Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and the German Idealism

On October 18, 1790, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was granted permission to enroll at the Tübinger Stift at an earlier age than usually permitted. An excerpt from the article:

"On January 27, 1775, German philosopher, anthropologist, theorist of so-called Romantic Medicine and one of the main representatives of German idealism Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was born. Schelling was the main founder of the speculative philosophy of nature, which from about 1800 to 1830 shaped almost all areas of the natural sciences in Germany at that time. His philosophy of the unconscious influenced the training of psychoanalysis. Schelling’s philosophy forms the decisive link between Kantian and Hegelian philosophy as well as between idealistic and idealistic philosophy.

“Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature.”
— Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schellong, Ideen, “Introduction”

Youth and Education
Schelling came from a long-established Swabian pastor’s family. The father Joseph Friedrich Schelling, first pastor and deacon in Leonberg, from 1777 teacher at the higher seminary of the monastery Bebenhausen, was a respected orientalist. Schelling first attended the Latin school in Nürtingen, then the Protestant monastery school in Bebenhausen. With a special permit Schelling was admitted to the Tübingen Protestant Monastery in 1790 at the age of sixteen. There he studied Protestant theology together with Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg W. F. Hegel. A mentally very fruitful friendship developed between these students, which is why they were called the “Tübinger Drei” (Thübingen Three). The ideas of the three were mainly influenced by the spiritual world of the theological Enlightenment and the enthusiasm of the French Revolution. Their revolutionary spirit is reflected in the so-called Eldest System Program of German Idealism (1796/97), in which the idea of a New Mythology is represented alongside ideas on freedom and state criticism. Besides the study of Kant‘s philosophy, it was above all the writing Über die Lehre des Spinoza (On the Doctrine of Spinoza) by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi that exerted great influence on the thinking of the three."