Philosophy: The Great Thinkers

Through man, then, the Absolute becomes conscious of itself.

Schelling now sees the spiritual activity of self-consciousness as identical with the Absolute, or God.

self-consciousness, the self is both subject and object.

The system of transcendental idealism is ‘the mechanism of the origination of the objective world from the inward principle of spiritual activity’.

According to Schelling, transcendental philosophy must begin with the subjective awareness of self, in other words, self-consciousness.

These are really one and the same. A proper transcendental philosophy should show how the two are united into one, part of the same all-embracing truth, aspects of the Absolute.

Schelling outlines his enterprise as the reconciliation of the subjective with the objective.

Schelling invites us to consider that they presuppose each other.

Schelling makes a distinction between ‘transcendental philosophy’, concerned with the most fundamental elements of cognition and experience, and natural philosophy, the science of what we ordinarily take to be the external world.