F. W. J. Schelling

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born in 1775 in Leonberg, in Württemberg, and entered the Tübingen seminary at fifteen, where he shared rooms with Hegel and Hölderlin. A prodigy, he published widely while still a student, and at twenty-three became a professor at Jena, then the centre of German philosophy and Romanticism.

His philosophy of nature presented nature as a living, self-organizing whole, the visible form of the same activity that becomes conscious in the mind. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) he argued that art is the highest expression of philosophy, since in the work of art the conscious and the unconscious, freedom and nature, become one. In his philosophy of identity the Absolute is the indifference of subject and object.

After Hegel’s Phenomenology criticized his Absolute, Schelling published less. His essay on human freedom (1809) explored the origin of evil in God’s own ground. He taught in Munich and Erlangen, and in 1841 was called to Berlin to oppose Hegel’s influence; his lectures on mythology and revelation drew a celebrated audience. He died in 1854 in Switzerland. He influenced Coleridge and, in the twentieth century, Paul Tillich and Martin Heidegger.