Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

First published Mon Oct 22, 2001; substantive revision Thu Feb 9, 2023

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) is, alongwith J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, one of the three most influentialthinkers in the tradition of ‘German Idealism’. Althoughhe is often regarded as a philosophical Proteus who changed hisconception so radically and so often that it is hard to attribute oneclear philosophical conception to him, Schelling was in fact often animpressively rigorous logical thinker. In the era during whichSchelling was writing, so much was changing in philosophy that astable, fixed point of view was as likely to lead to a failure tograsp important new developments as it was to lead to a defensiblephilosophical system. Schelling’s continuing importance todayrelates mainly to three aspects of his work. The first is hisNaturphilosophie, which, although many of its empiricalclaims are now indefensible, opens up the possibility of a modernhermeneutic view of nature that does not restrict nature’ssignificance to what can be established about it in scientific terms.The second is his anti-Cartesian account of subjectivity, whichprefigures some of the most influential ideas of thinkers such asNietzsche, Heidegger, and Jacques Lacan, in showing how the thinkingsubject cannot be fully transparent to itself. The third is his latercritique of Hegelian Idealism, which influenced Kierkegaard, Marx,Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, and aspects of which are echoed bythinkers such as T.W. Adorno and Jacques Derrida. Schelling’s focuson humankind’s relationship to nature has gained particularrelevance as the seriousness of the climate emergency has become fullyapparent in recent years.

1. Career

Schelling was born in Leonberg near Stuttgart on 27 January 1775. Heattended a Protestant seminary in Tübingen from 1790 to 1795,where he was close friends with both Hegel and the poet andphilosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. He moved to Leipzig in 1797,then to Jena, where he came into contact with the early Romanticthinkers, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, and, via Goethe’sinfluence, took up his first professorship from 1798 to 1803. From1803 to 1806 he lived in Würzburg, whence he left for Munich,where he mainly lived from 1806 onwards, with an interruption from1820 to 1827, when he lived in Erlangen. He moved to Berlin in 1841 totake up what had, until Hegel’s death in 1831, beenHegel’s chair of philosophy. Although his lectures in Berlinwere initially attended by such luminaries as Kierkegaard, Engels,Bakunin, Ranke, Burkhardt, and Alexander von Humboldt, he soon came tobe largely ignored by most of the leading thinkers of the day. It isclear, however, that his philosophical thought still influenced manywho rejected him on mainly political grounds. He died on 20 August1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland. Schelling’s influence on manydirections in modern philosophy has been seriously underestimated inthe English-speaking world, though sustained new attention to his workin recent years has increasingly brought him into contemporary debatesabout naturalism, freedom, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology.

2. Transcendental Philosophy andNaturphilosophie

The significance of the work of the early Schelling (1795–1800)lies in its attempts to give a new account of nature which, whiletaking account of the fact that Kant had irrevocably changed thestatus of nature in modern philosophy, avoids some of the consequencesof Kant’s theory that were seen as problematic by Kant’scontemporaries and successors. For the Kant of theCritique ofPure Reason (1781, 1787) nature is largely seen in the‘formal’ sense, as that which is subject to necessarylaws. These laws are accessible to us, Kant argues, because cognitiondepends on the subject bringing forms of thought, the categories, tobear on what it perceives. The problem this leads to is how thesubject 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 thecategories. Kant’s response to this dilemma is to split the‘sensuous’ realm of nature as law-bound appearance fromthe ‘intelligible’ realm of the subject’s cognitiveand ethical self-determination. However, if the subject is part ofnature there would seem to be no way of explaining how a nature whichwe can onlyknow as deterministic can give rise to a subjectwhich seems to transcend determinism in its knowing and in itsself-determined actions. Kant himself sought to bridge the realms ofnecessity and spontaneity in theCritique of Judgement(1790), by suggesting that nature itself could be seen in more thanformal terms: it also produces self-determining organisms and givesrise to disinterested aesthetic pleasure in the subject thatcontemplates its forms. The essential problems remained, however, that(1) Kant gave no account of the genesis of the subject that transcendsits status as a piece of determined nature, and (2) such an accountwould have to be able to bridge the divide between nature andfreedom.

The tensions in Schelling’s philosophy of this period, which setthe agenda for most of his subsequent work, derive, then, from theneed to overcome the perceived lack in Kant’s philosophy of asubstantial account of how nature and freedom come to co-exist. Twoways out of Kantian dualism immediately suggested themselves tothinkers in the 1780s and 90s. On the one hand, Kant’s argumentsabout the division between appearances and things in themselves, whichgave rise to the problem of how something ‘in itself’could give rise to appearances for the subject, might be overcome byrejecting the notion of the thing in itself altogether. If what weknow of the object is the product of the spontaneity of the I, anIdealist could argue that the whole of the world’sintelligibility is therefore the result of the activity of thesubject, and that a new account of subjectivity is required whichwould achieve what Kant had failed to achieve. On the other hand, thefact that nature gives rise to self-determining subjectivity wouldseem to suggest that a monist account of a nature which was more thana concatenation of laws, and was in some sense inherently‘subjective’, would offer a different way of accountingfor what Kant’s conception did not provide. Schelling seeksanswers to the Kantian problems in terms that relate to both theseconceptions. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the conceptions arein one sense potentially identical: if the essence of nature is thatit 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 regardedas exemplifying these alternatives are J.G. Fichte, and Spinoza.

The source of Schelling’s concern with Spinoza is the‘Pantheism controversy’, which brought Spinoza’smonism into the mainstream of German philosophy. In 1783 the writerand philosopher F.H. Jacobi became involved in an influential disputewith the Berlin Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn over theclaim that G.E. Lessing had admitted to being a Spinozist, anadmission which at that time was tantamount to the admission ofatheism, with all the dangerous political and other consequences thatentailed. In hisOn the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to HerrMoses Mendelssohn, (1785, second edition 1789), which wasinfluenced by his reading of Kant’s firstCritique,Jacobi revealed a problem which would recur in differing waysthroughout Schelling’s work. Jacobi’s interpretation ofSpinozism was concerned with the relationship between the‘unconditioned’ and the ‘conditioned’, betweenGod as the ground of which the laws of nature are the consequent, andthe linked chains of the deterministic laws of nature. Cognitiveexplanation relies, as Kant claimed, upon finding a thing’s‘condition’. Jacobi’s question is how finding athing’s condition can finally ground its explanation, given thateach explanation leads to a regress in which each condition dependsupon another conditionad infinitum. Any philosophical systemthat would ground the explanation of a part of nature thus“necessarily ends by having to discoverconditions oftheunconditioned” (Scholz, ed., 1916, p. 51). ForJacobi this led to the need for a theological leap of faith, as theworld’s intelligibility otherwise threatened to become a mereillusion, in which nothing would be finally grounded at all. In the1787 Introduction to the firstCritique Kant maintains thisproblem of cognitive grounding can be overcome by acknowledging that,while reason must postulate the “unconditioned (…) in allthings in themselves for everything conditioned, so that the series ofconditions should thus become complete” (Kant,Critique ofPure 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 beavoided. As we have already seen, though, this gives rise precisely tothe problem of how a subject which is not conditioned like the natureit comes to know can emerge as the ground of knowledge fromdeterministic nature.

The condition of the knowledge of appearances for Kant is the‘transcendental subject’, but what sort of‘condition’ is the transcendental subject? The perceptionthat Kant has no proper answer to this problem initially unitesSchelling and Fichte. Fichte insists in theWissenschaftslehre (1794) that the unconditioned status ofthe I has to be established if Kant’s system is to legitimateitself. He asserts that “It is (…) the ground ofexplanation of all facts of empirical consciousness that before allpositing in the I the I itself must previously be posited”(Fichte 1971, p. 95), thereby giving the I the founding role which hethought Kant had failed adequately to explicate. Fichte does this byextending the consequences of Kant’s claim that the cognitiveactivity of the I, via which it can reflect uponitself,cannot be understood as part of the causal world of appearances, andmust therefore be part of the noumenal realm, the realm of the‘unconditioned’. For Fichte the very existence ofphilosophy depends upon the free act of the I which initiates thereflection on its own activity by the I.

Schelling takes up the issues raised by Jacobi and Fichte in two textsof 1795:Of the I as Principle of Philosophy or on theUnconditional in Human Knowledge, andPhilosophical Letterson Dogmatism and Criticism. In a move which prefigures aspects ofHeidegger’s questioning of the notion of being, he reinterpretsKant’s question as to the condition of possibility of syntheticjudgements a priori as a question about why there is a realm ofjudgements, a manifest world requiring syntheses by the subject forknowledge to be produced, at all. InOf the I, Schelling putsKant’s question in Fichtean terms: “how is it that theabsolute I goes out of itself and opposes a Not-I to itself?”(Sämmtliche 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, musthave a different status from the determined realm which it posits:“nothing can be posited by itself as a thing, i.e. anabsolute/unconditioned thing (unbedingtes Ding) is acontradiction” (ibid., p. 116). However, his key worryabout Fichte’s position already becomes apparent in thePhilosophical Letters, where he drops the Fichteanterminology: “How is it that I step at all out of theabsolute and move towards something opposed (auf einEntgegengesetztes)?” (ibid., p. 294). The problemSchelling confronts was identified by his friend Hölderlin, inthe light of Jacobi’s formulation of the problem of the‘unconditioned’. Fichte wished to understand the absoluteas an I in order to avoid the problem of nature ‘initself’ which creates Kantian dualism. For something to be an I,though, it must be conscious of an other, and thus in a relationshipto that other. The overall structure of the relationship could not,therefore, be described from only one side of that relationship.Hölderlin argued that one has to understand the structure of therelationship of subject to object in consciousness as grounded in‘a whole of which subject and object are the parts’, whichhe termed ‘being’. This idea will be vital to Schelling atvarious times in his philosophy.

In the 1790s, then, Schelling is seeking a way of coming to terms withthe ground of the subject’s relationship to the object world.His aim is to avoid the fatalist consequences of Spinoza’ssystem by taking on key aspects of Kant’s and Fichte’stranscendental philosophy, and yet not to fall into the trapHölderlin identified in Fichte’s conception of an absoluteI. In hisNaturphilosophie (philosophy of nature), whichemerges in 1797 and develops in the succeeding years, and in theSystem of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, Schelling waversbetween a Spinozist and a Fichtean approach to the‘unconditioned’. In theNaturphilosophie theKantian division between nature as appearance and nature in itself isseen as resulting from the fact that the nature theorised in cognitivejudgements is objectified in opposition to the knowing subject. Thisobjectification, the result of the natural sciences’ search forfixed laws, fails to account for the living dynamic forces in nature,including those in our own organism, with which Kant himself becameconcerned in the thirdCritique and other late work, andwhich had played a role in Leibniz’s account of nature. Naturein itself is thought of by Schelling as a ‘productivity’:“As the object [qua ‘conditionedcondition’] is never absolute/unconditioned (unbedingt)then something per se non-objective must be posited in nature; thisabsolutely non-objective postulate is precisely the originalproductivity of nature” (SW I/3, p. 284). The Kantian dualismbetween things in themselves and appearances is a result of the factthat the productivity can never appear as itself and can only appearin the form of ‘products’, which are the productivity‘inhibiting’ itself. The products are never complete inthemselves: they are like the eddies in a stream, which temporarilykeep their shape via the resistance of the movement of the fluid toitself that creates them, despite the changing material flowingthrough them.

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

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

TheNaturphilosophie includes ourselves within nature, aspart of an interrelated whole, which is structured in an ascendingseries of ‘potentials’ that contain a polar oppositionwithin themselves. The model is a magnet, whose opposing poles areinseparable from each other, even though they are opposites. Asproductivity nature cannot be conceived of as an object, since it isthe subject of all possible real ‘predicates’, of the‘eddies’ of which transient, objective nature consists.However, nature’s ‘inhibiting’ itself in order tobecome something determinate means that the ‘principle of allexplanation of nature’ is ‘universal duality’, aninherent difference of subject and object which prevents nature everfinally reaching stasis (SW I/3, p. 277). At the same time thisdifference of subject and object must be grounded in an identity whichlinks them together, otherwise all the problems of dualism would justreappear. In a decisive move for German Idealism, Schelling parallelsthe idea of nature as the producing subject with the spontaneity ofthe thinking subject, which is the condition of the syntheses requiredfor the constitution of objectivity. The problem for Schelling lies inexplicating how these two ‘subjects’ relate to eachother.

In theSystem of Transcendental Idealism Schelling goes backto Fichtean terminology, though he will soon abandon most of it. Heendeavours to explain the emergence of the thinking subject fromnature in terms of an ‘absolute I’ coming retrospectivelyto know itself in a ‘history of self-consciousness’ thatforms the material of the system. TheSystem recounts thehistory of which the transcendental subject is the result. A versionof the model Schelling establishes will be adopted by Hegel in thePhenomenology of Mind. Schelling presents the process interms of the initially undivided I splitting itself in order toarticulate itself in the syntheses, the ‘products’, whichconstitute the world of knowable nature. The founding stages of thisprocess, 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 totheoretical knowledge results from the fact that “the[practical] act [of the absolute I] via which all limitation isposited, as condition of all consciousness, does not itself come toconsciousness” (SW I/3, p. 409). He prophetically attempts toarticulate a theory which comes to terms with the idea that thought isdriven by forces which are not finally transparent to it, of the kindlater to become familiar in psychoanalysis. How, though, does one gainaccess by thought to what cannot be an object of consciousness? Thisaccess is crucial to the whole project because without it there can beno understanding of why the move from determined nature to the freedomof self-determining thinking takes place at all.

Schelling adopts the idea from the early Romantic thinkers FriedrichSchlegel and Novalis, whom he knew in Jena at this time, that art isthe route to an understanding of what cannot appear as an object ofknowledge. Philosophy cannot represent nature in itself because accessto the unconscious must be via what appears to consciousness in therealm of theoretical knowledge. The work of art is evidently anempirical, appearing object like any other, but if it is not more thanwhat it isqua determinable object it cannot be a work ofart, because this requires both the free judgement of the subject andthe object’s conveying of something beyond its objective nature.Although theSystem’s own very existence depends uponthe transition from theoretical to practical philosophy, whichrequires the breaking-off of Jacobi’s chain of‘conditions’ by something unconditioned, Schelling isconcerned to understand how the highest insight must be into realityas 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 thesubjective. Whereas in theSystem nature begins unconsciouslyand ends in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge, in theart work: “the I is conscious according to the production,unconscious with regard to the product” (SW I/3, p. 613). Theproduct cannot be understood via the intentions of its producer, asthis would mean that it became a ‘conditioned’ object,something produced in terms of a pre-existing rule, and wouldtherefore 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 cannotrepresent externally” (ibid., p. 627). The particularsciences can only follow the chain of conditions, via the principle ofsufficient reason, and must determine any object via its place in thatchain, a process which has no necessary end. The art object, on theother hand, manifests what cannot be understood in terms of itsknowable conditions, because an account of the materials of which itis made or of its status as object in the world does not constitute itas art. Art shows what cannot be said. Philosophy cannot positivelyrepresent the absolute because ‘conscious’ thinkingoperates from the position where the ‘absolute identity’of the subjective and the objective has always already been lost inthe emergence of consciousness.

Although Schelling’s early work did not fully satisfy eitherhimself, or anybody else, it manages to address, in a cogent andilluminating fashion, many topics which affect subsequent philosophy.The model presented in theSystem impresses not leastbecause, at the same time as establishing the notion of the history ofself-consciousness that would be decisive for Hegel, it offers, in amanner which goes beyond its sources in Fichte, a model of therelationship between the subject and its conceptually inaccessiblemotivating forces which would affect thinkers from Schopenhauer, toNietzsche, to Freud, and beyond.

3. Identity Philosophy

Although the period of Schelling’s ‘identityphilosophy’ is usually dated from the 1801Presentation ofMy System of Philosophy until sometime before the 1809On theEssence of Human Freedom, the project of that philosophy can besaid to be carried on in differing ways throughout his work. Theidentity philosophy derives from Schelling’s conviction that theself-conscious I must be seen as a result, rather than as theoriginating act it is in Fichte, and thus that the I cannot be seen asthe generative matrix of the whole system. This takes him more in thedirection of Spinoza, but the problem is still that of articulatingthe relationship between the I and the world of nature, without eitherreverting to Kantian dualism or failing to explain how a purelyobjective nature could give rise to subjectivity.

Schelling’s mature identity philosophy, which is contained intheSystem of the Whole of Philosophy and of Naturphilosophie inParticular, written in Würzburg in 1804, and in other textsbetween 1804 and 1807, breaks with the model of truth ascorrespondence. It does so because:

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

The crucial problem is how to explain thelink between thesubject and object world that makes judgements possible, and thiscannot be achieved in terms of how a subject can have thoughts whichcorrespond to an object essentially separate from it. For there to bejudgements at all what is split and then synthesised in the judgementmust, Schelling contends, in some way already be the same. This hasoften been understood as leading Schelling to a philosophy in which,as Hegel puts it in thePhenomenology, the absolute is the‘night in which all cows are black’, because it swallowsall differentiated knowledge in the assertion that everything isultimately the same, namely an absolute which excludes all relativityfrom itself and thus becomes inarticulable. This is not a validinterpretation of Schelling’s argument. In an early version ofthe identity philosophy he had said the following:

For most people see in the essence of the Absolute nothing but purenight and cannot recognise anything in it; it shrinks before them intoa mere negation of difference, and is for them something purelyprivative, whence they cleverly make it into the end of theirphilosophy (…) I want to show here (…) how that night ofthe 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 isalso the many, Schelling, following the idea outlined above fromHölderlin, introduces a notion of ‘transitive’ being,which links mind and matter as predicates of itself. Schellingexplains this ‘transitivity’ via the metaphor of theearth:

you recognise its [the earth’s] true essence only in the link bywhich it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its thingsand again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do notimagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it,there is another earth which is the unity of these things, ratherthe same which is the multiplicity is also unity, andwhat the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and thisnecessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is whatyou 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, thelink of the twoaspects of being, which, on the one hand, is theuniverse,and, on the other, is the changingmultiplicity which theknowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that “TheI think,I am, is, since Descartes, the basicmistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being isnot my being, for everything is only of God or the totality” (SWI/7, p. 148), so the I is ‘affirmed’ as a predicate of thebeing by which it is preceded. In consequence he already begins tomove away, albeit inconsistently, from the German Idealist model inwhich the intelligibility of being is regarded as a result of itshaving an essentially mind-like structure.

Schelling is led to this view by his understanding of the changing andrelative status of theoretical knowledge. It is the inherentincompleteness of all finite determinations which reveals the natureof the absolute. His description of time makes clear what he means:“time is itself nothing butthe totality appearing inopposition to the particular life of things”, so that thetotality “posits or intuits itself, by not positing, notintuiting the particular” (SW I/6, p. 220). The particular isdetermined in judgements, but the truth of claims about the totalitycannot be proven because judgements are necessarily conditioned,whereas the totality is not. Given the relative status of theparticular there must, though, be a ground which enables us to beaware of that relativity, and this ground must have adifferent status from the knowable world of finite particulars. At thesame time, if the ground were wholly different from the world ofrelative particulars the problems of dualism would recur. As such theabsoluteis the finite, but we do notknow this inthe manner we know the finite. Without thepresupposition of‘absolute identity’, therefore, the evident relativity ofparticular knowledge becomes inexplicable, since there would be noreason to claim that a revised judgement is predicated of the sameworld 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 mustdisclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/revealitself in itself if it is not an other in itself, and isinthis other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the livinglink 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 mentalevents without physical events, the former cannot be reduced to beingthe causal results of the latter: “For real and ideal are onlydifferent 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, inwhich, in Schelling’s terms, “the sameness of thesubjective and the objective is made the same as itself, knows itself,and is the subject and object of itself” (SW I/6, p. 173), inthe ‘identity of identity and difference’, and the sensethat this position cannot finally circumscribe the structure of theabsolute. The structure of reflection, where each aspect reflectsitself and then is reflected in the other, upon which this account ofthe identity of subject and object relies, must be grounded in a beingwhich carries it:

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

Without this independent basis subject and object would merely be, asSchelling thinks they are in Fichte, relative negations of each other,leading to a circle “inside which a nothing gains reality by therelation to another nothing” (SW I/4, p. 358). Schellingprophetically distinguishes between the cognitive — reflexive— ground of finite knowledge and the real — non-reflexive— ground that sustains the movement of negation from one finitedetermination to another. As a two-sided relationship reflection alonealways entails the problem that the subject and the object in a caseof reflection can only beknown to be the same via that whichcannot appear in the reflection. If I am to recognise myselfas myself in a mirror, rather than see a random object in theworld, I mustalready be familiar with myselfbeforethe reflection, in a way which is not part of the reflection. Thismeans a complete system based on reflection is impossible, because, inorder for the system to be grounded, it must presuppose as external toitself what it claims is part of itself. Schelling will, in hisphilosophy from the 1820s onwards, raise versions of this objectionagainst Hegel’s system.

Schelling’s own dissatisfaction with his early versions ofidentity theory derives from his rejection of Spinozism. Spinozaregards the move from God to the world of ‘conditions’ asa logical consequence of the nature of God. Schelling becomesconvinced that such a theory gives no reason why the absolute, the‘unconditioned’, should manifest itself in a world ofnegative ‘conditions’ at all. Schelling is thereforeconfronted with explaining why there is a transition from the absoluteto the finite world, a finite world which he comes to see increasinglyin terms of the suffering and tragedy it has to involve. InPhilosophy and Religion (1804), he claims, as does Jacobi,that there is no way of mediating between conditioned andunconditioned, and already makes the distinction between‘negative’ and ‘positive’ philosophy, whichwill form the heart of his late work. Explicating the structure of thefinite world leads to “negative philosophy, but much has alreadybeen gained by the fact that the negative, the realm of nothingness,has been separated by a sharp limit from the realm of reality and ofwhat alone is positive” (SW I/6, p. 43). The question whichcomes to concern Schelling is how philosophy can come to terms with aground which cannot be regarded as the rational explanation of thefinite world, because the finite world involves so much that makes norational sense.

4. The ‘Ages of the World’

Schelling’s work from his middle period (1809–1827) isusually referred to as the philosophy of theAges of theWorld (WA =Weltalter), after the titleof the unfinished work of that name he worked on in the period1809–1827. The work characteristic of this period begins withthe 1809On the Essence of Human Freedom (FS=Freiheitsschrift) (written in Stuttgart). The WA philosophyis an attempt to explain the emergence of an intelligible world at thesame time as coming to terms with mind’s inextricable relationto matter. The initial concern is to avoid Spinoza’s fatalism,which he thinks renders the human freedom to do goodand evilincomprehensible. Schelling’s crucial objection is to the ideathat evil should be understood as merely another form of negativitywhich can be comprehended by insight into the inherent lack in allfinite parts of a totality, rather than as a positive fact relating tothe nature of human freedom. He now sees the fundamentalcontradictions of theNaturphilosophie in terms of therelationship of the intelligibility of nature and ourselves to aground without which there could be no intelligibility, but which isnot the explicable cause of intelligibility. In an attempt to get togrips with the problem of the ground of the finite world Schellingintroduces a Kant-derived conception of ‘willing’ in theFS which will be influential for Schopenhauer’s conception ofthe Will: “In the last and highest instance there is no otherbeing but willing. Willing is primal being, and all the predicates ofprimal being only fit willing: groundlessness, eternity, beingindependent of time, self-affirmation” (SW I/7, p. 350).Schelling now establishes a more conflictual version of the structureof the identity philosophy. The ‘ground’ is‘groundless’ — in the sense of‘uncaused’ — and it must be understood in terms offreedom if a Spinozist determinism is to be avoided. This means therecannot be an explanation of why there is the finite world, becausethat would entail taking the ground as a cause and thus renderingfreedom non-existent.

At the same time Schelling insists there must be that against whichfreedom can be manifest — a being which is not free and istherefore necessitated — for it to be meaningful freedom at all.The theory is based on the antagonisms between opposing forces whichconstitute the ‘ages of the world’, the past, present, andfuture. He argues that the world whose origins the WA wishes tounderstand must entail thesame conflicting forces whichstill act, though not necessarily in the sameform, in thisworld, of which the mind is an aspect: “Poured from the sourceof things and the same as the source, the human soul has aco-knowledge/con-science (Mitwissenschaft) of creation”(WA, p. 4). Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us:“an unconscious, dark principle and a consciousprinciple”, which must yet in some way be identical. The samestructure applies to what Schelling means by ‘God’. Atthis point his account of the ground is not consistent, but thisinconsistency points to the essential issue Schelling is trying tounderstand, namely whether philosophy can give a rational account ofthe fact of the manifest world. As that which makes the worldintelligible, 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, itisnature in God; an essence which is inseparable from God,but different from Him” (SW I/7, p. 358). The point is that Godwould be just be some kind of inarticulable, static One if there werenot that which He transcends: without opposition, Schelling argues,there is no life and no sense of development, which are the highestaspects of reality. The aim of the move away from Spinoza is to avoidthe sense of a world complete in itself which would render freedomillusory because freedom’s goal would already be determined asthe goal of the totality. Schelling starts to confront the idea thatthe rational reconciliation of freedom and necessity that had beensought by Kant in the acknowledgement of the necessity of the law, andwhich was the aim of German Idealism’s attempt to reconcile mindand nature, might be intrinsically unattainable.

Wolfram Hogrebe has claimed that the WA philosophy is an ontologicaltheory of predication. Being, as initially One and enclosed withinitself, is not manifest, and has no reason to be manifest. Hogrebeterms this ‘pronominal being’. Thesame beingmust 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 contradictionbetween the two kinds of being is only apparent. Schelling maintains,in line with the identity philosophy, that the “properlyunderstood law of contradiction really only says that the same cannotbeas the same something and also the opposite thereof, butthis 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, thedark force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, iscontractive, the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’.Dynamic processes are the result of the interchange between theseultimately identical forces. If they were wholly separate there wouldeither be no manifest universe, because contraction would dominate, orthe universe would dissipate at infinite speed because expansion woulddominate. The result would be the same: there would not be a world. Ifsomething is to beas something it must both be, in thepositive sense in which everything else is, which makes itindeterminately positive, pronominal, and it must have a relationshipto what it is not, in order to be determinate, which brings it intothe realm of predication by taking it beyond itself. In the WA the Onecomes into contradiction with itself and the two forces constantly viewith each other. Differences must, however, be grounded in unity, asotherwise they could not bemanifest at all as differences.The ground is now increasingly regarded as the source of thetransitory nature of everything particular, and less and less as thesource of tranquil insight into how we can be reconciled to finiteexistence. The mood of the WA is summed up in Schelling’sreference to the “veil of melancholy which is spread over thewhole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life”(SW I/7, p. 399). The source of this melancholy is that everythingfinite must ‘go to ground’ and that we areawareof this. Awareness thus both makes sense of things and yet is alsowhat is underpinned by a negativity it must constantly seek to come toterms with.

The abandonment of his residual Spinozism leads Schelling to a growingconcern with the tensions which result from contradictions that arealso embodied in human beings. The ages of the world are constitutedby the development of forms and structures in the material and themental world. This development depends upon the expandingforce’s interaction with the contracting force’s slowingof any expansion, which allows transient but determinate forms todevelop. This process also gives rise to language, which Schellingregards as the model for the development of the whole world because itmanifests how expansion and the release of tension can lead tointelligibility, rather than mere dissipation:

It seems universal that every creature which cannot contain itself ordraw itself together in its own fullness, draws itself togetheroutside itself, whence e.g. the elevated miracle of the formation ofthe word in the mouth belongs, which is a true creation of the fullinside 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 ofthe WA, and Schelling insists that, like the material world withoutthe ‘ideal’ capacity for expansion, language can become‘congealed’. This interaction between what is contained initself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives riseto consciousness, and thus to an inherent tension withinconsciousness, which can only be itself by its relation to an other.Hegel uses a related model of subjectivity, but Schelling will come toreject Hegel’s model for its failure to confront the ultimatelyirresolvable tension in all subjectivity. Schelling’s laterphilosophy will present a subject whose origin prevents it from everachieving the ‘self-presence’ that Hegel tries toexplicate by setting out the complete structure of‘self-reflection’ in the other. Schelling’s WAphilosophy is never completed: its Idealist aim of systematicallyunifying subject and object by comprehending the real development ofhistory from the very origins of being founders on problems concerningthe relationship between philosophical system and historicalcontingency which do not admit of solutions. Furthermore, thestructures he develops lead him to ideas which take him beyondIdealism and make him one of the crucial precursors of existential andother 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. Byregarding Hegel’s system as the culmination of German Idealismthis interpretation fails to do justice to Schelling’s realphilosophical ambitions. Many of these insights, particularly in thelater philosophy (1827–1854), directly and indirectly influencedthe ideas of thinkers, such as Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Heidegger, and Adorno, who were critical of Hegel’s claim toarticulate a complete philosophical system.

The differences between Hegel and Schelling derive from theirrespective approaches to understanding the absolute. For Hegel theabsolute is theresult of the self-cancellation of everythingfinite, whose mode of being is precisely to change into somethingdifferent. Philosophy can therefore articulate the nature of theabsolute by an account of how finite determinations are alwaystranscended. This takes the form of the ‘negation of thenegation’, in a system whose end comprehends its beginning. ForHegel the result becomes known when the beginning negates itself asbeing ‘in itself’ to becomes being ‘foritself’ at the end of the system, thus in a process in which itreflects itself to itself by becoming other to itself. Schellingalready becomes publicly critical of Hegel while working on a laterversion of the WA philosophy in Erlangen in the 1820s, but makes hiscriticisms fully public in lectures given in Munich in the 1830s, andin the 1840s and 1850s as professor in Berlin. The aim of the Idealistsystems was for thought to reflect what it is not — being— as really itself, even as it appears not to be itself, therebyavoiding Kant’s dualism. The issue between Schelling and Hegelis whether the grounding of reason by itself is not in fact a sort ofphilosophical narcissism, in which reason admires its reflection inbeing without being able fully to articulate its relationship to thatreflection. Like Hegel, Schelling argues that it is not the particularmanifestation of knowledge which tells me the truth about the world,but rather the necessity of moving from one piece of knowledge to thenext. However, a logical reconstruction of the process of knowledgecan, for Schelling, only be a reflection of thought by itself. Thereal process cannot be described in philosophy, because the cognitiveground of knowledge and the real ground, although they are inseparablefrom each other, cannot be shown toreflect each other.

Dieter Henrich characterises Hegel’s conception of the absoluteas follows: “The absolute is the finite to the extent to whichthe finite is nothing at all but negative relation to itself”(Henrich 1982, p. 82). Hegel’s system depends upon showing howeach particular way of conceiving of the world has an internalcontradiction. This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensiveways of grasping the world, until the point where there can be no morecomprehensive way because there is no longer any contradiction to giverise to it. The very fact of the finite limitations of empiricalthought therefore becomes what gives rise to the infinite, which, inHegel’s terms, is thought that is bounded by itself and bynothing else.

Schelling accepts such a conception, to which he substantiallycontributed in his early philosophy, as the way to construct a‘negative’ system of philosophy, because it explains thelogic of change, once there is a world to be explained. The conceptiondoes not, though, explain why there is a developing world at all, butmerely reconstructs in thought the necessary structure of developmenton the basis of necessities in thought. Schelling’s own attemptat explaining the world’s ontological and historical facticitywill lead him to a ‘philosophical theology’ which tracesthe development of mythology and then of Christian revelation in hisPhilosophy of Mythology andPhilosophy ofRevelation, which, like all his substantial works after 1811, arenot published in his lifetime. The failure of his philosophicaltheology does not, though, necessarily invalidate his philosophicalarguments against Hegel. His alternative to the “common mistakeof 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 logicalrelationship’ entails a reflexivity, in which the worldnecessarily follows from the nature of God, and God and the world aretherefore the ‘other of themselves’. Hegel’s systemtries to obviate the facticity of the world by understanding reason asthe world’s immanent self-articulation. Schelling, in contrast,insists that human reason cannot explain itsown existence,and therefore cannot encompass itself and its other within a system ofphilosophy. We cannot, he maintains, make sense of the manifest worldby beginning with reason, but must instead begin with the contingencyof being and try to make sense of it with the reason which is only oneaspect of it and which cannot be explained in terms of its being arepresentation of the true nature of being.

Schelling contends that the identity of thought and being cannot bearticulatedwithin thought, because thought mustpresuppose that they are identical in a way which thought, asone side of a relation, cannot comprehend. By redefining the‘concept’ in such a way that it is always already bothsubject and object, Hegel aims to avoid any presuppositions on eitherthe subject or the object side, allowing the system to complete itselfas the ‘self-determination of the concept’. Schellingpresents the basic alternative as follows:

For either the concept would have to go first, and being would have tobe the consequence of the concept, which would mean it was no longerabsolute being; or the concept is the consequence of being, then wemust begin with being without the concept. (SW II/3, p. 164)

Hegel attempts to merge concept and being by making being part of astructure of self-reflection, rather than the basis of theinterrelation between subject and object. In Schelling’s terms,Hegel therefore invalidly assumes that ‘essence’, what weknow of things, which is one side of the relationship between beingand 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 whichmakes it determinate as a knowable moment of the whole process. ForHegel, on the other hand, Schelling has to invoke being as somethingimmediate: this means it must be wholly opaque, and so is equivalentto nothing.

The problem which Hegel does not overcome is that the identity ofessence and being cannot beknown, because, as Schellingclaims of his concept of being, “existing is not here theconsequence of the concept or of essence, but rather existence is hereitself 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 (understoodnow as a metaphor for essence) entails, as we saw above, a priornon-reflexive moment if one is to know that the reflectionisoneself, rather than a random reflected object. How far Schellingmoves from any reflexive version of identity philosophy is evident inthe following from theIntroduction to the Philosophy ofRevelation or Foundation of the Positive Philosophy of1842–3:

our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that naturewhich has passed through everything, it is precisely justourconsciousness (…) for the consciousness of man is not = theconsciousness of nature (…) Far from man and his activitymaking the world comprehensible, man himself is that which is mostincomprehensible. (SW II/3, p. 5–7)

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

what we call the world, which isso completely contingentboth as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression ofsomething which has arisen by thenecessity of reason(…) it contains apreponderant mass ofunreason. (Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie, p.99)

The contemporary ramifications of the debate between Schelling andHegel have been given new significance by the continuing elaborationof ‘non-metaphysical’ readings of Hegel by Robert Pippinand others. If Hegel is really the philosopher who insists thatlegitimation can only be in terms of the account we can give of how wecame to adopt the forms of legitimation of our society, there being noextra-mundane perspective on these forms, how far is he fromSchelling’s moves against rationalist metaphysics in his laterphilosophy? The difference between Hegel and Schelling seems here tolie above all in Schelling’s insistence that one cannot reducethe ways in which we face up to the terrors and irrationality ofexistence to what can be achieved by a philosophical system that makessense of negativity by showing it has a rational basis. His attentionto art and the unconscious in his early philosophy already suggeststhis direction in his later thinking.

Schelling is one of the first philosophers seriously to begin thecritique of the model of metaphysics based on the idea of truerepresentation, a critique which can be seen as one of the key aspectsof modern philosophy from Heidegger to the later Wittgenstein andbeyond. He is, at the same time, unlike some of his successors,committed to an account of human reason which does not assume thatreason’s incapacity to ground itself should lead to anabandonment of rationality or the reduction to reason to the exerciseof power, in the manner of Nietzsche. This is one of the respects inwhich Schelling has again become part of contemporary philosophicaldebate, where the need to seek means of legitimation which do not relyon the notion of a rationality inherent in the world remains a majorchallenge. Above all, Schelling’s account of mind and world,particularly his insistence on the need not to limit our conception ofnature to what can be objectified by scientific methods, is, in thelight of the ecological crisis, proving to be more durable than hisreception might until recently have suggested. The question Schellingstill poses is how the capacity for expanding human knowledge andcontrol of nature can be reconciled with sustainable ways ofinhabiting that nature.

6. The Schelling Revival

Philosophical responses to Schelling in the German-speaking worldduring the post-War era form a fairly continuous tradition, withperhaps the main innovations being Frank 1975 and Schulz 1975, whichshift some of the focus of research towards his late philosophy andthe critique of Hegel. In the English-speaking world, in contrast, awider reception of Schelling only really got underway in the 1990s.This was manifested in a considerable increase in the number of booksand articles on, and translations of Schelling, and in the foundationof the American Schelling Society. The decisive shift here was theclaim that, rather than being, as he largely had been in Anglophonephilosophy, a stage on the path from Kant, via Fichte, to Hegel,Schelling actually opens up aspects of modern philosophy which areindependent of Hegelianism, and can challenge Hegel’s systematicphilosophy (Bowie 1993). As Bowie showed, Schelling can therefore bebrought into productive connection with a range of philosophers, such asHeidegger, Derrida, and others who have been influential in debatesabout the nature and aims of modern philosophy. The ensuing receptionof Schelling was given a boost by Zizek (1997), which shows howSchelling’s philosophy relates closely to aspects of Lacan thatform the focus of Zizek’s previous work on Hegel. Since then thegrowing Schelling reception has taken divergent paths, which reflectthe perennially contested nature of Schelling interpretation. Thisreception involves some paradigmatic differences, of the kind thatensue from conflicting ways of approaching texts from the history ofphilosophy, from historicist reconstruction, to using the texts toquestion prevailing contemporary positions in philosophy in the waythe Anglophone reception of Hegel by Brandom, McDowell, Pippin, andothers has done. These differing approaches have offered newperspectives on the theological and other sources of Schelling’sphilosophy, detailed historical and philosophical analysis of thefiner detail of work from differing periods, Schelling’s role inthe genesis of psychoanalysis (see, particularly, Ffytche [sic] (2012),which gives an exemplary historical, philosophical, and psychologicalaccount of the issue), and competing claims as to what constitutes theessence of Schellingian philosophy.

The bibliography below gives an indication of the basic content ofsome of the books that have appeared as part of the Schelling revival.The tensions between the approaches in these books both point to keyissues in the understanding of Schelling’s philosophy, andinvolve difficulties that are inseparable from engagement with thehistory of philosophy. The attempt to interpret philosophy from thepast demands an adequate reconstruction of the way philosophicalissues were constituted in the era of the philosopher in question, onthe assumption that philosophy, in various ways, is constituteddialogically. Schelling’s relationship to Kant and Fichtesuggests what is at issue here, and raises the further issue that howKant and Fichte themselves are interpreted repeats the same problem.At the same time, if Schelling is to be seen as contributing to ourcontemporary philosophical understanding, such contextualreconstruction can get in the way of interpretations which buildcritically on his work with a view to using it to illuminate thepresent. Examples of such issues are examined below in relation tosome characteristic recent contributions to the Schellingliterature.

Some of Schelling’s most important philosophical concerns relateto the modern understanding of nature, which is, of course, dominatedby unparalleled advances in the natural sciences. One of the reasonsSchelling came to be neglected was in part because his conception ofnature in theNaturphilosophie was seen as being overtaken bythose sciences. The revival of interest in Schelling relates not leastto the realisation that what is now seen in terms of the ecologicalcrisis can be interpreted in ways which suggest the kind ofalternative conception of humankind’s relationship to natureparadigmatically present in Schelling’s objection to Fichte:‘in the last analysis what is the essence of his whole opinionof nature? It is this: that nature should be used […] and thatit is there for nothing more than to be used; his principle, accordingto which he looks at nature, is the economic teleologicalprinciple’ (SW I/7 p. 17). Jason Wirth argues that theindustrialised world’s likely leading to the sixth GreatExtinction event ‘opens a space to appreciate the radicality ofSchelling’s ethical and ontological efforts to respond to thepositivism and anthropocentrism at the heart of the ecologicalcrisis’ (Wirth 2015: xv). He does so on the assumption that‘the basic case for Schelling’s intrinsic interest andcontemporary relevance has been made (xi), so that we can move beyond‘explication’ to ‘develop the fundamental issues atstake in his thought’ (ibid.).

The danger here is that such development can lead to wide-rangingclaims for Schelling that don’t always take adequate account ofother approaches to the issues. How far is Schelling’s‘retrieval of the question of nature’ (6) dependent onprecisely those aspects of hisNaturphilosophie which came tobe widely rejected, and how can that philosophy be interpreted so thatthe reasons for that rejection are overcome? Whether it can bejustified by metaphysical argument or not, seeing nature inKant’s ‘formal’ sense as a ‘system ofnecessary laws’ is a plausible way of characterising one keyassumption on which the investigations of the modern sciences arebased. If that were all that is to be said about nature, there wouldbe no point in trying to revive Schelling’s undoubtedly fruitfulviews on nature as a ‘productivity’, but neither canSchelling’s conception be used as a wholesale alternative thatsomehow obviates the ‘formal’ sense of nature.

Wirth maintains ‘Schelling’s nature from the perspectiveof its ownliving or wild ground – is no longersurrounding us as a place in which are located. We are theearth’s bio-regions’ (22). Hamilton Grant (2005) can beseen as seeking to cash in such a claim: ‘it is an argument ofthis book, as it was of Schelling’s, that metaphysics cannot bepursued in isolation from physics. To do so entails the reconstructionnot only of Schelling’s naturephilosophy, therefore, but therepairing of the context from which it begins’ (2005: 8).Hamilton Grant provides a wealth of instructive historical detail fromthat context, but then infers from it that ‘the enemy in allthis is all post-Cartesian European philosophy’s elimination ofthe concept, even the existence, of nature, a deficiency commonequally to Kant and the postkantians’ (viii). It seems, though,hard to square this kind of totalising claim with aspects, especiallyof the early Marx and the Frankfurt School, for example, who weredirectly and indirectly influenced by Schelling.

Any analysis of the issues here must take account of their relation tothe effects of political economy on how nature comes to be understood,otherwise the philosophical perspective can actually obscure keyaspects of the issue of nature in modernity. There are evidentlyimportant issues here, and both Wirth and Hamilton Grant offerinteresting philosophical and historical perspectives on aspects ofthem, but they do so at the risk of making claims that rely on alimited, exclusively philosophical perspective: ‘the presentwork asserts firstly that Schellingianism is resurgent every timephilosophyreaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique ofmetaphysics, its subjectivist-epistemological transcendentalism, andits isolation of physics from metaphysics’ (5), and thisentails ‘the systematic undoing of the criticalrevolution’ (6). It perhaps makes more sense, however, tosuggest that a resurgence of ‘Schellingianism’, in thesense of radical questioning of humankind’s relationship both tointernal and external nature, comes about when the concrete forms ofthat relationship, as they do in the contemporary ecological crisis,result in real historical breakdown. Whether a metaphysical accountbuilding on Schelling’s idea of nature as productivity ratherthan product, or on the primacy of being before reflection can do morethan add to an already existing concretehistoricalrevelation of the blindness of certain influential forms of philosophyto alternative views of nature depends on how one now sees the tasksof philosophy in the face of that breakdown.

Further difficulties in the reception of Schelling relate to claimsabout what the real core of his philosophy is, and these arecompounded by the fact that he changed the emphasis, if notnecessarily the underlying core, of his philosophy quite radicallythroughout his career. It might be argued that, rather than seeking tolocate Schelling in a framework that is supposed to constitute theessence of his philosophy, one should use his explorations of nature,freedom, language, theology, existence, etc., where they are mostfruitful in relation to both historical and contemporary issues.Whistler (2013) and Matthews (2011) both make claims regarding thecore of Schelling’s thinking, and thereby, while offering muchscholarly and historical insight, and detailed attempts to explicatesome of Schelling’s more intractable texts, can also obscuresome dimensions of that thinking. Both Whistler and Matthews attendalmost exclusively to Schelling’s earlierNaturphilosophie and identity-philosophy.

Whistler claims his ‘book is, […], an attempt toreconstruct Schelling’s philosophy of the time, theIdentitätssystem, by means of a focus on the role thesymbol plays therein’ (Whistler 2012: vi). The book’svalue lies in its cogent and extensive reconstruction andinterpretation of some of the detail of that system, which has notbeen attempted before in English. However, this leads to claims suchas the following, that in theIdentitätssystem:‘an absolute system is engendered which has no concern forreference or for the integrity of particular scientificpursuits’ (vii). This claim depends not least on an admittedlysophisticated account of a small part ofSchelling’sPhilosophy of Art on the nature of languageas ‘symbol’ in a specific sense, which sees language as‘producing’ its object, rather than as a form ofrepresentation of a pre-existing world. Language is here essentiallyperformative, as in such things as promises, vows, etc.:‘Referential language talks about reality more or lessaccurately; productive language is reality more or lessintensely’ (208), so that ‘Meaning is performed in and asbeing; it is thus wholly immanent to, and ultimately identical with,being’ (201). The ultimate aim of this is to arrive at a newkind of theology: ‘In short, theology must be poietic, notreferential — produce God, not refer to him (210).

There is much to be said for seeing language, in CharlesTaylor’s terms, asboth ‘constitutive’(poietic), and ‘designative’ (referential), as thetradition from Hamann to Heidegger suggests. It is, though, hard tomake sense of a conception that seems so cavalier about how languageis also changed by scientific activity that can invalidate previousways of talking about things. It is noticeable that such problemsarise when the goal of a Schelling interpretation is essentiallytheological. Moreover, concentrating mainly on the early Schellingomits other dimensions of his view of language that can eithercomplement or contradict what ensues from the ideas of the identityphilosophy. The later Schelling, for example, asserts: ‘One isalmost tempted to say: language itself is only faded mythology, in itis preserved in only abstract and formal differences what mythologypreserves in still living and concrete differences’ (SW II/1 p.52). This sustains the idea of poiesis, but opens up different issueswith regard to language’s relation to philosophy andtheology.

Matthews also concentrates on the earlier Schelling from a perspectivewhere theology plays a major role, revealing informative connectionsof the young Schelling’s philosophy to Pietists such asFriedrich Christoph Oetinger and Phillip Matthäus Hahn, andoffering discussions of how Schelling moves away from Kant. However,the dangers of a theological interpretation of Schelling are alreadyapparent in Matthews’ agenda: ‘The speculative thesis ofthis work is that there exists in the work of Schelling a possibleschema for a new configuration of unity and freedom capable ofovercoming the destructive void of contemporary philosophy’(Matthews 2011: 27). This supposedly new configuration involves:‘the realization of nature in its sacred status as the deityexternalized, the spirit of the divine made flesh’ (30). What isat issue is supposed to be manifest in the experience of art thattranscends the ‘static categories of the understanding’(22): ‘it is precisely this experience, this sublime realizationof the oneness of our natures, which overcomes our alienation andredeems us, making us whole again with our nature’ (34). Theserather grandiose claims may have made some sense during the period ofthe early Schelling, but invocation of ‘a telos that requireshumans to act and order their lives so as to best express the harmonyof the universe’ (69) seems to ignore the subsequentdevelopments of modernity in science and technology, which manifestsanything but the ‘harmony of the universe’.

Using theologically based interpretation of philosophy from the pastwhile seeking to circumvent the political, social, and scientificexperience of the modern era too easily suggests avoidance rather thanconfrontation of the contradictions of that era. Such an approach canreally only invoke Schelling if one keeps to his early work, and it isnotable that Matthews’s does not mention the effects of Jacobiand the early Romantics even on the early Schelling’s project,which make it hard to think of Schelling solely in terms of atheological harmony. The claim that the early Schelling involves theidea that ‘our way of thinking does, in this regard, actuallymanifest the structure of nature’ (183) also ignoresSchelling’s later existential claims, such as the following:‘our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of thatnature which has passed through everything, it is precisely justour consciousness … for the consciousness of man isnot = the consciousness of nature…. Far from man and hisactivity making the world comprehensible, man himself is that which ismost incomprehensible (SW II/3 pp. 5–7). If even Schellinghimself comes to question a theologically directed harmonisation ofhumankind’s relationship to the world, it seems questionable toconstruct an account of Schelling based wholly on the idea of suchharmonisation.

McGrath (2021) also takes a predominantly theological approach, butthis time in an extensive and informative examination ofSchelling’s late philosophy: ‘What is ultimately at stakein the Schelling–Hegel dispute, then – and this is stillnot sufficiently recognised by the new generation of scholars ofGerman idealism – is the philosophical interpretation ofChristianity, or as I will put it in this work, the interpretation ofthe end of Christianity’ (McGrath 2021: 6). The essentialtension in philosophical interpretation of Schelling McGrath points tois suggested when he cites Markus Gabriel’s deflationaryunderstanding of ‘God’ in Schelling: ‘For Schelling,it is crucial to note that “God” refers to nothing more orless than the incessant and polymorphous becoming of intelligibility.God is sense, the almost trivial fact that the ways we access theworld (our sense-making practices, which generate fields of sense)belong to the world itself’ (Gabriel 2015: 82). McGrath, incontrast, talks in terms of: ‘An absolute future when pantheismwill be real, when God will actuallybe everything, withoutany diminishment of the reality of individual things, the eventfulnessof time or the freedom of the human being – this is themaster-thought of the late Schelling’ (McGrath 2021: 65).

There can be no philosophical argument that could substantiate such avision, and this suggests where the philosophy/theology divisionbecomes decisive in Schelling interpretation. McGrath has to rely onfaith: ‘By a theology of revelation I mean a theology whichassumes, not blind fidelity to authoritatively pronouncedpropositions, but an ordinary intellect “illumined” byfaith’ (11). This leads, rather as it does in Matthews, to somefairly grandiose claims: ‘I mean to outline, elaborate andevaluate the logical, moral and existential arguments Schelling offersus for assuming revelation as an explanation for nature, the humansituation and history’ (14), and ‘Schelling is proposingthat the New Testament should be taken as offering us knowledge ofultimate things, knowledge that can and should be appropriated byphilosophy in a post-Kantian register’ (30). One’sresponse to this will depend very much on one’s relationship totheology, but interpretations such as the following can make one wary oftrying to actualise Schelling’s philosophy from a theologicalperspective: ‘Justice and a flourishing human civilisation willonly be achieved via a universal experience of the redeeming God– this is the social-political upshot of the Philosophy ofRevelation’ (240). The undeniable virtues of McGrath’sbook lie in the wealth of detailed exploration of Schelling’slater texts, in his investigation of the distinction between negativeand positive philosophy and its relationship to the critique of Hegel,and in his clarification of the idea of a ‘philosophicalreligion’ that is to be achieved via positive philosophy:‘positive philosophy is theexperience of theeventfulness of history, the disclosure, which can only be empirical,ofmeaningful history’ (50–1).

What the recent philosophical and theological takes on Schelling canbe said to share is their insistence on his widening the scope of‘meaning’ beyond a semantic view, to include all the waysin which the world is disclosed to us. Gabriel focuses on thePhilosophy of Mythology, and he sets himself an essentiallyphilosophical agenda in which it is read as a ‘combination ofthree approaches, an ontotheological, an anthropological, and onebased on the history of self-consciousness’ (Gabriel 2006: 6),such that ‘One can see in Schelling’s thinking the attemptto shift the anthropological component of cognition into the centre ofthe founding of metaphysics’ (23). His ‘concept of thehistory of religion as the history of self-consciousness isconstitutive for the whole of the Philosophy of Mythology’ (52).Whereas modern natural scientific understanding sees meaning in termsof semantic relations between language and a world of physicalobjects: ‘Mythological consciousness […] does notexclusively inhabit aworld of meaning, but rather aworld of meaningfulness’ (31). Schelling therefore, ina manner that is echoed in certain respects by Heidegger, ‘seeksto oppose modern [scientistic] consciousness via the proof that itarose from mythological consciousness’ (31).

As such, what differentiates Schelling’s ‘history ofself-consciousness’ from Hegel’s is that from his earlyphilosophy onwards ‘the last thing for Schelling is always theadmission that self-consciousness comes up against a ground thatprecedes it which it has itself not posited’ (472–3). IntheSystem of Transcendental Idealism this is what leads toart being the culmination of the system, and, in the late philosophy,religion as ‘the reference (re-ligio) of consciousness to abeing that is not posited by itself’ (473). AlthoughSchelling’s late philosophy seeks to sustain the idea of apositive philosophy as ‘a never completable proof of God’(474), what remains most significant for contemporary understandingthat no longer thinks in theological terms is that ‘ourexistence is always accompanied by an ineliminable contingency orfacticity which corresponds to the fact that theworld itselfis groundless, even though its contents are necessarily connected toeach other’ (475–6). One way of seeing this, as suggestedby Bowie (2022), is to focus on the enduring ways in which, as theearly Schelling and the early Romantics proposed, aesthetic questionscan show limitations in modern philosophy whose predominant focus isepistemological.

Schelling was for a long time seen as a figure of the past. Thecontributors to the Schelling revival all in some respects seek torevive him for contemporary philosophy, which, as we have seen, canlead to perhaps rather grandiose claims. Such approaches do, though,offer challenges to some dominant ways of doing philosophy, but can attimes risk excluding Schelling from more mainstream debate. Frank, ashas Gabriel both in the book just discussed and in other work, hasshown that it is possible to interpret Schelling in ways whichdirectly affect almost any approach to philosophy, be itEuropean/Continental, or analytic. Frank has recently done so byconsidering Schelling’s explications, which he returns to invarious ways throughout his career, of the ‘identity of natureand spirit/mind [Geist]’ (Frank 2018: X). Hisconclusion is that ‘Schelling has shown the way out of athousands of years old spiritualistic philosophy of the subject thatis hostile to nature, and brought nature to the same level asspirit/mind’ (269). This might also sound suspiciouslygrandiose, but Frank both refers in detail to contextual historicalsources that have been largely forgotten or neglected, and presentslogical and metaphysical reasons for taking Schelling’sexplorations of identity seriously with respect to contemporarydebates concerning physicalism, reductive naturalism, and thelike.

The core idea here is that the very philosophical difficulties stillencountered with respect to notions of ‘identity’ mayactually 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 thatthings are only ever strictly identical with themselves, whichprecludes saying anything that differentiates a thing as something atall; the other sense of identity raises the problem that if things areto be identified – knowledge being otherwise impossible –they must differ from themselves in some sense, which seemsparadoxical. Schelling therefore thinks that ‘both sameness(‘Einfachheit’) and difference – thus something likeself-differentiation – have to be assumed in the thought ofidentity’ (109).

Frank traces the history of the notion of ‘reduplicativeidentity’ and its adoption by Schelling to explicate what makesthis idea plausible. This leads to the following: ‘For identityis after all a symmetrical relationship […] For this reason itis meaningless to call an identity theory more“idealist/mentalist” than “materialist”. It isneither of the two and both at once, as Schelling so neatly putsit’ (224). The basic position is summed up as follows:

‘Spirit/mind and nature are One’ is understood as: Thereis an X, and this X is on the one hand A (spirit/mind), and on theother B (nature). Bas B is not ‘the same’(‘einerlei’) as A; and Aas A is not the same asB. The identity of the two rests on theirbeing-equally-sustained-in-being by X (or absolute being) (211).

In the terms of contemporary philosophical debate: ‘Types ofmental and types of neuronal states are not in themselves – ornot metaphysically – different (namely not to the extent whichthey are sustained by X. They are only different from a conceptual (orepistemological) perspective’ (232). In such a relation ofidentity ‘two different but equally rigid designations’are involved, ‘each of which could be sufficient to adequatelydetermine 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 akind of difference’ (251).

This position can be seen as avoiding both the kind of questionablebracketing of modern natural science seen in some of themetaphysical/theological accounts considered above, and the kind ofreductive physicalism and scientism that plays too much of a role incertain parts of neuroscience-oriented analytical philosophy. ASchellingian account of identity resists any attempt to reduce theways in which meaning arises in the world, such reductions beingcharacteristic of philosophy which sees cognitive control as its majorconcern. Axel Hutter suggests one implication of this when he talks ofhow Schelling reveals

the decisive state of affairs for modern history, that the modernimpulse for emancipation has turned into its opposite in being carriedout concretely in history. Modern thought falls prey, after it hasemancipated itself from external attachment to the authority ofrevelation, which it does completely justifiably, to another power:the ‘nature’ of its cognitive capacity, which it now obeysmore blindly than it previously obeyed external authorities (Hutter1996: 300).

In this sense, Schelling can be seen as inaugurating the idea of a‘dialectic of Enlightenment’. The freedom that Schellingsees as inseparable from philosophy is the potential to see thatwholesale focus on cognitive certainty can, for all the benefits itmay offer, become precisely what we need to emancipate ourselves from,because we make sense of the world in many ways which cannot bereduced to cognition. Reason must therefore incorporate a sense of itsown fallibility and historicity, because it involves what Schellingterms the ‘dark ground which must nevertheless be the ground ofcognition’ (SW I.7: 413). We don’t always deal with needsand impulses, or with the meanings we gain from involvement in thenatural world, just by knowing about the needs and about why somethingappears beautiful, overwhelming, senseless, etc. Instead we may actexpressively, seeking sense in ways which cognitive command of theworld cannot provide. How much the revival of Schellingian concernsmight affect a world in which human relations to nature are evidentlyin crisis remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Primary Literature: Editions of Schelling’s Work

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s SämmtlicheWerke, [SW], ed. K.F.A. Schelling, I AbtheilungVols. 1–10, II Abtheilung Vols. 1–4, Stuttgart: Cotta,1856–61. An easily accessible substantial selection of thecomplete works has been published, ed. M. Frank, asFriedrichWilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, 6Vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1985.
Die Weltalter, [WA], M. Schröter(ed.), Munich: Biederstein, 1946; other versions than the version from1813 printed in theSämmtliche Werke.
TheHistorisch-kritische Ausgabe, im Auftrag derSchelling-Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,edited by H. M. Baumgartner, W.G. Jacobs, H. Krings, Stuttgart1976– this will in time become the new standard edition.
Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophieüberhaupt, 1794, (On the Possibility of an Absolute Form ofPhilosophy),Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie oder überdas Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen, 1795, (Of the I as thePrinciple of Philosophy or on the Unconditional in Human Knowledge),Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,1795, (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), inTheUnconditional in Human Knowledge: Four early essays 1794–6,translation and commentary by F. Marti, Lewisburg: Bucknell UniversityPress, 1980.
Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus derWissenschaftslehre, 1796–7, (Essays in Explanation of theIdealism of the Doctrine of Science).
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in dasStudium dieser Wissenschaft, 1797,Ideas for a Philosophy ofNature: as Introduction to the Study of this Science, translatedby E.E. Harris and P. Heath, introduction R. Stern, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799,(First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature).
System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800,Systemof Transcendental Idealism, translated by P. Heath, introductionM. Vater, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978.
Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie und dierichtige Art, ihre Probleme zu lösen, 1801, (On the TrueConcept of the Philosophy of Nature and the Right Way to Solve itsProblems).
Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, 1801,(Presentation of My System of Philosophy).
Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie,1802, (Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy).
Bruno oder über das göttliche und natürlichePrinzip der Dinge, 1802, (Bruno, or On the Natural and the DivinePrinciple of Things), translated with an introduction by M. Vater,Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.
Philosophie der Kunst, 1802–3,The Philosophyof Art, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1989.
Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischenStudiums, 1803 (On University Studies), translated E.S. Morgan,edited N. Guterman, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966.
Philosophie und Religion, 1804, (Philosophy andReligion).
System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophieinsbesondere, 1804, (System of the Whole of Philosophy and thePhilosophy of Nature in Particular).
Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie, 1806,(Aphorisms as an Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature).
Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, 1806,(Aphorisms on the Philosophy of Nature).
Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zurNatur, 1807, (On the Relationship of the Fine Arts toNature).
Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen dermenschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängendenGegenstände, 1809, (Of Human Freedom), translation withcritical introduction and notes by J. Gutmann, Chicago: Open Court,1936.
Briefwechsel mit Eschenmayer, 1810, (Correspondence withEschenmayer).
Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, 1810, (Stuttgart PrivateLectures).
Die Weltalter, 1811–15, (The Ages of the World),translated with introduction and notes by F. de W. Bolman, Jr., NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1967.The Abyss of Freedom/Agesof the World, trans. Judith Norman, with an essay by SlavojŽižek, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,1997.
Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, 1815,Schelling’s Treatise on ‘The Deities ofSamothrace’, translation and introduction by R.F. Brown,Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977.
Initia Philosophiae Universae, 1820–1, ed. H.Fuhrmans, Bonn: Bouvier, 1969.
Über die Nature der Philosophie als Wissenschaft,1821, (On the Nature of Philosophy as a Science).
System der Weltalter, 1827–8, (System of the Agesof the World), ed. S. Peetz, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990.
Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1830, (Introduction toPhilosophy), ed. W. E. Ehrhardt (Schellingiana 11), Stuttgart:Frommann-Holzboog, 1989.
Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie, 1832–3,(Foundations of the Positive Philosophy), ed. H. Fuhrmans Turin:Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972.
Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, probably1833–4,On the History of Modern Philosophy,translation and introduction by A. Bowie, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994.
Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1841–2, (Philosophy ofRevelation), ed. M. Frank, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977.
Philosophie der Mythologie, 1842, (Philosophy ofMythology).
Philosophie der Offenbarung, 1842–3, (Philosophy ofRevelation). Part translation inThe Grounding of PositivePhilosophy ed. and trans. B. Matthews, Albany: SUNY Press.
Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologieoder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie, between 1847 and1852, (Philosophical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology orPresentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy).

Secondary Literature

Beach, Edward A., 1994,The Potencies of the God(s):Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology, Albany: SUNY Press.
[Account of the late philosophy.]
Bowie, A., 1990,Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant toNietzsche, Manchester: Manchester University Press, reprinted1993, completely revised edition 2003.
[Chapter on Schelling whichcharacterises him in relation to Hölderlin and to Romantic andpost-Romantic theories of aesthetics, and as a theorist ofsubjectivity who does not rely on the idea of self-presence.]
–––, 1993,Schelling and Modern EuropeanPhilosophy: An Introduction, London: Routledge.
[The firstfull-length account of Schelling in English to consider him as a majorphilosopher in his own right, rather than as a pendant to Hegel.Connects Schelling to issues in contemporary analytical and Europeanphilosophy.]
––––, 2022,Aesthetic Dimensions ofModern Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[How seeingart as a kind of philosophy, and philosophy as a kind of art, in themanner Schelling does in theSystem of TranscendentalIdealism can reorient contemporary philosophy.]
Bruno, G.A. (ed.), 2020,Schelling’sPhilosophy. Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
[Useful collection of essays on the main phases ofSchelling's philosophy.]
Buchheim, T., 1992,Eins von Allem. Die Selbstbescheidung desIdealismus in Schellings Spätphilosophie, Hamburg: Meiner.
[Argues, against Walter Schulz, that the key to thelate Schelling is the positive philosophy’s rejection ofidealism, on the basis of ‘unprethinkable’ being’sresistance to incorporation into a philosophical system.]
Fenichel, T. 2019,Schelling, Freud, and the PhilosophicalFoundations of Psychoanalysis, London, NY: Routledge.
[Schelling and Freud, the relationship betweenphilosophy and psychoanalysis.]
Fichte, J.G., 1971,Werke I, Berlin: de Gruyter.
[See § 1.]
Ffytche, M., 2012,The Foundation of the Unconscious.Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
[Schelling’s role in the origins ofpsychoanalysis.]
Frank, M., 1975,Der unendliche Mangel an Sein,Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
[The classic modern account of Schelling’scritique of Hegel: a dense and very difficult, but indispensablework.]
–––, 1985,Eine Einführung inSchellings Philosophie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
[A detailed account of Schelling’s early workuntil the end of the identity philosophy: see §2.]
–––, 1991,Selbstbewußtsein undSelbsterkenntnis, Stuttgart: Reclam.
[Contains a vital essay on Schelling’sidentity theory, ‘Identität und Subjektivität’,which sees the theory as a major event in Western philosophy. The mainidea of the essay is further developed in Frank, 2018.]
–––, 2018,‘ReduplikativeIdentität’. Der Schlüssel zu Schellings reiferPhilosophie, Stuttgart, Bad Cannstadt: Frommann Holzbog.
[Detailed examination of the question of identityof nature and spirit in Schelling in relation to other philosophicaltheories of identity.]
–––, 1975a, with Kurz, G.,Materialien zuSchellings philosophischen Anfängen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
[Essays on various aspects of Schelling’sphilosophy between 1795 and 1804, with accompanying historicalmaterial.]
Hamilton Grant, I., 2008,Philosophies of Nature AfterSchelling, London: Continuum.
[Reassessment of Schelling’s views of naturein relation to themes in contemporary European/Continentalphilosophy.]
Heidegger, M., 1971,Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesender menschlichen Freiheit, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
[Dense and difficult, but essential commentary onSchelling’sOn the Essence of Human Freedom, withmaterial from later lectures by Heidegger. See §3.]
–––, 1991,Die Metaphysik des deutschenIdealismus (Schelling), Frankfurt: Klostermann.
[After the positive account in Heidegger (1971) theclaim here is that Schelling is, after all, another example of the‘Western metaphysics’ which culminates inNietzsche’s ‘will to power’. Difficult and clearlyflawed, because it ignores the late work altogether.]
Henrich, D., 1982,Selbstverhältnisse, Stuttgart:Reclam.
[Important essays on Schelling, Hegel and modernphilosophy.]
Heuser-Kessler, M.-L., 1986, ‘Die Produktivität derNatur’, Schellings Naturphilosophie und das neue Paradigma derSelbstorganisation in den Naturwissenschaften, Berlin: deGruyter.
[Claims that Schelling’s philosophy of naturecan be linked to developments in non-linear dynamics and to the theoryof self-organising systems.]
Hogrebe, W., 1989,Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysikals Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings ‘DieWeltalter’, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
[A brilliant, but demanding account of the WA as atheory of predication, which uses the tools of analytical philosophyto show how consistent much of Schelling’s positionis.]
Hühn, L., 1996,Fichte und Schelling oder: über dieGrenze menschlichen Wissens, Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler.
[Examination of the notion of ‘intellectualintuition’ in Fichte’s and Schelling’s accounts ofthe role of the subject in post-Cartesian philosophy.]
Hutter, Axel., 1996,Geschichtliche Vernunft. DieWeiterführung der Kantischen Vernunftkritik in derSpätphilosophie Schellings. Frankfurt a. M.: SuhrkampVerlag.
[How Schelling’s later conception of reasoninvolves a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’.]
Jähnig, D., 1966/1969,Schelling. Die Kunst in derPhilosophie, 2 volumes, Pfullingen: Neske.
[Detailed and impressive account of the importanceof art for Schelling’s philosophy as a whole.]
Jaspers, K., 1955,Schelling: Größe undVerhängnis, Munich: Piper.
[An interesting, if outdated, account ofSchelling’s life and work, which sees Schelling as failing toachieve his philosophical goals.]
Kosch, M., 2010,Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, andKierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[Detailed discussion of issues in moral philosophyin Schelling’s work after 1809.]
Marx, W., 1984,The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History,System, Freedom, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
[General and fairly accessible account, mainly ofearlier work by Schelling, as far asOn the Essence of HumanFreedom.]
Matthews, B., 2011,Schelling’s Organic Form ofPhilosophy. Life as the Schema of Freedom, Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.
[The development of Schelling’s ideas onnature, freedom and philosophy in his earlier work.]
Nasser, D., 2013,The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing inEarly German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804, Chicago:Chicago University Press.
[Exploration of the meaning of the Absolute inEarly German Romanticism, including Schelling.]
Nisenbaum, K., 2018,For the Love of Metaphysics. Nihilism andthe Conflict of Reason from Kant to Rosenzweig, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
[Deals with Schellings’s response to the‘conflict of reason’ that follows from Kant’sphilosophy, as a conflict between thinking and acting, or knowing andwilling.]
Ostaric, L. (ed.), 2014,Interpreting Schelling: CriticalEssays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[Collection of essays on themes in Schelling,including a crucial essay on Schelling’s conception of identityby Manfred Frank.]
Sandkaulen-Bock, B., 1990,Ausgang vom Unbedingten. Überden Anfang in der Philosophie Schellings, Göttingen:Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.
[Excellent account of Schelling’s response toquestions posed in particular by Jacobi concerning the grounding ofphilosophy in the absolute: historically detailed and very thorough onthe early work.]
Sandkühler, H. J., 1970,Friedrich Wilhelm JosephSchelling, Stuttgart: Metzler.
[Contains bibliography, which compliments that ofSchneeberger — see below.]
––– (ed.), 1984,Natur und geschichtlicherProzeß, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
[Selection of essays on the philosophy of naturewith useful bibliography of writings on that philosophy.]
Schneeberger, G., 1954,Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph vonSchelling. Eine Bibliographie, Bern: Franke.
[The standard bibliography, to be complimented bythose cited above.]
Scholz, H. (ed.), 1916,Die Hauptschriften zumPantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn, Berlin:Reuther and Reichard.
[Contains most of the key texts by Jacobi in thePantheism controversy.]
Schulz, W., 1975,Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus inder Spätphilosophie Schellings, Pfullingen: Neske.
[The book which reoriented the study of Schellingafter World War 2 towards the study of the later work, particularlythe Hegel-critique, and linked Schelling to Kierkegaard andHeidegger. Difficult but thought-provoking.]
Snow, Dale E., 1996,Schelling and the End of Idealism,Albany: SUNY Press.
[Excellent, very lucid, account of the early andmiddle Schelling in particular.]
Tilliette, X., 1970,Schelling une philosophie endevenir, Two Volumes, Paris: Vrin.
[Encyclopedic historical account of the developmentof Schelling’s work: stronger on general exposition and ontheology than on Schelling’s philosophical arguments.]
Welchman, A. and Norman, J. (eds.), 2004,The NewSchelling, London: Continuum.
[Mixed collection of essays, including translationsof classic essays by M. Frank, and J. Habermas.]
Whistler, D., 2013,Schelling’s Theory of SymbolicLanguage. Forming the System of Identity, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
[Schelling’s early identity philosophy asimportant in relation to questions of symbolism and as philosophy inits own right, that has been widely misunderstood.]
Wirth, J. M., 2003,The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations onSchelling and His Time, Albany: State University of New YorkPress.
[Schelling as a philosopher of life, linked torelated conceptions in European and Eastern philosophy.]
–––, 2004,Schelling Now: ContemporaryReadings, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
[Collection of essays linking Schelling to themesin contemporary European/Continental philosophy.]
–––, 2015,Schelling’s Practice of theWild. Time, Art, Imagination, Albany: State University of NewYork Press.
[Reflections on Schelling’s views of naturein relation to issues concerning time and the imagination.]
White, A., 1983a,Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem ofMetaphysics, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
[Defends Hegel against Schelling’s critique,but does not take account of the arguments of Frank on the failure ofreflection in Hegel.]
–––, 1983b,Schelling: Introduction to theSystem of Freedom, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
[Good introduction to Schelling’s work as awhole, which tends to focus, though, on its undoubted weaknesses, atthe expense of its strengths.]
Zammito, J., 2018,The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophyand Physiology from Stahl to Schelling, Chicago: University ofChicago Press.
[On Schelling’s role in the emergence ofmodern biology.]
Žižek, S., 1996,The Indivisible Remainder: Essayson Schelling and Related Matters, London: Verso.
[Sees Schelling as “the first to formulatethe post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency andtemporality”, which means that Schelling is the source of keyideas in Žižek which were previously attributed toHegel.]

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