F. W. J. Schelling

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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was a German philosopher of the Idealist generation, remembered for a philosophy of nature, for a system that placed an undivided Absolute beneath the split of mind and world, and for a late religious metaphysics that reached back into the theosophic tradition. A prodigy from Württemberg, he shared a room at the Tübingen seminary with Hegel and the poet Hölderlin, held a chair at Jena while still in his twenties, and went on revising his position for the rest of a long life — to the point that his work is usually described not as one system but as a sequence of them. He is the thinker who, more than any other in the German Idealist line, drew the older esoteric strain of European thought — the living God of Jakob Böhme, the coincidence of opposites, the descent of all things from a single ground — back into the heart of academic philosophy and made it argue there on equal terms.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1835 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Formation: Leonberg, Nürtingen, Tübingen

Schelling was born on 27 January 1775 at Leonberg, near Stuttgart, in the Duchy of Württemberg, the son of a learned Lutheran deacon and orientalist. He grew up in a region whose church culture was saturated with a particular inheritance: the speculative Pietism of the Swabian fathers, the apocalyptic biblicism of Johann Albrecht Bengel, and the philosophia sacra of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger — that Württemberg theosophy which had already absorbed Böhme’s seven source-spirits and his groundless abyss into a churchly Lutheran frame. Schelling’s own family stood close to this circle, and at Nürtingen as a boy he is recorded in the orbit of Philipp Matthäus Hahn, Oetinger’s most important follower. How much of Böhme reached the young Schelling through this native Swabian channel rather than through later, more deliberate reading is a question scholars debate; what is not in doubt is that the vocabulary of a living, self-revealing God was in the air he first breathed.

A documented prodigy, he entered the Tübingen seminary in 1790, three years younger than the statutory age, and there fell into the company that would mark a generation: the room he shared with Hölderlin and with the older, slower Hegel. The three read Plato and Kant together, planted a tree of liberty for the French Revolution, and in their student years drafted the brief, electric program now called the Oldest System-Program of German Idealism — a manifesto for a philosophy that would crown itself in beauty and a new mythology of reason. Schelling published his first philosophical work before he was twenty. By 1798, at twenty-three, he held a chair at Jena, then the brilliant center of German letters, where he entered the Romantic circle of the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Tieck, and in 1803 married Caroline Schlegel, the circle’s most formidable mind.

The philosophy of nature

His earliest fame came from the Naturphilosophie, set out in the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) and On the World-Soul (1798). Against the picture of nature as inert matter set over against a thinking subject — the dead mechanism left by Descartes and, Schelling thought, never fully overcome even by Kant — he argued that nature is itself productive, an unconscious intelligence working its way upward through a graded series of forces toward the mind that would finally know it. Nature as endlessly producing he called the natura naturans, the productive ground; nature as finished product, the natura naturata, the visible world of stones and plants and bodies. The two are one activity caught at different depths. Nature is visible spirit; spirit is invisible nature. The same drive that organizes a magnet and quickens a seed rises, through ascending stages or potencies, into the self-consciousness that at last turns and recognizes itself in what it has climbed out of. Mind and nature are not two substances but the same activity seen from two sides.

This was a philosophy with a strong charge of the older organic cosmos, the world-soul of the Platonists, and Schelling knew it. The lineage he claimed ran through Spinoza, whose single substance he wished to set in motion, and behind Spinoza through the Neoplatonic descent of all things by emanation from the One.

The identity-philosophy and the Absolute

In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) Schelling worked the complementary movement — from the conscious self outward — and located the point where the two roads meet in the work of art, the one place where free intelligence and blind necessity visibly coincide. From there he passed, in the Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801) and the dialogue Bruno (1802) — named for Giordano Bruno, the burnt heretic of the infinite worlds — to the identity-philosophy proper. He named the ground of both nature and mind the Absolute: a point of indifference in which subject and object, ideal and real, are not yet divided — the identity underlying every opposition. In it all distinctions are held in a prior unity, the way the colors are held undivided in white light. The structure is the old coincidence of opposites of Nicholas of Cusa and the apophatic ground of Eriugena, pressed into the service of a post-Kantian system.

It was precisely this Absolute that drew the most famous blow in the history of the movement. In the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel — once the junior partner, now striking out on his own — mocked an Absolute in which all difference vanishes with the image of a night in which all cows are black. Such an identity, he charged, explains nothing, since everything disappears into it without remainder; the labor of philosophy is precisely to think the difference and the movement, not to drown them in a featureless sameness. Schelling never forgave the line. The two men, roommates and then rivals across Tübingen, Jena, and at last Berlin, did not reconcile, and the critique would shadow Schelling’s reputation for the rest of the century, as Hegel’s star rose and his own dimmed.

G. W. F. Hegel, Schelling’s Tübingen roommate and later rival, in the 1831 portrait by Jakob Schlesinger — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

1809: the dark ground in God

The decisive change came with the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, published in 1809 — the last book Schelling saw into print, and for many readers his greatest. The featureless Absolute now gives way to a God with an inner life and an inner history. Schelling locates within God a distinction between existence and the ground of existence — between God as the luminous, fully realized being, and a dark ground, a will, a longing, a craving that is in God but is not God himself, something not yet rational that the divine must take up and overcome to become fully God. He calls it, finally, with a word lifted from Böhme, the Ungrund — the groundless, the un-ground that is neither light nor dark but the indifference prior to both.

From this the whole architecture of evil and freedom is rebuilt. Because there is a real ground that is not yet ordered into the light, the will that arises from it can affirm itself against the whole — can pull the parts loose from their place and set the self in the center where God should be. Evil is not a mere lack of being, the privation of the older theology, but a positive inversion, a real possibility rooted in the ground. And human freedom, the capacity for good and evil, becomes correspondingly real: not the freedom of indifference, the bare choosing between options, but a self-chosen intelligible deed by which a person is what they are. The cost is steep — God’s own life now carries darkness within it — and Schelling pays it deliberately, in open debt to the seventeenth-century theosophy of Böhme: the living, self-divided, suffering God; the dark principle within the divine; creation as the resolution of an inner tension; the abyss beneath the persons of the godhead.

The Ages of the World

From the freedom essay grew the Ages of the World (Die Weltalter), drafted and redrafted around 1811, 1813, and 1815 and never finished — abandoned three times at the printer’s threshold. It is an attempt to narrate the inner life of the divine as a history: the past in which God, contracting into the dark ground, gathers the forces of being; the present in which they are released into a created world; the future in which all is to be raised into the light. The eternal is to be told as a story, the timeless given a before and an after. That the work could not be completed is, in a way, its argument: a philosophy of a God who is himself becoming cannot close into a finished system, and Schelling’s repeated failure to write the second and third ages enacts the very incompleteness it describes.

The late Schelling: negative and positive philosophy

For three decades after 1809 Schelling published almost nothing, lecturing at Munich and Erlangen while Hegel’s system swept the universities. Then, in 1841, the new Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV called him to Berlin expressly to combat the Hegelian dominance — to lay, as the phrase went, the dragon-seed of Hegelianism. There Schelling drew the distinction on which his last thought turns: between a negative philosophy, which reasons about what things must be, the realm of pure essence and possibility — and a positive philosophy, which confronts the sheer, unprethinkable fact that anything exists at all, the brute givenness no logic can deduce. Reason can map the necessary; it cannot generate existence; being is older than thought and must be met, not constructed. On this footing he built the late Philosophy of Mythology and Philosophy of Revelation, reading the whole history of the gods and of revelation as the theogonic process — the divine potencies working themselves out — within human consciousness.

Schelling in his Berlin years, 1848 daguerreotype by Hermann Biow — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His Berlin audience was extraordinary, and it carried his unpublished thought into the next century by other doors than the academic one. In the lecture hall sat the young Søren Kierkegaard, who came hungry for the philosophy of the actual and left disappointed but permanently marked; Friedrich Engels, who wrote pamphlets against him; Mikhail Bakunin; the historian Jacob Burckhardt; Alexander von Humboldt. The lectures themselves remained unprinted in his lifetime, surviving chiefly in transcriptions, of which the one made by H. E. G. Paulus and published, without leave, in 1843 is the most complete — a piracy that drew Schelling into a losing lawsuit and helped silence him.

The Böhme debt and its transmission

That the late Schelling reached back to Böhme is plain on the page: the Ungrund, the doctrine of potencies, the dark ground, the dramatic narrative of a God coming to itself, all carry the Behmenist signature. The contested question is how the seventeenth-century theosopher reached the nineteenth- century professor. The likeliest channel runs through Munich and the Catholic philosopher Franz von Baader, the most sophisticated reader of Böhme of his age, with whom Schelling was in close personal contact in the years around the freedom essay; Baader pressed Böhme on his idealist contemporaries and made the theosophy argue on the level of Kant and Hegel.

The theosopher Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), whose Ungrund and dark principle Schelling drew into the 1809 freedom essay — engraving, Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A second, older channel is the native one: the Württemberg Pietist theosophy of Oetinger, in which Schelling was raised. Scholars including S. J. McGrath and Glenn Alexander Magee argue that Schelling was very likely first introduced to Böhme and to Protestant mysticism through Oetinger, and that the corporeality and self-revealing-life motifs of that Swabian world run beneath the freedom essay and the Ages of the World. That this milieu shaped Schelling’s vocabulary and concerns is broadly accepted; that any single doctrine is a direct borrowing, and how much of Böhme he read at first hand rather than through Baader and the Pietist inheritance, remains genuinely disputed — a matter of degree and channel, not of whether the kinship exists.

Reception

Schelling’s influence ran in directions academic philosophy was slow to chart. The early Naturphilosophie fed the Romantic science and poetry of his Jena years and left a long mark on the European philosophy of nature. The late turn — the unprethinkable, the priority of existence over thought, the broken system — made him, against his own intent, a forerunner of existential thought: through Kierkegaard’s Berlin disappointment, through Heidegger, who lectured on the freedom essay in 1936 and called it the summit of the metaphysics of German Idealism, through Paul Tillich, who began with two dissertations on Schelling. And the strand that the seminar room was slowest to take seriously — the living Absolute, the ground in God, the open kinship with Böhme — passed into the theosophical and Russian sophiological currents, into Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev, the latter reading Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation alongside Böhme himself, and on into the wider esoteric reception that prized exactly what the academy set aside. Rudolf Steiner, reading the German mystical line back through Böhme and Bruno, drew on the same well.

Texts and scholarship

Schelling published only a fraction of what he wrote; the textual ground of his thought is unusually editorial. The standard nineteenth-century collection is the Sämmtliche Werke, gathered by his son Karl Friedrich August Schelling and issued at Stuttgart and Augsburg by Cotta in fourteen volumes between 1856 and 1861, with the Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology occupying its later bands; the modern critical Historisch-kritische Ausgabe of the Bavarian Academy (Frommann-Holzboog, in progress since 1976) is steadily replacing it. The works that matter most for the trajectory traced above are the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), the Presentation of My System (1801), the 1809 freedom essay, the Ages of the World drafts, and the posthumous Berlin lectures. In English, James Gutmann’s Of Human Freedom (Open Court, 1936) long served as the standard rendering of the freedom essay, and Frederick de Wolfe Bolman’s The Ages of the World (Columbia, 1942) the first full version of the 1815 draft; both have since been joined by newer scholarly translations.

The scholarly literature divides along the fault line of this entry. The philosophical recovery of Schelling in English owes much to Andrew Bowie’s study of 1993 and to Edward Allen Beach’s The Potencies of God(s) (1994) on the late philosophy of mythology — both already standing in this article’s source apparatus. The contested question of the theosophic debt is carried by S. J. McGrath’s The Dark Ground of Spirit (2012), which reads the freedom essay back through Böhme and the Württemberg Pietist line, and by Glenn Alexander Magee’s work on idealism and the Hermetic tradition, against more cautious historians who hold the Böhme kinship to be real but largely mediated. For the figure and the systems in synoptic form, the relevant reference articles — the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — set out the sequence of systems and the state of the debate.

A philosophy of an Absolute that is never finished cannot, by its own logic, arrive at a last word. Schelling’s lifelong refusal to close his system — the sequence of beginnings, the thrice-abandoned Ages, the lectures left in other hands — was not a failure of nerve but the form the thought required: a thinking faithful to a ground that is still becoming, and to an existence that no system can think its way behind. He left the work where such a philosophy must leave it — at the edge of what reason can deduce, looking out at the bare fact that there is anything at all.

→ In the library: Steiner — Mystics of the Renaissance (1910), incl. Böhme and Bruno

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