Schelling developed a Naturphilosophie treating nature as an unconscious, productive activity that mirrors and ultimately becomes conscious spirit, and an "identity philosophy" grounding subject and object in a common Absolute. In his 1809 "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom," he distinguished God's non-rational "ground" from God's rational "existence" to explain how genuine freedom and the real possibility of evil are compatible with a rational cosmos.
Intellectual setting
Schelling worked alongside Fichte and Hegel at Jena in the 1790s-1800s as post-Kantian idealism took shape, later broke publicly with Hegel over the direction of the system, and his late Berlin lectures attacking Hegelian rationalism were attended by the young Kierkegaard, Engels, and Bakunin.
Key ideas
Naturphilosophie
Schelling treated nature not as inert mechanism but as an unconscious productive activity structurally continuous with mind, so that the study of nature and the study of spirit trace the same underlying process at different stages of self-realization.
The ground of freedom and the possibility of evil
In his 1809 freedom essay, Schelling distinguished a non-rational "ground" from rational "existence" within God, arguing real human freedom and the possibility of evil require this pre-rational ground rather than a purely rational, necessitarian cosmos.
Legacy
Schelling's Naturphilosophie influenced German Romantic science, and his late philosophy of freedom and the "positive philosophy" beyond pure reason had a delayed but significant influence on Heidegger and on twentieth-century existentialism's treatment of freedom and contingency.