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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: SAR-SCY |
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SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON (1775-1854) , German philosopher, was born on the 27th of January 1775, at Leonberg, a small town of Wurttemberg. He was educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen, near Tubingen, where his father, an able Orientalist, was chaplain and professor, and at the theological seminary at Tubingen, which he was specially allowed to enter when he was three. years under the prescribed age. Among his (elder) contemporaries were Hegel and Holderlin. In 1792 he graduated in the philosophical faculty. In 1793 he contributed to Paulus's Memorabilien a paper " 17ber Mythus, historische Sagen, and Philosopheme der altesten 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 Ober die Maglichkeileiner Form der Philosophie uberhaupt (1794). There was nothing original
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 iiber Dogmatismus and 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 Philosophic der Natur (1997), and the treatise Von der Weltseele (1798). The philosophical renown of Jena reached its culminating point during the years (17981803) 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
From September 1803 until April 18o6 Schelling was professor at the new university of Wurzburg. 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 Wurzburg 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' The reviews of current philosophical literature were afterwards collected, and edited under the title " Abhandlungen zur Erlauterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre " in Schelling's Philos. Schriften, vol. i. (18og).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 (18061841) Schelling's literary activity seemed gradually to come to a standstill. The " Aphorisms on Naturphilosophie " contained in the Jahrbiicher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (18061808) are for the most part extracts from the Wurzburg lectures; and the Denkmal der Schrift von den gottlichen Dingen des Herrn Jacobi was drawn
Philosophy.Whatever judgment one may form of the total worth of Schelling as a philosopher, his place in the history of that important movement
interest
It is not unfair to connect the apparent failings of Schelling's philosophizing with the very nature of the thinker and with the historical accidents of his career. In his early writings, for example, more particularly those making up Naturphilosophie, one finds in painful abundance the evidences of hastily acquired knowledge, impatience of the hard labour of minute thought, over-confidence in the force of individual genius, and desire instantaneously to present even in crudest fashion the newest idea that has dawned upon the thinker. Schelling was prematurely thrust into the position of a foremost productive thinker; and when the lengthened period of quiet meditation was at last forced upon him there unfortunately lay before him a system which achieved what had dimly been involved in his ardent and impetuous desires. It is not possible to acquit Schelling of a certain disingenuousness in regard to the Hegelian philosophy; and if we claim for him perfect disinterestedness of view we must accuse him of deficient insight. At all stages of his thought he called to his aid the forms of some other system. Thus Fichte, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme and the Mystics, and finally, the great Greek thinkers with their Neop?atonic, Gnostic, and Scholastic commentators, give respectively colouring to particular works. But Schelling did not merely borrow, he had genuine philosophic spirit and no small measure of philosophic insight, and under all the differences of exposition which seem to constitute so many differing systems, there is one and the same philosophic effort and spirit. But what Schelling did want was power to work out his ideas methodically. Hence he could only find expression for himself in forms of this or that earlier philosophy, and hence too the frequent formlessness of his own thought, the tendency to relapse into mere impatient despair of ever finding an adequate vehicle for transmitting thought. It is fair in dealing with Schelling's development to take into account the indications of his own opinion regarding its more significant momenta. In his own view the turning points seem to have been0) the transition from Fichte's method to the more objective conception of naturethe advance, in other words, to Naturphilosophie; (2) the definite formulation of that which implicitly, as Schelling claims, was involved in the idea of Naturphilosophie, viz. the thought of the identical, indifferent, absolute substratum of both nature and spirit, the advance to Identitdtsphilosophie; (3) the opposition of negative and positive philosophy, an opposition which is the theme of the Berlin lectures, though its germs may, be traced back to 1804. Only what falls under the first and second of the divisions so indicated can be said to have discharged a function in developing philosophy; only so much constitutes Schelling's philosophy proper.i. Naturphilosophie.The Fichtean method had striven to exhibit the whole structure of reality as the necessary implication of self-consciousness. The fundamental features of knowledge, whether as activity or as sum of apprehended fact, and of conduct had been deduced as elements necessary in the attainment of self-consciousness. Fichtean idealism therefore at once stood out negatively, as abolishing the dogmatic conception of the two real worlds, subject and object, by whose interaction cognition and practice arise, and as amending the critical idea which retained with dangerous caution too many fragments of dogmatism; positively, as insisting on the unity of philosophical interpretation and as supplying a key to the form or method by which a completed philosophic system might be constructed. But the Fichtean teaching appeared on the one hand to identify too closely the ultimate ground of the universe of rational conception with the finite, individual spirit, and on the other hand to endanger the reality of the world of nature by regarding it too much after the fashion of subjective idealism, as mere moment, though necessitated, in the existence of the finite thinking mind. It was almost a natural consequence that Fichte never succeeded in amalgamating with his own system the aesthetic view of nature to which the Rritik of Judgment had pointed as an essential component in any complete philosophy. From Fichte's position Schelling started. From Fichte he derived the ideal of a completed whole of philosophic conception and also the formal method to which for the most part he continued true. The earliest writings tended gradually towards the first important advance. Nature must not be conceived as merely abstract limit to the infinite striving of spirit, as a mere series of necessary thoughts for mind. It must be that and more than that. It must have reality for itself, a reality which stands in no conflict with its ideal character, a reality the inner structure of which is ideal, a reality the root and spring of which is spirit. Nature as the sum of that which is objective, intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear thus as equally real, as alike exhibiting ideal structure, as parallel with one another. The philosophy of nature and transcendental philosophy are the two complementary portions of philosophy as a whole.Animated with this new conception Schelling made his hurried rush to Naturphilosophie, and with the aid of Kant and of fragmentary knowledge of contemporary scientific movements, threw off in quick
Nature, as having reality for itself, forms one completed whole. Its manifoldness is not then to be taken as excluding its fundamental unity; the divisions which our ordinary perception and thought introduce into it have not absolute validity, but are to be interpreted as the outcome of the single formative energy or complex of forces which is the inner aspect, the soul of nature This we are in a position to apprehend and constructively to exhibit to ourselves in the successive forms which its development assumes, for it is the same spirit, though unconscious, of which we become aware in self-consciousness. It is the realization of spirit. Nor is the variety of its forms imposed upon it from without; there is neither external teleology in nature, nor mechanism in the narrower sense. Nature is a whole and forms itself ; within its range we are to look for no other than natural explanations. The function of Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real, not to deduce the real from the ideal. The incessant change which experience brings before us, taken in conjunction with the thought of unity in" productive force of nature, leads to the all-important conception of the duality, the polar opposition through which nature, expresses itself in its varied products. The dynamical series of stages in nature, the forms in which the ideal structure of nature is realized, are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and con-tractive forces; light, with its subordinate processesmagnetism, electricity, and chemical action; organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility.' Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations develops in its ideal form. The theoretical side of inner nature in its successive grades from sensation to the highest form of spirit, the abstracting reason which emphasizes the difference of subjective and objective, leaves an unsolved problem which receives satisfaction only in the practical, the individualizing activity. The practical, again, taken in con-junction with the theoretical, forces on the question of the reconciliation between the free conscious organization of thought and the apparently necessitated and unconscious mechanism of the objective world. In the notion of a teleological connexion and in that which for spirit is its subjective expression, viz. art and genius, the subjective and objective find their point of union. 2. Nature and spirit, Naturphilosophie and Transcendentalphilosophie, thus stand as two relatively complete, but complementary parts of the whole. It was impossible for Schelling, the animating principle of whose thought was ever the reconciliation of differences, not to take and to take speedily the step towards the conception of the uniting basis of which nature and spirit are manifestations, forms, or consequences. For this common basis, however, he did not succeed at first in finding any other than the merely negative expression of indifference. The identity, the absolute, which underlay all difference, all the relative, is to be characterized simply as neutrum, as absolute undifferentiated self-equivalence. It lay in the very nature of this thought that Spinoza should now offer himself to Schelling as the thinker whose form of presentation came nearest to his new problem. The Darstellung meines Systems, and the more expanded and more careful treatment contained in the lectures on System der gesammten Philosophie and der Naturphilosophie insbesondere given in Wurzburg, 1804 (published in the Sdmmtliche Werke, vol. vi. pp. 131-576), are thoroughly Spinozistic in form, and to a large extent in substance. They are not without value, indeed, as extended commentary on Spinoza. With all his efforts, Schelling does not succeed in bringing his conceptions of nature and spirit into any vital connexion with the primal identity, the absolute indifference of reason. No true solution could be achieved by resort to the mere absence of distinguishing, differencing feature: The absolute was left with no other function than that of removing all the differences on which thought turns. The criticisms of Fichte, and more particularly of Hegel (in the " Vorrede " to the Phdnomenologie des Geistes), point to the fatal defect in the conception of the absolute as mere featureless identity. 3. Along two distinct lines Schelling is to be found in all his later writings striving to amend the conception, to which he remained true, of absolute reason as the ultimate ground of reality. It was necessary, in the first place, to give to this absolute a character, to make of it something more than empty sameness; it was necessary, in the second place, to clear up in some way the relation in which the actuality or apparent actuality of nature and spirit The briefest and best account in Schelling himself of Naturphilosophie is that contained in the Einleitung zu dem Ersten Entwurf (S.W. iii.). A full and lucid statement of Naturphilosophie is that given by K. Fischer in his Gesch. d. n. Phil., vi. 433-692. stood to the ultimate real. Schelling had already (in the System der ges. Phil.) begun to endeavour after an amalgamation of the Spinozistic conception of substance with the Platonic view of an ideal realm, and to find therein the means of enriching the bareness of absolute reason. In Bruno, and in Philos. u. Religion, the same thought finds expression. In the realm of ideas the absolute finds itself, has its own nature over against itself as objective over against subjective, and thus is in the way of overcoming its abstractness, of becoming concrete. This conception of a difference, of an internal structure in the absolute, finds other and not lees obscure expressions in the mystical contributions of the Menschliche Freiheit and in the scholastic speculations of the Berlin lectures on mythology. At the same time it connects itself with the second problem, how to attain in conjunction with the abstractly rational character of the absolute an explanation of actuality. Thingsnature and spirithave an actual being. They exist not merely as logical consequence or development of the absolute, but have a stubbornness of being in them, an antagonistic feature which in all times philosophers have been driven to recognize, and which they have described in varied fashion. The actuality of things is a defection from the absolute, and their existence compels a reconsideration of our conception of God. There must be recognized in God as a completed actuality, a dim, obscure ground or basis, which can only be described as not yet being, but as containing in itself the impulse to externalization, to existence. It is through this ground of Being in God Himself that we must find explanation of that independence which things assert over against God. And it is easy to see how from this position Schelling was led on to the further statements that not in the rational conception of God is an explanation of existence to be found, nay, that all rational conception extends but to the form, and touches not the realthat God is to be conceived as act, as will, as something over and above the rational conception of the divine. Hence the stress laid on will as the realizing factor, in opposition to thought, a view through which Schelling connects himself with Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, and on the ground of which he has been recognized by the latter as the reconciler of idealism and iealism. Finally, then, there emerges the opposition of negative, i e. merely rational philosophy, and positive, of which the content is the real evolution of the divine as it has taken place in fact and in history, and as it is recorded in the varied mythologies and religions of man-kind. Not much satisfaction can be felt with the exposition of either as it appears in the volumes of Berlin lectures. Schelling's works were collected and published by his sons, in 14 vols. 0856-1861). The individual works appeared as follows:Uber die Moglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie iiberhaupt (Tubingen, 1794) ; Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur ( Leipzig
Leipzig
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