Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854)

A famous German philosopher of objective idealism; a representative of romanticism in classical German philosophy.

Schelling was born in January 1775, in the town of Leonberg in the Duchy of Württemberg (now Baden-Württemberg), into a rural Protestant clergyman’s family. Between 1790 and 1795, Schelling studied philosophy and theology in the monastic school at Bebenhausen, near Tübingen, where his father was a priest and professor of Oriental Culture. On 18 October 1790, he was granted permission to enroll at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg), and at the Stift, he shared a room with Hegel as well as Hölderlin, and the three became good friends. In 1792, he graduated with the master theses titled Attempt at a Critical and Philosophical Exegesis of Genesis III, the Oldest Philosophical Fragment Exploring the Origin of Human Evil. Then Schelling began to study Kant and Fichte’s philosophy, which greatly influenced him in his youth. In 1795, he published an article explaining Fichte’s thought, On the Possibility of an Absolute Form of Philosophy which was acknowledged by Fichte himself, and thus made Schelling famous in the field of philosophy. In 1795, Schelling completed his theological dissertation. After graduation, Schelling worked as a tutor in Leipzig for two years, during which he studied mathematics, physics and medicine, as well as the philosophical works of the Italian thinker Giambattista Vico and Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In 1798, 23-year-old Schelling was appointed extraordinary (i.e., unpaid) professor of philosophy at the University of Jena to teach philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy. During his time at Jena University, he was influenced by romanticism, and his philosophical creation entered its golden age. In 1800, Schelling wrote his representative work, System of Transcendental Idealism, which systematically discussed the process of absolute change from subjectivity to objectivity. Soon Schelling became the most renowned thinker of the romanticism school and began to oppose Fichte’s ideas and establish his own “identity philosophy”. From 1803 to 1806, Schelling was professor at the new University of Würzburg and changed his ideas from the “identity philosophy” to the “philosophy of religion”, and in 1804, he wrote Philosophy and Religion. In 1806, he moved to Munich in 1806 as associate of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. From 1820 to 1827, without resigning his official position in Munich, he lectured for a short time in Stuttgart, and seven years at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (1820–1827), and served as president of the National Academy of Sciences and professor at the University of Munich. In 1841, Schelling was summoned by King William IV of Prussia to preside over a lecture on philosophy at the University of Berlin in an attempt to curb the influence of Hegel’s popular philosophical thoughts, especially those of Left Hegelians.

Schelling entered philosophical circles through Fichte’s philosophy, but he soon discovered shortcomings in Fichte’s philosophy. In Fichte, as a non-Ego nature is posited by the “absolute Ego”, and it is only a kind of material for man. Fichte’s philosophy was chiefly concerned with the question of the self or the question of man, whereas Schelling was concerned with the question of nature or the objective world, and established his system of “identity philosophy” on this basis. Schelling’s system of “identity philosophy” consists of three parts: (1) going through reshaping Fichte’s Ego; (2) meeting the Spinoza’s distorted substance; (3) establishing the mysterious spirit of absolute identity on the Ego and the Non-Ego. This “mystical spirit” or “absolute reason” is the absolute non-differentiation of subject and object, and it excludes all identity with difference. However, it has an inner impulse to develop itself and recognize itself, and this gives rise to nature and the human spirit, as well as to all kinds of differences and contradictions, which ultimately push everything back to “absolute identity” in the course of world history, and at this point the world spirit reaches a thorough and absolute self-consciousness. Therefore, Schelling held that both nature and human history are stages in the differentiation and development of the Absolute, and that at each stage, concrete things invariably contain elements of subjectivity and objectivity, only in different proportions. In nature, objectivity is predominant, but there is also an emerging subjectivity, which becomes stronger and stronger as the level of nature rises; and in the case of man and his self-consciousness, this proportion forms a turning point, and the history of the world passes from the predominance of objectivity to the predominance of subjectivity, until at last subjectivity completely annexes objectivity to itself, and reverts to a state of complete subject-object identity. Thus, in its totality, Schelling’s identity philosophy is divided into two stages: “philosophy of nature” and “transcendental philosophy”. The philosophy about matter and nature is called philosophy of nature, and the philosophy about spiritual thought is called transcendental philosophy. “Philosophy of nature” and “transcendental philosophy” are in opposition to each other, but they can be integrated into one system, with “absolute identity” as their common basis, and finally achieve the intrinsic unity of subject and object in aesthetic intuition. Schelling has proved the contradictory identity of thought and being, spirit and matter, subject and object by the “absolute identity” of objective idealism, which had an significant impact on Hegel’s idealist dialectic. Schelling died on his way to Switzerland on August 20, 1854.