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SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH V...

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SCHELLING, See also:FRIEDRICH WILHELM See also:JOSEPH VON (1775-1854) , See also:German philosopher, was See also:born on the 27th of See also:January 1775, at Leonberg, a small See also:town of See also:Wurttemberg. He was educated at the See also:cloister school of Bebenhausen, near See also:Tubingen, where his See also:father, an able Orientalist, was See also:chaplain and See also:professor, and at the theological See also:seminary at Tubingen, which he was specially allowed to enter when he was three. years under the prescribed See also:age. Among his (See also:elder) contemporaries were See also:Hegel and See also:Holderlin. In 1792 he graduated in the philosophical See also:faculty. In 1793 he contributed to See also:Paulus's Memorabilien a See also:paper " 17ber Mythus, historische Sagen, and Philosopheme der altesten Welt "; and in 1795 his thesis for his theological degree was De Marcione Paullinarum epistolarum emendatore. Meanwhile a much more important See also:influence had begun to operate on him, arising out of his study of See also:Kant and See also:Fichte. The See also:Review of See also:Aenesidemus and the tractate On the Notion of Wissenschaftslehre found in his mind most fruitful See also:soil. With characteristic zeal and impetuosity Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte's amended See also:form of the See also:critical See also:philosophy than he put together his impressions of it in his Ober See also:die Maglichkeil einer Form der Philosophie uberhaupt (1794). There was nothing See also:original in the treatment, but it showed such See also:power of appreciating the new ideas of the Fichtean method that it was hailed with cordial recognition by Fichte himself, and gave the author immediately a See also:place in popular estimation as in the foremost See also:rank of existing philosophical writers. The more elaborate See also:work, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, See also:oder caber das Unbedingte See also:im menschlichen Wissen (1995), which, still remaining within the limits of the Fichtean See also:idealism, however, exhibits unmistakable traces of a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more See also:objective application, and to amalgamate with it See also:Spinoza's more realistic view of things. After two years as See also:tutor to two youths of See also:noble See also:family, Schelling was called as extraordinary professor of philosophy to See also:Jena in midsummer 1798. He had already contributed articles and reviews to the See also:Journal of Fichte and Niethammer, and had thrown himself with all his native impetuosity into the study of See also:physical and medical See also:science.

From 1796 date the Briefe iiber Dogmatismus and Kriticismus, an admirably written critique of the ultimate issues of the Kantian See also:

system; from 1797 the See also:essay entitled Neue See also:Deduction See also:des Naturrechts, which to some extent anticipated Fichte's treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, published in 1796, but not before Schelling's essay had been received by the editors of the Journal.' His studies of physical science See also:bore rapid See also:fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophic der Natur (1997), and the See also:treatise Von der Weltseele (1798). The philosophical renown of Jena reached its culminating point during the years (1798–1803) of Schelling's See also:residence there. His intellectual sympathies See also:united him closely with some of the most active See also:literary tendencies of the See also:time. With See also:Goethe, who viewed with See also:interest and appreciation the poetical See also:fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he continued on excellent terms, while on the other See also:hand he was repelled by See also:Schiller's less expansive disposition, and failed altogether to understand the lofty ethical idealism that animated his work. He quickly became the acknowledged See also:leader of the Romantic school whose impetuous litterateurs had begun to See also:tire of the See also:cold abstractions of Fichte. In Schelling,oessentially a self-conscious See also:genius, eager and rash, yet with undeniable power, they hailed a See also:personality of the true Romantic type. With See also:August Wilhelm See also:Schlegel and his gifted wife See also:Caroline, herself the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, Schelling's relations were of the most intimate See also:kind, and a See also:marriage between Schelling and Caroline's See also:young daughter, Auguste See also:Bohmer, was vaguely contemplated by both. Auguste's See also:death in 1800 (due partly to Schelling's rash confidence in his medical know-ledge) See also:drew Schelling and Caroline together, and Schlegel having removed to See also:Berlin, a See also:divorce was, apparently with his consent, arranged. On the 2nd of See also:June 1803 Schelling and Caroline were married, and with the marriage Schelling's See also:life at Jena came to an end. It was full time, for Schelling's undoubtedly overweening self-confidence had involved him in a See also:series of disputes and quarrels at Jena, the details of which are important only as illustrations of the evil qualities in Schelling's nature which deface much of his philosophic work. From See also:September 1803 until See also:April 18o6 Schelling was professor at the new university of See also:Wurzburg. This See also:period was marked by considerable changes in his views and by the final See also:breach on the one hand with Fichte and on the other hand with Hegel.

In Wurzburg Schelling had had many enemies. He embroiled himself with his colleagues and also with the See also:

government. In See also:Munich, to which he removed in 1806, he found a quiet residence. A position as See also:state See also:official, at first as See also:associate of the See also:academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical See also:section of the academy of sciences, gave him ease and leisure. Without resigning his official position he lectured for a See also:short time at See also:Stuttgart, and ' The reviews of current philosophical literature were afterwards collected, and edited under the See also:title " Abhandlungen zur Erlauterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre " in Schelling's Philos. Schriften, vol. i. (18og).during seven years at See also:Erlangen (1820-1827). In 1809 Caroline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest See also:friends, Pauline See also:Gotter, in whom he found a faithful See also:companion. During the See also:long stay at Munich (1806–1841) Schelling's literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The " Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie " contained in the Jahrbiicher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806–1808) are for the most See also:part extracts from the Wurzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den gottlichen Dingen des Herrn See also:Jacobi was See also:drawn forth by the See also:special incident of Jacobi's work. The only See also:writing of significance is the "Philosophische Untersuchungen caber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit," which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften, vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to See also:mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophic and See also:Religion.

In 1815 appeared the See also:

tract Uber die Gottheiten zu Samothrake, ostensibly a portion of a See also:great work, Die Weltalter, frequently announced as ready for publication, of which no great part was ever written. Probably it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling to so long a silence, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a See also:preface to a See also:translation by H. Beckers of a work by See also:Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the See also:history of philosophy (Sdmmt. WGrke, x. 124-125) of 1822 See also:express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of See also:mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true See also:positive See also:complement to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy. Public See also:attention was power-fully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, as regards religion in particular, than the apparent results of Hegel's teaching. For the See also:appearance of the critical writings of See also:Strauss, See also:Feuerbach and See also:Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin particularly, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the See also:desire found expression to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realization of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the See also:appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and appreciative See also:audience. The enmity of his old foe, H.

E. G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling's apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim See also:

report of the lectures on the philosophy of See also:revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and suppression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No See also:authentic See also:information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death (at See also:Bad Rogaz, on the loth of August 1854), when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858). Philosophy.—Whatever See also:judgment one may form of the See also:total See also:worth of Schelling as a philosopher, his place in the history of that important See also:movement called generally German philosophy is unmistakable and assured. It happened to him, as he himself claimed, to turn a See also:page in the history of thought, and one cannot ignore the actual advance upon his predecessor achieved by him or the brilliant fertility of the genius by which that achievement was accomplished. On the other hand he nowhere succeeds in attaining to a See also:complete scientific system. His philosophical writings are the successive manifestations of a restless highly endowed spirit, striving unsuccessfully after a See also:solution of its own problems. Such unity as they possess is a unity of tendency and endeavour; in some respects the final form they assumed is the least satisfactory.

Hence it has come about that Schelling remains for the philosophic student but a moment of See also:

historical value in the development of thought, and that his See also:works have for the most part ceased now to have more than historic interest. It is not unfair to connect the apparent failings of Schelling's philosophizing with the very nature of the thinker and with the historical accidents of his career. In his See also:early writings, for example, more particularly those making up Naturphilosophie, one finds in painful abundance the evidences of hastily acquired knowledge, impatience of the hard labour of See also:minute thought, over-confidence in the force of individual genius, and desire instantaneously to See also:present even in crudest fashion the newest See also:idea that has dawned upon the thinker. Schelling was prematurely thrust into the position of a foremost productive thinker; and when the lengthened period of quiet meditation was at last forced upon him there unfortunately See also:lay before him a system which achieved what had dimly been involved in his ardent and impetuous desires. It is not possible to acquit Schelling of a certain disingenuousness in regard to the Hegelian philosophy; and if we claim for him perfect disinterestedness of view we must accuse him of deficient insight. At all stages of his thought he called to his aid the forms of some other system. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, See also:Jakob See also:Boehme and the Mystics, and finally, the great See also:Greek thinkers with their Neop?atonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works. But Schelling did not merely See also:borrow, he had genuine philosophic spirit and no small measure of philosophic insight, and under all the See also:differences of exposition which seem to constitute so many differing systems, there is one and the same philosophic effort and spirit. But what Schelling did want was power to work out his ideas methodically. Hence he could only find expression for himself in forms of this or that earlier philosophy, and hence too the frequent formlessness of his own thought, the tendency to relapse into See also:mere impatient despair of ever finding an adequate vehicle for transmitting thought. It is See also:fair in dealing with Schelling's development to take into See also:account the indications of his own See also:opinion regarding its more significant momenta. In his own view the turning points seem to have been—0) the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of nature—the advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie; (2) the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, viz. the thought of the identical, indifferent, See also:absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitdtsphilosophie; (3) the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposition which is the theme of the Berlin lectures, though its germs may, be traced back to 1804.

Only what falls under the first and second of the divisions so indicated can be said to have discharged a See also:

function in developing philosophy; only so much constitutes Schelling's philosophy proper. i. Naturphilosophie.—The Fichtean method had striven to exhibit the whole structure of reality as the necessary implication of self-consciousness. The fundamental features of knowledge, whether as activity or as sum of apprehended fact, and of conduct had been deduced as elements necessary in the attainment of self-consciousness. Fichtean idealism therefore at once stood out negatively, as abolishing the dogmatic conception of the two real worlds, subject and See also:object, by whose interaction See also:cognition and practice arise, and as amending the critical idea which retained with dangerous caution too many fragments of dogmatism; positively, as insisting on the unity of philosophical See also:interpretation and as supplying a See also:key to the form or method by which a completed philosophic system might be constructed. But the Fichtean teaching appeared on the one hand to identify too closely the ultimate ground of the universe of rational conception with the finite, individual spirit, and on the other hand to endanger the reality of the See also:world of nature by regarding it too much after the fashion of subjective idealism, as mere moment, though necessitated, in the existence of the finite thinking mind. It was almost a natural consequence that Fichte never succeeded in amalgamating with his own system the aesthetic view of nature to which the Rritik of Judgment had pointed as an essential component in any complete philosophy. From Fichte's position Schelling started. From Fichte he derived the ideal of a completed whole of philosophic conception and also the formal method to which for the most part he continued true. The earliest writings tended gradually towards the first important advance. Nature must not be conceived as merely abstract limit to the See also:infinite striving of spirit, as a mere series of necessary thoughts for mind. It must be that and more than that.

It must have reality for itself, a reality which stands in no conflict with its ideal See also:

character, a reality the inner structure of which is ideal, a reality the See also:root and See also:spring of which is spirit. Nature as the sum of that which is objective, intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear thus as equally real, as alike exhibiting ideal structure, as parallel with one another. The philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy are the two complementary portions of philosophy as a whole. Animated with this new conception Schelling made his hurried See also:rush to Naturphilosophie, and with the aid of Kant and of fragmentary knowledge of contemporary scientific movements, threw off in See also:quick See also:succession the Ideen, the Weltseele, and the Erster Entwurf. Naturphilosophie has had scant See also:mercy at the hands of See also:modern science. Schelling had neither the strength of thinking nor the acquired knowledge necessary to hold the See also:balance between the abstract treatment of cosmological notions and the See also:concrete re-searches of special science. His efforts after a construction of natural reality are bad in themselves, and gave rise to wearisome and uselessphysical See also:speculation. Yet it would be unjust to ignore the many brilliant and sometimes valuable thoughts that are scattered through-out the writings on Naturphilosophie—thoughts to which Schelling himself is but too frequently untrue. Regarded merely as a See also:criticism of the notions with which scientific interpretation proceeds, these writings have still importance and might have achieved more had they been untainted by the tendency to hasty, See also:ill-considered, a priori anticipations of nature. Nature, as having reality for itself, forms one completed whole. Its manifoldness is not then to be taken as excluding its fundamental unity; the divisions which our See also:ordinary See also:perception and thought introduce into it have not absolute validity, but are to be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative See also:energy or complex of forces which is the inner aspect, the soul of nature This we are in a position to apprehend and constructively to exhibit to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, for it is the same spirit, though unconscious, of which we become aware in self-consciousness. It is the realization of spirit.

Nor is the variety of its forms imposed upon it from without; there is neither See also:

external See also:teleology in nature, nor mechanism in the narrower sense. Nature is a whole and forms itself ; within its range we are to look for no other than natural explanations. The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal. The incessant See also:change which experience brings before us, taken in See also:conjunction with the thought of unity in" productive force of nature, leads to the all-important conception of the duality, the polar opposition through which nature, expresses itself in its varied products. The dynamical series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are See also:matter, as the See also:equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and See also:con-tractive forces; See also:light, with its subordinate processes—See also:magnetism, See also:electricity, and chemical See also:action; organism, with its component phases of See also:reproduction, irritability and sensibility.' Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations develops in its ideal form. The theoretical See also:side of inner nature in its successive grades from sensation to the highest form of spirit, the abstracting See also:reason which emphasizes the difference of subjective and objective, leaves an unsolved problem which receives See also:satisfaction only in the See also:practical, the individualizing activity. The practical, again, taken in con-junction with the theoretical, forces on the question of the reconciliation between the See also:free conscious organization of thought and the apparently necessitated and unconscious mechanism of the objective world. In the notion of a teleological connexion and in that which for spirit is its subjective expression, viz. See also:art and genius, the subjective and objective find their point of See also:union. 2. Nature and spirit, Naturphilosophie and Transcendentalphilosophie, thus stand as two relatively complete, but complementary parts of the whole. It was impossible for Schelling, the animating principle of whose thought was ever the reconciliation of differences, not to take and to take speedily the step towards the conception of the uniting basis of which nature and spirit are manifestations, forms, or consequences. For this See also:common basis, however, he did not succeed at first in finding any other than the merely negative expression of indifference.

The identity, the absolute, which underlay all difference, all the relative, is to be characterized simply as neutrum, as absolute undifferentiated self-equivalence. It lay in the very nature of this thought that Spinoza should now offer himself to Schelling as the thinker whose form of presentation came nearest to his new problem. The Darstellung meines Systems, and the more See also:

expanded and more careful treatment contained in the lectures on System der gesammten Philosophie and der Naturphilosophie insbesondere given in Wurzburg, 1804 (published in the Sdmmtliche Werke, vol. vi. pp. 131-576), are thoroughly Spinozistic in form, and to a large extent in substance. They are not without value, indeed, as extended commentary on Spinoza. With all his efforts, Schelling does not succeed in bringing his conceptions of nature and spirit into any vital connexion with the primal identity, the absolute indifference of reason. No true solution could be achieved by resort to the mere See also:absence of distinguishing, differencing feature: The absolute was See also:left with no other function than that of removing all the differences on which thought turns. The criticisms of Fichte, and more particularly of Hegel (in the " Vorrede " to the Phdnomenologie des Geistes), point to the fatal defect in the conception of the absolute as mere featureless identity. 3. Along two distinct lines Schelling is to be found in all his later writings striving to amend the conception, to which he remained true, of absolute reason as the ultimate ground of reality. It was necessary, in the first place, to give to this absolute a character, to make of it something more than empty sameness; it was necessary, in the second place, to clear up in some way the relation in which the actuality or apparent actuality of nature and spirit The briefest and best account in Schelling himself of Naturphilosophie is that contained in the Einleitung zu dem Ersten Entwurf (S.W. iii.). A full and lucid statement of Naturphilosophie is that given by K.

See also:

Fischer in his Gesch. d. n. Phil., vi. 433-692. stood to the ultimate real. Schelling had already (in the System der ges. Phil.) begun to endeavour after an amalgamation of the Spinozistic conception of substance with the Platonic view of an ideal See also:realm, and to find therein the means of enriching the bareness of absolute reason. In See also:Bruno, and in Philos. u. Religion, the same thought finds expression. In the realm of ideas the absolute finds itself, has its own nature over against itself as objective over against subjective, and thus is in the way of overcoming its abstractness, of becoming concrete. This conception of a difference, of an See also:internal structure in the absolute, finds other and not lees obscure expressions in the mystical contributions of the Menschliche Freiheit and in the scholastic speculations of the Berlin lectures on mythology. At the same time it connects itself with the second problem, how to attain in conjunction with the abstractly rational character of the absolute an explanation of actuality. Things—nature and spirit—have an actual being.

They exist not merely as logical consequence or development of the absolute, but have a stubbornness of being in them, an antagonistic feature which in all times philosophers have been driven to recognize, and which they have described in varied fashion. The actuality of things is a defection from the absolute, and their existence compels a reconsideration of our conception of See also:

God. There must be recognized in God as a completed actuality, a dim, obscure ground or basis, which can only be described as not yet being, but as containing in itself the impulse to externalization, to existence. It is through this ground of Being in God Himself that we must find explanation of that See also:independence which things assert over against God. And it is easy to see how from this position Schelling was led on to the further statements that not in the rational conception of God is an explanation of existence to be found, See also:nay, that all rational conception extends but to the form, and touches not the real—that God is to be conceived as See also:act, as will, as something over and above the rational conception of the divine. Hence the stress laid on will as the realizing See also:factor, in opposition to thought, a view through which Schelling connects himself with See also:Schopenhauer and Von See also:Hartmann, and on the ground of which he has been recognized by the latter as the reconciler of idealism and iealism. Finally, then, there emerges the opposition of negative, i e. merely rational philosophy, and positive, of which the content is the real See also:evolution of the divine as it has taken place in fact and in history, and as it is recorded in the varied mythologies and religions of See also:man-kind. Not much satisfaction can be See also:felt with the exposition of either as it appears in the volumes of Berlin lectures. Schelling's works were collected and published by his sons, in 14 vols. 0856-1861). The individual works appeared as follows:—Uber die Moglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie iiberhaupt (Tubingen, 1794) ; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (See also:Leipzig, 1797, ed. 1803) ; Von der Weltseele (See also:Hamburg, 1798, 3rd ed.

1809) ; Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena, 1799); Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf der Naturphilosophie (ib. 1799) ; System des transcendentalen Idealismus (Tubingen, 1800) ; Bruno, oder uber das gottliche and natiirliche Prinzip der Dinge (Berlin, 1802, ed. 1843) ; Vorlesungen fiber die Mcthode des akademischen Studiums (Tubingen, 1803, ed. Braun, 1907) ; Uber das Verhaltniss der bildenden Kiinste zu der Natur (Munich, 18o7); Uber die Gottheiten von Samothrake (Stuttgart, 1815). His Munich lectures were published by A. Drews (Leipzig, 1902). For the life See also:

good materials are to be found in the 3 vols.. Aus Schelling's Leben in Briefen (3 vols., 1869-187o), in which a biographic See also:sketch of the philosopher's early life is given by his son, and in J. See also:Waitz, Karoline (2 vols., 1871). An interesting little work is Klaiber, Holderlin, Hegel, u. Schelling in ihren schwabischen Jugendjahren (1877). The See also:biography in Kuno Fischer's Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, vol. vii.

(3rd ed., 1902) is complete and admirable. See further Schelling als Personlichkeit. Briefe, Reden, Aufsatze, ed. See also:

Otto Braun (1908), who also wrote Schellings geistige Wandlungen in den Jahren i800-18ro (1906); See also:Rosenkranz, Schelling (1843); L. Noack, Schelling and die Philosophie der Romantik (2 vols., 1859) G. A. C. Frantz, Schelling's Positive Philosophie (3 vols., 1879-188o) ; See also:Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Idealism (1882); Groos, The See also:seine Vernunftwissenschaft. Systematische Darstellung von Schellings ...Philosophie (1889) ; E. von Hartmann, Schelling's philos. System (1897); Delbos, De posteriore Schellingii philosophia quatenus Hegelianae doctrinae adversatur (1902) ; Koeber, Die Grundprinzipien der Schellingschen Naturphilosophie (1882); G. Mehlis, Schellings Geschichtsphilosophie in den Jahren 1799-1804 (1907); H. Sueskind, Der Einfluss Schellings auf die Entwicklung von Schleiermachers System (1909).

(R. AD.; J. M.

End of Article: SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON (1775-1854)

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