The Becoming-Life-of-Life: An Investigation into the Relationship 

between Nature and Freedom in F.W.J. Schelling 

 

by 

XIAO OUYANG 

 

A dissertation accepted and approved in partial  

fulfillment of the   

requirements for the degree of  

Doctor of Philosophy  

     in Philosophy 

 

Dissertation Committee: 

Daniela Vallega-Neu, Chair 

Peter Warnek, Core Member 

Jason Wirth, Core Member 

Jeffrey Librett, Institutional Representative  

 

 

University of Oregon 

Winter 2025 

 

  



2 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

©2025 Xiao Ouyang 

This Work is Openly Licensed via CC BY 4.0. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT 

 

Xiao Ouyang 

Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy 

Title: The Becoming-Life-of-Life: An Investigation into the Relationship between Nature and 

Freedom in F.W.J. Schelling 

 

The present thesis is an investigation into the intimacy between nature and freedom 

through the work of F.W. J. Schelling. The guiding question that I will be asking throughout the 

text is what calls for, or necessitates, a philosophy of nature? On the one hand, this question asks 

about the motivating factors, themes, and concerns that articulated Schelling’s philosophy of 

nature, whether one considers this inquiry as simply a “phase” that Schelling passes through 

among others or the inquiry that defines Schelling’s overall philosophical career. On a deeper 

level however, the question asks about the very relationship between philosophy and nature: how 

does nature concern philosophy? Is it simply one of the regions of beings that philosophy 

engages or did philosophy originate entirely out of a concern, even care, for nature?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

 

I wish to express sincere appreciation to Professor Vallega-Neu for our weekly meetings 

in the preparation of this manuscript and to Professor Warnek for planting the seed for the 

present project through our conversations on Schelling over the years. In addition, special thanks 

are due to Professor Wirth who, in addition to his constructive comments on my writing, put me 

in touch with Professor Grant, who kindly provided me with his unpublished manuscript of the 

translation of Schelling’s On the World Soul.  

  



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DEDICATION 

For My Parents and for My American Mother Lisa Schnepper 

  



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Table of Contents 

 

 

Chapters          Page 

 

INTRODUCTION         8  

Synopsis          13  

I. Nature as Inception: Early Beginnings      16 

1.1. Undoing the Platonic Dualism: World-Soul as αρχη κινησεως  17 

1.2. Kantianizing Plato?        25 

1.3. The Logic of Production and the Experience of Birth   26 

 

II. The Absolute as the Unconditionable      31 

2.1. Criticism and Dogmatism in the Ich-Schrift      32 

2.2. Leveling the Playing-field: Philosophical Letters    36 

2.2.1. Thinking through Schwӓrmerei      38 

2.2.2. The Tragic Remainder       44 

 

III. Transition into Philosophy of Nature      45   

      3.1. On Reflection         46 

      3.2. Schelling’s Critique of Mechanism      48 

      3.3. Materiality as Equilibrium-Disequilibrium     55 

      3.4. Being-in-Nature        59 

 

IV. Schelling’s Complete Organizationalism      67 

     4.1. The Causality that We Don’t Know: On Kant’s Theory of Organism  69 

     4.2. From Chemistry to Biology       74 

     4.3. Infinite Organization        80 

     4.4. The Becoming-Life-of-Life       84 



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V. Constructing Nature from Inside Out: Reading the First Outline   87 

     5.1.1. Preliminary Indications of Nature as Subject    88   

     5.1.2. “Plato’s Matter” Revisited: Schelling’s Theory of Natural Monads 90   

     5.1.3. Organism-Environment        94 

   

     5.2.1. Potentiation-depotentiation as Method and Critique   98  

     5.2.2. The Principle of Non-nature      104 

 

VI. From Inspiration to Revelation: Freedom Essay     108 

     6.1. Preamble         108 

     6.2. Pantheism and the Denial of Freedom     111 

     6.3. Schelling’s System of the Living        115 

     6.4. On Use and Misuse         120 

     6.5. The Life of God        124 

 

Conclusion           128 

Reference and Bibliography        129 

 



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Introduction 

The present thesis is an investigation into the intimacy between nature and freedom through the 

work of F.W. J. Schelling. The guiding question that I will be asking throughout the text is what 

calls for, or necessitates, a philosophy of nature? On the one hand, this question asks about the 

motivating factors, themes, and concerns that articulated Schelling’s philosophy of nature, 

whether one considers this inquiry as simply a “phase” that Schelling passes through among 

others or the inquiry that defines Schelling’s overall philosophical career.1 On a deeper level 

however, the question asks about the very relationship between philosophy and nature: how does 

nature concern philosophy? Is it simply one of the regions of beings that philosophy engages or 

did philosophy originate entirely out of a concern, even care, for nature?   

In the Freedom Essay, Schelling famously proclaims that “the entire new European philosophy 

since its beginning (with Descartes) has the common defect that nature is not available for it and 

that it lacks a living ground.”2 I interpret this utterance to mean: modern philosophy hitherto 

shared the common assumption that in order to know anything about nature, one must begin with 

the mind. Schelling, on the other hand, argues the reverse: nothing about human beings can 

become intelligible without a prior investigation into nature. One may immediately reject: why 

should the starting point matter? Are not the way up and the way down one and the same? As it 

turns out, they are not the same, for the simple reason that there is a ground upon which no 

reason could be conferred.  

Much of what I have written in the following pages was provoked by a single passage in the 

Freedom Essay. I will introduce it here as a way of anchoring my interpretation. At the very 

starting point of Schelling’s presentation of the ground/existence distinction, Schelling speaks of 

a “yearning” that the “eternal One feels to give birth to itself.”3 He then states that the “essence 

of yearning” presents the most challenging task to understanding because it has long been 

“repressed” by the “higher things that have arisen out of it.” The full passage reads: 

 
1 Scholarship generally divides Schelling’s intellectual development into several phases or periods, they are 1) the Fichtean 
period, 2) philosophy of nature, 3) identity philosophy, and 4) later period. While this kind of periodization is useful in charting 
out certain distinctive features, themes, or approaches, its problem is also evident since it tends to emphasize difference 
between periods rather than their continuity.  
2 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: 
SUNY Press, 2006), p. 26 [OA 427-430].  
3 Ibid., 28.  



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After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, 

order and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once 

again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as 

if initial anarchy had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible base of reality 

in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be 

resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground.4  

If Schelling is right, that there is an “incomprehensible base of reality in things” that the 

understanding could never penetrate, then any inquiry into nature that begins with the mind is 

doomed from the start.  

It does not happen very often that the first principal idea of a philosophical system starts with 

incomprehensibility itself. But this is precisely how Schelling’s philosophy of nature began. In 

one of his earliest philosophical writings, Schelling makes a distinction between “matter” and 

“elements” in Plato’s Timaeus. This is a strange distinction since the elements, construed as the 

building blocks of the universe, are precisely what we normally mean by “matter.” But Schelling 

interpretation challenges this assumption, for he argues that “elements were originally invisible 

because they had not yet acquired the form of the understanding (through which alone they are 

able to appear and become objects of experience).”5 Matter, in this case, pertains precisely to 

what elements were prior to their delimitation by the forms. In other words, because matter needs 

form in order to appear or constitute itself as the elements, it is not already informed; by itself, 

matter is invisible, dark, and “free of all forms.”6 

A similar figuration (or lack thereof) appears in Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature. In discussing 

Kant’s dynamic understanding of matter as the interplay between repulsion and attraction, 

Schelling says: “repulsive force without attractive force is formless; attractive force without 

repulsive force has no object.”7 While this sentence is generally thought as a reference to Kant’s 

famous words in the first Critique “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without 

 
4 Ibid.,29.  
5 Schelling, “Timaeus (1794),” trans. Adam Arola, Jena Jolissaint, and Peter Warnek. Epoché, Volume 12, Issue 2 (Spring 2008), 
p.229.  
6 Tim. 50 E.  
7 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris & Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 
p.187.  



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concepts are blind,”8 it also contains a subtle allusion to matter in the Timaeus Essay, for 

Schelling immediately relates the repulsive force to an “original, unconscious…self-activity, 

which is by nature unrestricted.”9   

Towards the end of Schelling’s On the World Soul, he presents the “positive principle of life” by 

writing:  

Now this principle is only restricted in its effects by the receptivity of the material with 

which it has been identified, and indeed different organs will arise according to different 

degrees of receptivity. For precisely that reason that principle, although sensitive to all 

forms, is itself originally formless (ἄμορφον) and is nowhere exhibited as a determinate 

matter.10 

Furthermore, Schelling says: “Since, as the cause of life, this principle withdraws from all 

observation and so is concealed in its own works, it can only be known in the particular 

phenomena in which it emerges.”11 

These passages that I have traced thus far have in common the following features: they are, 

without exception, the first principles of his philosophy of nature, though iterated under different 

contexts. Furthermore, they all tend to conceal themselves as first principles and stand in need of 

delimitation as a medium of their visibility: matter requires form, repulsion needs attraction, 

productivity requires inhibition. This begs the question of whether we could glimpse into this 

first principle in itself by seizing upon its very formlessness. Regarding the essence of yearning, 

Schelling writes: “we cannot grasp it by the senses but rather only with the mind and 

[in]thought.”12 One should note the potential contradiction here: if the ground were indeed 

“incomprehensible” as Schelling claims, how can we grasp it with “the mind and in thought”?  

In the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, Schelling proposes a theory of 

dynamic atomism that allows for the infinite divisibility of space without losing the individuality 

 
8 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 51/B75. See Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, ed. & trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood 
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.193-94.  
9 Schelling, Ideas, p.187.  
10 Schelling, On the World Soul, Grant Manuscript.  
11 Ibid.  
12 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, p.29 [SW 359-60] 



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of matter. To this end, he proposes a thinking experiment that precisely addresses the question I 

have raised above. He writes: 

In brief, our opinion is this: If the evolution of Nature were ever complete (which is 

impossible), then after the general decomposition of each product into its factors nothing 

would be left other than simple factors, i.e., factors which are no longer themselves 

products. Therefore, these simple factors can only be thought as originary actants, or --- if 

it is permissible to express it in this way --- as originary productivities.13 

Here, Schelling invites us to think what would remain once the whole of the extended universe 

or visible nature were to be thoroughly decomposed. The mechanical physicists would say that 

their atoms should still be there. For Kant, it is space as the a priori pure form of intuition. For 

Fichte, it is the intuiting activity of the I. Not surprisingly, Schelling’s response in the quote 

passage indicates that all three responses are wrong: the physicists are wrong because atoms are 

themselves extended; Kant is wrong because he thinks forces are only attributable to matter by 

the understanding while for Schelling it is felt through intuition. Finally, Fichte is wrong because 

the intuiting I cannot be the ground of the universe.  

This thinking experiment is a powerful one because it raises the question of how to think the 

elusive subject that is nature. More precisely, it foregrounds what it means to think nature as a 

subject. This is where the enormous distance between Schelling and the modern tradition comes 

to the fore: for Schelling, subjectivity precisely cannot begin from the self-certainty of the cogito 

and its affiliates, instead, the natural starting point of subjectivity lies at the very 

incomprehensible depth of nature, in the “initial anarchy” of the “formless fluid,” of the 

“whirling sea” of the monads, and of the “μὴ ὄν of the ancients.”  

If the above determinations are too abstract, let us look at a more concrete though equally 

provocative thought experiment from Blumenbach. As a biologist well-known for his notion of 

the “formative drive” (Bildungstrieb), Blumenbach speculates, from the existence of fossils, that 

there once existed a “preworld” (Vorwelt) that was wiped out by some known catastrophe. After 

some time, the “Creator” repopulated the earth by using “the same natural powers to effect the 

 
13 Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, tr. Keith R. Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), p.21.  



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production of a new organic creation that had filled the same purpose in the preworld.”14 Rather 

than treating Blumenbach’s conjecture as a theory of biological revolution, we could instead ask: 

how deep or how far does the preworld go? In other words, let us suppose that Blumenbach’s 

catastrophe destroyed the entirety of all living things, does it mean that the earth is now lifeless? 

No. The very postulation of a Creator, a stand-in for the Bildungstrieb, is to account for the 

strange fact that even if all actual bio-organisms were killed off, there will be still life not only 

on earth but in the cosmos as such, this is so because the formation of earth’s ecosystem is itself 

a life, though lived in the gradual progression of the inorganic in terms planetary dynamics, 

geological transformations, meteorological shifts and so on.  

Finally, Schelling’s central insight can be grasped through an excursion into Aristotle. In Book 

IX of the Metaphysics, Aristotle speaks of a peculiar idea allegedly held by the Megarians, he 

writes: 

There are some people, such as the Megarians, who say that something is potential only 

when it is active, but when it is not active it is not potential; for instance someone who is 

not building a house is not capable of building a house, but only the one who is building a 

house, when he is building a house, is capable of it.15  

To gather what I have been sketching out into a more definitive expression, like Plato’s matter, 

the first principle of nature is always withdrawn, negated, inhibited, and turned back. But in 

order to not think like the Megarians, the first principle must exist somewhere, since Plato tells 

us that “what is neither on earth nor somewhere in heaven is nothing.”16 In other words, its 

absconding must be thought as the necessary condition for our understanding or knowledge. We 

can only grasp what matter might be through the elements, since it is only in the latter that form 

and “matter” are discernable. Yet, Schelling writes: “once the elements appear to us, they also 

appear to us in the determinate and necessary forms of our intuition, not however as they were 

originally constituted in the ground.”17 In this decisive sentence that Schelling wrote when he 

was no more than nineteen years old, the incomprehensible has already dawned on his 

 
14 This example is taken from Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conceptions of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p.222. 
15 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1046b 30. 
16 Timaeus, 52 B-C. Translation from Plato, Timaeus, trans. & ed. Peter Kalkavage (Annapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 
2016), p.42.  
17 Schelling, “Timaeus (1794),” p. 229.  



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precocious spirit: matter is not fire or water; it is fire-like as fire is matter-like. Furthermore, 

water is too fire-like, and fire water-like though not in themselves but through their having been 

born out of matter. Schelling: “Without this preceding darkness, creatures have no reality; 

darkness is their necessary inheritance.”18 In short, it was precisely by probing into this “dark 

inheritance” of all things that Schelling was able to fundamentally displace the site of 

subjectivity hitherto imprisoned in a “purely human reason.”19  

Years after the Timaeus Essay, Schelling would give us a sense of the lasting impression the 

incomprehensible made upon him, and it is only appropriate to both end and begin my 

investigation into Schelling with this passage: 

Our reproach is therefore a reaction of the age against itself, or a counterrevolutionary 

after the revolution, and since on the one hand we have rejected the thoroughgoing will to 

conceptualization, and at the same time on the other hand nothing reasonable can be 

expected of us, then we must necessarily have maintained the opposite, [that] unreason 

[Unvernunft], namely, the incomprehensible as such, for the sake of the 

incomprehensible, is to be made the unique principle…Every fanatic clings to nature and 

necessarily becomes a philosopher of nature, that is, a kind of magician, an interpreter of 

sings and spirit conjurer…20 

 

Synopsis  

Chapter I is an analysis of Schelling’s youthful commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and Philebus. 

As an experimental reading of the Platonic dialogues through the concepts of Kant’s critical 

philosophy, this work has been generally acknowledged in scholarship as the germination of 

Schelling’s philosophy of nature. My analysis focuses on Schelling’s innovative reading of 

Plato’s notion of the world-soul while attending to the initial appearance of the formless through 

Schelling’s distinction between matter and the elements.  

 
18 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, p.29 [SW. 359-360]. 
19 Ibid., 4 [OA VIII -XII].  
20 Schelling, Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine, trans. Dale Snow 
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), p.35. 



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Chapter II deals with two of Schelling’s early essays: Of the I as Principle of Philosophy and 

Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. Although they were generally considered as 

works representative of Schelling’s “Fichtean period,” I argue Schelling was already starting to 

follow a different path. This divergence is particularly visible in Philosophical Letters on 

Criticism and Dogmatism. In this work, Schelling points out that just as one cannot make the 

absolute into a not-I as Spinozism has done, one equally cannot turn it into a I like Fichte. In 

other words, Schelling already realized that a system of the absolute must stay true to the 

unconditionable character of its subject matter.  

Chapter III deals with Schelling’s first systematic work on the philosophy of nature: Ideas for a 

Philosophy of Nature. I argue that chemical phenomena disclosed for Schelling an intensive 

dimension to matter that is immediately connected to our intuition. I call this dimension being-

in-nature, which is the idea that sensation is never reducible to the passive impressions of 

external stimulus but involves an unconscious yet active immersion in the environment. In other 

words, both matter and mind must be considered as positive; they are only positive and negative 

when opposed to each other. The limitation of the Ideas however rests on the fact that Schelling 

only thought being-in-nature in human terms. The key, however, lies in how to think being-in-

nature for all beings, which is the focus of Chapter IV.  

Chapter IV presents Schelling’s confrontation with Kant’s third Critique. I argue that in order to 

develop an organizational model that could encompass the whole of nature, Schelling has to 

overcome two major Kantian barriers: the exclusive identification between intentionality and 

human beings, and the rigid opposition between matter and life. The two barriers come down to 

the same point: how to find a source of motion or logos in nature?  For this purpose, Schelling 

turned to Leibniz’s monadology, which states that inorganic nature is not dead, but only asleep. 

This means one could construct a system of nature based on the idea of infinite life or 

differentiating intensities based on emergence and ground: what Schelling wanted to grasp 

through Kant’s natural end, namely, a real system of nature as living animal as originally 

proposed by Plato, is finally made tenable through Leibniz.  

In short, I argue that Leibniz taught Schelling how to think in terms of degrees (I call this idea 

“degree-being”). If one could assign a degree of life to inorganic nature, then it is also possible to 

assign a degree of mind to nature (however distant or different this idea of the mind might be 



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from ours), which ultimately delivers on the original hypothesis: nature is self-organizing and 

has its own logos. Thus compared to Kant, Schelling’s theory of organization can be described as 

“complete” since he argues that organization is real in the world and that organization is the 

principle of things, not the reverse. Through this crucial reversal, Schelling has returned to nature 

what modernity has taken away from it: spontaneity.  

Chapter V follows two interrelated trajectories that are both concerned with Schelling’s method 

in uncovering the first principle of nature. The first trajectory deals with a thinking experiment 

that Schelling proposes in preparation for his “dynamic atomism.” As already outlined above, 

this thinking experiment asks us to suspend the entire realm of natura naturata as a way to open 

up the intensive space of natura naturans. I argue that this thinking experiment is a crucial 

precursor to what Daniel Whistler calls Schelling’s “epochē of indifference” as well as what 

Marie-Luise Heuser calls Schelling’s “space philosophy.” 

The second trajectory deals with one of the major theoretical developments during Schelling’s 

identity philosophy period: depotentiation. By examining On the True Concept of Philosophy of 

Nature and the Correct Way of Solving its Problems, my analysis proposes a degree-based 

approach to the absolute as infinite potencies of the subject-object. The background from which 

this trajectory emerges is Schelling’s critique of Fichte.  

The final chapter is an interpretation of the ethical implications of Schelling’s philosophy of 

nature. By closely following the movement of his Freedom Essay, I argue that Schelling’s 

understanding of evil is deeply concerned with the question of use in modernity. I argue that the 

“severability of the principles” that characterizes the human condition entails two kinds of use: 

the first one is deeply entrenched in the inseparability between use and misuse, while the second 

one calls for a use of life akin to God’s separation into two eternal beginnings.  

 

 

 

 

 



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Chapter I. Nature as Inception: Early Beginnings 

 

Now to discover the poet and father of this all is quite a task, and even if we discovered 

him, to speak of him to all men is impossible.                                        Timaeus, 29A 

For this Goddess, Philebus, saw everyone’s arrogance and all their other wickedness, 

with no determinant of pleasures and indulgences, and she established law and order as 

determinants. You, of course, will say she destroyed them, but I think that on the contrary 

she was their salvation. What’s your view, Protarchus?     Philebus, 26b8-26c2 

 

The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate the ways in which Schelling’s engagement 

with the Platonic dialogues, especially the cosmological sections taken from the Timaeus and 

Philebus, as well as Plato’s account of poetic inspiration as presented in the Ion, sets the stage 

for his philosophy of nature. The main text I will be focusing on is Schelling’s Timaeus Essay 

(1794).  

Composed while still studying at the Tübingen Stift, the Timaeus Essay grew out of Schelling’s 

youthful engagement with the works of Plato and Kant.21 In scholarship, commentators have 

realized its relevance for understanding Schelling’s early thinking prior to his encounter with 

Fichte.22 While many of Schelling’s perennial themes make their debut appearance in this text, 

none rivals the importance of the cosmological horizon of the Timaeus itself: throughout his 

career, Schelling repeatedly experimented with the conceptualities he excavated from this text, to 

the extent that his Freiheitsschrift, considered by many to be his magnum opus, would remain 

incomprehensible without a prior familiarity with this interpretative history.  

 
21 The Timaeus Essay is found in a notebook entitled Über den Geist der Platonischen Philosophie and follows a series of short 
texts collected under Form der Platonischen Philosophie. For the English translations of these texts, see Timaeus, tr. Adam 
Arola, Jena Jolissaint, and Peter Warnek. Epoché, Volume 12, Issue 2 (Spring 2008) and Schelling’s Plato Notebooks, 1792-1794, 
tr. Naomi Fisher, Epoché, Issue 1 (Fall 2021).  
22  In “Plato’s Timaeus in German Idealism,” Werner Beierwaltes argues that “Schelling’s initial impulse regarding the Timaeus 
was to provide a theoretical interpretation of the visible world, of the universe, of nature.” In Schelling’s Organic Form of 
Philosophy, Bruce Matthews presents a thorough reconstruction of Schelling early period, especially with regards to his 
engagement with Greek philosophy and Kant.  Among the numerous studies on the Timaeus, I mention Chorology: On 
Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus by John Sallis and Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary 
by Francis Macdonald Cornford. For the Philebus, see J. C. B. Gosling’s running commentary of his translation of the text.  



- 17 - 
 

In what follows, I will trace two trajectories that are integral to my overall investigation into 

Schelling’s philosophy of nature. The first is Schelling’s explication of the world-soul, which I 

argue constitutes Schelling’s first attempt at tearing out the “root of opposition” between nature 

and spirit. In this attempt, I argue Schelling has developed, however inchoately, a theory of 

materiality that seeks to liberate matter from its traditional determination as a merely passive. 

The second trajectory is a propaedeutic to Schelling’s ontology of organization. Following in the 

footsteps of Lara Ostaric and others, I argue Schelling’s engagement with poetic inspiration is an 

important steppingstone for his distinctive mode of inquiry into nature. Against the technical 

interpretations of nature exemplified in mechanistic philosophy, Schelling calls for a 

participatory and non-representational approach based on the Empedoclean principle “like is 

known by like” in which “the god outside” is grasped through “the god within.”23  

 

1.1. Undoing the Platonic Dualism: World-Soul as αρχη κινησεως 

Schelling’s interpretation of the Timaeus covers passages from 28a to 53b, and, of the Philebus, 

from 22e to 30b.24 These sections are cosmogonic in nature, which is already indicative of the 

native soil in which Schelling’s philosophical seeds were first planted. In the present section, I 

will place special emphasis on how Schelling sought to dismantle the dualism between the 

intelligible and the sensible through the mediation of the world-soul. I argue that the crux of this 

interpretation lies in developing a positive account of matter beyond its traditional determination 

as involving a passive substrate. In short, matter must be characterized by a power that is not 

limitable or conditioned by any particular form; this freedom-from-form is precisely the 

condition for matter to assume a form at all.  

 
23 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY 
Press, 2006), p.10 [OA 401-03].  
24 The Timaeus is structured by three discourses respectively given by Socrates, Critias, and Timaeus: Socrates first recounts 
what he has said in a previous occasion regarding the constitution of an ideal city, then asks his interlocutors to bring this city to 
life through discourse as their way of reciprocating his generous offering. In response, Critias tells a story that his ancestors 
have inherited from Salon; driven by political fervent, Critias posits that the very city that Socrates has conjured out of nowhere 
bears a striking resemblance to the city of the archaic Athenians whose history has become forgotten due to natural disaster 
and the lack of writing. Once his story has come to a halt, Critias asks Timaeus the astronomer to give an account that extends 
from the birth of cosmos to the emergence of mankind. Although Critias promises to rejoin the conversation once Timaeus is 
done, the dialogue ends with Timaeus’ cosmogony. For an overview of the dialogue, see the essay by Peter Kalkavage in Plato: 
Timaeus, tr. Peter Kalkavage, St. John’s College, Annapolis, 2016. 95-140.  



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The cosmological portion of the Timaeus consists of a likely story about how the cosmos comes 

to be as an ordered whole. Schelling first addresses Plato’s grounding differentiation between the 

intelligible and the sensible. Plato writes: 

In my opinion, then, we must first distinguish the following. What is it that always is and 

has no beginning; and what is it that comes to be and never is? Now the one is grasped by 

intellection accompanied by a rational account, since it’s always in the same condition; 

but the other in its turn is opined by opinion accompanied by irrational sensation, since it 

comes to be and perishes and never genuinely is.25  

Influenced by the works of Plato commentors of his day,26 Schelling connects Plato’s distinction 

between the intelligible and the sensible to the notions taken from Kant and argues that the 

former, insofar as it is object of pure intellect, is relatable to “the ideas of pure understanding and 

pure reason,” while the latter, insofar as it is presented as something heterogeneous to the self-

same character of the former, to intuition and its objects.27 

Following from his preliminary bridging between Plato and Kant, Schelling then proceeds to the 

question regarding the cause of the cosmos, for it is stated in the Timaeus that “everything that 

comes to be necessarily comes to be by some cause.”28 This leads to a discussion of how a 

demiurge constructed the cosmos by looking to the intelligible forms as a model. It has to be 

clarified that unlike the Christian God who creates ex nihilo, the role played by the demiurge is 

that of a craftsman, which means that the genesis of the cosmos in the Timaeus must be 

understood, at least initially, from the perspective of human production in which matter is given 

rather than created.29 Schelling shows clear cognizance of this connection to human production 

as he writes that “the demiurgos had an ideal before his eyes” and that the “pre-existing original 

matter is presupposed.”30 

 
25 Tim. 27D-28A.  
26 Schelling mentions three commentators in the essay, they are: Friedrich Victor Lebrecht Plessing, Wilhelm Gottlieb 
Tennemann and Dietrich Tiedemann. Among them, Tennemann’s System der Platonischen Philosophie (1792-1795) and 
Plessing’s Versuche zue Aufklӓrung der Philosophie des ӓltesten Altherthums (1788-1790) are the most relevant works for 
Schelling’s interpretation.  
27 “Timaeus (1794),” 207.  
28 Tim. 28 A.  
29 For a discussion on the difference between the demigure and the Judeo-Christian God, as well as the role human production 
plays in this differentiation, see Francis Macdonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a 
Running Commentary (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937), pp. 159-177.  
30 “Timaeus (1794),” 213. 



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Just as a beautiful artifact requires a good design and skillfulness of the craftsman, the sensible 

cosmos is said to be fashioned after a perfect paradigm.31 Furthermore, the cosmos is not simply 

a well-made artifact but “the most beautiful of things born.”32 This superlative character of the 

cosmos is qualified by the possession of the intellect, for Timaeus says the demiurge “discovered 

that of all things visible by nature, nothing unintelligent will ever be a more beautiful work, 

comparing wholes with wholes, than what has intellect.”33 The demand for intellect poses an 

immediate question for Schelling: 

He (Plato) could not possibly view the form of the world in its regularity and lawfulness 

as inherent in matter itself, nor as a form that was brought forth from matter. He must 

have held that this form of the world is in its essence something wholly other and distinct 

from all matter. Accordingly, he locates it in the intellect, and describes it as something to 

be grasped only by the understanding; and because he could find the cause of this 

connection between form (πέρας) and matter (ἄπειρον) neither in the one nor in the other 

alone, nor in both together (for he saw these [regularity and unruliness] as two things 

constantly striving against one another), therefore some third was necessary (see the 

Philebus) that unified each with the other, or, in other words, ‘gave to the world a form,’ 

which was an imitation of the original, pure form of the understanding.34 

How could the intelligible principle interact or come into contact with the material, given the 

former is completely lawful and the latter completely unlawful? As indicated above, Schelling 

sees Plato rejecting the possibility of deriving lawfulness and regularity from matter, which 

means a strict materialist interpretation is not possible. On the other hand, due to the distance that 

separates Greek from Christian thinking, a theological interpretation that posits the existence of a 

transcendent creator is also denied. In lieu of this impasse, Schelling directs us to Plato’s 

 
31 Bruce Matthews devotes significant attention to Schelling’s interpretation of beauty (τὸ καλὸν). “Schelling reads Plato’s use 
of τὸ καλὸν as an ideal that demands completeness in creation, thereby requiring the uniting and integration of the seemingly 
dualistic domains of the intellectual and the sensual.” See Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy (Albany: 
SUNY Press, 2011), pp. 115-119.  
32 Tim. 29 A.  
33 Tim. 30 B.  
34 Ibid. 209.  



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trichotomic schema where a new element is introduced to solve the dichotomy between matter 

and the intelligible forms. This new element is the soul.35 

The possibility of an intelligent cosmos comes down to the question of how matter can be shaped 

by the forms. The traditional answer to this question posits that matter must be purely passive in 

relation to formation. This passivity is concretely reflected in the supposition that materiality 

must have an unmoving substrate independent from its activity. But if this substrate were to be 

granted, then the dualism between matter and form is unavoidable. The question of materiality 

ushered in through the soul is of vital importance for understanding the progression of 

Schelling’s philosophy of nature. In the Timaeus Essay, Schelling was still under the influence 

this substrate-based understanding of matter; this is most evident in his interpretation of the χὠρα 

as “prime matter” (Urstoff) and “substance.”36 Yet, by the time of the composition of his first 

systematic work on the philosophy of nature, Schelling has become extremely critical of any 

substrate-based approach to materiality (see Chapter II).37 While this change was influenced by 

his subsequent engagement with Fichte, its seed is planted precisely here, in his first engagement 

with the soul.  

By “soul,” Schelling is not thinking about a cosmic benevolent consciousness, instead, following 

Plato’s presentation in the Laws, Schelling understands the soul in a naturalistic way as “the 

original principle of motion” (αρχη κινησεως), which pertains to the “principle of alteration” that 

orders the whole cosmos. 38 Schelling writes:  

Ψυχη is nothing but: the original principle of motion, αρχη κινησεως …Because Plato 

regarded matter as something wholly heterogeneous to divine being, something entirely 

 
35 Schelling interprets “beauty” and “perfection” in the sense of perfect lawfulness of the forms. On the one hand, perfect 
lawfulness seems to be an adequate model for phenomena such as the movement of the heavenly bodies. But on the other 
hand, we know from experience that the cosmos is also filled with contingent occurrences that do not appear regular or 
bounded by laws. This contradiction leads to three interpretive possibilities: the cosmos is either completely lawful, or 
completely unlawful, or lawful to a degree. The first possibility leads to necessarianism while the second to relativism, neither 
would have been appealing to Plato or Schelling. Schelling thus argues that Plato is interested in exploring a third way, a higher 
ground on which both necessity and contingency can be unified as aspects or expressions of a single whole. 
36 “Timaeus:1794,” 226-229.  
37 To posit matter without substrate constitutes one of the central ideas of Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797). 
As will be discussed in Chapter 3, the founding of modern chemistry is a key contributing factor to this idea. Schelling writes: 
“The dynamical chemistry…admits no original matter whatever --- no matter, that is, from which everything else would have 
arisen by composition.” See Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, tran. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 221.  
38 “Is there anything we can desiderate, anything further toward complete demonstration of the identity of soul with the primal 
becoming and movement of all that is, has been, or shall be, and of all their contraries, seeing it has disclosed itself as the 
universal cause of all change and motion?” Laws, 896a.  



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contradictory to the pure form of lawfulness in divine understanding, he presupposed that 

the present world received nothing from God except form. Now, insofar as the form that 

God imparted to the world refers only to the form of the movement of world, the world 

must also have had its own original principle of motion, independently of God, which, as 

a principle that inheres in matter, contradicts all regularity and lawfulness, and is first 

brought within the bounds of lawfulness through the form (πέρας) that the divine 

understanding gave to it.39  

Given the significance of the world-soul would have for Schelling a few years later in his career, 

his interpretation here requires careful analysis. To begin, I want to point out where his 

interpretation differs from the original text: in the Timaeus, it is stated that the world-soul was 

“constructed” since “it’s impossible for intellect apart from soul to become present in 

anything.”40 There is no mentioning of the world having “its original own principle of motion” as 

Schelling claims. I argue Schelling most likely inferred this from 30a in the dialogue that reads: 

For since the god wanted all things to be good and, to the best his power, nothing to be 

shoddy, he thus took over all that was visible, and, since it didn’t keep its peace but 

moved unmusically without order, he brought it into order from disorder…41  

Now, insofar as motion is native to the cosmos even before it became a “cosmos” (in the sense of 

an ordered whole), it then makes sense to claim, as Schelling does, that “the present world 

received nothing from God except form.” Another feature I want to point out in Schelling’s 

interpretation is the relative dependency of the intellect on the soul. While the forms themselves 

are utterly independent and self-same, this absolute self-identity is also what prevents them from 

interacting with matter directly, which is why Timaeus says that the forms need the soul in order 

to come to present in beings. Schelling writes: “νοῦς is not the necessary condition of ψυχή, 

rather the reverse.”42 

Both points, I argue, are indicative of Schelling’s lively sense of nature. His interpretation both 

gives matter more independence than the pure passivity to which materiality has been consigned, 

 
39 “Timaeus (1794),” p. 210.  
40 Tim.30b. 
41 Tim. 30a. 
42 “Timaeus (1794),” 



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as well as takes away a significant degree of independence that has been usually attributed to the 

forms. As a result, the rigid opposition between matter and form is dissolved by their intimate 

cooperation through the soul (as Plato tells us, the soul is the “bond.”).43 Where Schelling’s 

interpretation falls short however, rests on the question of organization. In his reading, even 

though matter is self-moving, it is not self-organizing --- a capacity that was only given to matter 

by God through the forms.44 As we will see in Chapter IV, the issue of self-organization is key to 

Schelling’s confrontation with Kant’s third Critique.  

Before I end, I want to identify two passages that proved to be vital to Schelling’s later 

development. The first passage is located towards the end of Timaeus’ discourse on νοῦς: 

For mixed indeed was the birth of this cosmos here, and begotten from a standing-

together of necessity and intellect; and as intellect was ruling over necessity by 

persuading her to lead most of what comes to be toward what’s best, in this way 

accordingly was this all constructed at the beginning: through necessity vanquished by 

thoughtful persuasion.45 

According to Peter Kalkavage, the term “standing-together” (systasis) can refer to a political 

constitution either in the form of a pact or a conflict, meaning that the parties involved may 

either become joined as allies or separated as enemies.46 The verbal synistanai, meaning “make 

stand together,” is also the origin for our word “system.” In both cases, it pertains to an intimacy 

by which the parties are differentiated precisely through their belonging together. More 

specifically, in this relation of bonding between intellect and necessity, even though the former 

takes the active role of persuading and leading, it never overtakes the latter but is instead reliant 

on it as a “principle of action.” In other words, matter cannot be said to lack logos because only 

when something is able to hear or comprehend can it also be “persuaded.”47 Following from this, 

matter cannot be thought as the absolute absence of order or form but precisely signifies the 

 
43 Tim.31c.  
44 Schelling makes this point explicitly by writing 1) “matter by itself could not produce any zoa” and 2) “He (Plato) could not 
possibly view the form of the world in its regularity and lawfulness as inherent in matter itself.” 
45 Tim. 48 A.  
46 See Peter Kalkavage’s Glossary “construct” from Timaeus, 143.  
47 To take another example from everyday experience, even though a child is without knowledge, he is not therefore 
“ignorant,” since his un-educated state is only the negative characterization of the positive capacity to learn. 



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potentiality or receptivity for it. This would become one of the textual sources for Schelling’s 

conception of reciprocal causation.  

The second passage comes from the so-called “chorology” of the Timaeus. In his discourse on 

necessity, Timaeus explicates the relationship among the forms, the receptacle, and the product 

of their interaction by comparing them to father, mother, and the offspring. Insofar as the 

offspring is that which comes to be, the father provides the formal pattern “from which” it 

sprouts while the mother constitutes the “in which” or the “wherein” such impression occurs. 

Among the three, it is the role of the mother that must be emphasized, since it is most akin to 

materiality due to its reception to form. The text states: 

If the imprints are going to be sufficiently various with every variety to be seen, then that 

in which the imprints are fixed wouldn’t be prepared well unless it’s shapeless with 

respect to all those looks that it might be going to receive from elsewhere. For if it were 

similar to any of the things that come on the scene, on receiving what was contrary to 

itself or of an altogether different nature, whenever these things arrive, it would copy 

them badly by projecting its own visage alongside the thing copied. For this reason, that 

which is to take up all the kinds within itself should be free of all forms…48 

As indicated in this passage, the motherly receptacle is capable to receive all forms only insofar 

as it is “free of all forms.” If the receptacle had a form, its reception would be biased or partial 

since it would project “its own visage” unto the things that enter into it. This freedom-from-

determination is the necessary condition for phenomenalization, leading to the conclusion that 

only that which is by nature not limited by any definite form can assume any form whatsoever.49 

Although in the Timaeus Essay, Schelling has yet to realize the full significance of the formless 

mother, he makes a distinction between matter and the elements that precisely addresses the 

question of the indeterminable named above, he writes: 

Plato already claimed that the elements, insofar as they are visible, are to be wholly 

differentiated from the matter in which they are grounded and which as such never 

becomes visible, and that they are not properly matter itself, but rather forms, 

determinations of matter, which matter obtains externally. For the elements were 

 
48 Tim, 50 d-e.  
49 This determination will become crucial when we turn to Schelling’s conception of nature as an equilibrium in Chapter 3. 



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originally invisible because they had not yet acquired the form of the understanding 

(through which alone they are able to appear and become objects of experience). Next 

they obtained this form through the divine understanding, and precisely thereby became 

visible, but not, however, according to their ultimate empirical constitution, since once 

the elements appear to us, they also appear to us in the determinate and necessary forms 

of our intuition, not however as they were originally constituted in the ground, namely 

with neither this nor any necessary and determinate form.50 

On the one hand, matter does not seem to be so different from the elements because it is what the 

elements were before they “acquired the form of the understanding.” On the other hand, 

however, matter is to be sharply differentiated from the elements because it is the withdrawing 

necessary for the elements to appear as the elements: matter is what the elements would be if 

were possible to conceive them independently of their condition of appearing, i.e., according to 

their original constitution “in the ground.” In a striking manner, Schelling has already realized 

that formlessness is the ground-zero of all things, but precisely for this reason, it must exist 

“somewhere.”   

Taken together, I argue that Schelling’s interpretation of the soul, insofar as it contains a critique 

of the tradition’s inability to conceive matter dynamically, constitutes the germination of a theory 

of materiality that seeks to undo the dualism between mind and matter. The central idea of this 

doctrine --- the inseparability between matter and power and the untenability of matter as a 

substrate --- later becomes one of the keystones to his philosophy of nature. In conclusion, I 

suggest that the young Schelling has intuitively grasped that matter must have a potentiality for 

the logos that is “de-formative” in nature; its very excessive character is the ground for a new 

determination just as every determination is itself a catalyst for further change. It is not an 

accident that when Schelling first encountered Fichte’s work just a few months after the 

composition of the Timaeus Essay, he noticed a kindred thought in the latter that resonated with 

his own, namely, freedom as the first principle of philosophy. But precisely for this reason, it can 

be argued, as I do, that Schelling’s thinking differed from Fichte from its very inception, since 

his journey toward the absolute began from nature.  

 
50 “Timaeus (1794),” p. 229.  



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1.2. “Kantianizing” Plato? 

In the previous section, I have discussed Schelling’s interpretation of the world-soul as the 

germination of a dynamical theory of matter. I now turn to another theme from the essay that is 

integral to understanding Schelling’s later thinking, namely, natural organization. But rather than 

dealing with the concept from the perspective of natural philosophy proper, a task I shall 

undertake in subsequent chapters, the present section only offers a brief sketch of how the 

question of nature gets raised from within the interpretative horizon set by Plato and Kant.  

To begin with, Schelling announces the basic hermeneutic principle of the entire essay as 

follows: 

The key to the explanation of the entirety of Platonic philosophy is noticing that Plato 

everywhere carries the subjective over to the objective. It is from this that the principle 

arose in Plato that the visible world is nothing but a copy of the invisible world…But no 

philosophy could have come from this principle, if the philosophical ground for it weren’t 

already in us. This means, namely, insofar as the whole of nature, as it appears to us, is 

not only a product of our empirical receptivity, but is rather actually the work of our 

power of representation --- to the extent that this power contains within itself a pure and 

original foundational form (of nature) --- and insofar as the world belongs in 

representation to a power that is higher than mere sensibility and nature is exhibited as 

the stamp of a higher world which the pure laws of this world express.51 

The key to understanding the above passage, as well as the essay as a whole, lies in the phrase 

“carrying over the subjective over to the objective.” Interpreters have devoted significant 

attention to this formulation in order to anchor Schelling’s early thought.52 To unpack its 

meaning step by step, Schelling first presents what he considers to be Plato’s basic philosophical 

thesis: the visible, empirical world is a copy of the intelligible world. He then excavates the 

transcendental standpoint that is hidden beneath this thesis by arguing that “no philosophy could 

 
51 Ibid. 212. 
52 John Sallis: “The passage is addressed to the way in which what is subjectively given to our empirical receptivity gets 
constituted as something objective, as something that is no longer merely relative to our sensibility. For Plato this objectivation 
takes place through the referral of the visible to the invisible; it occurs precisely insofar as the visible (the subjective) comes to 
be taken as an image --- as a mere image: Nachbild --- of the invisible (the objective).” See Sallis, Chorology, p. 160. For a 
detailed analysis of varying interpretations of this passage, see Lara Ostaric’s dissertation, Between Insight and Judgment: 
Kant’s Conception of Genius and Its Fate in Early Schelling, 2006, pp. 199-203.  



- 26 - 
 

have come from this principle, if the philosophical ground for it weren’t already in us.” 

Following from this, Schelling argues that the philosophical ground of Plato’s thesis lies in “our 

power of representation” which contains a “foundational form of nature.” 

Schelling claims that nature is not a “product of our empirical receptivity” but the “work of our 

power of representation.” The key word is “appearance,” which is a clear allusion to Kant’s 

position that the objective world is not something exiting independently from us but is co-

constituted by the activities of the subject. Insofar as Plato argues that the natural world is 

grounded on a higher principle or an archetype, it is compatible with fundamental tenet of 

transcendental idealism. At the same time, however, the exhibition of this compatibility cannot 

occur at the expense of collapsing their differences, since Plato’s cosmogony is an account of the 

emergence of actual things as conceived in the divine understanding while transcendental 

idealism is interested in the condition of possibility of experience imbedded in our own 

subjectivity. While this difference might not appear significant to the young Schelling at the 

time, it eventually led to two distinct yet related modes of inquiry: the Platonic, Timaeus-inspired 

path turned into the philosophy of nature, while his interest in critical philosophy transitioned 

into a transcendental philosophy of consciousness. In a way, the decisive question has already 

emerged: is nature a product of our power of representation or is our self-consciousness an 

outcome of nature’s productivity?  

 

1.3. The Logic of Production and the Experience of Birth 

In his commentary on the Timaeus, John Sallis observes that there is a “tension” and “constant 

wavering” in Timaeus’ cosmogony between a “discourse of production” and a “discourse of 

birth” (and “all that is linked with eros”).53 The present section aims to use the distinction 

between production and birth as a guiding thread to identify the early signs of a budding natural-

philosophical sentiment in Schelling.  

Without venturing too deep into Sallis’ intricate analysis, I name the most apparent place where 

his proposed tension comes to the fore: the cosmic animal. On the one hand, the cosmos is 

clearly a life, an “animal having soul and intellect.” But at the same time however, it is also an 

 
53 Sallis, Chorology, p.58. 



- 27 - 
 

artifact conceived in “the forethought of God” and produced, component by component, by a 

divine craftsman.54  

In the Timaeus Essay, Schelling makes a direct connection between the idea of the cosmos as a 

living being and Kant’s notion of natural end. He writes: 

We have to remember that Plato viewed the entire world as a ζῷον, that is, as an 

organized being, thus as a being whose parts are possible only through their relation to 

the whole, whose parts are reciprocally related against each other as means and end, and 

thus which reciprocally bring themselves forth according to both their form and 

connectedness.55 

Furthermore, Schelling closely follows Kant’s formulation of the reflective judgment in the third 

Critique and writes that “we must keep in mind that we, according to the subjective orientation 

of our power of knowing, simply cannot think the emergence of an organized being otherwise 

than through the causality of a concept or idea.”56 What Schelling is aiming for, through this 

verbatim reference to Kant, is to connect the “idea of the whole” that the demiurge beheld when 

making the cosmos with Kant’s “intuitive understanding” that grasps the “unity” of the 

“manifold of forms in nature.”57  

To make this intention even more explicit, Schelling then immediately turns to the Philebus 

where Socrates offers a method of inquiry consisting of four inseparable components.58 Seizing 

upon Socrates’ claim that this fourfold method is a “gift of the gods” akin to the heavenly fire 

stolen by Prometheus,59 Schelling relates this method to the form that the demiurge imparted to 

 
54 “What Plato understands by ζῷον according to this passage is not difficult to judge. ζῷον, according to him, is what as such 
possesses an original power of movement (ψυχήν).” See “Timaeus: 1794,” p. 211. 
55 “Timaeus: 1794,” p. 213 
56 For Kant’s formulation of natural end, see Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews 
(Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.245 [5:373].  
57 Ibid.,67 [5:179]. 
58 The four components are: 1) the unlimited (ἄπειρον), which covers all qualitative intensities or “everything that can become 
more or less”; 2) the limit (πέρας), which includes all quantitative relations such as “equal and equality,” “double,” and “every 
proportion of number to number”; 3) the mixture of the two (τὸ κοινόν); and 4) the cause (τὸ τῆς αἰτίας γένος) by which the 
unlimited is bound to the limit. The original passage from the Philebus reads: “The first class, then, is the indeterminate, the 
second the determinant, thirdly there is the sort of thing that is brought about as a mixture of these, and it would be in 
harmony with what we have said to call the fourth what is responsible for this mixture and generation.” Philebus, 27b 7-10 
59 “There is a gift of the gods[…]which they let fall from their abode, and it was through Prometheus, or one like him, that it 

reached mankind, together with a fire exceeding bright. The men of old, who were better than ourselves and dwelt nearer the 

gods, passed on this gift in the form of a saying. All things…that are ever said to be consist of a one and a many, and have in 

their nature a conjunction of limit and unlimitedness. This then being the ordering of things we ought, they said, whatever it be 



- 28 - 
 

the “movement of the world” in fashioning the world soul as discussed in the last section.60 He 

writes:  

The idea of the connection between the unity and the manifold, or the many, is the one 

dominant idea throughout all of Plato that he applies not only logically, but rather also as 

a natural concept… It is everywhere considered as one form that embraces of the whole 

of nature, and through its application upon formless matter not only are individual objects 

brought forth, but rather also the relation of objects to each other and their subordination 

to genera and kinds becomes possible.61 

In relating the form of divine production to the form of inquiry, Schelling’s Timaeus Essay 

seems like a one-track project gearing toward “Kantianizing” Plato. If this were the case, it 

would also mean that Schelling during this period has assumed a 

productionist/representationalist outlook on nature. While this interpretation certainly contains a 

significant degree of validity, especially given that Schelling then proceeds to relate the fourfold 

to Kant’s categories of the understanding later in the text, I argue that it is not the full picture.  

Returning to Schelling’s original claim that nature is the “work of our power of representation,” 

which clearly betrays the influence of Kant and Reinhold, his usage of “representation” is not 

simply operating under a normative epistemological framework. In a series of notes compiled 

prior to the Timaeus Essay, one significant entry is entitled “Types of Representation in the 

Ancient World concerning Various Objects, Collected from Homer, Plato, and Others.”62 The 

phenomena that are covered in the text --- poetry, theopneusty, prophecy, and soothsaying --- are 

all considered by Schelling as “types of representation” (Vorstellungsarten). Furthermore, the 

central concern of this entry is precisely the divine origin of knowledge as exemplified in these 

activities. As it will soon become apparent, Schelling’s extensive comparison between the poetic 

 
that we are dealing with, to assume a single form and search for it[…]There then, that is how the gods, as I told you, have 

committed to us the task of inquiry, of learning, and of teaching.” Philebus, 16 c -d. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith 

Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 1092.  
60 According to this schema, the unruly matter in the Timaeus is ἄπειρον in relation to the self-same forms (πέρας, exemplified 

by mathematical ratios); the physical cosmos is the result of mixing between ἄπειρον and πέρας; and the soul, as the principle 

of becoming, is the counterpart of the cause. Furthermore, any individual being or state of affairs would fall under the category 

of mixture, while its coming into being, or the mixing itself, can be conceived as a passage from potency to activity, i.e., 

actualization or production.   
61 “Timaeus: 1794,” p. 215.  
62 Quotations from text are taken from “Schelling’s Plato Notebooks: 1792 – 1794,” trans. Naomi Fisher.  



- 29 - 
 

act in the Ion with the genesis of the cosmos in the Timaeus will cast a different light on the 

inception of Schelling’s idealism.   

To begin with, why does this entry matter? It matters because the same fourfold “method” that 

was used in the Timaeus Essay to establish the link with Kant’s categories is employed here to 

describe processes that are much more akin to the experience of birth and eros.   

Secondly, Schelling explicitly argues that poesis is not a τέχνη but functions through the 

transference of “divine power” (θείαν δύναμις).63 If the fourfold were nothing but a form or a 

blueprint of existence similar to the idea of a wardrobe in the mind of a carpenter, then the 

cosmos would become a technical product, entailing mechanism as the mode of inquiry that is 

most appropriate to it. But as our forgoing analysis has made clear, the cosmos for Schelling is in 

no way reducible to a machine but is instead a living being. In other words, whereas Schelling’s 

Timaeus Essay at times veers towards a productionist conception of nature by virtue of its appeal 

to Kant, I argue Schelling’s reading of poesis betrays a different way of approaching nature that 

is less-representationalist and more dynamic and processual, namely, a participatory mode of 

“knowing” in which the subject is “carried out of oneself” by the experience of a certain kinship 

with the natural world.  

In the Vorstellungsarten entry, Schelling likens the poesis to the genesis of the cosmos because 

they both involve “the bringing forth of a world out of chaos.” Like the demiurge who was 

confronted with a pregenetic existence “moving without order,” the poet is similarly working 

with an “overflowing abundance of representations and sensations.” 64 In this chaos, the finished 

product is present but only as ἄπειρον, which Schelling compares to an opaque yet immeasurable 

darkness. In order for there to be a word or a line through which the poem may unfold, a certain 

 
63 Lara Ostaric points out that Schelling intentionally misinterprets Plato on the relationship between poetic inspiration and 
knowledge: whereas Plato clearly critiques the poets for their lack of knowledge both regarding the things they speak about in 
their poems as well as their own artistic process, Schelling argues that such lack precisely belongs to the very nature of poesis 
since inspiration is not a τέχνη but a transference of “divine power” (θείαν δύναμις). See Ostaric, Between Insight and 
Judgment, pp.178-183.  
64 “Characteristic poetic power operates according to laws, of which the poet himself is not distinctly conscious, and which for 
others are even less cognizable. The product of the poet is in this way a miraculous effect, of which one cannot discover the 
natural cause. It appears quite suddenly before the eyes of the astonished, who, just as God brought forth the world from 
chaos, brought it forth from an overflowing abundance of representations and sensations. It is a lightning flash of sensation, of 
emotional capacities, of the power of thought and combination, with which he ceaselessly awakens new emotions, springs from 
sensation to sensation, from thought to thought, and connects everything in one harmonious whole. In short, it is an effect for 
which he himself never sees the complete series of cause and effects, and which the common person cannot think at all.” 
“Schelling’s Plato Notebooks,” p. 114.  



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measure or πέρας must be introduced into darkness of ἄπειρον as “a higher stream of light.”65 

Offering an “explanation” of how poesis occurs, Schelling writes: 

This phenomenon cannot be explained in any way other than the following: that the soul, 

without being conscious of it, labored on in silence, and gradually advanced from 

sentence to sentence, from conclusion to conclusion, connected sentences, divided 

sentences, until it finally and suddenly encountered that long and vainly sought sentence, 

and found it now in the clearest connection with other sentences and linked to a 

completely correct progressing chain of conclusions.66  

The laboring of the soul is “silent” because it is not conscious. Schelling writes: “Characteristic 

poetic power operates according to laws, of which the poet himself is not distinctly conscious, 

and which for others are even less cognizable.”67 At the same time however, this operation is 

also not unconscious as the poet is actively trying to bring forth something determinate. To 

appropriate a phrase that Schelling would later use to describe the “becoming of new matter” in 

chemical motion, poesis is “positive and negative at the same time,”68 meaning what 

distinguishes the poetic act is precisely the passage from the unconscious into the conscious, or 

the experience of birth from darkness into the light. This poetic passage would later characterize 

the trajectory of his philosophy of nature as the retrieve or the reconstruction of nature as spirit.  

In essence, I argue that Schelling’s account of poetic inspiration depicts an experience of what 

the coming to be of the cosmos must be like, if it were indeed possible to cast it in human terms. 

To anticipate my analysis in the coming chapters, many of the themes that have appeared in the 

present chapter --- the cosmological and the anthropological, production and birth, materiality 

 
65 “What thoughtful mind has not had the experience, after having long grasped for an obscurely hinted sentence, which he 
always lost again in an enveloping sea of representations as frequently as he sought to hold onto it --- often, this very sentence 
would suddenly appear to him bright and distinct and in exact connection with other sentences, after which he was suddenly 
awoken in that chaos as if by a higher stream of light, the disparate elements divided, the similar flew to one another.” Ibid. p. 
115.  
66 Ibid.  
67 Ibid. p. 114.  
68 “We affirm that matter itself is only a product of antithetical forces; when these reach equilibrium in matter, all motion is 
either positive (repulsion) or negative (attraction); only when that equilibrium is disrupted, is motion positive and negative at 
the same time and there arises an interaction of the two original forces.” Schelling, On the World Soul (forthcoming). 
Translation is taken from Iain Hamilton Grant’s manuscript.  



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and power --- would reassert themselves in different ways, but never trail so far from their native 

soil: the Timaeus.69  

 

 

Chapter II. The Absolute as the Unconditionable 

 

The present chapter explores two of Schelling’s early essays: Of the I as Principle of Philosophy 

(Hereinafter Ich-schrift) and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (Hereinafter 

Philosophical Letters). Composed not long after the Timaeus Essay, these two works are 

generally considered to be representative of Schelling’s so-called Fichtean phase. Like many of 

his contemporaries, Schelling’s early philosophical horizon was set by the advent and reception 

of Kant’s critical philosophy. This horizon is defined by two essential tasks: identifying the 

shortcomings in Kant’s work and realizing its latent possibilities. For Fichte, Schelling, and 

others, Kant’s emphasis on cognition in the first Critique has limited knowledge to conditioned 

beings, namely, beings that depend on other beings for their existence. They perceived this 

delimitation of theoretical reason to be vulnerable to skepticism since there lacked a positive 

term upon which our knowledge can be grounded.70 They sought this positive term in what 

synthesis must presuppose in order to be a synthesis at all: a prior whole or unity that the process 

of synthesizing attempts to recuperate. Schelling calls the recovery of this prior unity the “very 

purpose of all synthesis” and “task of all philosophy in general.”71 Furthermore, insofar as 

synthesis is structured by the division between subject and object, these idealists saw the 

elimination of this divide in the absolute as the indispensable condition for securing the spirit of 

Kant’s thinking.72   

 
69 It should be mentioned that the pairing between ἄπειρον and πέρας, as well as the fourfold method of inquiry as presented 
in the Philebus are crucial as well.  
70 For a discussion on Schelling and skepticism, see Michael N. Forster, “Schelling and Skepticism,” in Interpreting Schelling: 
Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp.32-47.  
71 Schelling, “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” in The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Essays (1794-
1796), tr. and ed., Fritz Marti (Cranbury, Associated University Press, 1980), p. 164 [296, 297].  
72 Schelling thus translates Kant’s guiding question in the First Critique “how are synthetic judgment a priori possible?” into 

“how the absolute could come out of itself and oppose to itself a world?” Ibid.174 [310].  



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In these two essays mentioned, Schelling consistently employs the comparison between 

dogmatism and criticism as a way of presenting his interpretation of the absolute. In my analysis, 

I will use Schelling’s comparison in these essays as a way of tracking how his interpretation of 

the absolute differed from that of Fichte. This difference precisely rests on the question of nature: 

whereas Fichte treats nature as a secondary term, a check that limits the I, Schelling argues that 

the I and the not-I are co-originary.  

Lastly, I argue that Philosophical Letters anticipates the vantage point Schelling would 

eventually arrive at in his Freedom Essay, namely, a system of the absolute should entail a 

system of freedom; Spinozism is a system of the absolute but failed as a system of freedom (one-

sided realism) while Fichteanism is a system of freedom but not a system of the absolute (one-

sided idealism).  

 

2.1. Dogmatism and Criticism in the Ich-Schrift 

In the Ich-Schrift, Schelling presents the difference between dogmatism and criticism through 

their respective ontological principles:  

The principle of dogmatism is a not-I posited as antecedent to any I; the principle of 

criticism, an I posited as antecedent to all [that is] not-I and as exclusive of any not-I. 

Halfway between the two lies the principle of an I conditioned by a not-I or, what 

amounts to the same, of a not-I conditioned by an I.73  

As stated in this passage, Schelling names three possibilities of thinking the absolute: 1) 

dogmatism, grounded on the not-I; 2) criticism, grounded on the I, and 3) incomplete criticism, 

which is founded on the empirical I or an I that is conditioned by the not-I. Among the three, 

Schelling endorses criticism while rejecting dogmatism and incomplete criticism, meaning that 

he would rule out the not-I and the empirical I as possible candidates for the absolute. I will first 

trace Schelling’s reasons for elimination before delving into his positive account of the absolute 

I.  

 
73 “Of the I,” p.77 [170-171].  



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Starting with dogmatism, which is a system that posits “a not-I as antecedent to any I.” Schelling 

argues that this fundamental principle contradicts itself because it “presupposes an unconditional 

thing (ein unbedingtes Ding).”74 To unpack his reason, Schelling thinks that objects or things in 

general are characterized by a constitutive negativity that is fundamentally inimical to the 

possibility of knowledge. This negativity is rooted in the fact that an object can never stand or 

exist by itself without the chain of cause and effect that gives rise to it. Consequently, if an object 

always refers to another object or a prior causal condition, then the very identity requisite for 

knowing would be impossible, since the identity of A is constituted by its not being B, C, D….,75 

Schelling thus writes: 

Knowledge which I can reach only through other knowledge is conditional. The chain of 

our knowledge goes from one conditional [piece of] knowledge to another. Either the 

whole has no stability, or one must be able to believe that this can go on ad infinitum, or 

else that there must be an ultimate point on which the whole depends. The latter, 

however, in regard to the principle of the principle of its being, must be the direct 

opposite of all that falls in the sphere of the conditional, that is, it must be not only 

unconditional but altogether unconditionable.76 

As stated in the passage, if an object is always determined by something other than itself, then 

our knowledge of objects would be condemned to an infinite regression. To ensure the reality of 

knowledge --- not only that we know something, but what we know is true --- there must be a 

positive term that grounds all conditioned beings. Furthermore, that which grounds 

conditionality cannot itself be something conditional, therefore it must be unconditional, that is, 

not determined by another term but determining itself in an originary and inceptual manner, that 

is, it must be a causa sui. Schelling calls this unconditional principle the absolute I.  

Having clarified the non-objective character of the absolute, the question remains as to why 

Schelling would associate the not-I or the objective with dogmatism in the first place. For 

 
74 “The principle of dogmatism contradicts itself, because it presupposes an unconditional thing (ein unbedingtes Ding) that is, a 
thing that is not a thing. In dogmatism therefore, consistency…attains nothing other than that which is not-I should become I, 
and that which is I should become not-I.” Ibid.  
75 Andrew Bowie writes: “Each object is part of a chain of ob-jects (Gegen-stӓnde), which ‘stand against’ each other. Objects, 

then, are not absolutely real because they only become themselves by not being other objects.” See Andrew Bowie, Schelling 

and Modern European Philosophy (London, Routledge, 1993), p.20.  
76 “Of the I,” p.72 [163-164].  



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Schelling, the ultimate form of dogmatism is Spinozism, which sets up substance as the basis of 

all reality. Schelling understands Substance as a not-I because it is something that exists 

independently of the subject. Schelling rejects this possibility because for him an object is only 

an object when it is cast in relation to a subject.  

For Schelling, one of the fatal flaws of Spinozist substance is its inability to provide a viable 

grounding for consciousness: if the not-I or something that exists independently of I were posited 

as the absolute, then everything subjective is immediately reduced to it, meaning that all mental 

activities are nothing but the effects of external things.77 If all mental events are ultimately 

material or physical events, then not only the activity but the reality of mind is annulled. This 

problem is best reflected in Spinoza’s reduction of all causations to mechanical causation. If 

mechanical causation were the only kind of causality operative in the world, then spontaneity (or 

what Schelling calls ‘causality by freedom’) would be a mere illusion. Furthermore, once 

freedom is eliminated, so goes morality insofar as the latter presupposes spontaneity as the 

indispensable condition for realizing moral worth. To conclude, Schelling’s objection against 

dogmatism rests on the assumption that the principles of mind, consciousness, and most 

importantly freedom are irreducible to things, which entails that the absolute cannot be 

constructed from a principle (the not-I) that excludes them or render them merely phenomenal 

from the ground up.  

Having delineated why dogmatism is eliminated from the contest for the absolute, I now turn to 

the second candidate: the empirical I of incomplete criticism. As already stated, by “non-

objective” Schelling does not only mean what is not an object, but what can never become 

determined or objectified; the empirical subject, even though it is formally not an object, is 

disqualified from the absolute for the same reason: it is determined by the object just as the 

object is determined by it. The distinguishing mark of the empirical I is the “I think,” Schelling 

writes: “It manifests itself not by a mere I am, but by I think, which means that it is, not by its 

 
77 Schelling’s interpretation of the relationship between dogmatism and criticism is indebted to Fichte. Regarding the latter’s 
understanding of Spinozism, Frederick Neuhouser writes: “Such a system, on Fichte’s view, is obligated to understand all of the 
features of consciousness as effects of the actions of external things upon the subject. Thus, even the subject’s seemingly free 
choices must be explained as resulting in some complex way from causal determination by things rather than as instances of 
genuine self-determination. The strategy of idealism, in contrast, is to begin with what it regards as the essential nature of the 
subject --- the ‘self-sufficiency of the I’ --- and upon this basis to explain all of experience, including the necessary features of 
the objective world.” See Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 
pp. 55-56.  



- 35 - 
 

own sheer being, but by thinking something, thinking objects.”78 Following from this, the 

empirical I exists only insofar as it thinks objects; once the objects are taken away, it too will 

perish, which is another way of saying that as long as the empirical subject is posited, the objects 

must be posited along with it. The ontological dependency of the empirical I on objects betrays 

the weakness of incomplete criticism, namely, dualism.79 If there were no absolute, then the 

opposition between subject and object would become the final terms;80 this consequence is 

equally unacceptable as the dogmatist denial of the I since it makes permanent the division 

between subject and object, while it is precisely this division that has to be bridged in order for 

genuine knowledge to be possible.  

In the forgoing analysis, it has been made clear the dogmatism and incomplete criticism are 

eliminated from the contest for the absolute for two reasons: firstly, while both lay claim to the 

absolute, their founding principles (not-I and empirical I) in fact reciprocally condition each 

other in the sense that each requires the other in order to be thought. This dependency on the 

other is what excludes both from becoming the absolute, since the absolute can never be thought 

through another but must be “thinkable only through itself” as the perfect unity between being 

and thinking.81 Secondly, following from their ontological partiality, the not-I cannot be the 

absolute because it structurally denies the possibility of freedom as something independent from 

mechanistic causation while the empirical I is also unviable due to its dualism. If neither 

determinism nor dualism is permitted, then the only possibility left is the principle of criticism, 

which must be based on a principle that does not ontologically exclude freedom.82  

 

 

 

 
78 “Of the I,” 85 [182].  
79 Schelling calls this criticism “incomplete” because he precisely sees Kant’s First Critique and its formulation of theoretical 
reason as having retained the dualism between subject and object by positing a thing in itself, which is for Schelling an absolute 
object. 
80 Schelling writes: “For if there were no absolute I, then the concept of subject, that is, the concept the I which is conditioned 
by an object, would be ultimate.” Schelling, “Of the I,” p.76 [169].  
81 “Of the I,” p.72 [163-164].  
82 It is only when viewed under these two demands --- monism as form and freedom as content ---do we understand why 

Schelling wants to “annul explicitly the very foundation of Spinoza’s system” as stated in the preface to the Ich-Schrift, since 

Spinozism is for him precisely a monistic system that falls short in accommodating freedom. 



- 36 - 
 

2.2. Leveling the Playing-field: Philosophical Letters  

In the previous section, I have traced Schelling’s conception of the absolute as the non-objective 

through the contrast between dogmatism and criticism. I now turn to Schelling’s Philosophical 

Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795).83  

The Philosophical Letters originally arose out of Schelling’s disagreement with a group of 

Tubingen theologians who sought to appropriate Kant’s practical philosophy to support their 

theological agendas. Quick to seize upon Kant’s well-known expression that it is “necessary to 

deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,”84 proponents of this new dogmatism argue that 

the very division between theoretical and practical reason in Kant suggests that what was 

impossible for theoretical reason to grasp, namely the existence of God, can be reintroduced into 

philosophy through practical demands issuing from the necessity of the moral laws.  

Schelling takes issue with this view because it threatens to send thinking back into the ditch of 

heteronomy Kant’s critical philosophy has struggled hard to leave behind. For Kant, a 

transcendent God is not only theoretically illicit but would practically ruin the very possibility of 

morality: If God exists, then conformity to divine laws would be our only option; no moral worth 

could possibly be derived from this conformity as it has taken away the very core of moral 

action: the capacity for self-determination in accordance with reason alone. For Kant then, God 

is a rational postulate necessitated by the structure of practical reason.  

Under this light, these new dogmatists are not Kantians at all, but dogmatists in Kantian clothing; 

as they find in Kant the most convenient corroboration for their ideas, namely that insofar as 

theoretical reason is too weak to know God, there is, they argue, a necessity for revelation as a 

more superior and therefore commanding mode of knowing. From Schelling’s perspective, this 

amounts to “letting in by the back door what has been evicted by the front door,” since rather 

than asking what new ethical possibilities are opened through Kant, they want reason to once 

 
83 For interpretations of the Philosophical Letters, see Lara Ostaric, “Nature as the World of Action, Not of Speculation: 
Schelling’s Critique of Kant’s Postulates in His Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” in Schelling’s Philosophy: 
Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, ed. G Anthony Bruno (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020), pp.11-31. Bruno, G. 
Anthony, “Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Doctrine and Critique” in Critique in German Philosophy: From Kant to Critical 
Theory, ed. María Del Del Rosario Acosta López and Colin McQuillan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), pp. 133-154. Frederick C. 
Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism: 1781-1801 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 476-
79.  
84 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr.and ed.Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 
117 [B xxx]. 



- 37 - 
 

again succumb, under a practical pretext, ideas that are most inimical to it, namely, conformity to 

convention, blind adherence to religious authority, and acquiescence toward the status quo.  

The resurgence of this new dogmatism, allegedly derived from Kant’s teachings, indicates to 

Schelling that the spirit of Kant has yet to be grasped. Against interpretations that argue the first 

Critique has successfully demolished dogmatism and definitively established criticism, Schelling 

argues that firstly, the first Critique has not defeated dogmatism but only “dogmaticism.” 

Secondly, the First Critique has not established criticism once and for all, because there is a gap 

between theoretical and practical reason. Regarding the first point, “dogmaticism” pertains to the 

dogmatism of the pseudo-Kantians aforementioned while dogmatism proper, the one that the 

first Critique has not defeated, pertains to the “systemic realism” of Spinoza and Leibniz. For 

Schelling, the deadlock between dogmatism and criticism cannot last forever because they were 

generated from the same source, which means their oppositionality is rooted in a deeper 

relatedness. 85 Schelling locates the intimacy between them through a common motion which he 

calls the “egress from the absolute.”86  

The trace of this egress can be found in the impulse to fulfill the conditionality of synthesis 

within theoretical reason itself, as Kant has stated that it belongs to the very nature of reason to 

seek the unconditioned. But this is impossible insofar as theoretical reason seeks to know the 

unconditioned as an object of knowledge. Thus as far as theoretical reason is concerned, there 

are only two possibilities: either the object is posited as the absolute, in which case everything 

subjective would be derivative, or the subject is posited as the absolute, in which case everything 

objective would have to be done away with. Schelling writes: “One of the two must come to 

pass. Either no subject and an absolute object, or no object and an absolute subject. How can we 

end this controversy?”87  

Consistent with his critique in the Ich-Schrift, Schelling argues that insofar as theoretical reason 

is structured by the subject-object divide, this controversy is irresolvable. The only way out is to 

cut the Gordian knot: “Reason itself would have to create a new realm where its knowledge 

 
85 “They are opposed to each other in their first principle but they must meet at some common point some time or other. No 

line of distinction could be drawn between different systems except in a field they had in common.” Schelling, “Philosophical 

Letters,” p.163.  
86 Ibid. 
87 Schelling, “Philosophical Letters,” p.167 [299, 300].  



- 38 - 
 

ceases, that is, from a merely cognitive it would have to turn into a creative reason [realisierende 

Verkunft], from theoretical reason into practical.”88 Theoretical reason necessarily seeks the 

unconditioned, but it can never find the unconditioned as an object of knowledge (since knowing 

presupposes determination which is precisely what the absolute, as unconditionable, cannot be), 

it therefore must “demand the act through which it (the unconditioned) ought to be realized.”89  

With Schelling’s proposal of a creative reason, the basic movement of philosophy, hitherto 

centered on the primacy of the theoretical, is reversed: rather than retroactively accounting for 

the transition from the infinite to the finite, philosophy must enact the transition from the finite 

to the infinite.90 This reversal would be impossible unless the practical displaces the theoretical 

as the dominant paradigm of reason. With this move, the guiding question of philosophy is no 

longer about knowing the world but what kind of world one ought to live in and realize. 

Consequently, the contest between dogmatism and criticism is no longer centered on which of 

the two has a better theoretical system, but which is more capable of bringing about a world that 

would give reality to their respective propositions.  

As soon as the arena is shifted from the theoretical to the practical, the contest between 

dogmatism and criticism begins again. Practically speaking, both dogmatism and criticism 

constitute a way of realizing the absolute in the sense that both systems are trying to eliminate 

the conditionality associated with the subject-object divide that plagues theoretical reason.  

Contrary to thinkers who thought the practical postulate as a unique invention of criticism, 

Schelling argues that dogmatism too is inherently informed by a practical impulse, meaning that 

it wants to leave behind the subject-object divide through action. What kind of praxis does 

dogmatism teach? How would criticism fare against dogmatism in the practical register?  

 

2.2.1. Thinking through Schwӓrmerei 

In the previous sections, I have examined Schelling’s understanding of the absolute by using the 

opposition between dogmatism and criticism as a guiding thread. Placing the two essays side by 

 
88 Ibid.175 [311].  
89 Ibid.  
90 “Philosophy cannot make a transition from the non-finite to the finite, but it can make one from the finite to the nonfinite.” 

Ibid. 178 [315-16]. 



- 39 - 
 

side, Schelling’s perspective on dogmatism has significantly shifted by the time he composed the 

Philosophical Letters. In the Ich-Schrift, Schelling’s diagnosis of dogmatism clearly is mainly 

negative, for Schelling argues that insofar as dogmatism is based on the “denial of the absolute 

I,” it “nullifies not only a specific philosophy but all philosophy.”91 In the Philosophical Letters 

however, Schelling no longer insists on the absolute as an I but only the absolute as such. 

Consequently, by toning down the primacy of the I in the absolute, both dogmatism and criticism 

were placed on an equal footing theoretically. One of the key factors that contributed to this 

equalization between dogmatism and criticism is the notion of Schwӓrmerei.  

The most extensive treatment of Schwӓrmerei occurs in the Eighth Letter. In its opening passage, 

Schelling posits that he has touched on the “very core of all possible Schwӓrmerei” when 

examining the ethical principle of dogmatism. He then explains why that is the case by viewing 

dogmatism under the light of intellectual intuition. Regarding the latter, Schelling writes:  

This intellectual intuition takes place whenever I cease to be an object for myself, when --

- withdrawn into itself --- the intuiting subject is identical with the intuited. In this 

moment of intuition, time and duration vanish for us; it is not we who are in time, but 

time is in us; in fact it is not time but rather pure absolute eternity that is in ourselves. It is 

not we who are lost in the intuition of the objective world; it is the world that is lost in 

our intuition.92 

As stated, intellectual intuition is an experience of myself not as a personal self, which, 

according to Kant, is mere appearance, but an experience of freedom that makes empirical 

consciousness possible. For Schelling, it is precisely this experience of freedom that Spinoza has 

objectified. Schelling writes: 

When he intuited the intellectual in himself [das Intellektuale in sich], the absolute was 

no longer an object for him. This was an experience which admitted of two 

interpretations; either he had become identical with the absolute, or else the absolute had 

become identical with him. In the latter case, intellectual intuition was intuition of self; in 

 
91 Schelling, “Of the I,” p.102 [205-06]. 
92 Ibid.,181 [319-20].  



- 40 - 
 

the former, intuition of an absolute object. This latter is what Spinoza preferred. He 

believed himself identical with the absolute object, and lost in its nonfiniteness.93  

One must approach Schelling’s diagnosis of Spinozism as presented in this passage in a twofold 

manner in terms of what is illuminating and what is deficient. On the one hand, insofar all 

philosophy (of the absolute) seek to do away with the dualism between the infinite and the finite, 

the subject and the object, Spinozism indeed presents a viable path of ending this divide by 

conceiving all finite beings as modifications of the infinite. In other words, if the impasse of 

theoretical reason lies in the inability to account for the transition from the infinite to the finite, 

then by considering the difference between the two as one of degrees rather than kind, Spinozism 

has done away with the need for this transition.  

Yet, even though Schelling acknowledges Spinoza’s effort at ending the dualism between subject 

and object, he takes issue with how Spinoza ends it. As stated in the previous sections, the 

absolute by itself is unconditionable; it is that through which the subject and object comes to be, 

which means it, by itself, cannot be either. Schelling’s main objection to Spinozism has to do 

with Spinoza’s objectification of absolute freedom as well as the practical consequence that 

follows: if the absolute or the infinite were something independent from the subject, then in order 

to become identified with it, a finite being must gradually shed off the limitations that set it apart 

from the infinite. The only way for a subject to do this is to renounce its own agency as it 

approximates an eternal and unchanging order. 

Schelling argues that this de-subjectivating approach is rooted in Spinoza’s unwillingness to 

grant the subject any kind of causality independent from the absolute causality of substance. The 

ethical demand of a dogmatic subject is to annihilate oneself and become completely passive 

toward absolute causality.94 In other words, in Spinoza’s system, the subject is a problem that 

must be eliminated because it was never conceived as an integral aspect of the absolute to begin 

with. In other words, even though Spinozism is a philosophy of the absolute, it has not entered 

the hermeneutic circle in the right way and therefore failed at becoming a philosophy of freedom.  

 
93 Ibid. 
94 Note that here, even though the passive-active distinction is vital to Spinoza, Schelling is either dismissing this distinction 
entirely or implicitly arguing that Spinoza’s active power is still a form of passivity. 



- 41 - 
 

Similar to dogmatism, criticism too must practically obliterate the subject-object divide. But its 

approach is different. Rather than reducing the subject, criticism seeks to expand the subjective 

domain through an interaction with the objective world. Schelling summarizes the difference 

between these two approaches in the following way:  

In dogmatism my vocation [Bestimmung] is to annihilate all free causality in me; to let 

absolute causality act in me, but not to act myself; to narrow more and more the limits of 

my freedom in order more and more to widen those of the objective world; in short, my 

destiny is the utmost unlimited passivity. While dogmatism solves the theoretical conflict 

between subject and object by demanding that the subject ceases to be subject for the 

absolute object, that is, that it ceases to be something opposed to it, criticism on the other 

hand must solve the conflict of theoretical philosophy by the practical demand that the 

absolute ceases to be object for me. This demand I can fulfill only through an infinite 

striving toward the realization of the absolute in myself, only through unlimited 

activity.95  

Schelling presents the difference between dogmatism and criticism in terms of activity and 

passivity and the inverted ratio between the subjective and the objective. For dogmatism, the 

more passive the empirical subject becomes, the more active the absolute causality could act 

through me. For criticism on the other hand, it is the subject that must become more active by 

mastering the objective. Under this light, while both are aiming to end the subject-object divide, 

dogmatism does so by eliminating the subjective pole whereas criticism requires the subject 

realizing itself through its interaction with the objective.  

In the Ich-Schrift, Schelling wanted to emphasize the absolute I as the original ground of all 

reality. But under the influence of Hӧlderlin, Schelling came to the realization that just as the 

absolute cannot be objectified as in Spinozism, it also cannot be “subjectified” as in 

Fichteanism.96 Rather than treating dogmatism as the sole representative of Schwӓrmerei, a 

position Schelling seemed to be committed to in the Ich-Schrift, Schelling argues, in the 

Philosophical Letters, that criticism too can become fanatic: 

 
95 Ibid.,192 [336].  
96 For a discussion on Hӧlderlin’s influence on Schelling, see Beiser, German Idealism, pp.476-78.  



- 42 - 
 

If dogmatism demands that I vanish in the absolute object, then criticism must demand, 

on the contrary, that everything called object shall vanish in the intellectual intuition of 

myself. In either case, every object is lost for me, and therewith also the consciousness of 

myself as subject. My reality vanishes in the infinite reality.97 

This leads him to emphasize the objective pole as indispensable aspect to the disclosure of the 

absolute, a shift that is best demonstrated in the following contrast: in the Ich-Schrift, Schelling 

writes that “Self-awareness implies the danger of losing the I,” 98 but in the Philosophical 

Letters, he says that “as long as intuition is intent upon objects, that is, as long as it is sensuous 

intuition, there is no danger of losing oneself.”99 Note the drastic change of emphasis, 

Schelling’s understanding of sensuousness goes from a fatal hindrance to our realization of the 

absolute I to the indispensable condition for its disclosure. It is precisely at this juncture that his 

investigation into Plato’s Timaeus becomes visible: the “standing-together” [σύστασις] of νοῦς 

and ἀνάγκη precisely entails that a cosmology or a system of nature cannot be constructed from 

the self-identity of the intellect alone but requires resistance.100 Schelling writes: 

With absolute freedom no consciousness of self is compatible. An activity without any 

object, an activity to which there is no resistan