Schelling's Critique of Hegel

Extract

Not only during his lifetime but for some years after his death Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling remained a figure of controversy. Few academic philosophers have been more execrated by their opponents, since with him intellectual differences quickly turned into personal animosities. That this was so was not simply his ill–luck; Schelling was always an ‘awkward customer’ to deal with. His vanity, which was inordinate, was no doubt basically temperamental, but it had been stimulated by the remarkable literary success of his early years, in which he appeared before the world as a prodigy. Increasingly touchy and irritable as he grew older, the least criticism struck him as a personal affront and disagreement as intended injury. The bitterness of his response, to intellectual equals and inferiors alike, was almost invariably such as to end in severed relationships. Thus he quarrelled in turn with Jacobi, with Fichte and with Friedrich Schlegel, as well as with lesser lights such as Baader and Eschenmayer, and even with his own pupils –J. J. Wagner, Krause, Stahl, Kohn and others. Those who managed to stay on good terms with him – men like Windischmann, Victor Cousin and his own publisher Cotta – had to learn to put up with his rancour. But of all with whom he fell foul the most eminent was Hegel, whom he regarded as his arch–enemy. The reason, little creditable to Schelling, is not far to seek. Originally fellow–students at Tübingen, they later became colleagues at Jena, where Schelling, the younger of the two, had already acquired national fame. By contrast the future author of the Phenomenology of Spirit was evidently as yet no more than a worthy but hardly scintillating collaborator with his academic senior in running a philosophical journal.