Friedrich Schelling biography
Friedrich Schelling was a German philosopher, representative of classical German philosophy. He was a friend, and then the opponent of Hegel. He was greatly admired in the philosophical world of Germany in the early 19th century, before the appearance of Hegel. Having lost to Hegel an open philosophical discussion in the early 1920’s, he lost his former influence and failed to restore it even after Hegel's death, occupying his chair at the University of Berlin. The main goal of Schelling's philosophy is to understand and explain the "absolute", which the beginning of being and thinking. His notable ideas were the System of Naturphilosophie, philosophy of identity, positive philosophy, art as "the eternal organ and document of philosophy" whose basic character is an "unconscious infinity," system of chemistry. He also coined the term "absolute idealism".
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born in 1775 in Leonberg, Württemberg, Holy Roman Empire. In 1790, 15-year-old Schelling entered the University of Tübingen with the characteristic "ingenium praecox" (German and Latin for "early talent"). At the university, Schelling's interests were divided between philosophy and theology. In 1792, he defended his master's thesis, titled Antiquissimi de prima malorum humanorum origine philosophematis Genes. III. explicandi tentamen criticum et philosophicum. He began to study the philosophy of Kant, read the first works of Fichte and at the age of nineteen he himself appeared in the philosophical field, first as a follower and interpreter of Fichte. His friends were Hegel and Goethe. After finishing the course in 1795, Schelling served three years as a home teacher, in conditions very favorable for his own studies. In 1798, Schelling became a professor at the University of Jena. At the same time, Schelling got into close contact with a circle of romantics, the brothers Schlegel, Hardenberg, etc. The soul of this circle was Caroline Schlegel, the wife of A. W. Schlegel. In 1803, the 27-year-old Schelling married a 40-year-old Caroline (their age difference was 13 years), but their marriage lasted 6 years (until 1809) and ended with the death of Caroline from dysentery.
From 1803 to 1806, Schelling taught at the University of Würzburg, after which he moved to Munich, where he became a full-time member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In the lectures of Schelling, read in Berlin in 1841-42 and promulgated by Paulus, there was already full recognition of the system of absolute idealism, as a remarkable completion of his own philosophy of identity. In addition to Jena, Schelling was a professor in Würzburg, Munich, Erlangen and Berlin. The end of Schelling's life was overshadowed by the lawsuit against Paulus, who unveiled without Schilling's permission his lectures at the University of Berlin.
The process ended not in favor of Schelling, since the court found it difficult to recognize the publication of lectures related to the critical discussion, for the "reprint" provided for by law. The insulted Schelling stopped lecturing forever. The last years of his life, Schelling spent surrounded by his loyal friends and a large family (three years after the death of his first wife, he entered married again). Friedrich Schelling died in 1854 in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.
Schelling's philosophy does not represent a fully unified and complete whole, but rather a several systems that are consistently developed by him throughout his life. The first period in the development of Schelling's philosophy consists in the study of the epistemological problem of the basic principle of cognition and the possibility of cognition from the point of view of criticism of the modified Fichte. The main task of the second period is the construction of nature as a self-developing spiritual organism. The system of identity that characterizes the third period consists in revealing the idea of the absolute as the identity of the main opposites of the real and the ideal, finite and infinite.
In the fourth period, Schelling expounds his philosophy of religion the theory of the falling away of the world from God and the return to God through the mediation of Christianity. To this same period, a "positive" philosophy, known only from Schelling's lectures, adjoins, as a supplement. In it, the philosophy of religion is not presented as an object of rational cognition, but as intuitively revealed truth. From this point of view, positive philosophy is at the same time a philosophy of mythology and revelation.