Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling - Reputation and Influence

Reputation and Influence

Some scholars characterize Schelling as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system. Others challenge the notion that Schelling's thought is marked by profound breaks, instead arguing that his philosophy always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between spirit and nature. Unlike Hegel, Schelling did not believe that the absolute could be known in its true character through rational inquiry alone. A transcendent apprehension through artistic creativity, or a mystical intuition through religious experience (evident in his writings by 1809), was instead required to realize the reality of the "Godhead" that is the absolute, primal ground of all being.

Schelling's thought is still studied, although his reputation has varied over time. His work impressed the English romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced his ideas into English-speaking culture, sometimes without full acknowledgment, as in the Biographia Literaria. Coleridge's critical work was itself influential, and it was he who introduced into English literature Schelling's concept of the unconscious.

By the 1950s, Schelling was almost a forgotten philosopher even in Germany. In the 1910s and 1920s, philosophers of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, like Wilhelm Windelband or Richard Kroner, tended to describe Schelling as an episode connecting Fichte and Hegel. His late period tended to be ignored, and his philosophies of nature and of art in the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century were the main focus. In this context Kuno Fischer characterized Schelling's early philosophy as "aesthetic idealism", focusing on the argument where he ranked art as "the sole document and the eternal organ of philosophy" (das einzige wahre und ewige Organon zugleich und Dokument der Philosophie). From socialist philosophers like György Lukács, he received criticism as anachronistic. An exception was Martin Heidegger, who treated Schelling's On Human Freedom in his lectures in 1936. Heidegger found there central themes of Western ontology: the issues of being, existence, and freedom.

In the 1950s, the situation began to change. In 1954, the centennial of his death, an international conference on Schelling was held. Several philosophers including Karl Jaspers gave presentations about the uniqueness and relevance of his thought, the interest shifting toward his later work on being and existence, or, more precisely, the origin of existence. Schelling was the subject of the 1954 dissertation of Jürgen Habermas. In 1955 Jaspers published a book titled Schelling, representing him as a forerunner of the existentialists. Walter Schulz, one of organizers of the 1954 conference, published a book claiming that Schelling had made German idealism complete with his late philosophy, particularly with his Berlin lectures in the 1840s. Schulz presented Schelling as the person who resolved the philosophical problems which Hegel had left incomplete, in contrast to the contemporary idea that Schelling had been surpassed by Hegel much earlier.

In the 1970s nature was again of interest to philosophers in relation to environmental issues. Schelling's philosophy of nature, particularly his intention to construct a program which covers both nature and the intellectual life in a single system and method, and restore nature as a central theme of philosophy, has been reevaluated in the contemporary context. His influence and relation to the German art scene, particularly to Romantic literature and visual art, has been an interest since the late 1960s, from Philipp Otto Runge to Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys.

In relation to psychology, Schelling was considered to have coined the term "unconsciousness". Slavoj Žižek has written two books around Schelling, attempting to integrate Schelling's philosophy, mainly his middle period works including Weltalter, with the work of Jacques Lacan. Ken Wilber places Schelling as one of two philosophers who "after Plato, had the broadest impact on the Western mind".