Schelling with Spinoza on Freedom and Necessity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019
Spinoza’s necessitarianism—the doctrine that everything that is actual is necessary—is an important matter of debate in German Idealism. I examine Schelling’s discussion of Spinozist necessitarianism in his 1809 Freedom Essay, and focus in particular on an objection that Schelling raises against this view: namely, that it has “blind necessity” govern the world. While Schelling draws in this context on Leibniz’s critique of Spinoza’s necessitarianism, he rejects the assumption of divine choice that stands behind Leibniz’s version of the charge of blind necessity. I develop an interpretation that shows both how Schelling consistently avoids necessitarianism despite denying divine choice, and how his own version of the charge of “blind necessity” offers objections against Spinozist necessitarianism that focus on the issues of divine personhood and love.
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.
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.”
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
In this paper, I examine Spinoza's notion of human freedom in the Ethics, and especially his exemplar of the free man. I argue that sociality is not an inevitability that human beings are bound to face with, but an essential constituent of our 'true freedom.' Under the two-step theory that I propose, people with 'minimal freedom' necessarily live under the dictates of reason and pursue their true advantage, i.e. 'true freedom' through education in society.
Freedom, God, and Ground An Introduction to Schelling’s 1809 Freedom Essay Epoché Magazine #77
Epoché Magazine , 2024
This essay is meant to be an introduction into some of the main themes of the Freedom Essay. My goal in writing this piece for Epoché Magazine is to popularize some of the most interesting and intriguing elements of Schelling’s 1809 masterpiece. My hope is that after reading this work that the reader will get a sudden urge to read Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and to explore all of these vast philosophical themes. https://epochemagazine.org/77/freedom-god-and-ground-an-introduction-to-schellings-1809-freedom-essay/