Why Schelling, who called nature a sleeping spirit, has come back

Some names in the history of philosophy stand in shadow not because they are mentioned less often than they deserve, but because they are mentioned for the wrong reason.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) is the best example of this. For a long time he was taught as "the stop between Fichte and Hegel." In the textbooks he is the middle link in the three-name chain of German idealism, a link not obviously required on its own account.

Over the past thirty years the picture has changed. Schelling is today no longer only a subject in the history of philosophy; his name comes up in arguments about ecology, about contemporary metaphysics and about the philosophy of religion.

To see why, one has to go back to the beginning.

An early maturity#

At the theological seminary in Tübingen, Schelling shared rooms with two others: Hegel and Hölderlin. All three shared the exhilaration of the French Revolution. Two days ago in this column we marked Hegel's birth; of the three men who came out of that room, two set the direction of the history of philosophy.

There is an oddity in the ordering. Schelling was the youngest of the three — five years younger than Hegel — and the first to mature.

He published his first significant texts at twenty-one. At twenty-three he was a professor at Jena. Hegel was still working as a private tutor at the time, and came to Jena with Schelling's help; in the early years the two brought out a journal together.

That early brilliance later told against him. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, without naming him, Hegel dismissed Schelling's conception of the absolute as "the night in which all cows are black." The friendship ended; and the writing of philosophy's history took Hegel's side for a long while afterwards.

The philosophy of nature: the forgotten half#

Schelling's first great contribution was Naturphilosophie — the philosophy of nature.

His problem was this. Kant and Fichte had put the subject at the centre of philosophy. Knowledge was explained by the way the subject constitutes its world. But that turned nature into nothing more than the object standing opposite consciousness: dead, passive, material without meaning in itself.

Schelling would not accept the picture. If consciousness has emerged out of nature — and it has — then there must be something in nature itself that prepares the possibility of consciousness.

His formula is famous: "Nature is visible spirit; spirit is invisible nature."

The claim here is structural, not mystical. Nature, for Schelling, is not merely a mechanism obeying laws; it is a process that folds back on itself by degrees, grows more complex, and finally arrives at consciousness of itself. The line running from inert matter to the organism, and from the organism to consciousness, is not a series of leaps added from outside.

Hence in Schelling nature is not "product" but productivity (natura naturans). The objects we see are the temporary way-stations of an activity still under way.

This was worked out in live exchange with the science of the day. Schelling followed the new findings on electricity, magnetism and chemical processes closely; polarity — the principle that every activity works in company with an opposing force — was his basic scheme of explanation.

Identity, and the case for art#

Schelling's second period is the philosophy of identity.

The question is this: how do thought and nature, subject and object, fit one another? Why should it be possible for an equation to explain the world?

His answer is radical. Both are aspects of one and the same underlying reality. The absolute is the point of indifference at which subject and object have not yet come apart.

But how is such a thing to be known? Not by the concept — the concept already divides.

Schelling's answer is a rare move in the history of philosophy: art.

According to the closing section of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), the work of art is the one place where conscious and unconscious activity are at work together. The artist knows what he is doing; yet something he does not know also becomes visible in the work. Art is therefore the organon of philosophy — its instrument of demonstration.

Much of the weight German Romanticism gave to art comes from here.

1809: freedom and evil#

The text of Schelling's that is most read today is the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809.

Its question is a classical one; its handling of the question is not. If everything issues from an absolute ground, where does evil come from?

The familiar answer treats evil as a lack: the absence of the good, a kind of defect. Schelling rejects it. Evil, for him, is a positive force — the human capacity to put one's own particularity in the place of the whole. And that capacity is the price of freedom: a being able to choose the good must be able to choose evil too.

The real radicalism of the text lies deeper. Schelling holds that there is a dark side in the ground itself: a substratum that resists reason and cannot be brought under a concept. Reason is born of that ground and cannot exhaust it.

This is the most serious piece of self-criticism German idealism produced from within, because what it says is: reality cannot be converted into thought without remainder.

Heidegger lectured on the text in 1936 and counted it among the summits of German philosophy.

The late work: negative and positive philosophy#

Schelling's final period stayed in the dark for a long time; the lecture notes were published only later.

The distinction runs as follows. Negative philosophy grasps by thought what a thing is — its essence. Logic and conceptual analysis do this. What it cannot produce is the fact that a thing exists.

For Schelling the facticity of being is something that cannot be inferred from a concept. Only positive philosophy can take it up: a way of thinking that sets out from history, from mythology, from religious experience, from what has actually happened.

This is a direct objection to Hegel. In Hegel, reality is the unfolding of the concept; in Schelling, the concept always follows reality at a distance.

Among those who heard these Berlin lectures in 1841 were the young Kierkegaard, Bakunin and Engels. Kierkegaard was enthusiastic at first and then disappointed — but the idea that facticity cannot be deduced from the concept stayed with him and lodged itself at the core of existentialism.

Why he has come back#

There are three reasons for Schelling's return over the past thirty years.

Ecology. As the view of nature as a passive resource has come under criticism, a thinker who held nature to be productive and valuable in itself has become interesting. Schelling's thesis that nature is productivity rather than product is used directly in environmental philosophy.

The new metaphysics. In the argument about speculative realism that we noted in this column earlier this month, Iain Hamilton Grant's work rests directly on Schelling. What Grant calls transcendental materialism turns Schelling's philosophy of nature into a contemporary programme.

The ground that resists reason. The thought that reason cannot wholly ground itself — what Schelling in 1809 called the dark ground — echoed in the twentieth century along a broad line running from Heidegger to Adorno, from psychoanalysis to Deleuze. That Slavoj Žižek has written two books on Schelling is a measure of the same interest.

A question of framing#

Reading Schelling as the road to Hegel makes none of these three veins visible.

Reading him on his own terms brings a different question forward: is it possible to think the human being without placing it outside nature, and without reducing it to nature either?

That is no longer merely a question in the history of philosophy. It lies on the common ground of arguments running from neuroscience to ecology, from artificial intelligence to bioethics.

Schelling's answer was incomplete, it was inconsistent, and he had to build his system again from the beginning three times over. But he was the first to frame the question.

A note on the cover image#

The image on our cover is not a painting but a photograph — a daguerreotype of 1848.

Of the great names of German idealism, Schelling is the only one who lived long enough to see the invention of photography. Kant died in 1804, Fichte in 1814, Hegel in 1831. Schelling lived until 1854.

The old man in the photograph was still lecturing twenty-three years after Hegel's death.

In Turkish translation#

Schelling's Philosophy of Art, On the Essence of Human Freedom and System of Transcendental Idealism have been translated into Turkish. The late lecture notes are not yet available in Turkish.