Fichte's repair was to make nature a product of the ego — scenery the self erects for its own striving. What he was repairing was a split Kant had left down the middle of philosophy: nature ran on mechanism, cause forcing effect all the way down, while the human being was free, and no road ran between them. To a seminarian reading Fichte in Tübingen, that looked less like a solution than a retreat indoors.
Schelling had entered the Tübinger Stift at fifteen, five years under the admission age, and shared a room with Hegel and Hölderlin. He published Of the I as Principle of Philosophy at twenty, and at twenty-three he held a chair at Jena, in the middle of German Romanticism as it was being invented. His move was to refuse the choice the older men had set up: nature is not inert matter waiting on a mind to organise it; nature is productivity, and mind is that same productivity come awake. Rocks, magnets, plants and thinking are stages of one activity. The philosophy of nature made him the most watched philosopher in Germany before he was thirty.
Then the system broke, and he broke it himself. In 1809 he published an essay on human freedom that put evil at the centre of the argument — evil as something a will positively does, rather than as an absence, an error or a shortfall of reason — which meant that whatever grounds the world had to contain a dark, unruly principle rather than pure order. Caroline, his wife, died that year, and the essay was the last book he published; he lived another forty-five.
What he did instead was rewrite: The Ages of the World was announced, drafted, set in type, withdrawn and begun again across two decades, and he never let it go out. Underneath it lay one question: why is there anything at all? He came to think no chain of reasoning could reach existence — that logic tells you what a thing must be if it is, and can never get you to the fact that it is. The philosophy that works out necessary structures he called negative; the philosophy that starts from the sheer fact of a world, positive. Reason, in other words, was not the road to reality. He had built the most ambitious system of his generation and then denied that any system could do what systems were for.
Hegel had already turned on him. The preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit mocked an absolute in which all distinctions vanish; Schelling read it as aimed at him, the friendship ended, and Hegel's philosophy then owned the century.
Berlin called him in 1841, to Hegel's own vacated chair, to answer the school that had eclipsed him. Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, Burckhardt and Alexander von Humboldt sat in the first audiences. Almost none of them stayed convinced. A former colleague published a pirated transcript of the lectures, Schelling failed to get it suppressed in court, and in 1845 he stopped lecturing publicly. He died in 1854 at Bad Ragaz, in the Swiss Alps.
Scholars still argue whether he wrote one philosophy or several. The recovery took a century: Heidegger lectured on the freedom essay and made it central, and English-language philosophy came back to him in the 1990s and has not left.