Then Schelling’s 15-year flareup of creativity in the center of public atten-
tion abruptly ended. After breaking with the Idealist network, Schelling ceased
publication after 1809. He continued to lecture on the history of mythology
as a poetic unfolding of the nature of God and hence of the cosmos. Schelling’s
religious phase, too, found disciples, notably von Baader (another mining
engineer) in the 1820s. Schelling left a trail of network disciples behind him;
after 1810, these movements based on his older positions were carrying along
on their own, overshadowing Schelling’s own later position in the attention
space.The Crisis of the Law of Small Numbers
By the first decade of the 1800s, there was altogether a considerable lineup of
positions: Kant’s critical philosophy; the psychological–scientific realist version
of Kant developed by Herbart and others; Fichte’s dialectical Idealism; Natur-
philosophie; aesthetic Idealism; Schleiermacher’s Idealist Christianity; and gen-
erally outside the fold of all these philosophical movements an increasingly
self-consciously orthodox religiosity, which founded itself on fideism and tra-
ditionalism alone. These total seven positions, pushing the upper limits of the
law of small numbers. How then do we account for the emergence of two more
major thinkers, Hegel and Schopenhauer? The comparison between the success
of one and the longtime failure of the other is instructive.
Hegel entered the scene relatively late.^10 His first important work (1801)
pointed out the difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s systems, precipitat-
ing a break between them. The topic shows that Hegel was well attuned to the
shifting niches in the core of the intellectual field. As Schelling’s old roommate
and closest friend, Hegel had very good network connections, but he was
effectively blocked from taking an independent position as long as he remained
in Schelling’s camp. By 1806, the lineup was changing. Schelling, so to speak,
was a niche hog; he had already gobbled up two of the available slots out of
the six allowed by the law of small numbers, and in 1803 was upstaging even
himself by proposing a third position, Absolute Idealism. This also moved him
closer to the orthodox religious camp, along with the rest of the Romantics.
Now Hegel sensed the opening of a slot: it was Fichte’s dialectical Idealism,
no longer being creatively developed by anyone. Since his great Wissenschaft-
slehre of 1794, Fichte had continued to publish prolifically, but largely on
topics of popular controversy: the French Revolution and later the national
revolt against Napoleon’s conquest of Germany, religious crisis, political and
educational reform. Fichte was devoting himself to being the organizational
leader rather than the intellectual leader of the movement, politicking for a
new material base, which would soon become the reformed university at Berlin.
634 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths