A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

3. The Transcendental Philosophy (1800–1801). While still at Jena he felt the influence of Schiller, who had united the ideas of Kant and Goethe into an Æsthetic Idealism. Under this influence Schelling reconstructed the Fichtean philosophy of the Ego on a Romantic basis.

4. The Philosophy of Identity (1801–1804). Schelling now undertook to put his recast philosophy of Fichte upon the basis of Spinozism. This caused a break between him and Fichte and Hegel. In 1803 he married Caroline, the divorced wife of August Schlegel and the idol of the Romantic circle, and the same year accepted a call to the University of Wurzburg, where he remained three years (1803–1806).

5. The Philosophy of Freedom and God (1804–1809). The doctrine of Schelling now became mystical and showed the influence of Boehme. In 1806 Schelling was called to the Academy of Munich.

6. The Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation (1809–1854). This may be well called Schelling’s period of silence, so far as publication was concerned. He who had poured forth his thoughts in print now became averse to publishing anything. He accepted the call to Munich in 1806 and remained there, excepting his seven years at Erlangen, thirty-five years (until 1841). During this time he was much under the influence of Aristotle, neo-Platonism, and the Gnostics. He had first an official position at the Academy of Munich; then he spent seven years as teacher at the University of Erlangen (1820–1827); and in 1827 he entered the newly founded University of Munich. In 1841 he was called to Berlin to counteract the Hegelian movement, and he became a member of the Academy with the privilege of lecturing at the University. He was now sixty-six, and he spent the remaining years in elaborating his system. He died in 1854.

A Brief Comparison of Fichte and Schelling as Philosophers. We have already spoken of the relation of Fichte and Schelling to the Romantic movement.What is their relation as philosophers? Fichte’s idealism is commonly called subjective because of his emphasis upon the Ego at the expense of the non-Ego. In non-technical terms Fichte gave no adequate philosophy of nature; for his assumption was that nature is only material for the reason. Nature to Fichte was only the stage upon which the reason could act. Fichte’s keen insight into human affairs blinded him to the meaning of nature. The contribution of Schelling to the philosophy of nature was not therefore unwelcomed by Fichte; for he saw that such a philosophy could easily be developed from his point of view, provided nature be regarded as a unity in the service of the reason. In brief, the development of Schelling over Fichte was this: (1) Schelling added a science of nature to Fichte’s science of mind; (2) Then he transformed Fichte’s philosophy of mind into an æsthetic philosophy of mind; (3) Then he tried in several successive attempts to find a common metaphysical ground for his own philosophy of nature and his recast philosophy of mind. While the method of Schelling was not different from that of Fichte, his general motive was different; for to Schelling the universe must not be regarded as the creation of an active moral Ego, but as having an existence of its own. While for Fichte to think is to produce, for Schelling it is to reproduce. To the investigating mind of Schelling experience and observation are the sources of knowledge; yet it must not be inferred that Schelling’s philosophy was inductive or that he derived the Ego from the non-Ego, as if the Ego had been evolved from the non-Ego. These were the days before the modern theory of evolution. Mind does not have its source in nature; on the contrary,mind and nature have a common source in the Reason. They have a parallel existence and develop according to the same law. Nature is existing Reason, mind is thinking Reason.

Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. Schelling started with Kant’s early conception of nature as dynamic—that matter exists through the interplay of the forces of attraction and repulsion. The human organism is the highest expression of such dynamic activity. In the world there is nothing dead. Matter is the lowest expression of dynamic activity; the vegetable is next, the animal next, and the human brain is the consummation of this process of productivity. Thus matter on the one hand and mind on the other are the two poles of reason in nature. Everything is life movement; everything is the oscillation between two extremes, the interplay of contrary but correlative forces. In romantic terms, nature is the Self in Becoming. Nature is a living whole which manifests itself in an ascending scale of rich and varied forces between matter and mind.

Such a conception met consistently the demands of this Romantic period.[64] The high expectations of the physicists of the previous century had been unfulfilled, for they had not succeeded in obtaining a purely mechanical explanation of the derivation of life from matter. Darwin was still to come. Medicine, which was at that time showing great progress, offered no argument for the mechanical conception of the world. There had, however, been many discoveries at this time in electricity and magnetism; and these mysterious qualities seemed to repudiate the mechanical theory. Vitalism thus usurped the place of mathematics. Spinoza ratherthan Galileo was the model of the time. Nature must be conceived as a unity in which the Divine manifests itself in its fullness.

All these influences appear in Schelling’s first philosophical undertaking. He states philosophically what Goethe states poetically. Nature is not to be described in quantities nor measured by rule. It transcends measurement. It is to be truly understood only as productivity having organic life as its goal. Nature is rational life, not mechanism. Everything has its logically determined place. Schelling used the natural science of his time to show how the connection of forces and their transformation into one another were the manifestation of divine cosmic purpose. The gaps he filled in with teleological conceptions. He used morphology with the same purpose as Goethe. He felt the same need of a deeper meaning of nature than mathematics can give—the need of a rational purposeful meaning. Goethe shows this in his “Theory of Colors” when he looks upon colors not as atomic movements, but as something essentially qualitative. Schelling, too, was not an evolutionist in the modern sense, and he did not regard one species as derived from another. He thought of species in an ascending scale, to be sure; but he saw in each only the preliminary stage to the next, and all as the divine expression. One accomplishment of nature merely precedes another in time.

The nineteenth century looked back on this Romantic science as merely a fit of excessive sentiment that has impeded the modern work of serious investigation. Yet it may safely be said that the nineteenth century has not settled the question, and that nature will always need a rational as well as a mechanical explanation.

Schelling’s Transcendental Philosophy. The Philosophy of Nature ends with the explanation of sensitivity; and it is there for Schelling that the philosophy of knowledge begins. When three years later Schelling was ready to reconstruct Fichte’s philosophy of mind—when he was ready to break with Fichte—he was influenced by the great change that had come over the thought of the Jena idealists. This change was due curiously enough to the philosophy of the intimate friend of Goethe, the poet Schiller. Here again the proximity of Weimar and Jena was the cause of the reciprocal influence of philosophy and literature. Schelling was the first to give this new thought its philosophical expression. The theory of Schiller is an æsthetic idealism in which the artistic function supplants the moral law of Fichte and Kant, and is the fundamental reality of life.