Schelling Versus Hegel

In tracing Friedrich von Schelling's long philosophical development, John Laughland examines in particular his disentanglement from German idealism and his reaction, later in life, against Hegel. He argues that this story has relevance beyond the facts themselves and that it explains much about the direction philosophy took in the century between the French Revolution and the rise of Communism. Schelling's development turned principally on the related questions of human liberty and the creation. Following a sharp disagreement with his old friend Hegel over the Phenomenology in 1807, Schelling wrote a short but brilliant essay on human freedom in 1809, after which he never published another word. In the remaining decades of his life (d. 1854) Schelling developed in an increasingly conservative and Christian direction, preoccupied with the relationship between Christianity and metaphysics. In numerous lectures and unpublished works, he attacked what he saw as the hubris and artificiality of Hegelian rationalism. However the path against which Schelling warned was the one which philosophy finally took. Schelling was determined to show how philosophy (especially ontology) explained and was explained by Christianity, and that both had been damaged by modern rationalism. But Hegel’s Marxist epigones who attended his later lectures scoffed and Hegelianism triumphed. This is an elegantly written and engaging study in the history of ideas of a philosopher on the losing side.

In this rigorous historical analysis, Lauer challenges traditional readings that have reduced two of German idealism's most important thinkers to opposing caricatures: Hegel the uncompromising systematist blind to the novelty and contingency of human life and Schelling the protean thinker drawn to all manner of pseudoscientific charlatanry. Bringing together recent scholarship that is just beginning to realise Schelling's centrality in the overthrow of metaphysics and Hegel's openness to diversity and innovation, this book shows that both thinkers can be read as contributing to the Kantian project of showing both the utter necessity and the limitations of reason. In readings of texts spanning each thinker's career, Lauer shows that animating much of Hegel and Schellings' most passionate work is their recognition of the need neither for a canonization of reason nor for its overthrow, but for its 'suspension'. Their lifelong willingness to revisit both their definitions of reason and their accounts of its role in philosophy give these discussions a vitality and depth that few in the history of philosophy can match.

In this essay, Hegel attempted to show how Fichte's Science of Knowledge was an advance from the position of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and how Schelling (and incidentally Hegel himself) had made a further advance from the position of Fichte. Hegel finds the idealism of Fichte too abstractly subjective and formalistic, and he tries to show how Schelling's philosophy of nature is the remedy for these weaknesses. But the most important philosophical content of the essay is probably to be found in his general introduction to these critical efforts where he deals with a number of problems about philosophical method in a way which is of general interest to philosophers, and not merely interesting to those who accept the Hegelian "dialectic method" which grew out of these first beginnings. Finally, the Difference essay is important in the development of "Nature-Philosophy" as a movement in the history of science.

This comprehensive, general introduction to Schelling's philosophy shows that it was Schelling who set the agenda for German idealism and defined the term of its characteristic problems.

This book develops an original interpretation of the relationship between F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. It argues that the difference between these philosophers should be understood in light of their shared commitment to the philosophy of nature and the idea that spirit, or humanity, emerges from the natural world. The author makes a case for the contemporary relevance of German idealist philosophy of nature by walking the reader through its major themes, motivations, and arguments. Along the way, Schelling and Hegel are shown to develop key insights about the structure of reality and the dependence of living things and human beings upon inorganic natural processes. In elucidating the details of Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective philosophies of nature, the book challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the scope of philosophical inquiry and the relationship between matter, life, and human existence. Schelling, Hegel, and the Philosophy of Nature will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on German idealism, as well as those interested in contemporary philosophies of nature and the topic of emergence.