SCHELLING, FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON
(1775–1854)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, the German idealist philosopher, was born at Leonberg in Württemberg, the son of a learned Lutheran pastor, Joseph Friedrich Schelling. From his earliest years, he was destined by his family for the ministry. He was educated at the cloister school of Bebenhausen and, from 1790 to 1792, at the theological seminary at Tübingen. There he became friendly with two older students who were to play significant roles in his own life, as well as in cultural history: G. W. F. Hegel and J. C. F. Hölderlin, the great romantic poet. The three young men were keen partisans of the French Revolution, and they also enthusiastically discussed the ideas of the philosophers, especially Benedict de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

For several years Schelling held a position as tutor of the sons of a noble family. Then, in 1798, at the unusually young age of twenty-three, he was called to a professorship at Jena. There the famous Fichte, the leading philosopher in Germany at the time and the idol of Schelling's youth, became his colleague and friend. In 1802 and 1803 Schelling and Hegel jointly edited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie. At that time, though Hegel was five years older than Schelling, he was generally considered to be Schelling's disciple, and Hegel's first book was a comparison of Fichte's and Schelling's philosophies.

In nearby Weimar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller were at the peak of their careers. Schelling met them both and became friendly with Goethe. Jena was now the center of German romanticism, and the ideas and personalities of this movement made a profound and lasting impression on Schelling. The romantic movement was, of course, also influenced by his philosophy. In its stress on the importance of the individual and the supreme value of art, and in its antirationalism, organicism, and vitalism, Schelling's transcendental idealism is the epitome of German romantic philosophies.

His friends among the romantics included Ludwig Tieck, who interested Schelling in folklore and mythology; the brilliant young poet Novalis; and August and Friedrich von Schlegel, whose translations of William Shakespeare made the English playwright one of the main shaping forces of German literature. Schelling was particularly intimate with August and his charming, intellectually gifted wife Caroline. Soon he became informally engaged to Auguste Böhmer, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Caroline by a previous marriage, but she died in 1800 before they could marry. It was rumored at the time that Schelling's amateur medical attentions contributed to her death. Certainly he was impetuous and self-confident to a point that some felt bordered on irresponsibility. This was a personal pattern common among the romantics, who sometimes defended themselves with the words of Schelling, "The beginning and end of all philosophy is—freedom."

In 1803 Caroline divorced August Schlegel and married Schelling. In keeping with the romantic creed, the three remained friends. It seems to have been an ideal marriage in every way. Schelling produced his most successful works during these years, and when Caroline died in 1809 he was grief-stricken; from then on he seemed unable to put his ideas together in a way that satisfied him. He never published another book as long as he lived, though he continued to write and lecture for many years. In 1812 he married Pauline Gotter, a friend of Caroline's.

From 1803 to 1806 Schelling taught philosophy at the new University of Würzburg, and in 1806 he was called to Munich as an associate of the Academy of Sciences and as secretary of the Academy of Arts. He later became secretary of the philosophical section of the Academy of Sciences. These positions were government sinecures that afforded him abundant leisure and also allowed him to lecture at Stuttgart and, from 1820 to 1827, at Erlangen. In 1827 he became a professor at Munich. In 1841 the Prussian authorities, in the hope that he would serve as a counterbalance to the powerful influence of the radical Young Hegelians, appointed him to the position of Prussian privy councilor and member of the Berlin Academy, and he lectured for the next five years at the University of Berlin. He died at the age of seventy-nine at Bad Ragaz, Switzerland.

Of all the major German philosophers, Schelling is the least known in the English-speaking world. His name is familiar as the historic link connecting Kant and Fichte with Hegel, but this description fits only his earlier work. Through his personal association with some of the German romantic writers and his doctrinal influence on the entire German romantic school, as well as through the direct influence of his aesthetics on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, through Coleridge, his indirect influence on other English poets of the period, he is also known as the philosopher of romanticism. In his last phase, which was partly a conscious reaction to Hegel, he anticipated some of the central ideas of the existentialists, and for this reason there has been a revival of interest in his later writings.

The development of Schelling's philosophy can be conveniently divided into four stages—subjective idealism, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of identity, and the philosophy of the opposition of the negative and the positive. The stages are logically connected with one another, but also are clearly separate, so much so that their author was often accused of inconsistency. For example, Hegel wrote, "Schelling carried on his philosophic education before the public and signaled each fresh stage of his advance with a new treatise."

Subjective Idealism

In the first stage Schelling was gradually working himself free from Fichte's subjective idealism to an independent position of his own. The major works of this phase were Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, oder über das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen (Tübingen, 1795), in which he posited the ego as the supreme, unconditioned element in human knowledge, and Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (in Philosophisches Journal, 1796), in which he compared Spinoza and Fichte. There is little that is original in these works other than the style and the tone. However, Schelling's style is important because its eloquence, its sense of emotional urgency, and its relative freedom from technical jargon—a rare trait in the writings of German idealists—all point to his affinity with the romantic movement and his unique philosophic stress on the importance of aesthetics.

Philosophy of Nature

The second stage, the philosophy of nature, was the most famous and the most influential of Schelling's philosophies and remained so until recent years. The first important work of this stage was Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Leipzig, 1797). Against Fichte's conception of the world as the construction of the ego, Schelling now insisted that the world of nature is just as real and just as important as the world of the ego. In fact, it is nature, the objective, that gives to consciousness what consciousness reproduces anew. Originally, consciousness and nature are one and infinite; but consciousness limits itself and presents itself to itself as finite, as different from nature. The essence of the ego is spirit, and the essence of nature is matter, but the essence of matter is force; that is, attraction and repulsion. In force, Schelling finds the common ground of nature and ego. As attraction it is objective, it is nature, it is matter; as repulsion it is subjective, it is ego, it is spirit. This duality also governs human perception: As attraction to the self, force governs the streaming of the outer world into the inner world of sensation, and this internal experience of movement constitutes the a priori basis of time; as repulsion, pushing out into the world, force constitutes the a priori basis of space.

physical sciences

In Von der Weltseele (Hamburg, 1798) Schelling dealt with the philosophic problems of the physical sciences. He believed that the fundamental aim of the sciences was the interpretation of nature as a unity, and therefore the proper study of all sciences was force. He tried to show that mechanical, chemical, electrical, and vital forces were all different manifestations of the same underlying force. In the following year, in Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena and Leipzig, 1799) and in Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie oder über den Begriff der spekulativen Physik (Jena and Leipzig, 1799), he depicted this force as "pure activity." He saw nature as an infinite self-activity, realizing itself in finite matter but forever unexhausted, forever short of completely realizing itself. He felt that he had thus found a parallel in the physical universe for Kant's idea of the moral universe as practical reason forever striving toward an unattainable ideal. He further developed this phase of his thought in "Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses" (in Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik, Vol. 1, 1800); Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie; Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (Jena and Leipzig, 1801); and Bruno, oder über das göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge (Berlin, 1802).

knowledge

In the System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen, 1800), his most systematic and mature statement, Schelling applied to the philosophy of nature the insights gained from the Kantian and Fichtean philosophy of knowledge. His technique for deriving the world of objects from the world of the ego was to turn consciousness upon itself as the only object of which we have immediate firsthand knowledge. Thus, he found that when we abstract from all objects of knowledge, both within ourselves and in the outside world, we arrive at the pure activity of abstracting, which is pure self-activity. Seen in this light, the consciousness of the not-self is the limit of self-activity, just as the things-in-themselves are at the limits of knowledge in The Critique of Pure Reason.

On this foundation, Schelling built a theory of three stages of knowledge, which he described as progressing from sensation to perception, from perception to reflection, and from reflection to will. At first, consciousness of a limit, of the not-self, is felt as a sensation. The limit, where the sensation is felt, is the meeting place of self-consciousness pushing outward and the force of the consciousness of external objects streaming inward. Therefore, all sensation is a feeling of myself as limited. Here we become aware of gravity, of the force of the real objective world in space, and also of intensity, which is the immediate consciousness of the self and its own activity in time. From the perception of the outside world comes reflection, and from reflection on the internal world comes will.

In this way Schelling felt that he had established links among Kant's categories, schemata, and objects of perception. Aside from the technical question of the correctness of this linkage—certainly Kant would have disputed it—it has great historical importance, because this is perhaps the only area in which Schelling decisively influenced the fully matured philosophy of Hegel, who used this reasoning to connect the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis with Kant's triadic formulation, though the dialectic itself was borrowed by Hegel from Fichte.

Schelling argued that the separation of knowledge from its object occurs only in abstraction. In reality, concepts have no existence apart from their objects, since knowledge is the meeting of objects and self. Therefore, the self is not merely one of the objects of knowledge; it is the condition of all knowledge. And since the essence of the self is pure self-activity, knowledge ultimately derives from willing, which is the action of the self.

other minds

Schelling now asks two fundamental questions. How do I know there are other intelligences? And how can they act on me? He answers that our consciousness of limitations implies the existence of other selves that act as limiting factors. (Here he takes issue with Kant's teaching that intelligence is limited by something not itself.) But the other selves can act on me only indirectly, through my representation of their acts. Their action does not compel mine, but limits it; and such limitation is compatible with my freedom. It is the community of interacting intelligences that constitutes the historical life of man. And while nature exists when not perceived by me, it exists then only because it is perceived by other human beings. Objectivity is intersubjectivity.

will and imagination

Although perception is necessary and limited, will is free and unlimited. The imagination and its ideas mediate between perception and will. As opposed to the conceptions of the understanding, which are finite, the ideas of the imagination are both finite and infinite. An idea's relation to its object is finite, but the activity of the imagination in this relation is infinite. Each idea is subsumed under an ideal, as conceptions are subsumed under their schemata in Kant. The function of the will is to idealize the imagination's ideas. The contradiction thus engendered gives rise to impulse, defined as the desire to restore destroyed identity. Through impulse, there is constant realization of ideals, but the ideas of the imagination are constantly striven after and never attained.

will and knowledge

The distinction between will and intelligence thus is relative, not absolute. From a higher point of view, they are identical. In intelligence, the I that acts and the I that knows are one. The acting I is an object for itself, while the knowing I merely perceives other objects. In action there is no transition from the world of nature to the world of mind, for the subject has become an object to itself. Any change in the outer world is received as a perception, but every action causes such a change; therefore action is perception. (Here, as elsewhere, Schelling anticipates Gestalt psychology.) Self-determination is the primary condition of all consciousness.

justice

The object of impulse, which always acts to restore the lost identity of the self and the world, is happiness. But an impulse that transcends its proper limits acts against itself and must be prevented by a sanction not found in nature—a sanction of the will. This sanction of the will is thus the basis of justice, and the law of justice is a second nature that our will sets above the first nature.

the nature of history

The process of history is the gradual realization of law; history can be described as the development of human freedom, as an eternal progress toward the perfect state—a sovereign world federation of all sovereign states—in which all men would be citizens. Thus, history is the realization of freedom through necessity. There is an absolute identity between freedom and necessity, but this identity is forever unconscious, never the object of knowledge but always the object of faith. God is neither personal nor objective, but the revelation of the divine in man. This revelation is never complete. History is a drama in which human beings are not merely the actors, but also the authors.

art and aesthetics

If history is a drama for Schelling, nature is a work of art. Like Kant in The Critique of Judgment, Schelling believed that organisms and works of art are alike in that they can be properly understood only teleologically; that is, as entities in which the parts serve the whole and the whole is itself purposive. The main difference between art and organisms, according to Schelling, is that in organisms the activity of the organizing intelligence lies hidden or unconscious, manifest only in the product—the organism itself; but in the work of art the productive activity is conscious whereas the product, the true art work, is unconscious and infinite. The artist never fully understands his art. The purpose of art is neither utility, nor pleasure, nor morality, nor knowledge, but beauty—the realization of the infinite in the finite.

In his aesthetics, which is elaborated in the System des transzendentalen Idealismus and his lectures on the philosophy of art, Über das Verhältniss der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (Munich, 1807), Schelling is at his most personal, his most impassioned, his most characteristic, and his most original. He held that in art, intelligence for the first time becomes completely self-conscious. In philosophy, it is abstract and limited in the expression of its potential infinity. But in art, which is completely free from abstraction in this sense, intelligence fully realizes its infinite nature. (It is pertinent that Hans Arp, the abstract artist, has written that the works usually called "abstractions" are more accurately referred to as "concretions.") Thus art is the goal toward which all intelligence moves. Art is the true philosophy, because in it nature and history are forever reconciled; but the artist is not therefore a philosopher, since he often lacks a theoretical understanding of his own creation. The theoretical intelligence merely contemplates the world, and the practical intelligence merely orders it; but the aesthetic intelligence creates the world.

Philosophy of Identity

The third stage of Schelling's thought was the philosophy of identity, first expounded at length in Vorlesungen über die Methode des academischen Studiums (Tübingen, 1803), appropriately written in Spinoza's geometric mode. Here Schelling said that the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of knowledge, taken together, constitute only half the truth and need to be completed by the other half, which unites nature and knowledge in an undifferentiated identity. The production of reality does not rest on the opposition of intelligence and nature, subject and object, but in the identity of all reality as it rises from the absolute. The absolute identity of nature and intelligence is found in their common neutral source, reason. Reason is one and infinite, embracing things-in-themselves and knowledge of things. In reason there is no object, no subject, no space, no time. Its supreme law is the law of identity, A = A, which is true regardless of all spatial or temporal considerations. In the formula A = A, the distinction between subject and object is formal and relative. Subject and object here concern only the form, and are indifferent as to essence. It was this phase of Schelling's thought that Hegel wittily called "the night in which … all cows are black."

pantheism

The philosophy of identity was a kind of pantheism, but it stressed the aliveness of nature in contradistinction to Spinoza's dead, materialistic, deterministic pantheism. Although Spinoza's influence is evident, it is filtered through the vitalistic interpretations of Johann Gottfried Herder and Goethe and tempered by the parallel influence of Giordano Bruno's vitalistic pantheism. Schelling believed that life was the basis of the inorganic world, and not vice versa. Nature is inseparable from God, but distinguishable from him. God is not to be comprehended rationally, because his essence is will and he can be apprehended only through the will, in action. For the most part, Schelling's thought here draws from Jakob Boehme, and reintroduces Protestant mysticism into the mainstream of Western philosophy.

god and evil

In Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Landshut, 1809; translated as Of Human Freedom, Chicago, 1936) Schelling, like Boehme, distinguishes between God as ground of being and God as perfection. Evil is explained as the ground eliciting the self-will of man in order to awaken him to the distinction between good and evil, which originally were united in one identity. Thus, evil is a necessary stage in the progress toward the total realization of good. Imperfection in being is perfection in the process of becoming. There is a dark ground or negative principle in God, but it exists so that he can become separate from it as a personality.

Positive Philosophy

After 1809, the year of his first wife's death, Schelling made the given situation of existence his predominant concern. This final existentialist phase of his philosophy was first propounded in Die Weltalter (written in 1811 but not published in Schelling's lifetime), consummated in his lectures at the University of Berlin, and saved for posterity in three volumes, Einleitung in die Mythologie, Philosophie der Mythologie, and Philosophie der Offenbarung, which were published posthumously in the Sämmtliche Werke. In these works he sought to erect a positive philosophy based on the evolution of the divine principle in human history, especially in myths and religions, which he felt opposed and thus completed his own earlier, negative, merely rational philosophy. However, rather than representing a sharp break with his past, this last phase can be considered as the flowering of tendencies he showed as early as 1795, when he wrote, "The main function of all philosophy is the solution of the problem of the existence of the world." It is significant that while the prolific and influential writings of his first three periods were crowded into fourteen brief years, from 1795 to 1809, his last period, during which his rate of production slowed and his influence waned, lasted from 1809 to his death in 1854.

god

The root of existence is now found in nonbeing, in God as the ungrounded, the abyss, the eternal nothing. Only against the ungrounded can the ground arise, because nothing can become evident without resistance. Thus God is "eternal contrariety," forever alienating himself from himself. This alienation creates the possibility of the fall. As only the Absolute is real, finite things, which are not real, can exist only in a removal, in a fall from reality. The Absolute creates its own counterpart, freedom, which is both the cause of the fall and the last trace of divinity things bear after the fall. Because of this progression through opposites, Schelling called this fourth phase of his thought the opposition of negative and positive philosophy.

man

As the creature in whom the fall, and the state of things before the fall, both rise for the first time into consciousness, man is the crown of creation and the most interesting and rewarding object of philosophic attention. Man is free creative activity, the essence of the world. Thus, in his last phase, Schelling was led to a kind of philosophic anthropology, seeking for the essence of man in what he thought was his deepest activity, myth-making and religion. Despite the profoundly mystical flavor of his thought in this period, he still kept contact with his Kantian heritage. In Philosophie der Mythologie he explained mythology as a symbolic system of ideas with its own a priori structure as necessary for its functioning as, according to Kant, the a priori structure of the understanding is necessary for logical thought. Ernst Cassirer's neo-Kantian formulation of mythology as just such a conceptual structure owes a great deal to Schelling, a debt fully acknowledged in the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

resemblance to existentialism

What has made this last phase of Schelling's thought most apposite to modern existential philosophy is another question rising from his consideration of man's being in the world. As he put it, "Just he, man, impelled me to the final desperate question: Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?" It is this question, described as "dreadful" rather than "desperate," that Martin Heidegger took for his central theme in Being and Time.

Schelling's resemblance to the modern existentialists is suggestive rather than substantive, but the suggestion is inescapable. Like them, he emphasized that philosophy must deal not only with the "what" of the world, which explains its nature, but also with the "that" of the world—the fact of its existence, of its being there. And like Søren Kierkegaard (who attended some of his lectures in Berlin but was not impressed), Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Schelling tried to express the inexpressible pathos of existence in oracular utterances halfway between poetry and metaphysics, the quality of which can be conveyed only by quotation. The world and God have as common ground "the incomprehensible basis of reality." "Existence is self-affirmation." God is "the infinite affirmation of himself." The objective world is the unconscious poetry of the spirit creating itself. Finally, there is a striking formulation of the existential anxiety, which is also an anticipation of the psychoanalytic doctrine of resistance: "The philosopher who knows his calling is the physician who … seeks to heal with gentle, slow hand the deep wounds of human consciousness. The restoration is all the more difficult since most people do not want to be healed at all and, like unhappy patients, raise an unruly outcry if one even approaches their wounds."

So the problems posed by Schelling in the nineteenth century are still very much alive in the philosophic and literary world of today. At that time his main influence in England was in aesthetics, and his lectures on the philosophy of art were translated as The Philosophy of Art in 1845. The continuing, perhaps growing contemporary interest in him is demonstrated by the fact that the first translations into English of any of his books since then—significantly, both from his last, existentialist phase—were published in America in 1936 and 1942.

Bibliography

works by schelling

Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie. Münchener Vorlesungen WS 1832/33 und SS 1833, edited by H. Fuhrmans. Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1972.

Einleitung in die Philosophie, edited by W. E. Ehrhardt. Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog, 1989.

System der Weltalter, edited by S. Peetz. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990.

Urfassung der Philosophie der Offenbarung, edited by W. E. Ehrhardt. Hamburg: Meiner, 1992.

Collected Works

Sämmtliche Werke. 14 vols, edited by K. F. A. von Schelling. Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–1861.

Werke. 8 vols, edited by M. Schröder. Munich, 1927–1956.

Translations

The Ages of the World. Translated by F. de Wolfe Bolman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. Translation of Über die Gottheiten von Samothrake, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1815, a part of Die Weltalter, which is mentioned in the text. The Ages of the World includes a long, informative introduction on Schelling's philosophy, especially its last phase.

Of Human Freedom. Translated by J. Gutmann. Chicago: Open Court, 1936. Translation of Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheít.

The Philosophy of Art: An Oration on the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature. Translated by A. Johnson. London: Chapman, 1845. Translation of Über das Verhältniss der bildenden Künste zu der Natur.

System of Transcendental Idealism. Translated by P. Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Essays, 1794–1796. Translated by Fritz Martl. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980.

Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principles of Things. Translated by Michale Vater. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: An Introduction to the Study of This Science. Translated by E. E. Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

works on schelling

Beach, E. The Potencies of God(s): Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Bowie, A. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1993.

Bréhier, Émile. Schelling. Paris: Alcan, 1912.

Cassirer, Ernst. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, Vol. III: Die Nachkantischen Systeme. Berlin: Cassirer, 1920. Includes a comprehensive, clear, and sympathetic account of Schelling's epistemology.

Copleston, Frederick C. History of Philosophy. Vol. VII. London, 1963. Includes the best account of Schelling's philosophy in English.

Courtine, J.-F. Extase de la raison: Essais zur Schelling. Paris: Galilée, 1990.

Esposito, J. Schelling's Idealism and Philosophy of Nature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1977.

Fischer, Kuno. Geschiehte der neueren Philosophie. Vol. VII. 3rd ed. Heidelberg, 1902. Probably the best full-length study of Schelling's life and work.

Frank, M. Der Unendliche Mangel am Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975.

Hartmann, Nicolai. Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus. 2nd ed. Berlin, 1960. An exhaustive and authoritative work on German idealism.

Heidegger, M. Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

Hirsch, Eric D. Wordsworth and Schelling. New York, 1962. Reviews Schelling's aesthetics and its parallels in William Wordsworth.

Jaspers, Karl. Schelling: Grösse und Verhängnis. Munich: Piper, 1955. A profound and searching analysis from an existentialist point of view.

Kaspar, W. Das Absolute in der Geschichte. Mainz: Grünewald, 1965.

Kroner, Richard. Von Kant bis Hegel. 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr, 1921–1924.

Marx, W. The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Noack, Ludwig. Schelling und die Philosophie der Romantik. Berlin: Mittler, 1859.

Read, Herbert. The True Voice of Feeling. London: Faber and Faber, 1953. Concerned with Schelling's influence on Coleridge. Includes translation of a chapter on philosophy of art by Schelling.

Schneeberger, G. Schelling: Eine Bibliographie. Bern, 1954. An extensive bibliography.

Schulz, W. Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. Pfüllingen: Neske, 1975.

Snow, D. E. Schelling and the End of Idealism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Tillich, P. The Construction of Historical Religion in Schelling's Positive Philosophy. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1974.

Tilliette, X. L'Absolu et la philosophie: Essais sur Schelling. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.

Watson, John. Schelling's Transcendental Idealism. Chicago: Griggs, 1882. A clear, careful, scholarly paraphrase of Schelling's System des transcendentalen Idealismus.

White, A. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.

Adam Margoshes (1967)

Bibliography updated by Thomas Nenon (2005)