page_title: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
section_title: Reputation and influence
hierarchical_section_title: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling / Reputation and influence
caption_attribution_description: Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) - Slovenian philosopher, Lacanian Marxist sociologist, psychoanalyst, and cultural critic
context_page_description: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his one-time university roommate, early friend, and later rival. Interpreting Schelling's philosophy is regarded as difficult because of its evolving nature.
  Schelling's thought in the large has been neglected, especially in the English-speaking world. An important factor in this was the ascendancy of Hegel, whose mature works portray Schelling as a mere footnote in the development of idealism. Schelling's Naturphilosophie also has been attacked by scientists for its tendency to analogize and lack of empirical orientation. However, some later philosophers have shown interest in re-examining Schelling's body of work.
context_section_description: Some scholars characterize Schelling as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system. Others challenge the notion that Schelling's thought is marked by profound breaks, instead arguing that his philosophy always focused on a few common themes, especially human freedom, the absolute, and the relationship between spirit and nature. Unlike Hegel, Schelling did not believe that the absolute could be known in its true character through rational inquiry alone.
  Schelling is still studied, although his reputation has varied over time. His work impressed the English romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced his ideas into English-speaking culture, sometimes without full acknowledgment, as in the Biographia Literaria. Coleridge's critical work was influential, and it was he who introduced into English literature Schelling's concept of the unconscious. Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism has been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899).
  Up to 1950, Schelling was almost a forgotten philosopher even in Germany. In the 1910s and 1920s, philosophers of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism, like Wilhelm Windelband or Richard Kroner, tended to describe Schelling as an episode connecting Fichte and Hegel. His late period tended to be ignored, and his philosophies of nature and of art in the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century were the main focus. In this context Kuno Fischer characterized Schelling's early philosophy as "aesthetic idealism", focusing on the argument where he ranked art as "the sole document and the eternal organ of philosophy" (das einzige wahre und ewige Organon zugleich und Dokument der Philosophie). From socialist philosophers like György Lukács, he was regarded as anachronistic. An exception was Martin Heidegger, who found in Schelling's On Human Freedomcentral themes of Western ontology - being, existence, and freedom - and expounded on them in his 1936 lectures.
  In the 1950s, the situation began to change. In 1954, the centennial of his death, an international conference on Schelling was held. Several philosophers, including Karl Jaspers, gave presentations about the uniqueness and relevance of his thought, the interest shifting toward his later work on the origin of existence. Schelling was the subject of Jürgen Habermas's 1954 dissertation.
  In 1955 Jaspers published Schelling, representing him as a forerunner of the existentialists and Walter Schulz, one of organizers of the 1954 conference, published "Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings" ("The Perfection of German Idealism in Schelling's Late Philosophy") claiming that Schelling had made German idealism complete with his late philosophy, particularly with his Berlin lectures in the 1840s. Schulz presented Schelling as the person who resolved the philosophical problems which Hegel had left incomplete, in contrast to the contemporary idea that Schelling had been surpassed by Hegel much earlier. Theologian Paul Tillich wrote: "what I learned from Schelling became determinative of my own philosophical and theological development". Maurice Merleau-Ponty likened his own project of natural ontology to Schelling's in his 1957–58 Course on Nature.
  In the 1970s nature was again of interest to philosophers in relation to environmental issues. Schelling's philosophy of nature, particularly his intention to construct a program which covers both nature and the intellectual life in a single system and method, and restore nature as a central theme of philosophy, has been reevaluated in the contemporary context. His influence and relation to the German art scene, particularly to Romantic literature and visual art, has been an interest since the late 1960s, from Philipp Otto Runge to Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. This interest has been revived in recent years through the work of the environmental philosopher Arran Gare who has identified a tradition of Sc
caption: Slavoj Zizek is one example of contemporary philosophers influenced by Schelling's philosophy.[42]
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