Schelling, Friedrich

Abstract

Abstract Over the course of his long philosophical development, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) neither devoted a single work to moral philosophy, nor attempted to produce a systematic ethical theory of the sort characteristic of Kantian philosophers. In this regard Schelling contrasts with Kant and his fellow German Idealists, Fichte and Hegel, for whom the construction of a system of practical norms is an essential part of the task of philosophy as Wissenschaft ( see Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Kant, Immanuel). Schelling's discussions of topics in practical philosophy, furthermore, remain comparatively fragmentary, insofar as they occur principally in contexts devoted to other issues and display changes of standpoint between writings of different periods. The absence of a systematically elaborated ethics from his work does not mean, however, that Schelling lacked a substantive and original conception of morality, nor that his work fails to pursue the systematic implications of Kantian ideas for practical philosophy. The former is contained in Schelling's metaphysical foundation of morality, the latter in his theory of right and the state ( see Rights). Schelling's systematic and historical importance lies in the originality of his attempt to base morality on a metaphysics of monistic idealism, and in the distinctive challenge which he poses to better‐known and more historically influential forms of post‐Kantian ethics.