The Ontology and Phenomenology of Striving in Schelling’s “History of Self-Consciousness” (1797–1800)

Abstract

One of Schelling’s first philosophical projects, and perhaps his most influential one for the history of philosophy, was what he called a “history of self-consciousness” —alternately (seemingly equivalently), a “history of the human spirit.” Schelling’s most direct influence for such a notion was Fichte’s so-called “pragmatic history of the human spirit,” and its most direct (and lasting) legacy was the history of Spirit presented by Hegel, particularly in the latter’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Though Schelling’s conception of such a history resembles Fichte’s own in many ways, the respects in which it differs from it are as subtle as they are important (much as was the case with respect to various other aspects of their respective philosophies of the time). Perhaps the most significant of these differences is that, whereas in Fichte the “metaphysical” status of the history of the human spirit is highly ambiguous, in Schelling’s case the history having such a status appears virtually incontrovertible.