Naturphilosophie

But it was Schelling who set out to locate the knowledge of nature within a larger system of philosophy. He came to this task as a participant in the general philosophical examination of Kant's system that was underway in the 1790s. In addition to those largely sympathetic to Kant, there were others, especially Johann Fichte (1762–1814), who questioned Kant's reliance on the existence of things-in-themselves. Since we cannot have knowledge of things-in-themselves, how could Kant insist that they were the source of the sense data that reason utilized to create knowledge of the world? Schelling's initial sympathy for this critique made it appear that he agreed with Fichte's claim that even the manifold of sense had been produced by us out of our own creative faculty. But in spite of his agreement with Fichte that the possibility of our knowledge of nature did not depend on the existence of Kant's things-in-themselves, it was Schelling's ultimate disagreement with Fichte's reliance on the absolute ego that led to his wish to construct a system of philosophy in which nature retained its own integrity.

At first, in the Ideen, Schelling insists merely that our belief in a reality outside ourselves grew up at the same time that our belief in our own existence appeared, that one was as necessary as the other. But this first book is best seen as a preliminary attempt, a beginning to the new enterprise. In it Schelling does not yet himself realize the basic foundation of his later Naturphilosophie. The Ideen contains, like Baader's work before it, an attack on atomism as an outlook sufficient to capture the depth of nature's reality. In place of atomism Schelling proposed a dynamic conception of underlying polar forces he believed were more up to the task. With these he felt that he could show how what we experience of nature derives from the same source that gives rise to our belief in a nature outside ourselves.

So far he has not gotten outside the mind, since he is here speaking about instances of our belief. But with the rapid appearance of a series of works between 1798 and 1801, in which the work of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was influential, he would make clean the break from Fichte and insist that the realm of the real has equal status to that of the ideal. It was these works that inspired many to abandon the viewpoint of Kant in favor of what they saw as the more realistic understanding that Schelling's approach provided.

It was likely while he was writing the Ideen that Schelling came to the realization that the realm of the organic, which had been dealt with only cursorily in his first work, altered fundamentally the direction in which he had been going. In the next book, Von der Weltseele (1798; On the world soul), the new emphasis became clear in the subtitle: An Hypothesis of Higher Physics to Explain General Organism. By recognizing that the metaphor for reality was not mechanism but organism, Schelling found a means by which he could overcome Kant's fracturing of human experience into two separate realms. If nature was an organism, then knowledge of organism would include knowledge of nature as a living whole. And that whole would include the life of the mind and soul as well as that of the body. There would not be, as Kant taught, two separate realms, only one of which was accessible to knowledge. For Schelling there was only one realm.

This perspective resonated with many in the early years of the nineteenth century. As a prolific author in Jena, Schelling had become an important member of the famous Romantic circle that had assembled there. He also got to know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who spent many hours together with Schelling reading the latter's work. Because of his youth—he was twenty-three when he received the call to Jena—Schelling established a reputation as a successful young genius.