Friedrich Schelling's Interpretation of Spinozan Pantheism
BARUCH Spinoza's (1632–1677) remarkable philosophy is often criticised for being pantheistic on account of the idea that he equates "God with things". Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) disagrees with this narrow interpretation and argues that within authentic pantheism one never really finds the tautology that "God = things" at all. This may surprise a few people, but Schelling's reading of Spinoza rests on the fact that between God and things there is a tertium quid, i.e. something that binds one to the other without altering the contradictory nature of either.
As far as the opponents of pantheism are concerned, and this was an extremely hot topic in the Germany of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if everything follows from God then it must eventually result in fatalism due to the Absolute swallowing up all "things as things". This is why G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) accused Schelling of devising a philosophy that is tantamount to a "night in which all cows are black". However, as the above suggests this is a fundamental misinterpretation of Schelling's ideas because neither he nor Spinoza were suggesting that Gods and things are indistinguishable at all.
Schelling, therefore, was not arguing that the formula "x is y" can be equated with "x = y" because the former retains the distinctive identity of each within a synthesis and does not, as the latter would have it, lead to a form of identicality. To use an example, the simple phrase "the tree is green" should not imply that the tree includes the idea of greenness. Both the tree and the colour green have no intrinsic relationship to one another, despite the fact that the phrase brings them together. They are never one and the same thing, simply because their opposition is maintained by way of an irresolvable internal contradiction or what might be called a logical disjunction.
The Prussian poet and theologian, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), would describe Schelling's position as a form of "pan-en-theism" in that all things seem to be contained within God but without becoming equal to the Divine itself. As Jason M. Wirth puts it:
"Even death expresses God, as it allows creation its fluidity of expression. Death is only the 'hastening away of that which cannot remain' [Herder]. Death is but a moment in a living, perfect, vital whole. God is the tertium quid by which all oppositions - phenomena and noumena, reason and faith, thinking and nature, etc. - are expressed."