Abstract

In the year 1841, the sixty-six year old philosopher, Schelling, was installed in the chair of philosophy at Berlin. Because he wanted someone with sufficient authority to combat the influence of Hegel, the new king of Prussia supported his appointment. As Crown Prince he had been concerned about the liberal and subversive elements in Hegel’s political philosophy. In power, he chose an associate of Hegel’s youth to lead the attack, a man who had disappeared from the intellectual scene just as Hegel’s star was beginning to rise. Although Schelling and Hegel were collaborators in the years that led up to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling had not been converted to dialectical philosophy. Indeed, in lectures on the history of philosophy given in Munich during the years after Hegel’s death, he challenged its rationality. The move from the logic of pure thought to a philosophy of nature was unjustified. For Schelling there could be no logical bridge between transcendental idealism and the theory which expressed the inherent structures of the natural order. They are two quite different disciplines, of quite a different order. When Hegel moved from one to the other, then, he was violating a fundamental logical principle, first enunciated by Aristotle. He was passing over into another genus—from thought to reality. The image that sprang to Schelling’s mind was one vividly expressed by Lessing for an analogous problem. Between the two—thought and reality—lay a “nasty broad ditch.”