The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Idealism as a View of Nature and Spirit: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

[ 1 ] Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was close to Fichte at the beginning of his search for a world view insofar as the idea of the soul, which grasps itself in the activity of self-awareness as in the certainty of its existence, also became the secure support of his knowledge. However, different thoughts radiate from this basic feeling in Schelling's mind than in Fichte's. For the latter, the comprehensive will of the world shines into the awakening soul as a spiritual kingdom of light; and he wants to recognize the rays of this light in their essence. For Schelling, the enigma of the world is formed by the fact that he sees himself, with the soul awakened to the "I", confronted with seemingly mute, dead nature. The soul awakens out of this nature. This reveals itself to human observation. And the cognizing, feeling human spirit immerses itself in this nature and through it fills itself with an inner world, which then becomes spiritual life in it. Could this be so if there were not a deep inner relationship between the soul and nature that is initially hidden from human cognition? But nature remains mute if the soul does not make itself its instrument of speech; it seems dead if the spirit of man does not disenchant life from appearance. The secrets of nature must emerge from the depths of the human soul. But if this is not to be a deception, it must be the essence of nature itself that speaks from the soul. And it must be true that the soul only appears to descend into its own depths when it recognizes nature; in reality, it must walk through subconscious corridors in order to immerse itself in the cycle of nature's weaving with its own life if it wants to find nature.

[ 2 ] Schelling sees in nature, as it presents itself to ordinary human consciousness, to a certain extent only a physiognomic expression of true nature, just as one sees in a human face the expression of the supersensible soul. And just as through this physiognomic expression one lives into the soul of man, if one is able to absorb into one's own experience the experience of the other, so for Schelling there is a possibility of awakening the cognitive faculties of man in such a way that they experience in themselves what weaves and works soulfully and spiritually behind the outer face of nature. Neither can the science of this outer face be taken for a revelation of what lives in the depths of nature; nor is man's cognitive power, which exhausts itself in such science, capable of unlocking nature's true secrets. Schelling therefore wants to awaken in the human soul an intellectual view that lies behind the ordinary human power of cognition. This way of seeing reveals itself - in Schelling's sense - as a creative power in man; but in such a way that it does not create concepts about nature out of the soul, but rather, through intimate coexistence with the soulfulness of nature, brings to manifestation the powers of ideas that are creative in nature. Fearful minds tremble at the thought of a view of nature that is supposed to stem from such an "intellectual view". And the ridicule and scorn poured on it in the period following Schelling's was great. For a person who knows how to avoid one-sidedness in these matters, there is no need to be ambivalent: either to indulge in the "reveries of natural fantasy of the kind of Schelling" and accuse proper, serious natural research of "coarse materialism"; or to take a level-headed stand on the point of view of this research and "dismiss all Schellingian conceptual playfulness as childishness". One can be unreservedly among those who want to give full validity to natural research as demanded by the latest "scientific age"; and yet one can understand the justification of Schelling's attempt to create a view of nature beyond this natural research, which enters the field that this natural research will not want to touch at all if it understands itself correctly. The only unjustified belief is that in addition to the natural science to be created with the ordinary human powers of cognition, there should not be a view of nature obtained by other means than are proper to this natural science as such. Why should the natural scientist have to believe that his field is only unthreatened if everyone striving from other points of view is silenced alongside him? Anyone who does not allow his mind to be blinded by "scientific fanaticism" in these matters will find the often so bitter rejection of a spiritual view of nature, as Schelling strove for, no different from a lover of photography saying: I take exact pictures of people that reproduce everything about them: don't compare this fidelity to nature with the portrait of a painter.

[ 3 ] With the awakened spiritual view, Schelling wanted to find the "spirit of nature", which has its mere physiognomic expression not only in sensory perception, but also in what is called the laws of nature. It is significant to imagine what a powerful impression he made with such a quest on those of his contemporaries who had an open mind for the way in which this quest burst forth from his spiritually illuminated, powerful personality. There is a description given by an amiable and spiritual thinker, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, of the impressions he received from Schelling's work in Jena. "What was it," Schubert wrote, "that drew both young and mature men from far and near so powerfully to Schelling's lectures? Was it only the man's personality or the peculiar charm of his oral presentation that had this attractive power? ... It was not that alone... There was, however, an engaging power in his lively words, which no young soul was able to resist where it only touched a few receptive ears. It would be difficult to explain to a reader of our time" (Schubert wrote in 1854 what he had experienced with Schelling in the nineties of the eighteenth century), "who, like me, was not a youthful, participatory listener, how, when Schelling spoke to us, I often felt as if I were reading or listening to Dante, the seer of an otherworldly world open only to the consecrated eye. The powerful content of his speech, measured out in lapidary style with mathematical acuity, seemed to me like a bound Prometheus, whose bonds it is the task of the understanding spirit to loosen and from whose hand to receive the inextinguishable fire... But neither the personality nor the invigorating power of the oral communication alone could be the reason why Schelling's world view, as soon as it became publicly known through his writings, aroused such interest and excitement for or against its direction as no other literary phenomenon of a similar kind has been able to do before or since. Where it is a question of things perceptible to the senses or natural phenomena, one will immediately notice whether a teacher or writer is speaking from his own observation and experience, or merely from what he has heard from others, or even from his own self-made imagination... It is the same with inner experience as with outer experience. There is a reality of a higher kind, the being of which the cognizing spirit in us can experience with the same certainty and assurance as our body experiences the being of external visible nature through its senses. This, the reality of bodily things, presents itself to our perceiving senses as an act of the same creating power through which our bodily nature also came into being. The existence of visibility is a real fact in the same way as the existence of the perceiving sense. The reality of the higher species has also approached the cognizing spirit in us as a spiritual-bodily fact; it will become aware of it when its own cognition rises to a recognition of that from which it is cognized and from which the reality of bodily as well as spiritual becoming emerges according to the same order. And this realization of a spiritual, divine reality, in which we ourselves live, weave and are, is the highest gain of life on earth and the search for wisdom... Even in my time, among the young men who heard him, there were those who suspected what he meant by the intellectual contemplation through which our spirit must grasp the infinite source of all being and becoming."

[ 4 ] Schelling sought spirit in nature through intellectual contemplation. The spiritual that made nature sprout from the power of his creativity. This nature was once the living body of this spiritual being, just as the human body is that of the soul. Now it spreads out, this body of the world spirit, revealing in its features that which the spiritual once incorporated into it, showing in its becoming and weaving the gestures that represent the effects of the spiritual. This working of the spirit in the world body had to precede the present state of the world, so that it hardened and gave birth to a bone system in the mineral kingdom, a nervous system in the plant kingdom, and a soul precursor of man in the animal kingdom. Thus the world body was introduced from its youth into its old age; the present mineral, plant and animal kingdoms are the hardened products, so to speak, of what was once accomplished spiritually and physically in a becoming that has now expired. From the womb of the old body of the world, however, the creating spirituality was able to give rise to the soul-spirit endowed human being, in whose inner being of cognition the ideas light up with which the creating spirituality first worked the world body. As if enchanted, the spirit that was once alive and active in nature rests in the present nature; in the human soul it is disenchanted. (This description of Schelling's relationship to nature is certainly not only not a literal one, but not even one based on ideas that Schelling himself used. But I am of the opinion that one can only render it faithfully in such brevity if one grasps the spirit of a view and, in order to express it, uses ideas that arise freely in order to say in a few words what the personality of whom one speaks has expressed in a series of detailed works. The personality's own words, used for this purpose, can only distort their spirit.)

[ 5 ] With such a way of approaching the "spirit of nature" and its relationship to the human spirit, Schelling felt himself faced with the necessity of gaining an understanding of how that in the world which interferes with the course of world events is to be understood. By surrendering itself to the omnipotent world of ideas, the soul will experience its progressive creation in a recognizing way. But the disturbance, the evil, the evil pushes towards the soul, as if from another side of world existence. At first, the cognizing soul cannot enter this field with the world of ideas; it borders on it like the shadow on the light. Just as the light cannot be present in the shadow space, neither can the activities undertaken by the soul in the realm of disturbances, evil, and evil in the first attempt at cognition. In his search for a way to penetrate this realm, Schelling found inspiration in the personality who, from the simplest German folk sensibility, attempted to solve high world riddles: Jakob Böhme. Certainly, Jakob Böhme read a great deal about worldview issues and also absorbed much in other ways through the educational paths that were offered to the simple man of the people in the German development of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the best that pulsates in Jakob Böhme's writings in such an unlearned way is a popular path of knowledge, is a result of the popular mind itself. And Schelling has lifted up into the realm of intellectual contemplation what this popular mind has seen in Jakob Böhme's unlearned but enlightened soul. It is one of the most marvelous observations one can make in world literature to see Jakob Böhme's elementary view of the mind illuminated by the philosophical language of Schelling's treatise "On the Essence of Human Freedom". In this elementary view of the mind there is the profound insight that no one can arrive at a satisfactory view of the world who only takes the means of thinking comprehension with him on his path of knowledge. Something beats in from the depths of the world into the sphere of what is thinking comprehension that is more comprehensive, more powerful than this thinking comprehension. But not more powerful than what the soul can experience within itself when thinking comprehension appears to it only as a member of its own being. If one wants to comprehend something, one must understand how it is necessarily connected with another. The things of the world, however, are necessarily connected on their surface, but not at the deepest level of their essence. Freedom reigns in the world. And only he understands the world who sees in the necessary course of the laws of nature the rule of free supersensible spirituality. Freedom as a fact can always be refuted on logical grounds. No refutation of the idea of freedom makes any impression on anyone who understands this. - Jakob Böhme's original, healthy way of cognition, his original, folk-sensual knowledge of the mind, saw freedom as permeating and working through all necessity, including natural necessity. And Schelling, ascending from a spiritual view of nature to a spiritual view, felt in harmony with Jakob Böhme.

[ 6 ] And this paved the way for him to see the historical development of humanity's spiritual life in its own way. The deed of Christ presented itself to him as the greatest earthly event in this development. He sought to understand what lay before this act through his "Philosophy of Mythology". Anyone who thinks that history only reveals ideas, one of which follows from the other, does not understand the course of the world. For with freedom supersensible essence intervenes from stage to stage in this course; and what freedom accomplishes at a subsequent stage can only be seen as a fact revealing itself to the mind, not conceived as a necessary sequence through the logical development of ideas. And as a completely free fact, as a revelation not to be illuminated by ideas, but which illuminates all the world of ideas, we must accept what supersensible worlds have allowed to flow into the development of the earth through Christ. Schelling wants to speak of this conception of the world in his "Philosophy of Revelation". - It is certain that the "contradiction" in which it becomes entangled can easily be pointed out against such a conception. And this "contradiction" has also been held against Schelling in all kinds of well-meaning and ill-meaning forms. But whoever brings up this "contradiction" only shows that he does not want to recognize the reign of free spirituality in the course of the seemingly necessary course of the world. Schelling did not want to deny the working of natural necessity; but he wanted to show how this necessity is also an act of spirituality that works through the world with freedom. And he did not want to renounce comprehension because the first attempt at this comprehension shatters at the limit of the freedom of the world; he wanted to ascend to a comprehension of what the omnipotent world of ideas does not have in itself, but can take in. The ideas that want to recognize the world need not abdicate, because mere thinking comprehension is not sufficient for the knowledge of life. There is no need to say: because ideas do not penetrate into the depths of the world with that which initially lies in their own being, therefore the depths of the world cannot be recognized. No, when the ideas surrender to these depths and are permeated by that which they do not have within themselves, then they emerge from the depths of the world, reborn, permeated by the essence of the "spirit of the world". In the nineteenth century, the German folk spirit of the seventeenth-century shoemaker Jakob Böhme from Görlitz, who continued to work in Schelling's philosophical spirit, achieved such a world view.