## 1. Career



Schelling was born in Leonberg near Stuttgart on 27 January 1775. He
attended a Protestant seminary in Tubingen from 1790 to 1795,
where he was close friends with both Hegel and the poet and
philosopher Friedrich Holderlin. He moved to Leipzig in 1797,
then to Jena, where he came into contact with the early Romantic
thinkers, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and, via Goethe's
influence, took up his first professorship from 1798 to 1803. From
1803 to 1806 he lived in Wurzburg, whence he left for Munich,
where he mainly lived from 1806 onwards, with an interruption from
1820 to 1827, when he lived in Erlangen. He moved to Berlin in 1841 to
take up what had, until Hegel's death in 1831, been
Hegel's chair of philosophy. Although his lectures in Berlin
were initially attended by such luminaries as Kierkegaard, Engels,
Bakunin, Ranke, Burkhardt, and Alexander von Humboldt, he soon came to
be largely ignored by most of the leading thinkers of the day. It is
clear, however, that his philosophical thought still influenced many
who rejected him on mainly political grounds. He died on 20 August
1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland. Schelling's influence on many
directions in modern philosophy has been seriously underestimated in
the English-speaking world, though sustained new attention to his work
in recent years has increasingly brought him into contemporary debates
about naturalism, freedom, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology.


## 2. Transcendental Philosophy and *Naturphilosophie*



The significance of the work of the early Schelling (1795-1800)
lies in its attempts to give a new account of nature which, while
taking account of the fact that Kant had irrevocably changed the
status of nature in modern philosophy, avoids some of the consequences
of Kant's theory that were seen as problematic by Kant's
contemporaries and successors. For the Kant of the *Critique of
Pure Reason* (1781, 1787) nature is largely seen in the
'formal' sense, as that which is subject to necessary
laws. These laws are accessible to us, Kant argues, because cognition
depends on the subject bringing forms of thought, the categories, to
bear on what it perceives. The problem this leads to is how the
subject could fit into a nature conceived of in deterministic terms,
given that the subject's ability to know is dependent upon its
'spontaneous' self-caused ability to judge in terms of the
categories. Kant's response to this dilemma is to split the
'sensuous' realm of nature as law-bound appearance from
the 'intelligible' realm of the subject's cognitive
and ethical self-determination. However, if the subject is part of
nature there would seem to be no way of explaining how a nature which
we can only *know* as deterministic can give rise to a subject
which seems to transcend determinism in its knowing and in its
self-determined actions. Kant himself sought to bridge the realms of
necessity and spontaneity in the *Critique of Judgement*
(1790), by suggesting that nature itself could be seen in more than
formal terms: it also produces self-determining organisms and gives
rise to disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the subject that
contemplates its forms. The essential problems remained, however, that
(1) Kant gave no account of the genesis of the subject that transcends
its status as a piece of determined nature, and (2) such an account
would have to be able to bridge the divide between nature and
freedom.



The tensions in Schelling's philosophy of this period, which set
the agenda for most of his subsequent work, derive, then, from the
need to overcome the perceived lack in Kant's philosophy of a
substantial account of how nature and freedom come to co-exist. Two
ways out of Kantian dualism immediately suggested themselves to
thinkers in the 1780s and 90s. On the one hand, Kant's arguments
about the division between appearances and things in themselves, which
gave rise to the problem of how something 'in itself'
could give rise to appearances for the subject, might be overcome by
rejecting the notion of the thing in itself altogether. If what we
know of the object is the product of the spontaneity of the I, an
Idealist could argue that the whole of the world's
intelligibility is therefore the result of the activity of the
subject, and that a new account of subjectivity is required which
would achieve what Kant had failed to achieve. On the other hand, the
fact that nature gives rise to self-determining subjectivity would
seem to suggest that a monist account of a nature which was more than
a concatenation of laws, and was in some sense inherently
'subjective', would offer a different way of accounting
for what Kant's conception did not provide. Schelling seeks
answers to the Kantian problems in terms that relate to both these
conceptions. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the conceptions are
in one sense potentially identical: if the essence of nature is that
it produces the subjectivity which enables it to understand itself,
nature itself could be construed as a kind of
'super-subject'. The main thinkers whose work is regarded
as exemplifying these alternatives are J.G. Fichte, and Spinoza.



The source of Schelling's concern with Spinoza is the
'Pantheism controversy', which brought Spinoza's
monism into the mainstream of German philosophy. In 1783 the writer
and philosopher F.H. Jacobi became involved in an influential dispute
with the Berlin Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn over the
claim that G.E. Lessing had admitted to being a Spinozist, an
admission which at that time was tantamount to the admission of
atheism, with all the dangerous political and other consequences that
entailed. In his *On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Herr
Moses Mendelssohn*, (1785, second edition 1789), which was
influenced by his reading of Kant's first *Critique*,
Jacobi revealed a problem which would recur in differing ways
throughout Schelling's work. Jacobi's interpretation of
Spinozism was concerned with the relationship between the
'unconditioned' and the 'conditioned', between
God as the ground of which the laws of nature are the consequent, and
the linked chains of the deterministic laws of nature. Cognitive
explanation relies, as Kant claimed, upon finding a thing's
'condition'. Jacobi's question is how finding a
thing's condition can finally ground its explanation, given that
each explanation leads to a regress in which each condition depends
upon another condition *ad infinitum*. Any philosophical system
that would ground the explanation of a part of nature thus
"necessarily ends by having to discover *conditions* of
the *unconditioned*" (Scholz, ed., 1916, p. 51). For
Jacobi this led to the need for a theological leap of faith, as the
world's intelligibility otherwise threatened to become a mere
illusion, in which nothing would be finally grounded at all. In the
1787 Introduction to the first *Critique* Kant maintains this
problem of cognitive grounding can be overcome by acknowledging that,
while reason must postulate the "unconditioned (...) in all
things in themselves for everything conditioned, so that the series of
conditions should thus become complete" (Kant, *Critique of
Pure Reason* B, p. XX), by restricting knowledge to appearances,
rather than assuming it to be of "things in themselves",
the contradiction of seeking conditions of the unconditioned can be
avoided. As we have already seen, though, this gives rise precisely to
the problem of how a subject which is not conditioned like the nature
it comes to know can emerge as the ground of knowledge from
deterministic nature.



The condition of the knowledge of appearances for Kant is the
'transcendental subject', but what sort of
'condition' is the transcendental subject? The perception
that Kant has no proper answer to this problem initially unites
Schelling and Fichte. Fichte insists in the
*Wissenschaftslehre* (1794) that the unconditioned status of
the I has to be established if Kant's system is to legitimate
itself. He asserts that "It is (...) the ground of
explanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before all
positing in the I the I itself must previously be posited"
(Fichte 1971, p. 95), thereby giving the I the founding role which he
thought Kant had failed adequately to explicate. Fichte does this by
extending the consequences of Kant's claim that the cognitive
activity of the I, via which it can reflect upon *itself*,
cannot be understood as part of the causal world of appearances, and
must therefore be part of the noumenal realm, the realm of the
'unconditioned'. For Fichte the very existence of
philosophy depends upon the free act of the I which initiates the
reflection on its own activity by the I.



Schelling takes up the issues raised by Jacobi and Fichte in two texts
of 1795: *Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on the
Unconditional in Human Knowledge*, and *Philosophical Letters
on Dogmatism and Criticism*. In a move which prefigures aspects of
Heidegger's questioning of the notion of being, he reinterprets
Kant's question as to the condition of possibility of synthetic
judgements a priori as a question about why there is a realm of
judgements, a manifest world requiring syntheses by the subject for
knowledge to be produced, at all. In *Of the I*, Schelling puts
Kant's question in Fichtean terms: "how is it that the
absolute I goes out of itself and opposes a Not-I to itself?"
(*Sammtliche Werke* [**SW**], I/1, p. 175).
He maintains that the condition of knowledge, the
'positing' by the I of that which is opposed to it, must
have a different status from the determined realm which it posits:
"nothing can be posited by itself as a thing, i.e. an
absolute/unconditioned thing (*unbedingtes Ding*) is a
contradiction" (*ibid*., p. 116). However, his key worry
about Fichte's position already becomes apparent in the
*Philosophical Letters*, where he drops the Fichtean
terminology: "*How is it that I step at all out of the
absolute and move towards something opposed (auf ein
Entgegengesetztes)?*" (*ibid*., p. 294). The problem
Schelling confronts was identified by his friend Holderlin, in
the light of Jacobi's formulation of the problem of the
'unconditioned'. Fichte wished to understand the absolute
as an I in order to avoid the problem of nature 'in
itself' which creates Kantian dualism. For something to be an I,
though, it must be conscious of an other, and thus in a relationship
to that other. The overall structure of the relationship could not,
therefore, be described from only one side of that relationship.
Holderlin argued that one has to understand the structure of the
relationship of subject to object in consciousness as grounded in
'a whole of which subject and object are the parts', which
he termed 'being'. This idea will be vital to Schelling at
various times in his philosophy.



In the 1790s, then, Schelling is seeking a way of coming to terms with
the ground of the subject's relationship to the object world.
His aim is to avoid the fatalist consequences of Spinoza's
system by taking on key aspects of Kant's and Fichte's
transcendental philosophy, and yet not to fall into the trap
Holderlin identified in Fichte's conception of an absolute
I. In his *Naturphilosophie* (philosophy of nature), which
emerges in 1797 and develops in the succeeding years, and in the
*System of Transcendental Idealism* of 1800, Schelling wavers
between a Spinozist and a Fichtean approach to the
'unconditioned'. In the *Naturphilosophie* the
Kantian division between nature as appearance and nature in itself is
seen as resulting from the fact that the nature theorised in cognitive
judgements is objectified in opposition to the knowing subject. This
objectification, the result of the natural sciences' search for
fixed laws, fails to account for the living dynamic forces in nature,
including those in our own organism, with which Kant himself became
concerned in the third *Critique* and other late work, and
which had played a role in Leibniz's account of nature. Nature
in itself is thought of by Schelling as a 'productivity':
"As the object [*qua* 'conditioned
condition'] is never absolute/unconditioned (*unbedingt*)
then something per se non-objective must be posited in nature; this
absolutely non-objective postulate is precisely the original
productivity of nature" (SW I/3, p. 284). The Kantian dualism
between things in themselves and appearances is a result of the fact
that the productivity can never appear as itself and can only appear
in the form of 'products', which are the productivity
'inhibiting' itself. The products are never complete in
themselves: they are like the eddies in a stream, which temporarily
keep their shape via the resistance of the movement of the fluid to
itself that creates them, despite the changing material flowing
through them.



Schelling next tries to use the insights of transcendental philosophy,
while still avoiding Kant's dualism, to explain our knowledge of
nature. The vital point is that things in themselves and
'representations' cannot be absolutely different because
we know a world which exists independently of our will, which can yet
be affected by our will:



> 
> one can push as many transitory materials as one wants, which become
> finer and finer, between mind and matter, but sometime the point must
> come where mind and matter are One, or where the great leap that we so
> long wished to avoid becomes inevitable. (SW I/2, p. 53)
> 



The *Naturphilosophie* includes ourselves within nature, as
part of an interrelated whole, which is structured in an ascending
series of 'potentials' that contain a polar opposition
within themselves. The model is a magnet, whose opposing poles are
inseparable from each other, even though they are opposites. As
productivity nature cannot be conceived of as an object, since it is
the subject of all possible real 'predicates', of the
'eddies' of which transient, objective nature consists.
However, nature's 'inhibiting' itself in order to
become something determinate means that the 'principle of all
explanation of nature' is 'universal duality', an
inherent difference of subject and object which prevents nature ever
finally reaching stasis (SW I/3, p. 277). At the same time this
difference of subject and object must be grounded in an identity which
links them together, otherwise all the problems of dualism would just
reappear. In a decisive move for German Idealism, Schelling parallels
the idea of nature as the producing subject with the spontaneity of
the thinking subject, which is the condition of the syntheses required
for the constitution of objectivity. The problem for Schelling lies in
explicating how these two 'subjects' relate to each
other.



In the *System of Transcendental Idealism* Schelling goes back
to Fichtean terminology, though he will soon abandon most of it. He
endeavours to explain the emergence of the thinking subject from
nature in terms of an 'absolute I' coming retrospectively
to know itself in a 'history of self-consciousness' that
forms the material of the system. The *System* recounts the
history of which the transcendental subject is the result. A version
of the model Schelling establishes will be adopted by Hegel in the
*Phenomenology of Mind*. Schelling presents the process in
terms of the initially undivided I splitting itself in order to
articulate itself in the syntheses, the 'products', which
constitute the world of knowable nature. The founding stages of this
process, which bring the world of material nature into being, are
'unconscious'. These stages then lead to organic nature,
and thence to consciousness and self-consciousness. Schelling claims,
in the wake of Fichte, that the resistance of the noumenal realm to
theoretical knowledge results from the fact that "the
[practical] act [of the absolute I] via which all limitation is
posited, as condition of all consciousness, does not itself come to
consciousness" (SW I/3, p. 409). He prophetically attempts to
articulate a theory which comes to terms with the idea that thought is
driven by forces which are not finally transparent to it, of the kind
later to become familiar in psychoanalysis. How, though, does one gain
access by thought to what cannot be an object of consciousness? This
access is crucial to the whole project because without it there can be
no understanding of why the move from determined nature to the freedom
of self-determining thinking takes place at all.



Schelling adopts the idea from the early Romantic thinkers Friedrich
Schlegel and Novalis, whom he knew in Jena at this time, that art is
the route to an understanding of what cannot appear as an object of
knowledge. Philosophy cannot represent nature in itself because access
to the unconscious must be via what appears to consciousness in the
realm of theoretical knowledge. The work of art is evidently an
empirical, appearing object like any other, but if it is not more than
what it is *qua* determinable object it cannot be a work of
art, because this requires both the free judgement of the subject and
the object's conveying of something beyond its objective nature.
Although the *System*'s own very existence depends upon
the transition from theoretical to practical philosophy, which
requires the breaking-off of Jacobi's chain of
'conditions' by something unconditioned, Schelling is
concerned to understand how the highest insight must be into reality
as a product of the interrelation of both the 'conscious'
and the 'unconscious'. Reality is not, therefore,
essentially captured by a re-presentation of the objective by the
subjective. Whereas in the *System* nature begins unconsciously
and ends in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge, in the
art work: "the I is conscious according to the production,
unconscious with regard to the product" (SW I/3, p. 613). The
product cannot be understood via the intentions of its producer, as
this would mean that it became a 'conditioned' object,
something produced in terms of a pre-existing rule, and would
therefore lack what makes mere craft into art. Art is, then,
"the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy,
which always and continuously documents what philosophy cannot
represent externally" (*ibid*., p. 627). The particular
sciences can only follow the chain of conditions, via the principle of
sufficient reason, and must determine any object via its place in that
chain, a process which has no necessary end. The art object, on the
other hand, manifests what cannot be understood in terms of its
knowable conditions, because an account of the materials of which it
is made or of its status as object in the world does not constitute it
as art. Art shows what cannot be said. Philosophy cannot positively
represent the absolute because 'conscious' thinking
operates from the position where the 'absolute identity'
of the subjective and the objective has always already been lost in
the emergence of consciousness.



Although Schelling's early work did not fully satisfy either
himself, or anybody else, it manages to address, in a cogent and
illuminating fashion, many topics which affect subsequent philosophy.
The model presented in the *System* impresses not least
because, at the same time as establishing the notion of the history of
self-consciousness that would be decisive for Hegel, it offers, in a
manner which goes beyond its sources in Fichte, a model of the
relationship between the subject and its conceptually inaccessible
motivating forces which would affect thinkers from Schopenhauer, to
Nietzsche, to Freud, and beyond.


## 3. Identity Philosophy



Although the period of Schelling's 'identity
philosophy' is usually dated from the 1801 *Presentation of
My System of Philosophy* until sometime before the 1809 *On the
Essence of Human Freedom*, the project of that philosophy can be
said to be carried on in differing ways throughout his work. The
identity philosophy derives from Schelling's conviction that the
self-conscious I must be seen as a result, rather than as the
originating act it is in Fichte, and thus that the I cannot be seen as
the generative matrix of the whole system. This takes him more in the
direction of Spinoza, but the problem is still that of articulating
the relationship between the I and the world of nature, without either
reverting to Kantian dualism or failing to explain how a purely
objective nature could give rise to subjectivity.



Schelling's mature identity philosophy, which is contained in
the *System of the Whole of Philosophy and of Naturphilosophie in
Particular*, written in Wurzburg in 1804, and in other texts
between 1804 and 1807, breaks with the model of truth as
correspondence. It does so because:



> 
> It is clear that in every explanation of the truth as a correspondence
> (*Ubereinstimmung*) of subjectivity and objectivity in
> knowledge, both, subject and object, are already presupposed as
> separate, for only what is different can agree, what is not different
> is in itself one. (SW I/6, p. 138)
> 



The crucial problem is how to explain the *link* between the
subject and object world that makes judgements possible, and this
cannot be achieved in terms of how a subject can have thoughts which
correspond to an object essentially separate from it. For there to be
judgements at all what is split and then synthesised in the judgement
must, Schelling contends, in some way already be the same. This has
often been understood as leading Schelling to a philosophy in which,
as Hegel puts it in the *Phenomenology*, the absolute is the
'night in which all cows are black', because it swallows
all differentiated knowledge in the assertion that everything is
ultimately the same, namely an absolute which excludes all relativity
from itself and thus becomes inarticulable. This is not a valid
interpretation of Schelling's argument. In an early version of
the identity philosophy he had said the following:



> 
> For most people see in the essence of the Absolute nothing but pure
> night and cannot recognise anything in it; it shrinks before them into
> a mere negation of difference, and is for them something purely
> privative, whence they cleverly make it into the end of their
> philosophy (...) I want to show here (...) how that night of
> the Absolute can be turned into day for knowledge (SW I/4, p. 403).
> 



In order to try to get over the problem in monism of how the One is
also the many, Schelling, following the idea outlined above from
Holderlin, introduces a notion of 'transitive' being,
which links mind and matter as predicates of itself. Schelling
explains this 'transitivity' via the metaphor of the
earth:



> 
> you recognise its [the earth's] true essence only in the link by
> which it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its things
> and again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do not
> imagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it,
> there is another earth which is the unity of these things, rather
> *the same* which is the multiplicity is also unity, and
> *what* the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this
> necessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what
> you call its existence (...) Existence is the link of a being
> (*Wesen*) as One, with itself as a multiplicity. (SW I/7, p.
> 56)
> 



'Absolute identity' is, then, the *link* of the two
aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the *uni*verse,
and, on the other, is the changing *multi*plicity which the
knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that "The
*I* think, *I* am, is, since Descartes, the basic
mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is
not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality" (SW
I/7, p. 148), so the I is 'affirmed' as a predicate of the
being by which it is preceded. In consequence he already begins to
move away, albeit inconsistently, from the German Idealist model in
which the intelligibility of being is regarded as a result of its
having an essentially mind-like structure.



Schelling is led to this view by his understanding of the changing and
relative status of theoretical knowledge. It is the inherent
incompleteness of all finite determinations which reveals the nature
of the absolute. His description of time makes clear what he means:
"time is itself nothing but *the totality appearing in
opposition to the particular life of things*", so that the
totality "posits or intuits itself, by not positing, not
intuiting the particular" (SW I/6, p. 220). The particular is
determined in judgements, but the truth of claims about the totality
cannot be proven because judgements are necessarily conditioned,
whereas the totality is not. Given the relative status of the
particular there must, though, be a ground which enables us to be
*aware* of that relativity, and this ground must have a
different status from the knowable world of finite particulars. At the
same time, if the ground were wholly different from the world of
relative particulars the problems of dualism would recur. As such the
absolute *is* the finite, but we do not *know* this in
the manner we know the finite. Without the *presupposition* of
'absolute identity', therefore, the evident relativity of
particular knowledge becomes inexplicable, since there would be no
reason to claim that a revised judgement is predicated of the same
world as the preceding -- now false -- judgement.



Schelling summarises his theory of identity as follows:



> 
> for being, actual, real being is precisely self-disclosure/revelation
> (*Selbstoffenbarung*). If it is to be as One then it must
> disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/reveal
> itself in itself if it is not an other in itself, and is *in*
> this other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the living
> link of itself and an other. (SW I/7, p. 54)
> 



The link between the 'real' and the 'ideal'
cannot be regarded as a causal link. Although there cannot be mental
events without physical events, the former cannot be reduced to being
the causal results of the latter: "For real and ideal are only
different views of one and the same substance" (SW I/6, p. 501).
Schelling wavers at this time between a 'reflexive'
position of the kind which Hegel will soon try to articulate, in
which, in Schelling's terms, "the sameness of the
subjective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows itself,
and is the subject and object of itself" (SW I/6, p. 173), in
the 'identity of identity and difference', and the sense
that this position cannot finally circumscribe the structure of the
absolute. The structure of reflection, where each aspect reflects
itself and then is reflected in the other, upon which this account of
the identity of subject and object relies, must be grounded in a being
which carries it:



> 
> reflection (...) only knows the universal and the particular as
> two relative negations, the universal as relative negation of the
> particular, which is, as such, without reality, the particular, on the
> other hand, as a relative negation of the universal. (...)
> something independent of the concept must be added to posit the
> substance as such. (SW I/6, p. 185)
> 



Without this independent basis subject and object would merely be, as
Schelling thinks they are in Fichte, relative negations of each other,
leading to a circle "inside which a nothing gains reality by the
relation to another nothing" (SW I/4, p. 358). Schelling
prophetically distinguishes between the cognitive -- reflexive
-- ground of finite knowledge and the real -- non-reflexive
-- ground that sustains the movement of negation from one finite
determination to another. As a two-sided relationship reflection alone
always entails the problem that the subject and the object in a case
of reflection can only be *known* to be the same via that which
cannot appear in the reflection. If I am to recognise myself
*as* myself in a mirror, rather than see a random object in the
world, I must *already* be familiar with myself *before*
the reflection, in a way which is not part of the reflection. This
means a complete system based on reflection is impossible, because, in
order for the system to be grounded, it must presuppose as external to
itself what it claims is part of itself. Schelling will, in his
philosophy from the 1820s onwards, raise versions of this objection
against Hegel's system.



Schelling's own dissatisfaction with his early versions of
identity theory derives from his rejection of Spinozism. Spinoza
regards the move from God to the world of 'conditions' as
a logical consequence of the nature of God. Schelling becomes
convinced that such a theory gives no reason why the absolute, the
'unconditioned', should manifest itself in a world of
negative 'conditions' at all. Schelling is therefore
confronted with explaining why there is a transition from the absolute
to the finite world, a finite world which he comes to see increasingly
in terms of the suffering and tragedy it has to involve. In
*Philosophy and Religion*, of 1804, he claims, like Jacobi,
that there is no way of mediating between conditioned and
unconditioned, and already makes the distinction between
'negative' and 'positive' philosophy, which
will form the heart of his late work. Explicating the structure of the
finite world leads to "negative philosophy, but much has already
been gained by the fact that the negative, the realm of nothingness,
has been separated by a sharp limit from the realm of reality and of
what alone is positive" (SW I/6, p. 43). The question which
comes to concern Schelling is how philosophy can come to terms with a
ground which cannot be regarded as the rational explanation of the
finite world, because the finite world involves so much that makes no
rational sense.


## 4. The 'Ages of the World'



Schelling's work from his middle period (1809-1827) is
usually referred to as the philosophy of the *Ages of the
World* (**WA** = *Weltalter*), after the title
of the unfinished work of that name he worked on in the period
1809-1827. The work characteristic of this period begins with
the 1809 *On the Essence of Human Freedom* (**FS**
= *Freiheitsschrift*) (written in Stuttgart). The WA philosophy
is an attempt to explain the emergence of an intelligible world at the
same time as coming to terms with mind's inextricable relation
to matter. The initial concern is to avoid Spinoza's fatalism,
which he thinks renders the human freedom to do good *and* evil
incomprehensible. Schelling's crucial objection is to the idea
that evil should be understood as merely another form of negativity
which can be comprehended by insight into the inherent lack in all
finite parts of a totality, rather than as a positive fact relating to
the nature of human freedom. He now sees the fundamental
contradictions of the *Naturphilosophie* in terms of the
relationship of the intelligibility of nature and ourselves to a
ground without which there could be no intelligibility, but which is
not the explicable cause of intelligibility. In an attempt to get to
grips with the problem of the ground of the finite world Schelling
introduces a Kant-derived conception of 'willing' in the
FS which will be influential for Schopenhauer's conception of
the Will: "In the last and highest instance there is no other
being but willing. Willing is primal being, and all the predicates of
primal being only fit willing: groundlessness, eternity, being
independent of time, self-affirmation" (SW I/7, p. 350).
Schelling now establishes a more conflictual version of the structure
of the identity philosophy. The 'ground' is
'groundless' -- in the sense of
'uncaused' -- and it must be understood in terms of
freedom if a Spinozist determinism is to be avoided. This means there
cannot be an explanation of why there is the finite world, because
that would entail taking the ground as a cause and thus rendering
freedom non-existent.



At the same time Schelling insists there must be that against which
freedom can be manifest -- a being which is not free and is
therefore necessitated -- for it to be meaningful freedom at all.
The theory is based on the antagonisms between opposing forces which
constitute the 'ages of the world', the past, present, and
future. He argues that the world whose origins the WA wishes to
understand must entail the *same* conflicting forces which
still act, though not necessarily in the same *form*, in this
world, of which the mind is an aspect: "Poured from the source
of things and the same as the source, the human soul has a
co-knowledge/con-science (*Mitwissenschaft*) of creation"
(WA, p. 4). Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us:
"an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious
principle", which must yet in some way be identical. The same
structure applies to what Schelling means by 'God'. At
this point his account of the ground is not consistent, but this
inconsistency points to the essential issue Schelling is trying to
understand, namely whether philosophy can give a rational account of
the fact of the manifest world. As that which makes the world
intelligible, God relates to the ground in such a way that the
'real', which takes the form of material nature, is
'in God' but "is not God seen absolutely, i.e.
insofar as He exists; for it is only the ground of His existence, it
is *nature* in God; an essence which is inseparable from God,
but different from Him" (SW I/7, p. 358). The point is that God
would be just be some kind of inarticulable, static One if there were
not that which He transcends: without opposition, Schelling argues,
there is no life and no sense of development, which are the highest
aspects of reality. The aim of the move away from Spinoza is to avoid
the sense of a world complete in itself which would render freedom
illusory because freedom's goal would already be determined as
the goal of the totality. Schelling starts to confront the idea that
the rational reconciliation of freedom and necessity that had been
sought by Kant in the acknowledgement of the necessity of the law, and
which was the aim of German Idealism's attempt to reconcile mind
and nature, might be intrinsically unattainable.



Wolfram Hogrebe has claimed that the WA philosophy is an ontological
theory of predication. Being, as initially One and enclosed within
itself, is not manifest, and has no reason to be manifest. Hogrebe
terms this 'pronominal being'. The *same* being
must also, given that there is now a manifest world, be
'predicative being', which "flows out, spreads,
gives itself" (SW I/8, p. 210-211). The contradiction
between the two kinds of being is only apparent. Schelling maintains,
in line with the identity philosophy, that the "properly
understood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannot
be *as the same* something and also the opposite thereof, but
this does not prevent the same, which is A, being able, as an other,
to be not A" (SW I/8, p. 213-4). One aspect of being, the
dark force, which he sometimes terms 'gravity', is
contractive, the other expansive, which he terms 'light'.
Dynamic processes are the result of the interchange between these
ultimately identical forces. If they were wholly separate there would
either be no manifest universe, because contraction would dominate, or
the universe would dissipate at infinite speed because expansion would
dominate. The result would be the same: there would not be a world. If
something is to be *as* something it must both be, in the
positive sense in which everything else is, which makes it
indeterminately positive, pronominal, and it must have a relationship
to what it is not, in order to be determinate, which brings it into
the realm of predication by taking it beyond itself. In the WA the One
comes into contradiction with itself and the two forces constantly vie
with each other. Differences must, however, be grounded in unity, as
otherwise they could not be *manifest* at all as differences.
The ground is now increasingly regarded as the source of the
transitory nature of everything particular, and less and less as the
source of tranquil insight into how we can be reconciled to finite
existence. The mood of the WA is summed up in Schelling's
reference to the "veil of melancholy which is spread over the
whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life"
(SW I/7, p. 399). The source of this melancholy is that everything
finite must 'go to ground' and that we are *aware*
of this. Awareness thus both makes sense of things and yet is also
what is underpinned by a negativity it must constantly seek to come to
terms with.



The abandonment of his residual Spinozism leads Schelling to a growing
concern with the tensions which result from contradictions that are
also embodied in human beings. The ages of the world are constituted
by the development of forms and structures in the material and the
mental world. This development depends upon the expanding
force's interaction with the contracting force's slowing
of any expansion, which allows transient but determinate forms to
develop. This process also gives rise to language, which Schelling
regards as the model for the development of the whole world because it
manifests how expansion and the release of tension can lead to
intelligibility, rather than mere dissipation:



> 
> It seems universal that every creature which cannot contain itself or
> draw itself together in its own fullness, draws itself together
> outside itself, whence e.g. the elevated miracle of the formation of
> the word in the mouth belongs, which is a true creation of the full
> inside when it can no longer remain in itself. (WA I, p. 56-7)
> 



Language as 'contracted' material signifier, and
'expanding' ideal meaning repeats the basic structure of
the WA, and Schelling insists that, like the material world without
the 'ideal' capacity for expansion, language can become
'congealed'. This interaction between what is contained in
itself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives rise
to consciousness, and thus to an inherent tension within
consciousness, which can only be itself by its relation to an other.
Hegel uses a related model of subjectivity, but Schelling will come to
reject Hegel's model for its failure to confront the ultimately
irresolvable tension in all subjectivity. Schelling's later
philosophy will present a subject whose origin prevents it from ever
achieving the 'self-presence' that Hegel tries to
explicate by setting out the complete structure of
'self-reflection' in the other. Schelling's WA
philosophy is never completed: its Idealist aim of systematically
unifying subject and object by comprehending the real development of
history from the very origins of being founders on problems concerning
the relationship between philosophical system and historical
contingency which do not admit of solutions. Furthermore, the
structures he develops lead him to ideas which take him beyond
Idealism and make him one of the crucial precursors of existential and
other non-Idealist forms of modern philosophy.


## 5. Positive and Negative Philosophy, and the Critique of Hegel



Schelling has often been understood as providing the transitional
'objective idealist' link between Fichte and Hegel. By
regarding Hegel's system as the culmination of German Idealism
this interpretation fails to do justice to Schelling's real
philosophical ambitions. Many of these insights, particularly in the
later philosophy (1827-1854), directly and indirectly influenced
the ideas of thinkers, like Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Adorno, who were critical of Hegel's claim to
articulate a complete philosophical system.



The differences between Hegel and Schelling derive from their
respective approaches to understanding the absolute. For Hegel the
absolute is the *result* of the self-cancellation of everything
finite, whose mode of being is precisely to change into something
different. Philosophy can therefore articulate the nature of the
absolute by an account of how finite determinations are always
transcended. This takes the form of the 'negation of the
negation', in a system whose end comprehends its beginning. For
Hegel the result becomes known when the beginning negates itself as
being 'in itself' to becomes being 'for
itself' at the end of the system, thus in a process in which it
reflects itself to itself by becoming other to itself. Schelling
already becomes publicly critical of Hegel while working on a later
version of the WA philosophy in Erlangen in the 1820s, but makes his
criticisms fully public in lectures given in Munich in the 1830s, and
in the 1840s and 1850s as professor in Berlin. The aim of the Idealist
systems was for thought to reflect what it is not -- being
-- as really itself, even as it appears not to be itself, thereby
avoiding Kant's dualism. The issue between Schelling and Hegel
is whether the grounding of reason by itself is not in fact a sort of
philosophical narcissism, in which reason admires its reflection in
being without being able fully to articulate its relationship to that
reflection. Like Hegel, Schelling argues that it is not the particular
manifestation of knowledge which tells me the truth about the world,
but rather the necessity of moving from one piece of knowledge to the
next. However, a logical reconstruction of the process of knowledge
can, for Schelling, only be a reflection of thought by itself. The
real process cannot be described in philosophy, because the cognitive
ground of knowledge and the real ground, although they are inseparable
from each other, cannot be shown to *reflect* each other.



Dieter Henrich characterises Hegel's conception of the absolute
as follows: "The absolute is the finite to the extent to which
the finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself"
(Henrich 1982, p. 82). Hegel's system depends upon showing how
each particular way of conceiving of the world has an internal
contradiction. This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive
ways of grasping the world, until the point where there can be no more
comprehensive way because there is no longer any contradiction to give
rise to it. The very fact of the finite limitations of empirical
thought therefore becomes what gives rise to the infinite, which, in
Hegel's terms, is thought that is bounded by itself and by
nothing else.



Schelling accepts such a conception, to which he substantially
contributed in his early philosophy, as the way to construct a
'negative' system of philosophy, because it explains the
logic of change, once there is a world to be explained. The conception
does not, though, explain why there is a developing world at all, but
merely reconstructs in thought the necessary structure of development
on the basis of necessities in thought. Schelling's own attempt
at explaining the world's ontological and historical facticity
will lead him to a 'philosophical theology' which traces
the development of mythology and then of Christian revelation in his
*Philosophy of Mythology* and *Philosophy of
Revelation*, which, like all his substantial works after 1811, are
not published in his lifetime. The failure of his philosophical
theology does not, though, necessarily invalidate his philosophical
arguments against Hegel. His alternative to the "common mistake
of every philosophy that has existed up to now" -- the
"merely logical relationship of God to the world"
(*System der Weltalter*, p. 57) -- Schelling terms
'positive philosophy'. The 'merely logical
relationship' entails a reflexivity, in which the world
necessarily follows from the nature of God, and God and the world are
therefore the 'other of themselves'. Hegel's system
tries to obviate the facticity of the world by understanding reason as
the world's immanent self-articulation. Schelling, in contrast,
insists that human reason cannot explain its *own* existence,
and therefore cannot encompass itself and its other within a system of
philosophy. We cannot, he maintains, make sense of the manifest world
by beginning with reason, but must instead begin with the contingency
of being and try to make sense of it with the reason which is only one
aspect of it and which cannot be explained in terms of its being a
representation of the true nature of being.



Schelling contends that the identity of thought and being cannot be
articulated *within* thought, because thought must
*presuppose* that they are identical in a way which thought, as
one side of a relation, cannot comprehend. By redefining the
'concept' in such a way that it is always already both
subject and object, Hegel aims to avoid any presuppositions on either
the subject or the object side, allowing the system to complete itself
as the 'self-determination of the concept'. Schelling
presents the basic alternative as follows:



> 
> For either the concept would have to go first, and being would have to
> be the consequence of the concept, which would mean it was no longer
> absolute being; or the concept is the consequence of being, then we
> must begin with being without the concept. (SW II/3, p. 164)
> 



Hegel attempts to merge concept and being by making being part of a
structure of self-reflection, rather than the basis of the
interrelation between subject and object. In Schelling's terms,
Hegel therefore invalidly assumes that 'essence', what we
know of things, which is one side of the relationship between being
and essence, can articulate its identity with the other side in the
'concept', because the other side is revealed as being
'nothing' until it has entered into a relationship which
makes it determinate as a knowable moment of the whole process. For
Hegel, on the other hand, Schelling has to invoke being as something
immediate: this means it must be wholly opaque, and so is equivalent
to nothing.



The problem which Hegel does not overcome is that the identity of
essence and being cannot be *known*, because, as Schelling
claims of his concept of being, "existing is not here the
consequence of the concept or of essence, but rather existence is here
itself the concept and itself the essence" (SW II/3, p. 167).
The problem of reflection cannot be overcome in Hegel's manner:
identifying one's reflection in a mirror as oneself (understood
now as a metaphor for essence) entails, as we saw above, a prior
non-reflexive moment if one is to know that the reflection *is*
oneself, rather than a random reflected object. How far Schelling
moves from any reflexive version of identity philosophy is evident in
the following from the *Introduction to the Philosophy of
Revelation or Foundation of the Positive Philosophy* of
1842-3:



> 
> our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature
> which has passed through everything, it is precisely just *our*
> consciousness (...) for the consciousness of man is not = the
> consciousness of nature (...) Far from man and his activity
> making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is most
> incomprehensible. (SW II/3, p. 5-7)
> 



Schelling refuses to allow that reason can confirm its status via its
reflection in being:



> 
> what we call the world, which is *so completely contingent*
> both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression of
> something which has arisen by the *necessity of reason*
> (...) it contains a *preponderant* mass of
> *unreason*. (*Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie*, p.
> 99)
> 



The contemporary ramifications of the debate between Schelling and
Hegel have been given new significance by the continuing elaboration
of 'non-metaphysical' readings of Hegel by Robert Pippin
and others. If Hegel is really the philosopher who insists that
legitimation can only be in terms of the account we can give of how we
came to adopt the forms of legitimation of our society, there being no
extra-mundane perspective on these forms, how far is he from
Schelling's moves against rationalist metaphysics in his later
philosophy? The difference between Hegel and Schelling seems here to
lie above all in Schelling's insistence that one cannot reduce
the ways in which we face up to the terrors and irrationality of
existence to what can be achieved by a philosophical system that makes
sense of negativity by showing it has a rational basis. His attention
to art and the unconscious in his early philosophy already suggests
this direction in his later thinking.



Schelling is one of the first philosophers seriously to begin the
critique of the model of metaphysics based on the idea of true
representation, a critique which can be seen as one of the key aspects
of modern philosophy from Heidegger to the later Wittgenstein and
beyond. He is, at the same time, unlike some of his successors,
committed to an account of human reason which does not assume that
reason's incapacity to ground itself should lead to an
abandonment of rationality or the reduction to reason to the exercise
of power, in the manner of Nietzsche. This is one of the respects in
which Schelling has again become part of contemporary philosophical
debate, where the need to seek means of legitimation which do not rely
on the notion of a rationality inherent in the world remains a major
challenge. Above all, Schelling's account of mind and world,
particularly his insistence on the need not to limit our conception of
nature to what can be objectified by scientific methods, is, in the
light of the ecological crisis, proving to be more durable than his
reception might until recently have suggested. The question Schelling
still poses is how the capacity for expanding human knowledge and
control of nature can be reconciled with sustainable ways of
inhabiting that nature.


## 6. The Schelling Revival



Philosophical responses to Schelling in the German-speaking world
during the post-War era form a fairly continuous tradition, with
perhaps the main innovations being Frank 1975 and Schulz 1975, which
shift some of the focus of research towards his late philosophy and
the critique of Hegel. In the English-speaking world, in contrast, a
wider reception of Schelling only really got underway in the 1990s.
This was manifested in a considerable increase in the number of books
and articles on, and translations of Schelling, and in the foundation
of the American Schelling Society. The decisive shift here was the
claim that, rather than being, as he largely had been in Anglophone
philosophy, a stage on the path from Kant, via Fichte, to Hegel,
Schelling actually opens up aspects of modern philosophy which are
independent of Hegelianism, and can challenge Hegel's systematic
philosophy (Bowie 1993). As Bowie showed, Schelling can therefore be
brought into productive connection with a range of philosophers, like
Heidegger, Derrida, and others who have been influential in debates
about the nature and aims of modern philosophy. The ensuing reception
of Schelling was given a boost by Zizek (1997), which shows how
Schelling's philosophy relates closely to aspects of Lacan that
form the focus of Zizek's previous work on Hegel. Since then the
growing Schelling reception has taken divergent paths, which reflect
the perennially contested nature of Schelling interpretation. This
reception involves some paradigmatic differences, of the kind that
ensue from conflicting ways of approaching texts from the history of
philosophy, from historicist reconstruction, to using the texts to
question prevailing contemporary positions in philosophy in the way
the Anglophone reception of Hegel by Brandom, McDowell, Pippin, and
others has done. These differing approaches have offered new
perspectives on the theological and other sources of Schelling's
philosophy, detailed historical and philosophical analysis of the
finer detail of work from differing periods, Schelling's role in
the genesis of psychoanalysis (see, particularly, Ffytche (2012),
which gives an exemplary historical, philosophical, and psychological
account of the issue), and competing claims as to what constitutes the
essence of Schellingian philosophy.



The bibliography below gives an indication of the basic content of
some of the books that have appeared as part of the Schelling revival.
The tensions between the approaches in these books both point to key
issues in the understanding of Schelling's philosophy, and
involve difficulties that are inseparable from engagement with the
history of philosophy. The attempt to interpret philosophy from the
past demands an adequate reconstruction of the way philosophical
issues were constituted in the era of the philosopher in question, on
the assumption that philosophy, in various ways, is constituted
dialogically. Schelling's relationship to Kant and Fichte
suggests what is at issue here, and raises the further issue that how
Kant and Fichte themselves are interpreted repeats the same problem.
At the same time, if Schelling is to be seen as contributing to our
contemporary philosophical understanding, such contextual
reconstruction can get in the way of interpretations which build
critically on his work with a view to using it to illuminate the
present. Examples of such issues are examined below in relation to
some characteristic recent contributions to the Schelling
literature.



Some of Schelling's most important philosophical concerns relate
to the modern understanding of nature, which is, of course, dominated
by unparalleled advances in the natural sciences. One of the reasons
Schelling came to be neglected was in part because his conception of
nature in the *Naturphilosophie* was seen as being overtaken by
those sciences. The revival of interest in Schelling relates not least
to the realisation that what is now seen in terms of the ecological
crisis can be interpreted in ways which suggest the kind of
alternative conception of humankind's relationship to nature
paradigmatically present in Schelling's objection to Fichte:
'in the last analysis what is the essence of his whole opinion
of nature? It is this: that nature should be used [...] and that
it is there for nothing more than to be used; his principle, according
to which he looks at nature, is the economic teleological
principle' (SW I/7 p. 17). Jason Wirth argues that the
industrialised world's likely leading to the sixth Great
Extinction event 'opens a space to appreciate the radicality of
Schelling's ethical and ontological efforts to respond to the
positivism and anthropocentrism at the heart of the ecological
crisis' (Wirth 2015: xv). He does so on the assumption that
'the basic case for Schelling's intrinsic interest and
contemporary relevance has been made (xi), so that we can move beyond
'explication' to 'develop the fundamental issues at
stake in his thought' (ibid.).



The danger here is that such development can lead to wide-ranging
claims for Schelling that don't always take adequate account of
other approaches to the issues. How far is Schelling's
'retrieval of the question of nature' (6) dependent on
precisely those aspects of his *Naturphilosophie* which came to
be widely rejected, and how can that philosophy be interpreted so that
the reasons for that rejection are overcome? Whether it can be
justified by metaphysical argument or not, seeing nature in
Kant's 'formal' sense as a 'system of
necessary laws' is a plausible way of characterising one key
assumption on which the investigations of the modern sciences are
based. If that were all that is to be said about nature, there would
be no point in trying to revive Schelling's undoubtedly fruitful
views on nature as a 'productivity', but neither can
Schelling's conception be used as a wholesale alternative that
somehow obviates the 'formal' sense of nature.



Wirth maintains 'Schelling's nature from the perspective
of its own *living* or wild ground - is no longer
surrounding us as a place in which are located. We are the
earth's bio-regions' (22). Hamilton Grant (2005) can be
seen as seeking to cash in such a claim: 'it is an argument of
this book, as it was of Schelling's, that metaphysics cannot be
pursued in isolation from physics. To do so entails the reconstruction
not only of Schelling's naturephilosophy, therefore, but the
repairing of the context from which it begins' (2005: 8).
Hamilton Grant provides a wealth of instructive historical detail from
that context, but then infers from it that 'the enemy in all
this is all post-Cartesian European philosophy's elimination of
the concept, even the existence, of nature, a deficiency common
equally to Kant and the postkantians' (viii). It seems, though,
hard to square this kind of totalising claim with aspects, especially
of the early Marx and the Frankfurt School, for example, who were
directly and indirectly influenced by Schelling.



Any analysis of the issues here must take account of their relation to
the effects of political economy on how nature comes to be understood,
otherwise the philosophical perspective can actually obscure key
aspects of the issue of nature in modernity. There are evidently
important issues here, and both Wirth and Hamilton Grant offer
interesting philosophical and historical perspectives on aspects of
them, but they do so at the risk of making claims that rely on a
limited, exclusively philosophical perspective: 'the present
work asserts firstly that Schellingianism is resurgent every time
philosophy *reaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique of
metaphysics, its subjectivist-epistemological transcendentalism, and
its isolation of physics from metaphysics*' (5), and this
entails 'the systematic undoing of the critical
revolution' (6). It perhaps makes more sense, however, to
suggest that a resurgence of 'Schellingianism', in the
sense of radical questioning of humankind's relationship both to
internal and external nature, comes about when the concrete forms of
that relationship, as they do in the contemporary ecological crisis,
result in real historical breakdown. Whether a metaphysical account
building on Schelling's idea of nature as productivity rather
than product, or on the primacy of being before reflection can do more
than add to an already existing concrete *historical*
revelation of the blindness of certain influential forms of philosophy
to alternative views of nature depends on how one now sees the tasks
of philosophy in the face of that breakdown.



Further difficulties in the reception of Schelling relate to claims
about what the real core of his philosophy is, and these are
compounded by the fact that he changed the emphasis, if not
necessarily the underlying core, of his philosophy quite radically
throughout his career. It might be argued that, rather than seeking to
locate Schelling in a framework that is supposed to constitute the
essence of his philosophy, one should use his explorations of nature,
freedom, language, theology, existence, etc., where they are most
fruitful in relation to both historical and contemporary issues.
Whistler (2013) and Matthews (2011) both make claims regarding the
core of Schelling's thinking, and thereby, while offering much
scholarly and historical insight, and detailed attempts to explicate
some of Schelling's more intractable texts, can also obscure
some dimensions of that thinking. Both Whistler and Matthews attend
almost exclusively to Schelling's earlier
*Naturphilosophie* and identity-philosophy.



Whistler claims his 'book is, [...], an attempt to
reconstruct Schelling's philosophy of the time, the
*Identitatssystem*, by means of a focus on the role the
symbol plays therein' (Whistler 2012: vi). The book's
value lies in its cogent and extensive reconstruction and
interpretation of some of the detail of that system, which has not
been attempted before in English. However, this leads to claims like
the following, that in the *Identitatssystem*: 'an
absolute system is engendered which has no concern for reference or
for the integrity of particular scientific pursuits' (vii). This
claim depends not least on an admittedly sophisticated account of a
small part of Schelling's *Philosophy of Art* on the
nature of language as 'symbol' in a specific sense, which
sees language as 'producing' its object, rather than as a
form of representation of a pre-existing world. Language is here
essentially performative, as in such things as promises, vows, etc.:
'Referential language talks about reality more or less
accurately; productive language is reality more or less
intensely' (208), so that 'Meaning is performed in and as
being; it is thus wholly immanent to, and ultimately identical with,
being' (201). The ultimate aim of this is to arrive at a new
kind of theology: 'In short, theology must be poietic, not
referential -- produce God, not refer to him (210).



There is much to be said for seeing language, in Charles
Taylor's terms, as *both* 'constitutive'
(poietic), and 'designative' (referential), as the
tradition from Hamann to Heidegger suggests. It is, though, hard to
make sense of a conception that seems so cavalier about how language
is also changed by scientific activity that can invalidate previous
ways of talking about things. It is noticeable that such problems
arise when the goal of a Schelling interpretation is essentially
theological. Moreover, concentrating mainly on the early Schelling
omits other dimensions of his view of language that can either
complement or contradict what ensues from the ideas of the identity
philosophy. The later Schelling, for example, asserts: 'One is
almost tempted to say: language itself is only faded mythology, in it
is preserved in only abstract and formal differences what mythology
preserves in still living and concrete differences' (SW II/1 p.
52). This sustains the idea of poiesis, but opens up different issues
with regard to language's relation to philosophy and
theology.



Matthews also concentrates on the earlier Schelling from a perspective
where theology plays a major role, revealing informative connections
of the young Schelling's philosophy to Pietists such as
Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and Phillip Matthaus Hahn, and
offering discussions of how Schelling moves away from Kant. However,
the dangers of a theological interpretation of Schelling are already
apparent in Matthews' agenda: 'The speculative thesis of
this work is that there exists in the work of Schelling a possible
schema for a new configuration of unity and freedom capable of
overcoming the destructive void of contemporary philosophy'
(Matthews 2011: 27). This supposedly new configuration involves:
'the realization of nature in its sacred status as the deity
externalized, the spirit of the divine made flesh' (30). What is
at issue is supposed to be manifest in the experience of art that
transcends the 'static categories of the understanding'
(22): 'it is precisely this experience, this sublime realization
of the oneness of our natures, which overcomes our alienation and
redeems us, making us whole again with our nature' (34). These
rather grandiose claims may have made some sense during the period of
the early Schelling, but invocation of 'a telos that requires
humans to act and order their lives so as to best express the harmony
of the universe' (69) seems to ignore the subsequent
developments of modernity in science and technology, which manifests
anything but the 'harmony of the universe'.



Using theologically based interpretation of philosophy from the past
while seeking to circumvent the political, social, and scientific
experience of the modern era too easily suggests avoidance rather than
confrontation of the contradictions of that era. Such an approach can
really only invoke Schelling if one keeps to his early work, and it is
notable that Matthews's does not mention the effects of Jacobi
and the early Romantics even on the early Schelling's project,
which make it hard to think of Schelling solely in terms of a
theological harmony. The claim that the early Schelling involves the
idea that 'our way of thinking does, in this regard, actually
manifest the structure of nature' (183) also ignores
Schelling's later existential claims, like the following:
'our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that
nature which has passed through everything, it is precisely just
*our* consciousness ... for the consciousness of man is
not = the consciousness of nature.... Far from man and his
activity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is
most incomprehensible (SW II/3 pp. 5-7). If even Schelling
himself comes to question a theologically directed harmonisation of
humankind's relationship to the world, it seems questionable to
construct an account of Schelling based wholly on the idea of such
harmonisation.



McGrath (2021) also takes a predominantly theological approach, but
this time in an extensive and informative examination of
Schelling's late philosophy: 'What is ultimately at stake
in the Schelling-Hegel dispute, then - and this is still
not sufficiently recognised by the new generation of scholars of
German idealism - is the philosophical interpretation of
Christianity, or as I will put it in this work, the interpretation of
the end of Christianity' (McGrath 2021: 6). The essential
tension in philosophical interpretation of Schelling McGrath points to
is suggested when he cites Markus Gabriel's deflationary
understanding of 'God' in Schelling: 'For Schelling,
it is crucial to note that "God" refers to nothing more or
less than the incessant and polymorphous becoming of intelligibility.
God is sense, the almost trivial fact that the ways we access the
world (our sense-making practices, which generate fields of sense)
belong to the world itself' (Gabriel 2015: 82). McGrath, in
contrast, talks in terms of: 'An absolute future when pantheism
will be real, when God will actually *be everything*, without
any diminishment of the reality of individual things, the eventfulness
of time or the freedom of the human being - this is the
master-thought of the late Schelling' (McGrath 2021: 65).



There can be no philosophical argument that could substantiate such a
vision, and this suggests where the philosophy/theology division
becomes decisive in Schelling interpretation. McGrath has to rely on
faith: 'By a theology of revelation I mean a theology which
assumes, not blind fidelity to authoritatively pronounced
propositions, but an ordinary intellect "illumined" by
faith' (11). This leads, rather as it does in Matthews, to some
fairly grandiose claims: 'I mean to outline, elaborate and
evaluate the logical, moral and existential arguments Schelling offers
us for assuming revelation as an explanation for nature, the human
situation and history' (14), and 'Schelling is proposing
that the New Testament should be taken as offering us knowledge of
ultimate things, knowledge that can and should be appropriated by
philosophy in a post-Kantian register' (30). One's
response to this will depend very much on one's relationship to
theology, but interpretations like the following can make one wary of
trying to actualise Schelling's philosophy from a theological
perspective: 'Justice and a flourishing human civilisation will
only be achieved via a universal experience of the redeeming God
- this is the social-political upshot of the Philosophy of
Revelation' (240). The undeniable virtues of McGrath's
book lie in the wealth of detailed exploration of Schelling's
later texts, in his investigation of the distinction between negative
and positive philosophy and its relationship to the critique of Hegel,
and in his clarification of the idea of a 'philosophical
religion' that is to be achieved via positive philosophy:
'positive philosophy is the *experience* of the
eventfulness of history, the disclosure, which can only be empirical,
of *meaningful* history' (50-1).



What the recent philosophical and theological takes on Schelling can
be said to share is their insistence on his widening the scope of
'meaning' beyond a semantic view, to include all the ways
in which the world is disclosed to us. Gabriel focuses on the
*Philosophy of Mythology*, and he sets himself an essentially
philosophical agenda in which it is read as a 'combination of
three approaches, an ontotheological, an anthropological, and one
based on the history of self-consciousness' (Gabriel 2006: 6),
such that 'One can see in Schelling's thinking the attempt
to shift the anthropological component of cognition into the centre of
the founding of metaphysics' (23). His 'concept of the
history of religion as the history of self-consciousness is
constitutive for the whole of the Philosophy of Mythology' (52).
Whereas modern natural scientific understanding sees meaning in terms
of semantic relations between language and a world of physical
objects: 'Mythological consciousness [...] does not
exclusively inhabit a *world of meaning*, but rather a
*world of meaningfulness*' (31). Schelling therefore, in
a manner that is echoed in certain respects by Heidegger, 'seeks
to oppose modern [scientistic] consciousness via the proof that it
arose from mythological consciousness' (31).



As such, what differentiates Schelling's 'history of
self-consciousness' from Hegel's is that from his early
philosophy onwards 'the last thing for Schelling is always the
admission that self-consciousness comes up against a ground that
precedes it which it has itself not posited' (472-3). In
the *System of Transcendental Idealism* this is what leads to
art being the culmination of the system, and, in the late philosophy,
religion as 'the reference (re-ligio) of consciousness to a
being that is not posited by itself' (473). Although
Schelling's late philosophy seeks to sustain the idea of a
positive philosophy as 'a never completable proof of God'
(474), what remains most significant for contemporary understanding
that no longer thinks in theological terms is that 'our
existence is always accompanied by an ineliminable contingency or
facticity which corresponds to the fact that the *world itself*
is groundless, even though its contents are necessarily connected to
each other' (475-6). One way of seeing this, as suggested
by Bowie (2022), is to focus on the enduring ways in which, as the
early Schelling and the early Romantics proposed, aesthetic questions
can show limitations in modern philosophy whose predominant focus is
epistemological.



Schelling was for a long time seen as a figure of the past. The
contributors to the Schelling revival all in some respects seek to
revive him for contemporary philosophy, which, as we have seen, can
lead to perhaps rather grandiose claims. Such approaches do, though,
offer challenges to some dominant ways of doing philosophy, but can at
times risk excluding Schelling from more mainstream debate. Frank, as
has Gabriel both in the book just discussed and in other work, has
shown that it is possible to interpret Schelling in ways which
directly affect almost any approach to philosophy, be it
European/Continental, or analytic. Frank has recently done so by
considering Schelling's explications, which he returns to in
various ways throughout his career, of the 'identity of nature
and spirit/mind [*Geist*]' (Frank 2018: X). His
conclusion is that 'Schelling has shown the way out of a
thousands of years old spiritualistic philosophy of the subject that
is hostile to nature, and brought nature to the same level as
spirit/mind' (269). This might also sound suspiciously
grandiose, but Frank both refers in detail to contextual historical
sources that have been largely forgotten or neglected, and presents
logical and metaphysical reasons for taking Schelling's
explorations of identity seriously with respect to contemporary
debates concerning physicalism, reductive naturalism, and the
like.



The core idea here is that the very philosophical difficulties still
encountered with respect to notions of 'identity' may
actually themselves be an indication of something important,
especially with respect to the relationship between mind and nature.
One sense of identity leads, as Leibniz suggested, to the idea that
things are only ever strictly identical with themselves, which
precludes saying anything that differentiates a thing as something at
all; the other sense of identity raises the problem that if things are
to be identified - knowledge being otherwise impossible -
they must differ from themselves in some sense, which seems
paradoxical. Schelling therefore thinks that 'both sameness
('Einfachheit') and difference - thus something like
self-differentiation - have to be assumed in the thought of
identity' (109).



Frank traces the history of the notion of 'reduplicative
identity' and its adoption by Schelling to explicate what makes
this idea plausible. This leads to the following: 'For identity
is after all a symmetrical relationship [...] For this reason it
is meaningless to call an identity theory more
"idealist/mentalist" than "materialist". It is
neither of the two and both at once, as Schelling so neatly puts
it' (224). The basic position is summed up as follows:



> 
> 'Spirit/mind and nature are One' is understood as: There
> is an X, and this X is on the one hand A (spirit/mind), and on the
> other B (nature). B *as* B is not 'the same'
> ('einerlei') as A; and A *as* A is not the same as
> B. The identity of the two rests on their
> being-equally-sustained-in-being by X (or absolute being) (211).
> 



In the terms of contemporary philosophical debate: 'Types of
mental and types of neuronal states are not in themselves - or
not metaphysically - different (namely not to the extent which
they are sustained by X. They are only different from a conceptual (or
epistemological) perspective' (232). In such a relation of
identity 'two different but equally rigid designations'
are involved, 'each of which could be sufficient to adequately
determine the object and which both apply to the same thing (X)'
(252-3). Identity of nature and spirit therefore 'appears
(as opposed to logical freedom from contradiction) to include in it a
kind of difference' (251).



This position can be seen as avoiding both the kind of questionable
bracketing of modern natural science seen in some of the
metaphysical/theological accounts considered above, and the kind of
reductive physicalism and scientism that plays too much of a role in
certain parts of neuroscience-oriented analytical philosophy. A
Schellingian account of identity resists any attempt to reduce the
ways in which meaning arises in the world, such reductions being
characteristic of philosophy which sees cognitive control as its major
concern. Axel Hutter suggests one implication of this when he talks of
how Schelling reveals



> 
> the decisive state of affairs for modern history, that the modern
> impulse for emancipation has turned into its opposite in being carried
> out concretely in history. Modern thought falls prey, after it has
> emancipated itself from external attachment to the authority of
> revelation, which it does completely justifiably, to another power:
> the 'nature' of its cognitive capacity, which it now obeys
> more blindly than it previously obeyed external authorities (Hutter
> 1996: 300).
> 



In this sense, Schelling can be seen as inaugurating the idea of a
'dialectic of Enlightenment'. The freedom that Schelling
sees as inseparable from philosophy is the potential to see that
wholesale focus on cognitive certainty can, for all the benefits it
may offer, become precisely what we need to emancipate ourselves from,
because we make sense of the world in many ways which cannot be
reduced to cognition. Reason must therefore incorporate a sense of its
own fallibility and historicity, because it involves what Schelling
terms the 'dark ground which must nevertheless be the ground of
cognition' (SW I.7: 413). We don't always deal with needs
and impulses, or with the meanings we gain from involvement in the
natural world, just by knowing about the needs and about why something
appears beautiful, overwhelming, senseless, etc. Instead we may act
expressively, seeking sense in ways which cognitive command of the
world cannot provide. How much the revival of Schellingian concerns
might affect a world in which human relations to nature are evidently
in crisis remains to be seen.