Schelling and the Metaphysics of Evil

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Actual Existence

This chapter examines Schelling’s 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom to argue that it contains one of the most sophisticated challenges to Kant’s theory. Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that maintains that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being, but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings Schelling to engage with the question of why some individuals choose to actualise this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision orientated to the good that can be subsequently overcome, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be altered. The chapter concludes by raising two critical questions regarding Schelling’s analysis.

Schelling’s Romanticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Joan Steigerwald
Keyword(s):  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The World ◽  
Dark Ground

This paper is a contribution to recent scholarly interest in the intersections of post-Kantian idealism and Romanticism. It traces overlapping concerns in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s and Novalis’ works. Both thinkers began their philosophical studies with critical engagements of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, developing similar arguments for the duplicity of relationships of identity and the problem of their mediation. Novalis and Schelling also explored the intersections of mind and nature through notions of potentiation and depotentiation, stimulated by their respective philosophical examinations of contemporary mathematics and natural sciences. Finally, both thinkers introduced figures of a dark ground or night—Novalis in Hymns to the Night and Schelling in works as diverse as On the World Soul and Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom—to present the unpresentability of the infinite. Although there is little historical documentation of direct borrowings of one thinker from the other, these overlapping concerns are richly suggestive.

The Personal, Evil, and the Possibility of Philosophy in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-167
Author(s):  
Richard Velkley
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Intrinsic Connection ◽  
The Will ◽  
The One

Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Freiheitsschrift) is a reflection on the essence of the personal and its intrinsic connection to the possibility of philosophy, with which it establishes “the first clear concept of personality”. In accord with the idea of personality the essay stresses the dialogic mode of inquiry which it opposes to the will to system. The latter, as the will to an absolute ground independent of the personal, reveals itself as unable to account for the dialogic movement of thought that is without end, as thinking never fully captures itself in concepts. This reflection frames the essay’s account of God or the One, whose original self-diremption as a personal being (whereby it grounds evil) assures the permanence of dialogic philosophizing.

scholarly journals Nature, Freedom, and Gender in Schelling

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-184
Author(s):  
Alison Stone
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines Schelling’s ideas about nature and freedom from a feminist perspective, looking at his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and his later Philosophical Investigations on the Essence of Human Freedom. In both works, Schelling argues that two opposed but interdependent metaphysical powers are necessary to the constitution of the world, and he interprets these powers in terms of a gendered polarity. The chapter draws out the ambiguous implications of Schelling’s views as regards the relative value of each gender, and considers how this bears on contemporary possibilities for reappropriating Schelling’s thought, with critical reference to Žižek.

The Star of Redemption as a System of Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Nisenbaum
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object

This chapter explains why Schelling and Rosenzweig hold that the representation of God by finite human beings is a topic of practical philosophy. Like Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and his Ages of the World fragments, Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is motivated by an attempt to provide an explanation for the existence of the finite world, for the condition that brings about the relation between subject and object that characterizes all states of human consciousness. The system that Rosenzweig develops in the Star invites us to consider our commitments, the values that we ascribe to ourselves when we form maxims for action, as the means through which abstract concepts of the good are cognized. On Rosenzweig’s view, our commitments are the site of reason’s revelation; for this reason, God is both cognized and realized through human action in the world.

What does it mean to say that Jesus Christ is indispensable to a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity?

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Divine Freedom ◽  
The Trinity

Let me begin by thanking Jeff Hensley for taking the time and expending the effort to respond to my book on the Trinity. Naturally I appreciate his positive assessments offered in the opening pages of his paper. As any reader might expect, I was less enthusiastic about his Rahnerian proposals, together with his other two critical questions. As Hensley mentioned, it might very well be helpful to discuss these issues in greater depth so that we might come to a deeper appreciation of how and why a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity might help us recognise more clearly both divine and human freedom at a time when God's freedom for us so frequently takes the form of a purely economic trinitarianism which leaves no room for God really to act for us within history in his own distinctive way. And it is worth noting, of course, that the purpose of my book was not to discuss any and every possible implication of a properly conceived doctrine of the immanent Trinity; my purpose, rather, was to clear the ground of misconceptions of divine freedom, in order that any theology claiming to be based on sound trinitarian doctrine could be seen to be grounded in God rather than being the product of human projection. My book, then, was not a book about social justice, which certainly is a worthy topic of discussion in its own right, even though it seems Hensley would have preferred such a work.

scholarly journals Intelligible Character and Revelation of Person: F.W.J. Schelling “Psychological Scheme”

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-470
Author(s):  
P. V. Rezvykh
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Crown Prince

This article focuses on analysis of a handwritten fragment by F. W. J. Schelling “Psychological scheme” (1837-1839), which is a study of main principles of philosophical anthropology. The article reconstructs the circumstances of creating the mentioned text, which are connected with the trusting relationship between Schelling and Bavarian Crown Prince Maximilian; it also highlights the parallels between the text and the earlier Schelling's works exploring philosophical-anthropological problematic: “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom” (1809) and “Stuttgart Seminars” (1810). In the course of terminological analysis of the fragment author displays that the the main source of influence was the work by I. Kant “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”. Major problem, considered by Schelling's anthropology, is defining the correlation between intelligible and empirical human character, the main resolving instrument being Schelling’s doctrine of potencies as ontological modalities developed in 1820-1830.

Schelling, Jung and the Imaginatio Vera

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Nicolaus
Keyword(s):  
Depth Psychology ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Existential Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

While Jung hardly mentions Schelling in his writings, Schelling's philosophy anticipates many elements of his psychology. In Schelling'sPhilosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedomphilosophy reaches a crisis point, which prepares the way for Schelling's positive philosophy as well as existentialism and the later ascendancy of depth psychology as Jung conceived it. A closer examination of the nature of this crisis as it finds expression in Schelling'sInvestigations,which takes clues from Berdyaev's and Kierkegaard's existential philosophy, provides a revealing perspective on the present post-modern condition of our culture. This essay is an attempt to examine Schelling's text with regard to the role the imagination plays in it in order to gain deeper insight into the cultural relevance of Jung's psychology.

Higher Necessity

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg U. Noller ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Practical Reason ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Will

The aim of this paper is to analyze Schelling’s compatibilist account of freedom of the will particularly in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). I shall argue that against Kant’s transcendental compatibilism Schelling proposes a “volitional compatibilism,” according to which the free will emerges out of nature and is not identical to practical reason as Kant claims. Finally, I will relate Schelling’s volitional compatibilism to more recent accounts of free will in order to better understand what he means by his concept of a “higher necessity.”

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