Schelling’s Innovations

Abstract This chapter presents two of Schelling’s works, his 1797 Ideas and his 1800 System, as consonant with the Neoplatonic elements of his early essays. This chapter thus advances an interpretation of these works as consistent with his earlier texts in their overarching perspective, in contrast to the view that Schelling shifts in his fundamental commitments. Schelling’s philosophy of nature and his transcendental idealism both begin with insight into a primordial unity and proceed via a unification of contrary principles, to the culminating unities of the organism or work of art. Accordingly, Schelling’s Platonism is idiosyncratic in allowing these higher entities to be sensibly material. This chapter argues that Schelling nevertheless can be called a Platonist in his commitment to absolute unity as the ground and telos of all things. Schelling thereby develops a framework that is novel both in his own era and in the tradition of Platonism.