Friedrich Schelling 1775 – 1854

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was a 19th-century German philosopher and a leading figure of German Idealism alongside Fichte and Hegel. His early Naturphilosophie sought to integrate the natural sciences into a comprehensive idealist system in which nature and spirit are two aspects of one absolute reality. The System of Transcendental Idealism, published in 1800 when he was 25, set out his identity philosophy. His later work turned toward the philosophy of mythology and revelation, and a distinction between negative and positive philosophy that anticipated existentialist concerns. He was an early collaborator and later opponent of Hegel and held the chair of philosophy at Berlin in his old age. His influence on continental thought, including on Heidegger, the German theological schools, and process philosophy, has been substantial.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was the second of the three great German Idealists, between Fichte and Hegel, and one of the most philosophically restless thinkers of his century. Born in Leonberg in Württemberg, he studied theology at Tübingen alongside Hegel and Hölderlin, and held chairs at Jena, Würzburg, Munich, Erlangen, and finally Berlin, where he was called in 1841 to combat what the Prussian state took to be the dangerous influence of left-Hegelianism.

Schelling's philosophical career is conventionally divided into several phases. The early Naturphilosophie of the 1790s presents nature as a living, self-organizing whole continuous with mind; the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) develops the parallel between nature and mind through the productive imagination; the Identity Philosophy of the early 1800s presents the absolute as the indifference point of subject and object. The 1809 Freedom essay and the late Berlin lectures on positive philosophy mark a decisive turn against Hegelian rationalism toward the recognition of brute existence and the necessity of revelation as supplements to philosophical reason.

Schelling's later work shaped Kierkegaard, Marx (briefly his student in Berlin), and the broader tradition of philosophical reckoning with whatever cannot be subsumed in the Hegelian system. He died in Switzerland in 1854. The recent revival of his philosophy — through Žižek, Iain Hamilton Grant, and others — has restored him to philosophical prominence after a long period of neglect.