Kant had left a split 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. The repair offered by Fichte, a founding figure of German idealism, was to make nature a product of the ego — scenery the self erects for its own striving. To a seminarian reading Fichte in Tübingen, that looked less like a solution than a retreat indoors.
Schelling had entered the Tübinger Stift, the seminary at Tübingen, at fifteen, five years under the admission age, and shared a room with Hegel and the poet 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, he held, is something a will positively does, not an absence, an error or a shortfall of reason — and if so, whatever the world rests on must contain a dark, unruly principle and not pure order. Caroline, his wife, died that year, and the essay was the last book he published; he lived another forty-five years.
What he did instead was rewrite: The Ages of the World was announced, drafted, set in type, withdrawn and begun again across two decades, and he never let it go out.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. He called the philosophy that works out what must be negative, and 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, the anarchist Bakunin, the historian Burckhardt and the naturalist 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.
His reputation took a century to recover: Heidegger, the twentieth-century German philosopher, lectured on the freedom essay and made it central, and English-language philosophy came back to him in the 1990s and has not left. Scholars still argue whether he wrote one philosophy or several.