Friedrich Schelling Quotes on Nature
Schelling's early Naturphilosophie — Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), On the World-Soul (1798), First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799) — proposed a speculative philosophy of nature on Spinozist and Kantian foundations as the necessary complement to the transcendental philosophy of self-consciousness. Nature is not the dead mechanical totality of post-Cartesian physics but a single productive and self-organizing power that ascends through stages of increasing complexity from the simplest physical processes to the appearance of self-consciousness in human beings — and the philosophical task is to exhibit that natural ascent as the same dialectical development that transcendental philosophy traces from the side of the conscious subject. The framework shaped Coleridge, Goethe, the Romantic philosophy of nature, and the early Hegel.
Quotes
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Attributed to Friedrich Schelling:
“Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schelling:
“Architecture is frozen music.”
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Attributed to Friedrich Schelling:
“Without the contradiction of opposites, there would be no life, no movement, no progress.”
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“How both the objective world accommodates to presentations in us, and presentations in us to the objective world, is unintelligible unless between the two worlds, the ideal and the real, there exists a pre-determined harmony . But this latter is itself unthinkable unless the activity, whereby the objective world, is produced, is at bottom identical with that which expresses itself in volition, and vice versa.”
Wie zugleich die objektive Welt nach Vorstellungen in uns, und Vorstellungen in uns nach der objektiven Welt sich bequemen, ist nicht zu begreifen, wenn nicht zwischen den beiden Welten, der ideellen und der reellen, eine vorherbestimmte Harmonie existiert. Diese vorherbestimmte Harmonie aber ist selbst nicht denkbar, wenn nicht die Tätigkeit, durch welche die objektive Welt produziert ist, ursprü