Engels’s Anti-Schelling Thesis: Intellectual Origins, Core Contents and Contemporary Implications

Abstract

The critical essays that Friedrich Engels wrote between 1841 and 1842 with the aim of criticizing the philosophy of revelation of the German classical philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling possess significant theoretical and practical importance in the history of the development of Marxism. Forging a trenchant, profound and systematic anti-Schelling thesis, Engels intervened in the “Schelling-Hegel controversy” that had been triggered when Schelling in 1841 took to the platform at the University of Berlin to publicly criticize Hegel and lectured on the philosophy of revelation, thereby laying bare the mystical elements and conservative substance of Schelling’s later thought. Engels in his critical essays resolutely takes the side of reason, dissecting and refuting from multiple angles and on several levels the irrational and anti-logical tendencies within the system of positive philosophy that Schelling propounded. Arguing in a combative spirit, Engels defends the standpoint of Enlightenment and revolution, laying the intellectual cornerstone for his subsequent, wide-ranging social research and critique of political economy. Engels’s anti-Schelling thesis is a dialectical unity of philosophical, religious, and political critique. It offers both a profound historical judgment and an enduring source of insight for expanding the theoretical horizon of Marxism amid today’s complex and shifting ideological landscape.