Summary
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was the German philosopher who placed living nature at the center of post-Kantian thought. Working in the Romantic circle around Jena in the late 1790s, he argued that nature is not a dead mechanism to be dissected but a productive, organic whole whose laws also structure the human mind. He wrote his first books in his early twenties, shaped a generation of German biologists, physicians, and poets, and gave the philosophical movement called Naturphilosophie its enduring shape. His ideas about the organism, polarity, and the slow temporal unfolding of natural forms reached far into nineteenth-century biology, physiology, and medicine, and helped prepare the German scientific reception of evolutionary thought.
Life and Context
Schelling arrived at the Tübinger Stift as a precocious teenager and shared a room with two slightly older students, Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, both five years his senior. The three formed a dense intellectual partnership during the years of the French Revolution, and Hegel’s first book was a comparison of Fichte’s and Schelling’s systems.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling moved from this seminary milieu into the Frühromantiker circle at Jena, where philosophy, literature, and science were not separate disciplines but enmeshed in personal relationships among a small group of writers and scientists.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The Romantic circle Schelling joined had already rejected the rationalisms that preceded it. The Romantics complained that under Wolff, Leibniz, and the Kant of the first Critique, nature had been “dissected atomistically like a dead corpse.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling’s mature project took shape against this complaint: nature had to be reconceived as living, generative, and intelligible from within rather than reduced to mechanism from without. Fichte had given the Romantics a transcendental starting point: an absolute self that posits itself, encounters resistance (the Anstoss), and develops both the empirical self and the world that confronts it.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling took this Fichtean foundation and reformulated it by reinstating nature as the ego’s coequal, infusing Fichte’s idealism with the realism of Spinoza.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Goethe’s relationship to the young philosopher was paternal. Caroline Schlegel wrote to Schelling: “Goethe loves you like a father, and I love you like a mother — what wonderful parents you have!”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Goethe’s mentorship oriented Schelling toward what he came to call the rights of nature, and Schelling’s organic conception of nature was formed in dialectical exchange with Kant, Reil, Kielmeyer, Goethe, and Humboldt.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Fichte himself, with whom Schelling first identified philosophically, observed that one’s choice of philosophical system is not arbitrary: “What kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends on what kind of man one is.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Naturphilosophie
For Schelling, natural science had to begin from the organism rather than from mechanism. He held that organism is the fundamental concept of nature, not a regulative idea (as Kant had argued in the Critique of Judgment), but a constitutive feature of reality itself. The basic principles given objectively in nature, he argued, are isomorphic with the acts that the self can find subjectively in itself.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Schelling rejected Kant’s dualism of noumena and phenomena and treated nature and mind as two aspects of a single absolute reality, with the organism as the foundational concept for science.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Where Kant had argued that biology cannot be a genuine science because teleological principles are merely regulative, Schelling, together with Goethe, countered that archetypes are constitutive of nature itself.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Where Kant maintained that organisms must be analyzed als ob (as if) they had teleological structure, Schelling insisted that nature is intrinsically teleological and organic, making mechanism derivative rather than foundational.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
This put biology at the center of philosophy. For Schelling, nature was fundamentally organic, virtually a living and generative being, and biology was therefore the paradigmatic science: the discipline that most conspicuously displayed the creativity and beauty of the one infinite reality.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) His core formula, often quoted, identified natural with aesthetic creative forces: “the objective world is only the original, though unconscious, poetry of the mind [Geist].” On this view the biologist’s great aid in comprehending nature was poetic, that is, aesthetic, judgment.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
After 1801, Schelling moved into what is often called his identity philosophy, in which the absolute is the indifferent ground of both subject and object, and ideas (archetypes) within the absolute serve as the basis for both truth and beauty.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The forces creating nature, he held, are identical to those creating aesthetic objects. A naturalist of Schellingian disposition (Alexander von Humboldt was the example Richards reaches for) would discover in nature “the self’s other kingdom, where the forces were familiar and the mind would meet its double.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Richards rejects the persistent charge that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie exemplified, as critics have put it, “a denial of the value of experiment.” Schelling’s early work, Richards argues, exemplifies a persistent effort to think rationally through basic epistemological problems, grounded both in the certainty of self-reflection and in an experimental understanding of nature.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The Polarity Principle and Temporal Process
Schelling’s mature philosophy of nature was built around polar forces and slow temporal development. He proposed what he himself called dynamische Evolution, a process-driven evolutionism in which species arise through gradual development driven by polar forces, but not through genealogical descent from a common ancestor.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The deep-time premise was explicit. The epigraph to On the World Soul announced that “the alteration to which the organic as well as the inorganic nature was subjected … occurred over a much longer time than our small periods could provide measure.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Schelling criticized genealogical theories like Erasmus Darwin’s for misunderstanding the archetype. The archetype, on his view, can only be realized in the aggregate of all species over infinite time, not in a branching common-ancestor tree.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) His evolutionism instead held that archetypal forms unfold in time through a teleological process, not through mechanical descent, and that recapitulation links individual development to species development: individual organisms recapitulate the history of their species during ontogeny.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The polarity principle gave him a way to read living and non-living nature in the same terms. Reil applied the principle directly to obstetrics, modeling the pregnant uterus as a polar magnetic line in which the force of expansion and the force of contraction govern opposite poles.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) The same logic of opposed forces in productive tension was meant to apply across physics, chemistry, and physiology.
Influence on Biology and Medicine
Schelling’s influence on biology and medicine ran through a network of researchers who came to his philosophy because of his organic conception of nature, not in spite of it. Carl Gustav Carus, Lorenz Oken, Ignaz Döllinger, Karl Friedrich Burdach, and Karl Ernst von Baer all worked within or in dialogue with his Naturphilosophie framework.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Richards calls him the philosophical architect of Romantic science, whose ideas about archetypes and organicism shaped nineteenth-century biology, morphology, and medicine.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Several of these relationships are worth describing in their own terms. Schelling’s organic conception, Richards writes, “served as the magnet that initially attracted such researchers as Reil, Kielmeyer, and Goethe to labor over his quite abstruse philosophy.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Reil incorporated Schelling’s conception of an active ego into his theory of personality development; Humboldt endorsed Schelling’s claim of an intimate connection between organic and inorganic forces of nature; Schelling’s organic conception itself owed much to Kielmeyer.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Kielmeyer’s case is especially telling. Schelling recognized Kielmeyer’s 1793 lecture “Über die Verhältnisse der organischen Kräfte” as “a talk that future ages, without doubt, will regard as an epoch of the new natural history.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Kielmeyer in turn acknowledged that he and Schelling had arrived at convergent views of nature without coordination: “What my countryman and friend Schelling has up to now produced from the depths of the human mind [Geist] concerning external nature could and should agree with what I have perceived in external nature — the world of appearance; however, since no written communication occurred [between us], this agreement arose quite independently for each.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Reil’s trajectory shows the depth of the Schellingian turn in German medicine. After 1800, Reil adopted Schelling’s Romantic Naturphilosophie, reconceiving mental illness as a fragmentation of self-consciousness and advocating psychological therapies; his Rhapsodieen (1803) is generally taken as the founding text of psychiatry as a discipline.(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Reil’s mature metaphysics is recognizably Schellingian: every form, he held, “lay sequestered in absolute substance,” which “must carry under cover the idea of the sensible universe, like the seed carries the future plant,” and the Bildungstrieb expresses “a striving of the ideal, which expresses itself in the forms it creates, to become objective.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) Reil also described nature in terms that could have come from Schelling’s hand: “nature, like a Proteus, brings everything from herself; she herself is the material, tool, craftsman, and archetype.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
In a departing speech from Halle in 1810, Reil summarized the revolution in German medicine and natural science: “The effort at explanation has made place for living intuition [lebendige Anschauung]; the idea has entered the arena of the mechanical principle; and observation has achieved a standpoint from which to view things in their natural relations.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
The wider claim Richards develops is that Schelling and Goethe were both biological evolutionists and that their conceptions “straightened the path for German zoologists to advance more quickly and easily to Lamarckian and Darwinian theories than could their counterparts in England and France.”(Richards, Robert J., 2002) On this reading, Darwin’s theory of evolution was deeply influenced by ideas from the Romantic movement, and the Goethe–Schelling–Kielmeyer line is part of the prehistory of Darwinian biology rather than its opposite.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
Goethe’s own theory of life, in turn, partly shared Schelling’s outlook. Richards reads the homunculus narrative in Faust Part II as encoding a naturphilosophisch metamorphosis (creatures rising from “living dust” through gradual evolution into higher animals and human beings) and as reflecting the Schellingian view that nature herself is comparable to a living creature.(Richards, Robert J., 2002)
See Also
naturphilosophie, johann-christian-reil, karl-friedrich-kielmeyer, johann-wolfgang-goethe, lorenz-oken, alexander-von-humboldt, immanuel-kant, romantic-biology, archetype, teleology, organicism
Sources
This page is drawn from Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which is the lead authority for German Romantic biology in this encyclopaedia.
[TODO: integrate primary Schelling texts (Ideas, On the World Soul, First Outline, On Human Freedom) once Library extractions are available.]