SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH. – Philosopher, born in Leonberg (Württemberg) on 21 January 1775, died in Ragaz (Switzerland) on 20 August 1854. After studying theology at Hegel (v.), and then mathematics and the sciences at Leipzig, he attended Fichte’s (v.) lectures at the University of Jena. It was precisely at Jena that, at barely twenty-three years of age (at Goethe’s suggestion), he was appointed Fichte’s assistant in university teaching; and when Fichte, after a few months, left the chair, he was immediately called upon to replace him. For S. this was a period of rich and varied intellectual experiences and intense exchanges with the Romantic brothers (v.): and the contacts and relationships established from that time onward with the most representative figures of the German culture of the period enabled the young philosopher to assimilate and make his own, with precocious rapidity, the new moral and speculative demands of German Romanticism. Those contacts and relationships did not, in fact, always remain cordial, owing to that lack of discipline and inner balance which made his conduct in relations with others inconstant and often ungracious: suffice it here to recall his break with Fichte, and the related harsh polemic documented by the writing Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der ver-
besserten Fichteschen Lehre (in vol. VIII of the Gesamtausgabe); a break which was later followed by others, such as the famous one with Hegel (with whom he had collaborated in the joint direction of the Krit. Journal der Philosophie), or the no less virulent GIACOBBI (v.).
In 1803, S. moved to the University of Würzburg, which he left in 1806, when he was offered membership in the Academy of Sciences of Munich. His productive activity, however, was destined gradually to lose much of its original speculative richness and vitality, while his star was rapidly setting in the German cultural world of the early nineteenth century, replaced by Hegel’s, now more brilliant, star. His subsequent returns to university teaching (in 1820 at Erlangen and in 1827 at Munich) did not save him from a sad moral isolation and the progressive unpopularity of his thought; and when, in 1841, King Frederick William IV of Prussia called him to the University of Berlin, intending to make use of him to stem the invasion of Hegelian pantheism, the lectures he delivered from the chair that had witnessed Hegel’s triumphs found no echo in the surrounding intellectual circles: as was inevitable for a man who, having reached the threshold of old age, had long since revealed himself to be almost entirely insensitive to the liveliest demands of recent culture, wholly imbued with Hegelian ideas and therefore determined to go beyond Hegel as well. Embittered by the ineffectiveness of his teaching and by the growing futility of the milieu, S. withdrew from teaching, spending the final years of his not brief and not tranquil existence in solitude.
S.’s philosophy is the living document of the wholly Romantic versatility of its author, whose works successively reflect the continual changes of perspective of a speculation apparently lacking systematic coherence and filled with rhapsodic and shifting intuitions. Hence the embarrassment experienced by interpreters of Schellingian thought, who, in order to introduce into the philosopher’s rich and varied production an order at least capable of reflecting the genetic development of his speculation, have divided his works into various groups. Leaving aside the youthful writings inspired by Fichte, the following may be regarded as fundamental: a) the group of works relating to the «philosophy of nature» (of particular importance are the Idem zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797; the writing Von der Weltseele, 1798; the Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799, and the Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Processes, 1800) and to «transcendental idealism» (documented by S.’s perhaps most famous book, the System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800); b) the group of writings in which the «philosophy of identity» finds its most distinctive expression (suffice it here to recall the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, 1801, and the suggestive dialogue Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge, 1802); c) finally, the group of writings relating to the «philosophy of freedom» (Philosophie und Religion, 1804; Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 1809; Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, 1810, as well as the principal polemical writings directed against Fichte, including the one mentioned above). To these groups there is usually added the group comprising the writings that reflect the final position assumed by S.’s speculation (the so-called «positive philosophy»): it includes the Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, the Philosophie der Mythologie, and the Philosophie der Offenbarung, resulting from the Berlin courses and published posthumously.
S.’s position vis-à-vis Spinoza (v.) Descartes (v.): just as Spinoza translated Cartesian spiritualism into a realistic metaphysics of Substance, so S. made use of Fichte’s idealist experience in order to identify, in an absolute principle, the metaphysical unity of the world. That S.’s approach to Spinoza is not arbitrary is also demonstrated by the fact that the Darstellung of 1801, in which Schellingian metaphysics of identity finds its decisive expression, follows very closely, in the procedure of its…
in his argument, the geometrizing and deductive patterns of Spinoza’s Ethica: without mentioning, moreover, that the name of Spinoza recurs frequently, from his earliest works onward, in S.’s writings (see, for example, the comparison S. draws between his own position and that of Spinoza in the youthful essay [1795] Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie), almost as testimony to Schelling’s vivid sense of the ideal proximity of the two philosophies of the Absolute. And yet Spinozism remained for S. the symbol of a speculative program rather than a consistently held mental perspective: other, wholly modern cultural, scientific, and philosophical experiences still awaited adequate expression and interpretation in Schelling’s thought. The general Romantic atmosphere, in which the sensitive soul of the young S. joyfully immersed itself, led the philosopher to translate the new and impressive results of contemporary science into living symbols of the dynamic inwardness of universal life, and to see in the recent interpretations of physiological, electrical, magnetic, and chemical phenomena the most eloquent demonstration of the inadequacy of traditional naturalistic mechanism (v.) to account for the organic vitality of nature. Kant (v.), of the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, was by then ideally too distant. More than an analysis of the phenomenal structure of our knowing, what asserted itself for S. was a profound intuitive consciousness of the inner purposes of cosmic becoming, such as to hear nature speaking the very language of spirit, and then to see in nature and in spirit the living documents of the infinite expansive activity of one single and identical absolute principle of reality. In a significant reversal of the Kantian position, the effort of the Romantics and of S. himself was directed rather toward extracting the metaphysical implications of the Critique of Judgment than toward understanding the gnoseological and epistemological meaning of Kant’s first Critique. On the other hand, Fichte’s teaching had not passed without leaving its mark on the speculative sensibility of the young S. The subjectivist-transcendental principle of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science, elevated into a metaphysical symbol of the spirituality of the real insofar as it expressed the inexhaustible creative activity of the pure I, which in its unceasing dialectical rhythm articulates the ideal moments of its realization and its earthly vicissitude, invited S. to integrate, and almost critically mediate, his pantheistic vision of universal reality within the concept of a higher subjectivity. That S. succeeded in doing so cannot be asserted: his philosophy is ultimately the record of a mental experience perpetually oscillating between the diverse and unreconciled demands that prompted its inner developments.
This oscillation emerges with the utmost clarity in Schelling’s writings devoted to expounding the «philosophy of nature» and the «system of transcendental idealism». For S., the philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism represent two opposing yet convergent points of view on reality; if the former romantically corrects the fundamental deficiency of Fichtean idealism by insisting on the dynamically active and spiritual character of nature (of a nature not reducible, in principle, to a mere functional and dialectically negative moment in the affirmation of the I), the latter accentuates the subjective aspect of the spirituality of the real and translates the very moments of nature’s life into terms of mental knowledge. A double perspective is thus established, reflecting in metaphysical terms the fundamental uncertainty of speculative Romanticism in its constant effort to clarify and concretize in plastic intuitions the turbid pantheistic visions transmitted by Sturm und Drang. In reality, the convergence between a philosophy of nature, aimed at bringing to light the spirituality latent in the organic processuality of the physical world, and a transcendental idealism that, from the opposite standpoint of self-consciousness, seeks to reconstruct the progressive materialization of the laws of spirit into laws of nature, remained for S. a normative ideal of his speculation, which he attempted to realize practically in the successive series of his rhapsodic intuitions. Ultimately, that ideal was the hypothesis of a myth: the myth of the fundamental aesthetic character of human consciousness, elevated into a hermeneutic canon of the metaphysical structure of the real. And S. himself
showed that he was in some way aware of the aesthetic origin of his myth when he romantically identified art as the organ of knowledge of the Absolute: «Art — he says (Transz. Ideal., VI, § 3) — is for the philosopher the highest thing there is, since it opens to him almost the sanctuary where, in eternal and primordial union, what is separated in nature and history burns as in a flame, and what, in life and action, as in thought, must eternally flee from itself». Thus, in the end, that myth became objectified for S. in the twofold interpretation of nature as «visible spirit» and of spirit as «invisible nature» (Ideen zu einer Philos. d. Natur [Werke, Auswahl in drei Bänden, ed. edited by O. Weiss, I, cited work in the bibliography, p. 152]); this entailed resolving the dialectic of nature and the dialectic of spirit and history into the undifferentiated unity of the two, in which the fundamental contrast of existence as spiritual inwardness and, at the same time, corporeal worldliness is definitively and without remainder annulled.
Once it had embarked upon this path, Schellingian thought was able to undertake its most ambitious adventure. Dissatisfied with the ideal perspective opened up onto the Absolute, S. even imagined that, with the “philosophy of identity,” he could place himself at the real standpoint of the Absolute itself, in order to grasp it concretely as the original unity of spirituality and naturality: thus the Absolute, initially pushed into the background of the picture, now ends by absorbing and dissolving in its indifference the defined contours of the real in its individual existential aspects, and by rendering impossible, despite the most varied attempts, the deduction of the finite from the infinite and of opposition from identity. On this ground Hegel easily prevailed, comparing the Schellingian Absolute to the night in which all cows are black (Phenomenology of Spirit, preface and Italian translation by E. De Negri, I, Florence 1933, p. 15); and, for that matter, Schelling himself demonstrated as much when, almost in response to the objections of his old friend, he sought to show, in the theosophical writings relating to the “philosophy of freedom,” how the Absolute is capable of an internal and vital articulation of its own. Bohme (v.) he then attempted to investigate the metaphysical essence of God, distinguishing from his being a nature or substratum that is a dark desire to be and to come to light; and in this distinction he saw the first origin both of the existence of finite beings and of their metaphysical fall into the world, and of evil and sin: thus finitude, fall, evil, and guilt would be the inevitable consequences of the irrationality persisting in the dark recesses of divine Being and fatally transmitted from there to human beings and things (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, in Werke, ed. cit., III, especially p. 451 ff.). Faced with such theosophical speculations, in which the turbid and disordered religiosity of Romanticism is complicated by typically Protestant motifs, Hegel, as has been said, could easily prevail. Yet not so completely as to resolve the fundamental aporia of every strictly monistic and pantheistic position, such as the Schellingian “philosophy of identity” had proved to be: namely, ultimately, the unjustifiable dissolution of the essential problematic character of human existence within the framework of a metaphysics that irreparably compromises the profoundly human—and for that very reason genuinely Christian—meaning of spiritual values by denying them the necessary reference to the pure spirituality of God.
In the final phase of his troubled intellectual development, S. attempted to overturn his own earlier speculative positions in order to reopen the course of his thought toward horizons no longer limited by the narrow perspectives of pantheism and theosophy. The result of this evolution was the so-called “positive philosophy,” which represents a significant protest against the Enlightenment claims of every merely intellectualistic philosophy: in its light, the history of philosophy too appears to assume a new meaning, entirely different from that conferred upon it by Hegel, and clearly indicative of the possibility of a less traditionalistic orientation of spe-
SCHELLING FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH - SCHERER RUDOLF
future speculation. Having recognized, in fact, the radical insufficiency of rationalistic and “negative” philosophies to account not so much for the ideal essence as for the real existence of things, S. aims to replace the traditional contemplative attitude of speculation with a vivid sense of the theogonic historicity of cosmic existence. This historicity is understood as the progressive becoming of a God who is foreshadowed and allows himself to be glimpsed in myths and naturalistic religions, in order finally to authenticate himself in the supreme document of Revelation. Historically, the interest of this final Schellingian attempt to introduce into traditional speculative discussions, through the emphasis placed on a vital disequilibrium between reason and existence, a motive capable of new and unforeseen developments cannot be denied; yet the fact remains that the persistent recourse to an inadequate transcription, in metaphysical and cosmological terms, of the fundamental spiritualist demands ultimately rendered ineffective and without continuation even the final theme of Schellingian speculation.