Freidrich Wilhelm von Schelling & Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling

Life and Works

Friedrich Schelling was born in 1775 at Leonberg, a small town of Wurttemberg. At the age of sixteen he entered the theological seminary at Tubingen, where he studied theology, philosophy and philology.

A schoolmate, disciple and friend of Hegel, he later broke with him and became one of his most severe opponents. Called to lecture at Jena in 1798, Schelling had Fichte and Hegel as colleagues there, and came into close contact with the Romanticists. From 1803 to 1806 Schelling lectured at Wurzburg. Between 1806 and 1820 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences, with residence in Munich.

Next he went to Erlangen and lectured there for about six years before returning to Munich to teach philosophy. Finally he accepted an invitation to lecture in Berlin, where he succeeded to the chair Hegel had held. Schelling died in 1854.

Schelling's most systematic philosophical works are: System des Transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, and Darstellung meines Systems (Exposition of My System).

Doctrine

Fichte, differing from Kant, had given to the thinking ego a metaphysical reality, making it the unique creative principle of the world of nature. According to Fichte, the ego produces nature by means of unconscious activity, and the reality of nature is nothing other than a conscious "representation" of the empirical ego.

Schelling accepts Fichte's concept of Pure Ego as the unique metaphysical principle, but he differs from Fichte in his concept of nature. Nature, according to Schelling, has its own metaphysical reality, independent of the rising consciousness of the empirical ego. The Absolute (the Pure Ego of Fichte) must be conceived of as the complete identity of the Universal Spirit and nature.

Making use of new concepts in the field of electricity and transferring them to philosophy, Schelling maintains that the Spirit and nature must be conceived as two poles, positive and negative, of the reality of the Absolute, completely identical and inseparable from one another. The production of nature is due to the fact that the pole of nature prevails over the pole of the spirit through the unconscious action of the Absolute. This prevalence, however, can never reach the point of nullifying the presence of the Universal Spirit, for both the Spirit and nature are insuppressible.

Hence nature is internally spiritualized, endowed with life, organic functions and finality. Mechanical causality is a secondary means for the actuation of finality. The finalistic and organic tendency of nature becomes visible in the living being, in which the various parts act for the good of the whole.

The Universal Spirit, always present in nature, makes it possible for empirical consciousness (individual egos) to arise; that is to say, the Spirit, after long wandering unconsciously in nature, becomes conscious in empirical egos -- or rather, the presence of the Spirit in nature is an essential condition for the emergence of empirical egos.

The consciousness of the Universal Spirit first appears in sensation. The odyssey of the Spirit has ended, and an inverse process has begun. The Spirit, by reflection, reconquers that which it had produced in the shadows of the unconscious. This process is the work of philosophy, which goes back and considers the stages or moments through which the Absolute became nature and consciousness.

For Schelling, neither practical nor theoretical activity gives us the model of the primitive identity of the Absolute as Spirit-nature. The creative activity of art alone is capable of giving us such a model. Indeed, a work of artistic genius is the result of two distinct activities, that is, the unconscious activity of inspiration and the conscious activity of the artist. Art, therefore, is the organ of philosophy, because art alone brings to philosophy a concrete representation of the unconscious process by which action is identified with consciousness. Thus art is the representation of the unbroken unity of the Absolute Principle.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German Protestant theologian and philosopher, was born at Breslau in 1768. He was a lecturer and professor at Halle and Berlin. He died in 1834. His most representative works are Reden uber die Religion (Sermons on Religion) and Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith).

With Schleiermacher, the Romantic idealism of Schelling takes the form of manifestations of interiority, religiosity, and sentiment. The perfect identity of the Absolute, and, at the same time, our absolute dependence upon the Absolute can be grasped only in these interior activities.

According to Schleiermacher, the Absolute is an actual reality, the immanent content of our consciousness, and the perennial source of the life of our spirit. Neither thought nor will can arrive at the Absolute and comprehend it as perfect unity. Theoretical thought is possible only in so far as a limited perceptible world is presupposed; and likewise, will is possible only in so far as there is presupposed a limited end to be attained. In both cases the ego must have a relationship to something which is different from itself. Some kind of communication between the finite and the infinite must be established.

If we are recollected and place our ego in relation to itself, this self-consciousness or sentiment makes it possible for us to comprehend the absolute unity of Being, God. During such a period of recollection, we feel, on the one hand, that we are submerged in the infinite Being and, on the other, that the infinite Being seems to be concentrated in one point of our consciousness.

In this sentiment man does not lose consciousness of himself but is aware that he and his being are rooted in God. Thus man comprehends the absolute dependence of his being upon God, of the finite upon the infinite. The sentiment of the Divine in ourselves is religion, in which the entire series of particular and determined acts of our lives find their motive.