Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

German philosopher (1775-1854), founder of Naturphilosophie. In Knight's reading, Schelling is the decisive — and insufficiently acknowledged — influence on Merleau-Ponty's late ontology. Where the standard reception traces Merleau-Ponty's debts to Husserl and Heidegger, Knight argues that Schelling provides the ontological grammar: nature as the fundamental starting point, the irreducibility of the ground, the symbolic operation of physis, and the inseparability of the unconscious from productive reason.

Key Points

• The barbarian-principle (das barbarische Prinzip, Ages of the World): "could be stifled, but never suppressed." An irreducible dark ground (Grund) in every existence — not evil, not chaos, but the condition of all manifestation. Merleau-Ponty adopts this as etre sauvage (wild being)
• Tautegory (from Coleridge, adopted by Schelling): the symbol says the same rather than pointing elsewhere. Myths are not allegories for natural processes — they are real theogonic events. The succession of gods in mythology is "symbolic replication," the absolute's progressive self-differentiation through finite forms
• Philosophy of mythology: theogonies record real events in the life of consciousness — "successive polytheism" is the real process by which the absolute manifests itself. Schelling's "literalist" reading of mythology means taking mythic images at their word rather than translating them into abstract concepts
• "Force is the ultimate to which all our physical explanations must return" (Schelling): nature is not inert matter organized by external form (Aristotelian hylomorphism) but productive force that manifests itself through self-differentiation. This is why Naturphilosophie is a philosophy of nature and not a natural science
• Merleau-Ponty's eclectic reception: he encountered Schelling through Jaspers's Schelling: Grosse und Verh angnis and S. Jankelevitch's French translations. Knight argues this was "fortuitous" (Introduction, section 4) because the eclectic approach avoided the phase-based distortions that characterize much Schelling scholarship — the assumption that early Naturphilosophie, the Freedom essay, and the late mythology represent incompatible systems

Details

The Freedom Essay (1809)

The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom is Schelling's pivotal text, where the dark ground of existence first receives its fullest articulation. God requires a ground in order to exist — "as there is nothing before or outside God, he must have the ground of his existence within himself." This ground is not God's essence but that within God which is not yet God — the dark, contractive principle that makes manifestation possible. Knight reads Merleau-Ponty's "flesh" as a secularized transposition of this structure: the flesh is the ground of perception that is not itself perceptual in the ordinary sense (Ch. 5, section 3).

Ages of the World (1811-15)

The unfinished Weltalter drafts develop a temporal cosmogony: the absolute must pass through stages of self-contraction and expansion, and each stage leaves a "remainder" (Rest) that cannot be absorbed into the next. The barbarian principle is this remainder — the past that persists within the present as an irreducible weight. Knight connects this to Merleau-Ponty's temporality: "past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped — and that itself is the flesh" (November 1960 working note; Ch. 6, section 2).

Philosophy of Mythology (1842-45)

Schelling's late Munich and Berlin lectures develop a "positive philosophy" that takes mythology seriously as philosophical material. The key move: mythological narratives are not allegories (they do not encode hidden philosophical truths) but tautegories (they say what they mean, and mean what they say). The succession of gods in polytheism — from Uranos through Kronos to Zeus — is the real process by which the absolute differentiates itself through finite forms. Each god is a "potency" (Potenz) of the absolute, and the succession records the real history of consciousness's emergence from nature.

Knight argues (Ch. 5, section 1) that this "literalist" reading of mythology is decisive for Merleau-Ponty's concept of perceptual-cosmogony: if every cosmogony is thought in perceptual terms, and if mythological narratives are real cosmogonic events (not allegories), then mythology is a form of perceptual truth — not a primitive substitute for science but a disclosure of the originary.

Real-Idealismus (1800-1801)

Gardner argues that Schelling's system of Real-Idealismus — the melding of subject-centred transcendental idealism with object-centred Naturphilosophie — is the decisive structural parallel to Merleau-Ponty's chiasm. The system holds that: (1) philosophical understanding resolves into two irreducibly distinct, internally self-organized standpoints; (2) each apprehends the other as its opposite; (3) each can recognize itself as both producing and passing over into the other; (4) they relate as "inverted images of themselves."

The unity of the system is expressed not as a proposition but as an instruction — a "postulate": "First posit either the I or Nature! Then follow through to its final ground. Whereupon you will find yourself positing the other disjunct" (Gardner, §3). Two major conceptualizations support this: a logical movement (circular, from self to nature to self) and an Indifferenzpunkt (point of absolute indifference) supplying the unitary origin. Schelling's aphorism captures the result: "Nature is 'mind made visible' and mind 'the invisible nature'" — but the identity asserted is "not simple"; it names a movement between two systems, not a conjunction.

Gardner notes that Merleau-Ponty employs — "though not by name" — the concept of an indifference point in V&I (pp. 137-138, 146-148), and that Real-Idealismus appears to meet Merleau-Ponty's own conditions for "good ambiguity" (§3, fn. 35).

Positive Philosophy and the Quelle (1850)

Gardner (Thought's Indebtedness) reconstructs Schelling's late positive philosophy through the 1850 Quelle ("On the Source of the Eternal Truths"), Schelling's last public statement of his position. The central thesis — thought is indebted to being for its own possibility — is named with Schelling's own technical term unvordenklich: being pre-dates thought, possibility, and the PSR. Gardner gives this a precise gloss: it is "an ontological necessity within thought more primitive than the PSR," located at a passing-over point where the distinction between "necessity of thinking X" and "necessity of X being so" no longer applies. This is what Schelling calls the Fact of the World at the root of thought.

The Quelle traces the source of necessary truths through medieval and early modern philosophy to show that Kant's Ideal of Pure Reason (ens realissimum) gives the correct answer — but harbours an ambiguity between two "aspects": (A) the Ideal as the ground of necessary truth (pure universality), and (B) the Ideal as actually existent God (absolute individual). When (A) is developed systematically — through Descartes's voluntarism, Leibniz's intellectualism, and Wolff's theological rationalism — it inevitably resolves into "the system in which Reason is all" (Hegel's), losing individuality entirely. Schelling's solution: the Daß/Was distinction.

The structure is asymmetrically bi-directional: God-qua-(B) — pure Daß, actus purus, das selbst-Seyende — causes (A) to have being, but depends alethically on (A) for the truth that God is. The "why" of this asymmetry is "the final limit, that beyond which one cannot pass" — God's freedom. The structure can also be represented in terms of becoming or mereology; all three representations are equally legitimate. Crucially, per Gardner, this is not a doctrine of multiple modes of being but a complexification of the unitary concept of being, demanding "an interfoliation of logical and temporal vocabularies" (Gabriel aptly: "a theory of logical time"). The structural profile — asymmetric bi-directional mutual constitution — is the same formal profile Gardner 2016 identifies in Real-Idealismus, and the same profile chiasm takes in Merleau-Ponty. Across Schelling's career (1800 and 1850) and into MP's late ontology, the same non-linear absolute form recurs.

The Schelling-Hegel opposition. Per Gardner's conclusion, the dispute is "all-decisive" but not directly adjudicable: it turns on a constitutive two-sidedness in the Situation of Thinking (possibility and being both presented immediately, with priority undecidable from within). Unlike Fichte's idealist/dogmatist antithesis (doctrinally fixable), the Schelling-Hegel dispute "has no similar determinate ramifications" (fn. 63). Adjudication depends on the history of philosophy — the emptiness that results from pure reason's attempt to self-ground. This is why positive philosophy is philosophische Religion: "a title that Hegel's system could never merit." Philosophy must stage itself as the reversal of an ordo inversus — "philosophical reflection lies at the end of a real process which begins with God and in the course of which God's structure has been inverted."

The 1847 middle-term. The Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie (1847) is the specific textual middle-term between the Philosophy of Mythology lectures and the Quelle. Vorlesung 12 (and 11 setting the scene) treat Kant's Ideal explicitly (SW XI: 255–94, esp. 273–6 and 282–7). Here Schelling argues that Kant conceived the Ideal as an existent individual, but our knowledge of it "as only a hypothesis, to be defended merely as advantageous, and that he was content to do because his concerns were limited to accounting for the mere representability of things." Hence the Ideal exists as an individual "only for and in consequence of our representation; it is merely unser Werk" (SW XI: 286–7). Hence Kant's ultimate failure: "there is a more determinate content to be got from the Ideal than Kant realizes" (SW XI: 292). The 1847 text is what the 1850 Quelle summarizes — a year before Kant's Ideal surfaces again in the Berlin Academy lecture (Gardner fn. 62; Hogrebe 1989: 59–71 and Gabriel 2006: 104–15 offer helpful accounts).

Gardner traces the late insight back to Kant's pre-Critical Beweisgrund (1763), where the same proto-transcendental structure appears. Schelling's assessment: Kant "did arrive at (and even mastered) the standpoint which Schelling has set forth; on the other hand, he did so 'just barely', and 'did not progress beyond it'" (SW XI: 585).

Naturphilosophie and the Recent Revival

Schelling's Naturphilosophie was long dismissed as speculative obscurantism — the philosophy of the "night in which all cows are black" (Hegel's famous jibe). The recent revival, particularly through Iain Hamilton Grant's Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (2006), has rehabilitated Naturphilosophie as a serious philosophical project. Grant's "continuity thesis" argues that Schelling's philosophy is unified by the question of nature's productivity — from the early identity philosophy through the Freedom essay to the late mythology. Knight builds on this revival while diverging from Grant's reading in important respects (Grant emphasizes the dynamic, Knight emphasizes the symbolic).

The relevance for Merleau-Ponty scholarship: if Schelling's philosophy is unified by the question of nature's productivity, then Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Schelling is not an idiosyncratic borrowing but a retrieval of the central thread of German Idealism's most nature-oriented thinker. This recasts Merleau-Ponty not as a Husserlian who flirted with Heidegger but as a thinker whose deepest affinities lie with the Romantic tradition of Naturphilosophie.

Key Concepts Appropriated by Merleau-Ponty

Schelling Concept	Merleau-Ponty Appropriation	Knight's Reading
Barbarian principle	Etre sauvage	Irreducible ground of flesh
Tautegory	Chiasm as saying-the-same	Ch. 6, sections 1-2
Dark ground (Grund)	Pre-reflective depth	Ch. 5, section 3
Symbolic replication	Body schema, perception	Ch. 5, section 2
Nature as productivity	Flesh as self-differentiating	Throughout
Real-Idealismus	chiasm (six-element parallel)	Gardner, §3
Indifferenzpunkt	Flesh as medium (V&I 137-138)	Gardner, §3

Connections

• is the source of barbarian-principle and natural-symbolism concepts appropriated by Merleau-Ponty — these are Schelling's most consequential contributions to the late ontology
• contrasts with martin-heidegger on physis — for Heidegger, physis is self-showing within a horizon; for Schelling, physis is productive force that includes the unconscious and the dark ground
• shares with Freud an understanding of the unconscious as linked to forces — Knight traces a line from Schelling's "dark ground" through Romantic psychology to Freud's drive theory (Ch. 3)
• is developed further by chiasm — Knight reads the chiasm as Schelling's tautegory radicalized by being thought "from the middle"; Gardner reads it as structurally parallel to Real-Idealismus
• is connected to immanuel-kant via the Third Critique — Schelling's Real-Idealismus grows out of a realistic interpretation of Kant's teleology (CPJ §§76-77)
• is connected to immanuel-kant via the Beweisgrund — Schelling's late positive philosophy returns to and expands a proto-transcendental insight Kant glimpsed in 1763: thought is indebted to being for its own possibility
• contrasts with Hegel — the Schelling-Hegel opposition is "all-decisive": Schelling's positive philosophy recognizes the priority of being over thought; Hegel's system reduces All to Reason
• is contextualized by the I.H. Grant revival — the "continuity thesis" provides the scholarly backdrop for Knight's reading
• shares with MP a three-token asymmetric bi-directional structure — Real-Idealismus (1800) + Daß/Was (1850) + chiasm (1960s) — see claims#schelling-mp-asymmetric-bi-directionality (live claim) for the structural-parallel articulation

Open Questions

• How systematic is Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Schelling — is it a deep appropriation or a set of suggestive borrowings? The eclectic reception complicates the answer.
• Does Schelling's theism (the God who requires a ground) survive the secularization into Merleau-Ponty's flesh? The dark ground without God becomes the barbarian-principle without theology — but is something lost in this translation?
• How does the Schelling connection reshape the standard Husserl-Heidegger-Merleau-Ponty lineage? If Schelling is the decisive influence, the canonical narrative needs revision.
• What is the relationship between Schelling's Naturphilosophie and contemporary new materialism (Grant, DeLanda, Bennett)?
• Does the tautegory concept survive the post-structuralist critique of presence, or does it depend on a metaphysics of immediacy?

Key Quotes

"Force is the ultimate to which all our physical explanations must return." (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)

"Could be stifled, but never suppressed." (Schelling, Ages of the World, on the barbarian principle)

"Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature." (Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)

Sources

• knight-2024-merleau-ponty-essence-of-nature — Schelling is a presence throughout; concentrated in Introduction section 4 (reception), Ch. 5 sections 1-3 (barbarian principle, tautegory, Freedom essay), Ch. 6 sections 1-2 (chiasm as development of tautegory); Ch. 5 section 1 (philosophy of mythology)
• gardner-2016-kant-third-critique-schelling — §3: Real-Idealismus as structural parallel to the chiasm; §4: the question of Wissenschaft vs. phenomenological expressivism
• gardner-2018-thoughts-indebtedness-to-being — positive philosophy and the Quelle (1850): the Daß/Was distinction, thought's indebtedness to being, the Beweisgrund connection
• carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — ch. 5 ("The Light of the Flesh") develops MP's engagement with Schelling's Naturphilosophie as a source for the "new idea of light." Via Francesco Moiso (Chiasmi 1, 1988): Schelling's "diffused reason" in Nature; light as "a sort of concept that walks among appearances." MP's NC 193 formula ("Light is not a quale, it is the impossibility of darkness") read as structurally Schellingian. See light-of-the-flesh.