Schelling's influence on Kierkegaard's thought: towards a philosophy of existence

Abstract

This study analyses the influence of Friedrich Schelling’s positive philosophy on Søren Kierkegaard in order to nuance the foundations of existential thought, a field seldom revisited today. Two objectives were set: to identify traces of Schelling’s distinction between negative and positive philosophy in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and to evaluate its contribution to understanding freedom as concrete experience. A hermeneutic-comparative approach was applied to primary sources, including Schelling’s 1841 Berlin lectures and Kierkegaard’s 1844 treatise, supported by a critical survey of scholarship on late Idealism and existential precursors. Results show that Schelling’s critique of systematic rationality, together with his vindication of contingency, guided Kierkegaard to frame anxiety as a phenomenological manifestation of human freedom, relocating the theme from the rational to the existential sphere. Convergence was confirmed in the idea that freedom is verified in acts rather than in abstract definitions—a rupture that prepared the twentieth-century reception of existentialism. The investigation also clarifies historiographical gaps and invites further renewed attention to interactions between German Idealism and early existentialism. It is concluded that the transition from Idealist metaphysics to a subject-centred philosophy occurred through Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Schelling’s positive project, thereby anticipating later developments in Heidegger and existential phenomenology. This connection constitutes a substantial contribution to modern and twentieth-century philosophy.