Dictionary of Literary Biography on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling might well be dubbed "the philosopher of Romanticism." He was close to Friedrich Hölderlin, the Schlegels, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck; he theorized about their central concerns, such as consciousness, mythology, religion, nature, and art; above all, in his early thinking he made the philosophy of art the "organon" of philosophy as a whole. But Schelling may be thought Romantic in yet another sense: he tended to promote one system after another, almost in fragments, as if (to quote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's jibe) he were carrying on his philosophical education in public. Henry Crabb Robinson, a student at the University of Jena in the early 1800s, relates in his diary that one evening Schelling asked whether the serpent was not characteristic of English philosophy; Robinson replied that his countrymen thought it emblematically German, since it shed its coat each year. Schelling had the last laugh, explaining that the English saw only the coat, not what was beneath. Schelling's philosophy is indeed more of a piece than his critics have alleged. There is a consistency between what Schelling called his early "negative" philosophy, which is marked by a restless Fichtean search for certification and systematization, and his later "positive" philosophy, which is more religious and existential, almost a repudiation of philosophical system. It is this second phase that influenced such thinkers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger.
Schelling was born on 27 January 1775 in Leonberg in the Duchy of Württemburg to Joseph Friedrich and Gottliebin Maria Cless Schelling. His father was a pastor who in 1777 became professor of oriental languages at the Bebenhausen seminary near Tübingen. Intellectually precocious, Schelling attended school at Bebenhausen and at Nürtingen prior to entering the Tübingen Stift (seminary) at the unusually early age of fifteen and a half. He received a master's degree in philosophy in 1792 and another master's in theology in 1795. Like his friends and fellow seminarians Hölderlin and Hegel, he came under the influence of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and embraced the ideals of the French Revolution. He responded to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Grundlagen der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (1794; translated as Science of Knowledge, 1970) with enthusiasm, determined at the same time to test the system's claims; his Ueber die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (On the Possibility of a Form of any Philosophy) and Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (translated as "Of the I as Principle of Philosophy, or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge," 1980), both written in 1795, began a ten-year dialogue with Fichtean idealism. His next work, "Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus" (1795; translated as "Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism," 1980) attempts to balance an absolute object, such as is found in the philosophy of Spinoza, against a Fichtean absolute subject. Schelling declares that the proper task of philosophy lies in explaining the existence of the world by linking the two poles. Schelling's main response to Fichte was to try to open up to speculative thought that dark continent of nature or the non-ego, inaugurating with Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas toward a Philosophy of Nature, 1797) a series of efforts in what he called "Naturphilosophie" (philosophy of nature). Nature was not to be consigned, as in Fichte's system, to material for the ego's moral striving but was to be viewed as slumbering spirit. This conception of nature links Schelling with the Romantics.
After three years as a house tutor (a formative experience shared with other underemployed intellectuals such as Fichte, Hölderlin, and Hegel), two of them spent in Leipzig, Schelling was invited in 1798 to teach at the University of Jena. There he favorably impressed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He also befriended the Romantics Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and Tieck and the scientists Henrik Steffens and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. In 1802-1803 he co-edited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie with Hegel.
From this period comes his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800; translated as System of Transcendental Idealism, 1978, which inaugurates the phase in his development which is known as "Identitätsphilosophie" (Philosophy of Identity) because it supposes one ultimate ground for everything). The work comprises three parts: the first deduces consciousness from sensation through intuition and reflection to abstractive intelligence; the second, practical part moves from the Kantian will through social and political institutions to history, seen as the progressive discovery of freedom, a drama in which human beings are not just the actors but also the authors; the third part attempts to synthesize the poles of transcendental philosophy, which moves from spirit to nonspirit, and Naturphilosophie, which moves in the opposite direction. It is in the third part that art, aesthetic intuition, and productive genius find their proper place as the keystone of the arch of philosophy, uniting conscious and unconscious activities, spirit and nature, ideal and real. The priority of art recurs in slightly altered guise in Schelling's lectures on art, published as "Philosophie der Kunst" (1859; translated as The Philosophy of Art, 1988), where art exemplifies the "Indifferenzpunkt" (indifference-point) between the real and the ideal that is the hallmark of the Identitätsphilosophie. In these two works Schelling formulates in philosophical terms the Romantic apotheosis of art and philosophy. Schelling also tried his hand at literature: in 1802 he published some poems under the pseudonym "Bonaventura," which led some to suppose him the author of the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (1804; translated as The Night Watches of Bonaventura, 1971); in the twentieth century the work has been attributed to Clemens Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, and Friedrich Gottlob Wetzel.
Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Princip der Dinge (1802; translated as Bruno; or, On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things, 1984) signals a turn away from Fichtean method toward a more mystical attitude influenced by Neoplatonism. This tendency is strengthened in the 1804 essay Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion), in which the finite and fallen world is taken to be the self-expression of an eternally creative principle. The work is heavily influenced by the thought of the seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Böhme, to which Schelling had been introduced by Franz von Baader.
In 1803 Schelling married Caroline Schlegel, the former wife of August Wilhelm Schlegel, and moved to the University of Würzburg. In 1806 he moved to Munich, where he was appointed secretary to the Academy of Arts and was ennobled. Caroline died in 1809, and although Schelling married a friend of hers, Pauline Gotter, in 1810, the death was a blow from which he found it difficult to recover.
Perhaps this experience only served to confirm him in his turn to more religious topics, specifically the problem of evil. "Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände" (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, 1809; translated as Of Human Freedom, 1936) expressly poses the problem of how God could have brought evil into the world. Schelling argues that evil arises not in God but in the disunity inherent in finite human existence; evil makes freedom and choice possible. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, president of the Bavarian Academy, mistook the position for pantheism; embittered by the ensuing controversy, Schelling published little for the rest of his life.
He continued to lecture, however, moving to Erlangen in 1820 and to Munich in 1827. In the second phase of his development, the period of his positive philosophy, Schelling's thinking turned against Fichtean speculation, which, he argued, dealt only with ideas, not with existence; insight was obtainable only through religion. Starting with "Die Weltalter: Fragmente" (1857; translated as The Ages of the World, 1942), written in 1811, Schelling undertook an extended study of mythology and revelation, understanding both as the evolution and expression of the divine in history. He did not believe that myths could be decoded, like allegories; he borrowed Coleridge's neologism tautegory (that which speaks only to itself) to describe the myth's mode of signifying. The results of his investigations appeared as Philosophie der Mythologie (Philosophy of Mythology, 1857) and Philosophie der Offenbarung (Philosophy of Revelation, 1858).
In 1841 Schelling was called to the University of Berlin to eradicate Hegelian pantheism. The audience for his eagerly awaited inaugural lecture included Kierkegaard, Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Engels, and Mikhail Bakunin; by all accounts it proved a disappointment. In 1846 Schelling gave up lecturing. He retired to Munich and set about preparing his manuscripts for publication. He died in 1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.
Schelling's later theosophical mode of thinking influenced the pan-Slavist movement in Russia, and the often proto-existentialist expression of this phase has been taken up by Paul Tillich, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Of greater moment for literary history is Schelling's earlier privileging of art. He was the first to formulate a Romantic philosophy: a philosophy centered on art, one that puts aesthetic self-expression at the heart of things. This philosophy influenced many poets and thinkers; Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817) is indebted to Schelling.
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