Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH. - Philosopher, b. at Leonberg (Württemberg) on 21 Jan. 1775, d. at Ragaz (Switzerland) on 20 Aug. 1854. After studying theology at Tübingen together with Hölderlin and with Hegel (v.), and then mathematics and sciences at Leipzig, he attended the lectures of Fichte (v.) at the University of Jena. It was precisely at Jena that he was appointed, when barely twenty-three (on Goethe's suggestion), as Fichte's assistant in university teaching; and when Fichte, after a few months, gave up the chair, he was without further ado called to replace him. This was for S. a period of rich and varied intellectual experiences and of intense exchanges with the Romantic milieu dominated by the brothers Schlegel (v.): and the contacts and relationships, established from that time on with the most representative personalities of German culture of the age, allowed 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, it is true, always remain cordial, owing to that lack of discipline and inner balance which made his conduct in relations with others inconstant and often unpleasant: suffice it here to recall his break with Fichte, and the accompanying bitter polemic documented by the writing Darlegung des wahren Verhältnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserten Fichteschen Lehre (in vol. VIII of the Gesamtausgabe); a break which others were later to follow, such as the famous one with Hegel (with whom he had collaborated in the joint editorship of the Krit. Journal der Philosophie), or the other, no less virulent, with the old philosopher Jacobi (v.).

In 1803, S. moved to the University of Würzburg, which he left in 1806, when he was offered a place in the Academy of Sciences of Munich. His productive activity was, however, destined gradually to lose much of its original richness and speculative vivacity, while his star was rapidly setting in the German cultural world of the early 19th century, replaced by that, by then more brilliant, of Hegel. His subsequent returns to university teaching (in 1820 at Erlangen and in 1827 at Munich) did not suffice to save him from a sad moral isolation and from the progressive unpopularity of his thought; and when, in 1841, the King of Prussia Frederick William IV called him to the University of Berlin, with the intention of using him to stem the invasion of Hegelian pantheism, the lectures he delivered from the chair that had witnessed the triumphs of Hegel found no echo at all in the surrounding cultural circles: as was inevitable for a man who, having reached the threshold of old age, had long since shown himself almost entirely insensitive to the most vital demands of recent culture, wholly imbued with Hegelian spirits and for that very reason determined to proceed even beyond Hegel. Embittered by the ineffectiveness of his teaching and by the growing hostility of the milieu, S. withdrew from teaching, spending in solitude the last years of his not brief and not tranquil existence.

The philosophy of S. is the living document of the wholly Romantic versatility of its author, whose works reflect one after another the continual changes of perspective of a speculation apparently devoid of systematic coherence and full of rhapsodic and shifting intuitions. Hence the embarrassment in which the interpreters of Schellingian thought have found themselves, who, in order to introduce into the rich and varied production of the philosopher an order somehow capable of reflecting the genetic development of his speculation, have distinguished his works into various groups, of which, setting aside the youthful writings of Fichtean inspiration, the following may be called fundamental: a) the group of works relating to the "philosophy of nature" (of particular importance the Ideen 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 perhaps the most famous book of S., the System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800); b) the group of writings in which the "philosophy of identity" finds its most proper 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, among which the one recalled earlier). To these groups is usually added the one comprising the writings that reflect the final position assumed by the speculation of S. (the so-called "positive philosophy": included in it are the Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, the Philosophie der Mythologie and the Philosophie der Offenbarung, resulting from the Berlin courses and published posthumously).

The position of S. with respect to Fichte closely recalls that of Spinoza (v.) with respect to Descartes (v.): as Spinoza translated Cartesian spiritualism into a realistic metaphysics of Substance, so S. made use of the idealistic experience of Fichte in order to identify in an absolute principle the metaphysical unity of the world. That the approach of S. to Spinoza is not arbitrary is also confirmed by the fact that the Darstellung of 1801, in which the Schellingian metaphysics of identity finds decisive expression, follows very closely, in the procedure of its arguing, the geometrizing and deductive schemas of Spinoza's Ethica: not to mention, moreover, that the name of Spinoza recurs often, from the earliest works onward, in S.'s pages (see, for example, the comparison that S. draws between his own position and that of Spinoza in the youthful writing [1795] Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie), almost as if to bear witness to Schelling's vivid sense of the ideal closeness of the two philosophies of the Absolute. And yet, Spinozism remains for S. the symbol of a speculative program rather than a mental perspective stably possessed: for other experiences, all of them modern — cultural, scientific and philosophical — awaited adequate expression and interpretation in Schellingian thought. The general Romantic atmosphere, into which the sensitive soul of the young S. joyously immersed itself, induced the philosopher to translate the new and striking results of contemporary science into living symbols of the dynamic interiority of universal life, and to see in the recent interpretations of physiological, electrical, magnetic and chemical phenomena the most eloquent demonstration of the insufficiency of traditional naturalistic mechanism (v.) to account for the organic vitality of nature. The time of 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 imposed itself upon S. was a profound intuitive consciousness of the inner finalities of cosmic becoming, such as to hear nature speak the very language of spirit, and then to see in nature and in spirit the living documents of the infinite expansive activity of a single and identical absolute principle of the real. With a significant inversion of the Kantian position, the effort of the Romantics and of S. himself was directed rather at drawing out the metaphysical implications of the Critique of Judgment than at understanding the gnoseological and epistemological meaning of Kant's first Critique. On the other hand, Fichte's teaching had not passed without leaving a trace on the speculative sensibility of the young S. The subjectivistic-transcendental principle of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, raised to the status of a metaphysical symbol of the spirituality of the real insofar as it expresses the inexhaustible creative activity of the pure I, which marks out in its ceaseless dialectical rhythm the ideal moments of its realization and of its earthly vicissitude, invited S. to integrate and almost to mediate critically, in the concept of a higher subjectivity, his panic vision of universal reality. That S. succeeded in this cannot be asserted: his philosophy is, in the end, the document of a mental experience perpetually oscillating between the diverse and unreconciled demands that prompt its internal developments.

This oscillation stands out with extreme clarity in the Schellingian writings that set out to expound the "philosophy of nature" and the "system of transcendental idealism." Philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism represent for S. two opposed but convergent points of view on reality; if the one romantically corrects the fundamental deficiency of Fichtean idealism, 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 of the affirmation of the I), the other accentuates the subjective aspect of the spirituality of the real and translates the very moments of the life of nature into terms of mental knowledge. Thus a double perspective is established, which reflects in metaphysical terms the fundamental uncertainty of speculative Romanticism in its constant effort to clarify and to render concrete in plastic intuitions the turbid pantheistic visions transmitted by the Sturm und Drang. In reality, the convergence between a philosophy of nature, aiming to bring out the spirituality latent in the organic processuality of the physical world, and a transcendental idealism, which from the opposite point of view of self-consciousness tends to reconstruct the progressive materializing 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. In the last instance, that ideal was the hypothesis of a myth: the myth of the fundamental aestheticity of human consciousness, erected 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 in art the organ of the knowledge of the Absolute: "Art — he says (Transz. Ideal., VI, § 3) — is for the philosopher the highest of all things, since it opens to him, as it were, the sanctuary where, in eternal and original union, there burns as in a flame what in nature and in history is separate, and what in life and in action, as in thought, must eternally flee itself." So that, in the end, that myth was 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, op. cit. in bibl., p. 152]); which entailed the resolution of the dialectic of nature and of the dialectic of spirit and of history into the undifferentiated unity of the one and the other, in which the fundamental contrast of existence as spiritual interiority and at the same time corporeal worldliness is definitively annulled without residue.

Once it had set out on this path, Schelling's thought was able to run its most ambitious adventure. Dissatisfied with the ideal perspective opened upon the Absolute, S. even imagined that he could place himself, with the "philosophy of identity," at the real standpoint of the Absolute itself, in order to grasp it concretely as the original unity of spirituality and naturality: so that the Absolute, previously pushed into the background of the picture, ends up now absorbing and dissolving in its indifference the defined contours of the real in its individual existential aspects, and rendering impossible, despite the most disparate attempts, the deduction of the finite from the infinite and of opposition from identity. On this ground Hegel easily had the better of him, comparing Schelling's Absolute to the night in which all cows are black (Phenomenology of Spirit, preface and Italian trans. E. De Negri, I, Florence 1933, p. 15), as, moreover, S. himself demonstrated when, almost in reply to the objections of his old friend, he sought to prove, in the theosophical writings relating to the "philosophy of freedom," how the Absolute is capable of an internal and vital articulation of its own. In the footsteps of Böhme (v.) he then claimed to investigate the metaphysical essence of God, distinguishing from His being a nature or a substratum, which is a dark longing for being and for coming to the light; and in such a distinction he saw the primary origin both of the existence of finite beings and of their metaphysical fall into the world, and of evil and sin: so that finitude, fall, evil, guilt would be the inevitable consequences of the irrationality persisting in the dark recesses of the divine Being and thence fatally transmitted to men and things (Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, in Werke, ed. cit., III, especially p. 451 ff.). In the face of such theosophical speculations, in which the turbid and uncomposed religiosity of Romanticism is complicated by typically Protestant motifs, Hegel, it has been said, could easily have the better of him. But not so much, however, as to resolve the fundamental aporia of every rigidly monistic and pantheistic position, such as Schelling's "philosophy of identity" had proved to be: that is, in the end, the unjustifiable dissolution of the essential problematicity 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 last phase of his tormented mental development S. attempted to overturn his own previous speculative positions in order to reopen the course of his thought toward horizons no longer limited by the narrow pantheistic and theosophical perspectives. The result of this evolution was the so-called "positive philosophy," which represents a significant protest against the Enlightenment pretensions of every merely intellectualistic philosophy: in its light, even the history of philosophy seems 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 speculation of the future. 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 living sense of the theogonic historicity of cosmic existence. This historicity is understood as the progressive self-making of a God, who announces himself and allows himself to be glimpsed in myths and naturalistic religions in order to authenticate himself, finally, in the supreme document of Revelation. Historically, the interest of this last Schellingian attempt to introduce into traditional speculative discussions, with the emphasis of a vital imbalance between reason and existence, a motif susceptible of new and unthought-of developments is not to be denied: but the fact nevertheless remains that the persistent recourse to an inadequate transcription into metaphysical and cosmological terms of fundamental spiritualistic demands rendered, in the end, ineffective and without following even the last theme of Schellingian speculation.

Vittorio Sainati