the first wife to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. In 1800 he widowed and later married Caroline Schelling. After her death, he married the third time, his wife was Pauline Gotter.
He also had two children, Hermann Schelling and Clara Waitz.