Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling (1775-1854) was a German philosopher, best known for calling architecture
“frozen music,” and for being one of the four names in the
quadrivium Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel. Other than that, Bertrand
Russell calls him philosophically unimportant, Nietzsche casually gives
him credit for despising Locke, and notes that it was Schelling who christened
the human faculty for the “supersensible” “intellectual
intuition,” thus gratifying the most heartfelt
cravings of the Germans, whose cravings were at bottom pious. Schopenhauer
comments on Schelling more frequently, but these comments are the most
uncharitable: “…The mask of unintelligibility holds
out the longest; this is only in Germany, however, where it was introduced by
Fichte, perfected by Schelling, and attained its highest climax,
finally, in Hegel, always with the happiest results… Those writers who construct
difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not
rightly know what it is they wish to say--- they have only a dull consciousness
of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; they also often
wish to conceal from themselves, and other people, that, in reality, they have
nothing to say. Like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, they wish to appear to know
what they do not know, to think what they do not think, and to say what they do
not say. (Parerga und Paralipomena). There are many more insults
of this nature in Schopenhauer, but the ones above should suffice.
…Considering all this, the
question arises, Why Schelling at all? The immediate answer is
sentimental and utterly silly, but very often such little personal things
outgrow the actual objects of our memory and loom large in our psyche, as we
are reluctant to admit, especially to ourselves, such an inane weakness. But
ever since my youth, I have remembered the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel
quadrivium of names, and although I confess that I never read Schelling, his
name sounded so pleasantly to me that I transferred my liking of his name to
Schelling the person, by sheer association.
But there is another, this time
objective reason, coming to the rescue of the subjective one, which becomes
apparent from the following narrative in the Wikipedia:
American
philosopher Ken Wilber out of the blue places Schelling as one of two philosophers who, “after
Plato, had the broadest impact on the Western mind.” Today, every period of
his thought concerning The Being is weighed by Western philosophers--
philosophy of nature, of art and of mythology and revelation. But he has not
enjoyed such reputation in every time. His work impressed the English romantic
poet and critic Coleridge, who introduced his ideas into English-speaking
culture, sometimes, unfortunately, without full acknowledgment, as in the Biographia
Literaria. Coleridge’s critical work was highly influential, and it was he
who introduced into English Schelling’s concept of the unconscious. However by
the 1950’s he was almost a forgotten philosopher even in his country Germany.
In the 1910’s and 1920’s philosophers of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism,
like Wilhelm Windelband or Richard Kroner, tended to describe him as an episode
connecting Fichte and Hegel. His late period tended to be ignored, and his
philosophy of nature, as well as philosophy of art in the 1790’s and 1800’s
were mainly focused on. In this context, Kuno Fischer characterized Schelling’s
early philosophy as aesthetic idealism, focusing his argument where he
ranked art as “the sole document and the eternal organ of philosophy.”
From socialist philosophers, such as György Lukács, he received criticism as an
anachronistic antagonist.
One
exception in that age was Heidegger who treated Schelling’s On Human Freedom
in his 1936 lectures. He found there the central themes of Western
ontology: the issues of being, existence and its freedom.
In the
1950’s, the situation began to change. In 1954, the centenary of his death, an
international conference on Schelling was held. Several German-speaking
philosophers including Karl Jaspers gave presentations on Schelling, on the
uniqueness and actuality of his thought, with the interest of philosophers
shifting toward his late period thought, where he focuses on being and
existence, or precisely the origin of existence. Schelling was the subject of
the 1954 dissertation of the eminent German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. In
1955, Jaspers published a book titled Schelling, which represents him as
a forerunner of the existentialists. Walter Schultz, one of organizers of the
1954 conference, published a book too, claiming that Schelling had made the
German Idealism complete with his late philosophy, and particularly with his
Berlin lectures in 1840’s. Schultz presented Schelling as the person who
resolved philosophical problems which Dr. Hegel had left incomplete (!), in contrast of
contemporary thought that Schelling had been overcome by Hegel much earlier,
and outdated. In 1970’s, nature was again one of philosophical interests in
relation to environmental issues. Schelling’s philosophy of nature,
particularly, his intention to construct a program, which covers both nature
and the intellectual in the same system, and to attempt to pick up the nature
as a central theme of philosophy, has been reevaluated in the contemporary
context. His influence and relation to German art scene, particularly, to
Romantic literature and visual art, has been a scientific interest since late
1960’s… Also, in relation to psychology, Schelling was considered the first
philosopher who coined the term “unconsciousness.”
Having said, or rather quoted,
all this, it should be interesting to see what my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary has to report about Schelling.
Accordingly, here is Webster’s Schelling entry:
“Schelling,
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. 1775-1854. German philosopher; professor, U. of
Jena (1798), Würzburg (1803), Munich (1827); lecturer, U. of Berlin
(1841-1846). Among his works are Ideen zu
einer Philosophie der Natur (1797), Der
Erste Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (1799), System des Transzendentalen Idealismus (1800),
Bruno oder über das Natürliche und
Göttliche Prinzip der Dinge (1802), Philosophie
und Religion (1804), and Untersuchungen
über das Wesenden Menschlichen Freiheit (1809).”
…Well, precious nothing is what
my Webster’s says about Professor
Schelling, which is of course saying a lot between the lines…
Most of this entry as it stands
now is of course stock, but I have my work cut out for me, and I will work on
the person and philosophy of Schelling in the next stage of my work, which is a
promise I make to myself.
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