"Philosophy of Nature

For Schelling, the starting point was Fiche’s notion of I as free moral agent, but he also remained influenced by Spinoza’s pantheism, a philosophy Fichte had come to reject early on in his career. In Schelling’s eyes, Fichte’s emphasis on the subject (I or Ego) was one-sided, just as Spinoza’s emphasis on the object (nature) was one-sided. Schelling’s philosophy thus intended to reach some kind of a synthesis between the two, identifying what transcends both of these poles. In particular, Schelling disagreed with Fichte’s view that the natural world was merely an obstacle the Ego gave itself to serve as the field of its moral action. His conclusion was that the Absolute, as the “original grounding” (Urgrund) of all reality, manifested itself in nature through three stages that are not to be understood in a temporal sense. First, the Absolute objectifies itself in nature. Second, it becomes subjectivity. Third, the subjective and the objective become one again in the Absolute in an act of self-knowledge. This is the synthesis, the unity of the real with the ideal. Schelling’s philosophy of nature is thus a metaphysics in which he tries to show the teleology of nature – the way in which the Absolute realizes itself through it. Schelling uses the expression of “speculative physics.”

The Absolute and its Potencies

Schelling emphasizes the oneness in this process by borrowing Spinoza’s terminology of “natura naturata” and “natura naturans”, i.e., nature as it is created and nature as it creates. To describe the process, he uses the term “potencies” (Potenzen) of nature. The first and lowest one corresponds to the material bodies and movements of nature. The second potency consists of the same forces at work on a higher level, e.g., magnetism and electricity. The third potency corresponds to living organisms, culminating with the human organism. The general idea is that in nature the Absolute gradually expresses itself in an ascending pattern consistent with the notion of evolution through creative design, but one that is not imposed from the outside.

Here, we have the same dialectical pattern as with Fichte and later Hegel. Unlike Fichte, however, Schelling does not try to reduce the entire process to a function of the Ego. Like him, he postulates intellectual intuition but the general scope of his speculation is wider, since he moves further away from a phenomenological description of self-perception to create an overall vision. That vision makes sense, but it is remote from any empirical verification or logical description: for him, the Absolute can only be perceived through intellectual intuition and is beyond any logical formulation – something Hegel would vehemently object to.

Finally, Schelling goes on to describe the way in which this process culminates in endless progress with the constitution of a world state consisting of a federation of states (somewhat reminiscent of Kant’s vision for perpetual peace).

Philosophy of Religion

In the more than 20 years by which Schelling outlived Hegel, he was not really able to capitalize on the rapid loss of standing of his illustrious rival. For this, Schelling’s own system was far too inconsistent. However, with his philosophy of religion, he did offer significant contributions that go beyond the speculative method of German Idealism and, in some way, bring him into close contact with the existentialist approach. In particular, Schelling came to see the cosmic human fall as coinciding with creation as an alienation from the center.

His key influence in this late period was the medieval mystic Jakob Boehme. Schelling, in turn, would be a significant influence on the development of religious studies, based on his discussion of religious consciousness. Schelling’s philosophy of religion in particular had a deep influence on the young Paul Tillich, though he quickly came to reject the speculative aspect of it. Still, Tillich also stated that Schelling’s words on the subject were perhaps the deepest ever spoken by anyone, and even in his later work the influence of Schelling remains evident.

In response to Hegel’s criticism of his philosophy as vague, Schelling makes the distinction between positive and negative philosophy, the latter (e.g., Hegel’s system) being merely discursive and unable to grasp the essence of the absolute. Positive philosophy, on the other hand, implies the recognition of God as a personal being acting through history.

Mythology and the unconscious

The last theme that came to preoccupy Schelling in the more religious period of his later years was that of mythology and revelation. Schelling saw mythological themes as the empirical verification of his metaphysical theory of the absolute and its genesis in the unconscious. For him, myths were an early, still unconscious historical manifestation of the absolute, while Christian revelation represented the free, intentional expression of a later stage. In his The Deities of Samothrace (1815), Schelling interprets the function of ancient Greek deities as that of precursors to the full manifestation of God...his understanding that the development of the religious spirit does not proceed from rationality but from an unconscious process originating in the abyss of Being (the “Urgrund”) has had repercussions in modern psychology".

NWE