Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s On the History of Modern Philosophy appears, in Andrew Bowie’s lucid English translation, as both a retrospective cartography of the main line of early-modern and post-Kantian philosophy and a programmatic intervention in the fate of Idealism itself. Not a mere chronicle, the work offers a disciplined reconstruction of the inner motives that carry European thought from the inaugurating decisions of Descartes to the architectural ambitions of German Idealism, and then subjects those ambitions to an immanent critique that turns on the difference between what Schelling calls a negative philosophy (the intelligibility of necessity within thought) and a positive philosophy (the intelligibility of the fact that there is a world at all). The lectures were delivered in Munich in the 1830s, compiled for posthumous publication by Schelling’s son from his father’s manuscript, and presented here with Bowie’s contextualizing introduction; the volume is the first complete English translation and has been taken, since publication, as a key to the later Schelling’s systematic intentions and his sharp opposition to Hegel’s claim to have completed philosophy in the medium of dialectical science.
From the outset Schelling defines his historical undertaking not as an external survey but as a necessary accompaniment to any philosophy that wishes to know where it begins and toward what it tends. Philosophy, he remarks, is a product of time; anyone proposing to advance it must locate his point of departure in the succession of prior standstills and transitions. The retrospective view thus functions as propaedeutic to science itself: it identifies unresolved problems inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it clarifies why the “highest goal” of philosophy could not have been achieved by the routes tried thus far. This is the didactic and conceptual rationale for a sequence that moves, thematically and argumentatively, through Descartes, a comparison of Bacon and Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Naturphilosophie, Hegel, and then, in two culminating movements, Jacobi and the theosophical current and a reflection on national differences in philosophical practice. The table of contents itself encodes the architectonic: Descartes names the decisive modern beginning; the Spinoza–Leibniz–Wolff axis secures rationalist system; Kant and Fichte refound the project transcendental-critically; Naturphilosophie reopens the ontological question by placing mind in nature; Hegel radicalizes reflexivity; Jacobi and theosophy expose the limit-points of both rationalism and immediacy; and the national comparison tests whether “philosophy in the German sense” can claim universal legitimacy.
Bowie’s introduction situates the lectures at the center of Schelling’s late project, whose guiding distinction between the negative and the positive reframes the historiography of modern thought. Negative philosophy, in Schelling’s usage, is the science of what exists in a necessary manner: the logical articulation of determinations and their inner transitions, the self-unfolding of concepts as in Hegel’s Logic. Positive philosophy, by contrast, is the science that begins from the fact that there is being at all; it answers to the contingency and irreducible factuality of existence, to what Schelling elsewhere called ein Seyn, das allem Denken vorhergeht—a being prior to thought—which cannot be “derived” in the mode of pure negativity but must be acknowledged as unconditioned fact or free deed. The later Schelling contends that a philosophical system that only ever explicates necessity lacks the conceptual resources to account for the existence of the system itself; the “why” of being cannot be explained by a method that presupposes being in order to operate. The ontological proof, so Schelling argues, confuses what exists necessarily in thought with what necessarily exists, and Hegel’s claim that thought ultimately proves identical with being reinstates that confusion at a higher level: the explanatory circle closes without ever squarely facing the difference between the necessity of a concept and the factuality of a world. The lectures’ sustained confrontations with Descartes and Hegel are designed to make this difference palpable.
On Schelling’s accounting, modern philosophy begins with Descartes because the Cogito posits thinking as indubitable and thereby installs reflexivity as the medium in which certainty is to be won. But precisely here a decisive ambiguity enters. The Cogito ergo sum shows that thinking must exist as thinking; it does not, by itself, ground the existence of what is other than thinking, nor does it license a transition from the necessity of the proposition “I think” to a general thesis about necessary being as such. The sceptical doubt of an external world already posits that world as somehow there to be doubted, so that the minimum concession to facticity has already been made; the critical issue is whether this “there” can be accounted for within a reflexive science alone. For Schelling, it cannot: the move from thinking’s self-certainty to being’s unconditionality needs an additional principle—the acknowledgment of the positivity of being—which cannot be rendered as a deduction from a merely negative logic. The Descartes chapter accordingly functions as a hinge: it shows how the modern primacy of reflexivity generates the problem field within which Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff elaborate rationalist solutions, and it exhibits why those solutions, for all their internal power, fail to touch the question of existence as such.
Schelling’s treatment of Spinoza respects the rigor of monism while identifying the lacuna it leaves behind: to the extent that explanation proceeds by the principle of sufficient reason, every finite determination is intelligible only as a node in an endless chain of “conditioned conditions.” What is missing, from Schelling’s perspective, is an account of why there should be such a chain at all and why it is not merely the reflection of an already given logical form. The early Schelling had sought to surpass this deficit by making nature “invisible mind” and mind “invisible nature,” thereby refusing the Kantian bifurcation of noumenal and phenomenal and seeking the common origin of consciousness and world in a dynamic productivity. That monistic impulse remains in the lectures as historical reconstruction, but it is now framed by a later insistence that a rational Naturphilosophie, however successful at presenting internal necessity—how expansion interacts with countermovements to generate determinate forms—still cannot deduce the that of being itself. The negative science may show that, given being, there must be organisms, mind, and lawlike structures; it cannot show why there is being at all. In Bowie’s exposition of the Munich lecture on Naturphilosophie, Schelling even recasts the emergence of consciousness as a process in which the subject can never stabilize itself as pure self-presence, because the very act of “attracting” itself makes it other than itself; the ground in nature refuses complete reflexive capture.
When the narrative reaches Kant and Fichte, Schelling credits the transcendental turn with having identified the conditions of possibility for experience and the primacy of the subject’s spontaneity, while insisting that the transcendental deduction of categories is still an account of forms and thus remains within the horizon of negativity. Kant’s critical delimitation of knowledge and Fichte’s radicalization of the self-positing I illuminate why representation and practical reason have the structure they do, but they do not, in Schelling’s terms, penetrate to the pre-reflective ground from which both mind and nature arise. This is why the later Schelling re-opens, within a thoroughly post-Kantian framework, the question of ontology: the unconditioned cannot be the product of reflection without ceasing to be unconditioned, yet the unconditioned cannot be posited as an object without contradiction. The only coherent alternative is to mark the status of the unconditioned as fact—positivity—and then to ask how a science that begins from fact can nevertheless do more than simply point. That demand does not dispense with logic; it reassigns logic to its proper domain (the necessary) while requiring that philosophy include an account of its own factual ground. The lectures make this reassignment by moving, after the Kant–Fichte exposition, to a re-presentation of Schelling’s own Naturphilosophie and then to Hegel, whose system offers the most ambitious modern attempt to render positivity superfluous.
Schelling’s analysis of Hegel proceeds with concessions and refusals. He grants that Hegel’s method faithfully describes how determinate knowledge overcomes its limits by discovering the insufficiency of each of its own forms, and he accepts that, as a history of conceptual self-correction, dialectics has no need of an “external” appeal. What he denies is that such a method can ever be more than negative: it charts what follows when thinking is already in play; it cannot ground the fact that thinking and its world are there at all. For Hegel, the process in which the immediacy of object and the immediacy of subject cancel each other, level by level, culminates in a standpoint where thought comprehends itself as identical with being. For Schelling, this conclusion mistakes the indwelling necessity of thought for an answer to the question of being’s origin; it collapses the distinction between necessary existence in thought and necessary existence as such. In Bowie’s reconstruction, Schelling’s late writings articulate this refusal by a persistent analysis of the ontological proof: the inference from the completeness of the concept (that which exists necessarily in thought) to the existence of what necessarily is invalidly crosses from the negative to the positive. To maintain the crossing is to grant thought a sovereignty over its other that, in fact, it does not possess.
This refusal does not return Schelling to a pre-critical mysticism. The lectures insist on a sharp boundary between philosophy and theosophy: immediate feeling or visionary “experience,” however abundant its matter, is mute without the mediating organ of thought; the philosopher must bring the potency of experience to reflection in order to communicate and to know. Jacobi, who stands at a strategic juncture in the book’s narrative, is exemplary and cautionary in equal measure. Schelling acknowledges Jacobi’s service in exposing the inner emptiness of a purely rationalist knowledge that endlessly “knows” without ever attaining what we really wish to know—how to reach that which is higher than thinking—but he argues that Jacobi ultimately oscillates between an extra-philosophical appeal to revelation and an equally extra-philosophical appeal to ungrounded immediacy. The former subordinates philosophy to external authority, the latter deprives philosophy of the very movement through which knowing becomes more than blind assent. Thus, on Schelling’s view, Jacobi ends as the transitional figure “between rationalism and empiricism”: with his understanding he belongs unreservedly to rationalism, with his feeling he strains beyond it without yet discovering a scientific path to the positive. The lectures’ extended portrait brings into relief what Schelling thinks is required: not the abdication of reflection in favor of feeling, but the conscious passage through the negative to a science that begins from the factual while refusing to remain mute about it.
The concluding meditation on national differences in philosophy shows Schelling at once defending the seriousness of German speculation and conceding that the distance other nations maintain from “philosophy in the German sense” may well have a legitimate ground. He cautions against imputing an incapacity for philosophy to peoples who have produced Descartes, Malebranche, and Pascal; he argues instead that the divergence indexes something missing in German metaphysics itself. A truly universal philosophy, he writes, cannot be the property of one nation; as long as a philosophy remains bounded by national limits, it has not yet attained truth. The remarks that follow sketch a prospective reconciliation in which German speculative depth and the empirical strengths of French and English sciences are no longer adversaries but partners. When the French import of German ideas proceeds most fruitfully, he notes, it does so in the domains of the natural sciences and historical study rather than in speculative system; it is therefore “up to us Germans,” after the advent of Naturphilosophie, to escape the old alternative between foundationless metaphysics and narrow empiricism and to build a philosophy that can claim the name universal. The historical survey thereby closes in a methodological key: the same distinction between negative and positive that structures the internal critique of Idealism also supplies the terms in which a viable European philosophical culture might be conceived.
As a whole, the book demonstrates how a history of modern philosophy can be philosophically productive rather than merely documentary. Each figure is treated as a necessary moment in the dialectical ascent of problems: with Descartes, reflexivity and the certainty of thinking; with Spinoza and Leibniz, the systematicity of reason and the dominance of sufficient reason; with Kant and Fichte, the transcendental constitution of experience and the self-positing I; with Schelling’s own Naturphilosophie, the ontological entanglement of subject and nature; with Hegel, the culminating claim that negativity exhausts the need for positivity; with Jacobi and the theosophers, the ambiguous revolt against rationalism through immediacy. Passages in the lectures amplify this mapping by staging concrete discriminations—between visionary theosophy and the self-discipline of philosophy, between a merely “ideological” empiricism and an empiricism worthy of the name, between the confidence of purely deductive system and the humility that begins from fact—thereby allowing the reader to see why the later Schelling could claim to forecast much of what would come after him. The volume’s paratext underscores this claim: it is not accidental that Bowie remarks how Schelling’s late positions prefigure central moves in Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; in each case the turn from the sovereignty of representation to some register of irreducible factuality, existence, or difference echoes Schelling’s refusal to let thought declare itself identical with being.
Seen from the standpoint of contemporary philosophical concerns, the lectures anticipate two debates that continue to structure theoretical work: first, the debate over whether explanation in terms of formal necessity (logical, mathematical, or transcendental) can ever explain its own application to the world—its aboutness—without presupposing what it aims to ground; second, the debate over whether the phenomena of life, mind, and history can be understood as continuous with nature without either eliminating freedom or introducing a supernatural rupture. Schelling’s response to the first is the demand for a positive philosophy that accepts the that of being as a free deed or unconditioned fact and then proceeds historically and empirically; his response to the second is the Naturphilosophie’s insistence on a dynamic ontology in which subjectivity emerges from nature without ever exhausting its dependence on nature’s pre-reflective ground. Both responses are on display in the lecture-room: in the re-reading of German Idealism that makes Hegel’s negativity conceptually indispensable yet insufficient, and in the critique of theosophical immediacy that keeps the space of science open without letting it harden into a circle that pretends to be all of reality.
Bowie’s framing materials strengthen the book’s value for readers entering Schelling’s later thought. He reconstructs the composition history, clarifies the textual situation after the destruction of many manuscripts in the Second World War, and situates the lectures among Schelling’s Erlangen and Berlin works and the projected historico-critical edition. More importantly, he explicates the philosophical stakes of the negative/positive distinction and shows how Schelling’s critique does not collapse into an anti-rational appeal to intuition; rather, it is an attempt to legitimate a mode of rationality that begins from what reason cannot confer upon itself. This double orientation—toward a historical account that is at the same time a systematic diagnosis—explains the continued scholarly interest in On the History of Modern Philosophy and justifies the claim, made in the series description and reiterated in the translator’s introduction, that the book is a “key transitional text” in European philosophy.
The resulting volume demands a rigorous reader. It presupposes familiarity with the canonical positions from Descartes to Hegel, and it constantly enjoins a distinction that is easy to miss but decisive once grasped: the difference between the intelligibility of necessary connections and the intelligibility of existence as such. Schelling’s general claim is that the Idealist tradition, by making reflexivity the sovereign medium of intelligibility, conflated these two senses of intelligibility; his remedy is neither a regression to pre-critical dogmatism nor an embrace of anti-intellectual feeling, but a reorganization of philosophy that allows historical experience, empirical inquiry, and reflective science to cooperate under the guidance of that distinction. To read the lectures as a “history” is therefore to read them as a prologue to such cooperation. It is in this sense that Schelling can be said to forecast trajectories later taken up by Feuerbach’s anthropological turn, Kierkegaard’s insistence on existential subjectivity, Marx’s critique of speculative ideology in the name of sensuous praxis, Nietzsche’s genealogies of value, Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein against metaphysical presence, and Derrida’s deconstruction of closure: each, in his own register, protests the sufficiency of a logic of necessity to capture the event of being. In Schelling’s vocabulary, each protests the imperial ambition of the negative and reclaims, in a distinct idiom, the rights of the positive.
For scholars of philosophy, intellectual history, theology, and literary theory, On the History of Modern Philosophy provides not only a reliable account of modernity’s systematic path but also an instrument for diagnosing its impasses. The work’s pedagogical clarity—evident in its ordering from Descartes to the national comparison, in its conceptual appraisals of Jacobi and theosophy, and in its precise delimitation of what reflection can and cannot do—makes it exceptionally suitable as a reference point for any attempt to think beyond the received options of “German metaphysics” and “Anglo-French empiricism.” For those concerned with the shape of contemporary thought, it models a form of historical writing that is itself philosophical: the past is not an archive of inert opinions but the staged disclosure of problems that we still inherit, and the measure of a historical reconstruction is the sharpness with which it can bring those problems into view. In this respect Schelling’s lectures remain exemplary. They invite readers to consider that there is more to philosophy than the perfection of conceptual necessity, and they challenge readers to measure their own positions against the recalcitrant positivity of a world that thought can illuminate but not originate.
Finally, the book’s editorial and historical framing—Bowie’s preface and introduction; the account of the text’s authenticity and dating; the placement within the Texts in German Philosophy series—makes explicit what the internal argument already implies: the lectures stand at a crucial juncture in the European tradition, mediating between the grand systems of German Idealism and later movements that contest system while preserving its seriousness. To that mediation they add a stringent conceptual proposal: that philosophy, if it is to deserve its name, must both preserve the insight of the negative—that necessity can be made transparent in and through the labor of thought—and submit to the discipline of the positive—that being, as fact and deed, outruns every circle in which thought might attempt to contain it. In making that proposal legible in the form of a “history,” Schelling’s lectures justify the claim that this book is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand how modern philosophy arrived at its present and what resources it still possesses for going on.
Simon Gros 
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