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Abstract

In the contemporary idealist philosophy an iterest in Schelling is topicalized, namely in the second period of hie philosophy where he approaches the newly conceived theism and gnosticism. The fragmentariness of his thinking is being emphasized and there are attempts at taking advantage of later Schelling’s works for a search for sources of the philosophy of existence. F. W. J. Schelling is often detached from the thought tradition of the German classical philosophy and declared the beginning of the new thinking leading through Kierkegaard to Heidegger. On the other hand the Marxist philosophy tries to understand Schelling as a phenomenon of the German classical philosophy in the long development of which both its theoretical start and the symptoms of its disintegration are reflected; its objective idealism has its place in the history of dialectics. Schelling’s greatest importance consists in „the sincere idea of his youth“ (Marx). This is to say namely the ideas of the dialectical connection of spirit and nature, of organic and inorganic nature, of the eternal fight of contradictory forces etc. from the time of his Leipzig and Jena stay. Especially then the idea of nature as a dialectical unity of infinite productivity and finite products as crystallization of this contradictory process contains the idea of endless reproduction of contradiction as the main principle of the explanation of the world. In spite of its „romantically utopian“ character it is just this natural dialectics of Schelling’s that is of the greatest importance in his legacy of ideas.