Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

2026

Publisher

Palgrave-Macmillan Publishing

Source Publication

The Palgrave Schelling Handbook

Source ISSN

9783031183362

Abstract

Schelling is notorious for having a fluid vision of systematic philosophy and its methods. In an age where philosophy is expected to result in one or two books, not years of discussions with students and colleagues--and certainly not a distillation of one’s way of life--Schelling’s thought has been called protean or restless, or in Hegel’s snarky verdict “an education pursued in public.” The same could be said of Socrates. But there is a truth in these comments; it is difficult to find in fifty-six years of publications, addresses and abandoned manuscripts the single argument that is Schelling’s philosophy. What provokes and guides his philosophic quest are the contrasting legacies of Spinoza and Kant, the antipodes of the German philosophic globe at the turn of the nineteenth century. Kant publishes the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781; Jacobi has his provocative conversations with Lessing in 1783, recounted in his 1785 Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza, in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn. Spinoza’s axiomatized exposition of his views on God, man, and well-being—Ethica Ordine Geometrico demonstrata—was published anonymously after his death in 1677 but was excluded from public and academic discussion. Nothing makes views more interesting than prohibition, so Spinoza was widely read but publicly ignored for more than a century until the old Lessing piped up and confessed that he was a Spinozist, grumbling that Spinoza was still treated like a dead dog (MPW 193; LS 27). The world shared by Goethe and Schiller, the Jena romantics, and the post-Kantian idealists was defined by the near simultaneous appearance of Kant’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism, almost a double sun in the intellectual heavens. Schelling’s temperament--with his taste for grand theory, wide learning, medicine and natural science, as well as situational ethics--hewed closer to Spinoza’s doctrine than to Kant’s, though his vision of philosophical system, methodology, and philosophical vocabulary was indebted to Kant. While one can get a basic view of Fichte by looking at what he took from Kant and Reinhold, or of Hegel by his appropriation and critique of Fichte, it is difficult to get a single story of Schelling’s path by looking to its Kantian elements. But from his first philosophical essays to his last public address in 1850, one finds Schelling ever at work criticizing and reshaping Spinoza’s naturalism. One aphorism in Kant’s Opus postumum calls Spinoza, Schelling, and Lichtenberg the past, present, and future of transcendental philosophy (OP 1.87: OPT 251). Melamed calls Spinoza “Schelling’s life companion,” although as in many such partnerships, threads of admiration and criticism are ever intertwined. If one wants a phrase that distills Schelling’s lifetime of thinking into a single goal, it would be overcoming Spinoza: infusing his deduction of God, world, and the human order in a mechanistic (or behaviorist) key with a sense of life, sprit, freedom and contingency. That is as comprehensive an account as history of philosophy can offer; it complements recent efforts to craft a unified metaphysical account by Woodard, Alderwick, and Tritten.

Comments

Accepted version. "Schelling and Spinoza" in The Palgrave Schelling Handbook. Eds Sean J. McGrath, Joseph Carew, Kyla Bruff. Springer, Cham, 2026: 441-467. Publisher link. © 2026 Palgrave-Macmillan Publishing. Used with permission.

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