Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph

[Autom. eng. transl.] Philosopher, FWJ Schelling (1775-1854) embodied the typical example of the romantic genius. His thought began to be characterized by the impetus towards the ultimate and undivided unity of knowledge and being. This is clearly stated in the first writings, in which he took up the fundamental principle of Fichte's philosophy, the ego, and identified it with the Deus sive natura of the substance theorized by Spinoza, reaching the conceptual unification of form and matter, ideality and reality, conscious and unconscious. In his "System of transcendental idealism" (1800) art is understood as an extraphilosophical culmination of the knowledge and practice of communicative philosophy. In the speculation immediately afterwards, Schelling attempts to return to philosophy what he had previously determined as the essence of the artistic work. The "Philosophical Researches on the Essence of Human Freedom" (1809) will re-set the theoretical problem, which will find a final settlement in the distinction between "negative philosophy" and "positive philosophy" developed in "Philosophy of Mythology" and "Philosophy of Revelation ".