Schelling, Friedrich W. J. von (1775–1854)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling was born on January 27, 1775, in Leonberg, Württemberg, Germany. He was perhaps the most important German idealist philosopher who lived after the time of Immanuel Kant and before G. W F. Hegel. with them, he shared the principle of idealism, namely, that the essence of an object is the objectified essence of a subject.

In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling began by adopting the seminal notion of time as the intuition of inner sense, developed by Kant, but developed it into the doctrine that “the self itself is time conceived of in activity.” In his metaphysics, Schelling identified “being” with “process,” that is to say, to be is to produce. The self is the process that produces itself; that is, the self is simply the activity of producing its own world. This process is itself time and space, as they are nothing other than the process which creates them. The self begins unaware that it produces the world and only gradually becomes conscious of the fact.

Greatly influenced by Kant's late notion of “force” in Metaphysics of the Natural Sciences, Schelling developed an idealism that took into account the natural sciences. The resemblance between the theories of Schelling and Roger Joseph Boscovich is due to the fact that Kant largely adapted Boscovich's concept of force in Metaphysics of the Natural Sciences

Schelling wrote in the verbose and dense terminology of the German idealists. He constructed a “system of transcendental idealism” in considerable detail, which cannot be entered into in this entry.

In On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling criticized his immediate forerunner in German idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Schelling had studied at the prestigious University of Jena, becoming close friends with the well-established and famous Fichte, who had already developed a subjective idealism of the ego. Schelling began as a follower of Fichte but moved on through a series of developmental stages. Beyond Fichte's subjective idealism, Schelling found his way to his own philosophy of nature and his own philosophy of identity. Another student at Jena and a close friend of Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was also an idealist in the manner of Kant, but Hegel eventually succeeded in surpassing Fichte and Schelling in logic and much else. Though his junior, Hegel seemed to mentor Schelling. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vol. 3), Hegel criticized, but also praised, Schelling. Still another Jena student, Arthur Schopenhauer, became an immediate lifelong opponent to Schelling, however. Much later, the University of Berlin gave Schelling a teaching appointment as a sort of counterbalance to the Young Hegelian movement there. Yet, [Page 1137]Schelling's star never shone as bright as Hegel's, although Schelling had followers in Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and others.