Schelling

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) appears in the depth-psychology corpus not as a historical curiosity but as a living philosophical resource. Two principal registers of engagement emerge. The first, elaborated most fully by M.H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism, situates Schelling within the great Romantic narrative of circuitous history: humanity’s necessary fall into alienation from an original unity and its effortful return to a higher, self-conscious reconciliation. For Abrams, Schelling is the philosopher who most systematically translates Neoplatonic and theological schemas of fall-and-return into idealist metaphysics, producing a vision of universal history as a double epic whose centrifugal first movement is answered by a centripetal second. The second register, dominant in Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, mines Schelling’s Naturphilosophie for its phenomenological and cosmological resources: his stream-and-eddy image of individuation from undifferentiated nature, his equilibrium model of life as perpetual disequilibrium, his claim that Nature is ‘the living ground and visible body of an eternally incarnating divinity,’ and his status as one of the first modern thinkers to transcend the idealism-realism dichotomy. Coleridge’s debt to Schelling — most visible in the term Ineinsbildung, translated as ‘esemplastic power’ — forms a crucial relay between German Naturphilosophie and Anglophone Romantic poetics. Across these registers, Schelling functions as both a systematic philosopher of the self-completing circle and a visionary naturalist whose dynamic ontology anticipates process philosophy and depth-psychological models of the unconscious as creative ground.

In the library 19 passages

Schelling represents the general course of human history, so conceived, as a circuitous journey which constitutes the plot of a double Homeric epic: History is an epic composed in the mind of God.

Abrams identifies Schelling’s philosophy of history as the paradigmatic articulation of the Romantic circuitous-journey motif, wherein humanity’s departure into alienation and its return to unity constitute a cosmic epic structured by fall and redemption.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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Think of a stream, which is itself pure identity. Where it meets resistance, it forms an eddy. This eddy has no permanence, but is constantly disappearing and reappearing. Originally nothing in Nature is differentiated.

McGilchrist deploys Schelling’s stream-and-eddy image as the central metaphor for how differentiated entities arise within undifferentiated nature through resistance, making Schelling the key philosophical precedent for his own account of continuity and discontinuity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Think of a stream, which is itself pure identity. Where it meets resistance, it forms an eddy. This eddy has no permanence, but is constantly disappearing and reappearing. Originally nothing in Nature is differentiated.

Parallel passage establishing Schelling’s stream metaphor as the philosophical core of McGilchrist’s argument about the co-dependence of identity and differentiation in nature and mind.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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He took Schelling’s almost equally cumbersome term Ineinsbildung, and since, to be fair, it would not work as a single word in English, turned it into Greek before anglicising it: eis, in, + en, one + plastikos, moulding: ‘moulding into one.’

McGilchrist traces Coleridge’s coinage of ‘esemplastic power’ directly to Schelling’s Ineinsbildung, documenting the precise intellectual transmission whereby Schelling’s theory of imagination entered Romantic poetics in English.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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He took Schelling’s almost equally cumbersome term Ineinsbildung, and since, to be fair, it would not work as a single word in English, turned it into Greek before anglicising it.

Parallel passage documenting the Schelling-to-Coleridge transmission of the esemplastic-imagination concept, establishing Schelling as the originary source of one of Romanticism’s cardinal aesthetic terms.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Schelling clearly intuited that water was a potent metaphor or symbol for the nature of reality … In his treatise On the World-Soul, which Schelling wrote when he was only 23, he speaks of an equilibrium to life that must constantly be disturbed and re-established.

McGilchrist presents Schelling’s early cosmological treatise On the World-Soul as articulating a dynamic equilibrium model of life, in which oxygen and hydrogen serve as opposing ‘weights on the lever of life,’ anticipating process-oriented ontologies.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Schelling clearly intuited that water was a potent metaphor or symbol for the nature of reality … he speaks of an equilibrium to life that must constantly be disturbed and re-established.

Parallel passage linking Schelling’s World-Soul cosmology to Oriental philosophical uses of flowing water as metaphor, situating his thought within a cross-cultural tradition of dynamic-process ontology.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Young Friedrich Schelling declares that his philosophy aims ‘not merely at a reform of knowledge, but at a total reversal of its principles; that is to say, it aims at a revolution of knowledge.’

Abrams documents Schelling’s early programmatic declaration that his idealist philosophy constitutes a cognitive revolution aimed at liberating humanity from fear of the objective world and establishing absolute freedom as its first principle.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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“The general fall of man,” Schelling wrote in 1803, which … the world of nature … lies the last and supreme appeasement and expiation of cognition.

Abrams cites Schelling’s 1803 text to illustrate how the Romantic philosophical tradition displaced theological concepts of the Fall into a narrative of cognitive estrangement whose resolution constitutes the ‘true Theodicy’ of universal history.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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In an early essay Schelling proposed … that all science in its highest perfection and unity must become possible insofar as the first principle of philosophy is precisely also its last principle.

Abrams presents Schelling’s early systematic ambition — that philosophy must be a closed circle in which first and last principles coincide — as the idealist analogue of Fichte’s completed circle and the structural backbone of Romantic system-building.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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We began to philosophize through pride, and so destroyed our innocence; we discovered our nakedness, and since then we philosophize out of the need for our redemption.

Abrams quotes Schelling’s reading of the speculative fall — the moment humanity began to question the being of God — as the origin of philosophical striving and the engine of the circuitous return toward redemption.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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Boehme, said Schelling, ‘was a miraculous phenomenon in the history of mankind … J. Boehme, in the birth of God, as he describes it for us, precede all the scientific systems of modern philosophy.’

Abrams records Schelling’s high estimation of Jacob Boehme as a proto-philosophical mythologist of divine generation, demonstrating the esoteric-theosophical lineage that feeds into Schelling’s own speculative theology.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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Schelling, The Ages of the World, p. 212. See also pp. 213–17 for Schelling’s explicit translation into philosophical concepts of both the physical and psychological details of sexual attraction, union, and generation.

Abrams notes in an endnote that Schelling’s Ages of the World elaborates the union of opposites through the specific philosophical treatment of sexual polarity, linking cosmological and erotic principles.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside

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