Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

Schelling was the son of a Württemberg pastor and orientalist. At fifteen he was admitted early to the Tübingen seminary, where he shared a room with Hegel and Hölderlin, five years his seniors, and the three planted a liberty tree for the French Revolution. He published his first philosophical essay at nineteen and at twenty-three, on Goethe's recommendation, became professor at Jena, the first of the German idealists to achieve fame.

At Jena he first followed Fichte, then quickly struck out on his own. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature and the System of Transcendental Idealism argue that Fichte began only from the I and neglected nature. Nature is not dead mechanism but unconscious spirit rising by stages, through magnetism, electricity, chemistry and life, to consciousness. Philosophy has two paths, from nature to spirit and from spirit to nature, which meet in art, since the work of art unites conscious and unconscious activity in a single intuition. The 'philosophy of identity' of these years declared subject and object indistinguishable in the Absolute, which Hegel later mocked as 'the night in which all cows are black'.

In 1803 he married Caroline, Schlegel's former wife, left Jena, and held posts at Würzburg and Munich. In 1809 he published the Essay on Human Freedom, arguing that there is a dark ground within God and that freedom is the capacity for both good and evil; Heidegger called it the peak of idealism. Caroline died the same year, and for the next forty-five years he published almost nothing, only lecturing. In 1841 the Prussian king brought him to Berlin to 'stamp out the dragon-seed of Hegelian pantheism'; Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin and Burckhardt sat in the audience and all went away disappointed.

The late lectures divide 'negative' from 'positive' philosophy: concepts can tell us only what is possible, not what exists; existence itself exceeds reason and can be pursued only through the history of myth and revelation. Dismissed in his lifetime as a relapse, these ideas were rediscovered in the twentieth century: he is a forerunner of Heidegger, Tillich, Habermas and Žižek, and a distant ancestor of the unconscious in psychoanalysis.