Freedom and Evil in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift (original) (raw)
Related papers
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
How must a world be constituted for a moral being?' ('Oldest System-Programme', 1796/97) 1 Schelling's 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, known as the Freiheitsschrift, marks a turning point in his developmentthe end of his attempt to define a satisfactory form of absolute idealism, and the beginning of his late philosophy, by any measure one of the most demanding parts of German Idealism. 2 The treatise is short but its scope could hardly be broader. In addition to the one announced in its title, topics discussed in it include pantheism and philosophical systematicity, moral psychology, good and evil, the nature of God, identity and predication, and the nature of being. Schelling's treatment of these themes evidences a change of key, employing idioms and drawing on resources alien to the modern philosophical tradition, as if he were embarking on a new type of metaphysical speculationmaking it no accident that Heidegger seized on the work and declared it the summit of German Idealism. 3 In this paper I make the case that Schelling's central claims in the Freiheitsschrift can be regarded as the product of a complex and extended development arising out of Kant's theory of freedom. This is not quite how Schelling presents it. As he describes the overall aim of the treatise, it is concerned with the problem, more easily recognized as attaching to Spinoza's legacy than to Kant's, of incorporating an adequate conception of human freedom within the system of philosophy, where system is understood to carry implications of completeness and finality. 4 This is however, as I will try to show, fully compatible with interpreting Schelling as taking over where Kant leaves off, for it is precisely in their encounter with Spinozism that the limitations of Kant's metaphysics of freedom are revealed. Because I am approaching the Freiheitsschrift from a somewhat specific angle, my treatment of it here will not amount to a comprehensive view of the work, and many important ideas contained in it will not receive discussion, although they are not, I believe, inconsistent with the interpretation I offer. To root the speculative claims of the Freiheitsschrift in a Kantian problematic is of course not to contest the originality and autonomy of Schelling's thought: the guiding
Freedom and Ground: A Study of Schelling's Treatise on Freedom
SUNY Press, 2023
This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance—indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of ground through Schelling's treatise, this book provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. This analysis shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation—including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today.
Theory Construction and Existential Description in Schelling's Treatise on Freedom
Despite considerable recent attention, important features of Schelling's famous work, the 1809 treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom, remain under-explored. One of these is the methodological dualism which Schelling advocates at the very start of the text. Schelling aims to weld together into a coherent position a first-person phenomenology of freedom and an explanation achieved by locating freedom within a conceptual system articulating the basic structure of the world. Most interpretations of the Freiheitsschrift, however, concentrate on only one of these approaches, thus foreshortening their understanding of Schelling's enterprise. The article explores this tendency towards one-sidedness by considering two sophisticated recent interpretations of the work, taking opposite tacks. One, by Markus Gabriel, focuses on the distinctive, self-reflexive metaphysics which Schelling proposes, while the other, by Sebastian Gardner, claims that Schelling's ontology is extrapolated entirely from his account of our moral consciousness, a procedure pioneered by Kant. The article argues that neither of these interpretations can do full justice to Schelling's project. Furthermore, although the Freiheitsschrift is not entirely successful, and hence points towards later developments in Schelling's thinking, its treatment of freedom is superior to the 'soft naturalism' pioneered by Peter Strawson, and currently influential across various philosophical traditions.
Schelling and the problem of evil
Religious Studies, 2023
This article contributes to discussions about the problem of evil and Schelling studies by analysing Schelling's conception of the problem in his 1809 Freiheitsschrift essay. I explicate Schelling's critical response to four classic solutions to the problem (embodiment, degree, dualism, and divine forms) and outline his positive solution. My thesis is that Schelling offers a unique theodicy by arguing for a dialectical conception of the infinite omnipotence of God. In contrast to traditional notions of the infinite as the opposite of the finite, Schelling claims that God is only truly infinite if also embodied in the finite, an embodiment enacted through the human freedom to do evil. To explore Schelling's project, I draw parallels between his account of God's omnipotence and Hegel's 'good infinite' and situate Schelling's thesis within Mackie's discussion of the problem of evil in 'Evil and Omnipotence'.
An Ethics of Temptation: Schelling's Contribution to the Freedom Controversy
European Journal of Philosophy, 2020
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12601 In the period following the publication of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, there was a wide-ranging debate in German philosophy about the concept of freedom. It drew in not only Kant and the so-called “popular philosophers” of his generation, but also many of those who would go on to be the leading lights of post-Kantian idealism, including Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. Building on recent scholarship that brings Fichte's ethics into contemporary discussions of this freedom controversy, this article introduces Schelling's contribution, found in the seventh installment of his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature.” This article first reconstructs the conflict between Kant and Reinhold as Schelling understood it, which forms the background to this text. Then, it outlines the original position he stakes out in this debate, which is termed an “ethics of temptation.”
The anthropology of evil in Kant and Schelling
European Romantic Review, 2001
Schelling's major preoccupations in the 1809 Inquiries into Human Freedom gather around the problem of the finitude of freedom. This is not a new problem for Schelling. Nearly fifteen years earlier he had observed, "What is incomprehensible is not how an absolute ego, but how an empirical ego should possess freedom, not how an intellectual ego could be absolutely free, but how an empirical ego could. .. possess causality through freedom." 1 For Schelling, the freedom of an absolute ego does not present a philosophical puzzle. The puzzle is how freedom, which is absolute, can be attributed to an ego that is finite, and thus not absolute. By 1809 Schelling no longer endorses the Fichtean talk of an absolute ego; he has in the meantime established that the absolute, as the identity of identity and difference, outstrips the distinction between subject and object, ego and non-ego, ideal and real. Accordingly, while in the 1790s Schelling has seen transcendental freedom as equivalent to the unconditioned self-positing of an absolute ego, in 1809 Schelling dissociates absolute freedom, as decision, from the absolute. Freedom begins its complex career not as absolute identity but as absolute difference, a difference or divorce from the absolute that is not compromised in also being a difference or divorce within the absolute. 2 Schelling's discovery in 1 809 is clear. Divorce or separation, Scheidung, is the condition of all performance and activity, thus the condition of freedom. Yet divorce is not original; it, too, must be performed. Separation from the absolute is thus, paradoxically, both the condition of freedom and a free act. As Jean-Francois Marquet puts it, freedom must "declare itself, decide itself," in a free deed. 3
Kant and Schiller - Freedom and Nature
O Romantismo Alemão e seu legado, 2023
This short article aims to question the concept of freedom of reason presented by Kant in the CoPR that permeates all his critical work. In this sense, as this concept of freedom is central to Kantian philosophy, we understand that it weakens both the project of finding a pragmatic foundation for morality and reduces the importance of a concept of freedom found in the CoJ. A problematic development of this concept of freedom in Kant is the creation of a duality in human nature that is difficult to reconcile with the modern view that we are part of nature. If there is in humanity a concept of freedom that opposes the determination of nature, and in Kant's case it can overcome it, what to think of a concept of freedom that could be harmonized with human nature and nature’s laws? We will try to indicate not only the fragility of the concept of freedom of reason as argued by Kant, but we will present a concept of freedom that not only harmonizes reason and sensibility, but, mainly, unites all humans when seeking a foundation for morality, giving it a pragmatic character. To do that, we will introduce an interpretation of the third sequence of letters found in Schiller’s AEM.
Schelling's Conception of Evil (2016)
Many idealists treated Kant’s system as a wound that needed to be healed: the rigorous dichotomy Kant presented between the phenomenal world and its noumenal counterpart. By the time Schelling came to see a special problem with evil, in his 1809 Freedom essay, he and his contemporaries had explored essentially two possible post-Kantian positions. In very broad outlines, Fichte attempted to reduce receptivity and the phenomenal world to the spontaneity of the self-positing I. Schelling by contrast had developed what he termed a nature philosophy or Naturphilosophie that attempted to derive the spontaneity of the I from nature. The Freedom essay rejects this enumeration of healing responses to Kant, returns to Kant’s work, and then exacerbates its splits and divisions. What makes Schelling do this? One answer is in the title: freedom. Schelling comes to think that human freedom has somehow not been adequately addressed in the post-Kantian aftermath. And it is evil that makes freedom something the earlier systems cannot address.
(Final Draft) A dark Nature: Schelling on the World and Freedom in the Years 1806-1810
Idealistic Studies, 2022
The main aim of this work is to indirectly display, through an analysis of the concepts of world, God, and human freedom, the shift from a harmonious concept of nature to another chaotic, darker, and pre-rational. It is important to relate this transformation, which takes place around 1807, to (I) the change in Schelling’s ideas about the relationship between God and the world to weaken a previous Spinozist monistic standpoint. These changes in turn affect Schelling's view of the concept of unity. He now modifies the notions of immanence and pantheism in favour of a (II) dualistic doctrine of particular and finite existence that we could relate to Kierkegaard and later existentialists. Finally, (III) we introduce Schelling’s theory of love. Love is a mode of union through free will and personal choice that neutralizes the totalizing metaphysics of identity associated to the systematic construction of idealism from Spinoza to Hegel, and that Schelling criticizes, in his middle and late philosophy, as a resource to a self-transparent and overdetermining Absolute.