1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von

SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON (1775–1854), German philosopher, was born on the 27th of January 1775 at Leonberg, a small town of Württemberg. He was educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen, near Tübingen, where his father, an able Orientalist, was chaplain and professor, and at the theological seminary at Tübingen, which he was specially allowed to enter when he was three years under the prescribed age. Among his (elder) contemporaries were Hegel and Hölderlin. In 1792 he graduated in the philosophical faculty. In 1793 he contributed to Paulus’s Memorabilien a paper “Über Mythus, historische Sagen, und Philosopheme der ältesten Welt”; and in 1795 his thesis for his theological degree was De Marcione Paullinarum epistolarum emendatore. Meanwhile a much more important influence had begun to operate on him, arising out of his study of Kant and Fichte. The Review of Aenesidemus and the tractate On the Notion of Wissenschaftslehre found in his mind most fruitful soil. With characteristic zeal and impetuosity Schelling had no sooner grasped the leading ideas of Fichte’s amended form of the critical philosophy than he put together his impressions of it in his Über die Möglichkeit

einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1794). There was nothing original in the treatment, but it showed such power of appreciating the new ideas of the Fichtean method that it was hailed with cordial recognition by Fichte himself, and gave the author immediately a place in popular estimation as in the foremost rank of existing philosophical writers. The more elaborate work, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (1795), which, still remaining within the limits of the Fichtean idealism, however, exhibits unmistakable traces of a tendency to give the Fichtean method a more objective application, and to amalgamate with it Spinoza’s more realistic view of things.

After two years as tutor to two youths of noble family, Schelling was called as extraordinary professor of philosophy to Jena in midsummer 1798. He had already contributed articles and reviews to the Journal of Fichte and Niethammer, and had thrown himself with all his native impetuosity into the study of physical and medical science. From 1796 date the Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus, an admirably written critique of the ultimate issues of the Kantian system; from 1797 the essay entitled Neue Deduction des Naturrechts, which to some extent anticipated Fichte’s treatment in the Grundlage des Naturrechts, published in 1796, but not before Schelling’s essay had been received by the editors of the Journal. His studies of physical science bore rapid fruit in the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (1798).

The philosophical renown of Jena reached its culminating point during the years (1798–1803) of Schelling’s residence there. His intellectual sympathies united him closely with some of the most active literary tendencies of the time. With Goethe, who viewed with interest and appreciation the poetical fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he continued on excellent terms, while on the other hand he was repelled by Schiller’s less expansive disposition, and failed altogether to understand the lofty ethical idealism that animated his work. He quickly became the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school whose impetuous litterateurs had begun to tire of the cold abstractions of Fichte. In Schelling, essentially a self-conscious genius, eager and rash, yet with undeniable power, they hailed a personality of the true Romantic type. With August Wilhelm Schlegel and his gifted wife Caroline, herself the embodiment of the Romantic spirit, Schelling’s relations were of the most intimate kind, and a marriage between Schelling and Caroline’s young daughter, Auguste Böhmer, was vaguely contemplated by both. Auguste’s death in 1800 (due partly to Schelling’s rash confidence in his medical knowledge) drew Schelling and Caroline together, and Schlegel having removed to Berlin, a divorce was, apparently with his consent, arranged. On the 2nd of June 1803 Schelling and Caroline were married, and with the marriage Schelling’s life at Jena came to an end. It was full time, for Schelling’s undoubtedly overweening self-confidence had involved him in a series of disputes and quarrels at Jena, the details of which are important only as illustrations of the evil qualities in Schelling’s nature which deface much of his philosophic work.

From September 1803 until April 1806 Schelling was professor at the new university of Würzburg. This period was marked by considerable changes in his views and by the final breach on the one hand with Fichte and on the other hand with Hegel. In Würzburg Schelling had had many enemies. He embroiled himself with his colleagues and also with the government. In Munich, to which he removed in 1806, he found a quiet residence. A position as state official, at first as associate of the academy of sciences and secretary of the academy of arts, afterwards as secretary of the philosophical section of the academy of sciences, gave him ease and leisure. Without resigning his official position he lectured for a short time at Stuttgart, and

during seven years at Erlangen (1820–1827). In 1809 Caroline died, and three years later Schelling married one of her closest friends, Pauline Gotter, in whom he found a faithful companion.

During the long stay at Munich (1806–1841) Schelling’s literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The “Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie” contained in the Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1806–1808) are for the most part extracts from the Würzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den göttlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn forth by the special incident of Jacobi’s work. The only writing of significance is the “Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,” which appeared in the Philosophische Schriften, vol. i. (1809), and which carries out, with increasing tendency to mysticism, the thoughts of the previous work, Philosophie und Religion. In 1815 appeared the tract Über die Gottheiten zu Samothrake, ostensibly a portion of a great work, Die Weltalter, frequently announced as ready for publication, of which no great part was ever written. Probably it was the overpowering strength and influence of the Hegelian system that constrained Schelling to so long a silence, for it was only in 1834, after the death of Hegel, that, in a preface to a translation by H. Beckers of a work by Cousin, he gave public utterance to the antagonism in which he stood to the Hegelian and to his own earlier conceptions of philosophy. The antagonism certainly was not then a new fact; the Erlangen lectures on the history of philosophy (Sämmt. Werke, x. 124-125) of 1822 express the same in a pointed fashion, and Schelling had already begun the treatment of mythology and religion which in his view constituted the true positive complement to the negative of logical or speculative philosophy. Public attention was powerfully attracted by these vague hints of a new system which promised something more positive, as regards religion in particular, than the apparent results of Hegel’s teaching. For the appearance of the critical writings of Strauss, Feuerbach and Bauer, and the evident disunion in the Hegelian school itself had alienated the sympathies of many from the then dominant philosophy. In Berlin particularly, the headquarters of the Hegelians, the desire found expression to obtain officially from Schelling a treatment of the new system which he was understood to have in reserve. The realization of the desire did not come about till 1841, when the appointment of Schelling as Prussian privy councillor and member of the Berlin Academy, gave him the right, a right he was requested to exercise, to deliver lectures in the university. The opening lecture of his course was listened to by a large and appreciative audience. The enmity of his old foe, H. E. G. Paulus, sharpened by Schelling’s apparent success, led to the surreptitious publication of a verbatim report of the lectures on the philosophy of revelation, and, as Schelling did not succeed in obtaining legal condemnation and suppression of this piracy, he in 1845 ceased the delivery of any public courses. No authentic information as to the nature of the new positive philosophy was obtained till after his death (at Bad Rogaz, on the 20th of August 1854), when his sons began the issue of his collected writings with the four volumes of Berlin lectures: vol. i. Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1856); ii. Philosophy of Mythology (1857); iii. and iv. Philosophy of Revelation (1858).