An ‘Ethics for the Transition’

Over the last four decades, environmental ethics has become an increasingly significant field of philosophy. Yet, many of its practitioners question its goals and effectiveness. Above all, environmental philosophers voice uncertainty about the extent to which the field has been able to influence action, behaviour, and policy in relation to the environment. What are the reasons behind this meagre influence and what kind of contrasting philosophical approach might enable transformative action? The goal of this paper is to answer these questions by drawing on Schelling’s late philosophy. I argue that Schelling’s critique of philosophical logicism reveals the ways in which certain ways of doing philosophy fails to enable ethical and behavioural transformation. By contrast, I show that Schelling’s “positive philosophy” can offer important insights into our current situation and illuminate a way forward for a sustainable environmental ethics.

Schelling’s Romanticism

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.

Nature, Freedom, and Gender in Schelling

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

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.

Thought’s Indebtedness to Being

I identify in Kant’s 1763 Beweisgrund an original insight that is both relevant to late Schelling and a dim anticipation of Kant’s conception of transcendental proof. The insight is best revealed by contrast with an alternative reading of the text that situates Kant at this period firmly within early modern rationalism. While the insight that I locate is proto-Schellingian, the alternative reading is proto-Hegelian. Deciding how to read the Beweisgrund is consequently a kind of rehearsal of Schelling’s argument with Hegel. My reading makes two gains vis-à-vis Schelling: an entry point into his late thought that is independent of the constantly shifting terms that he himself employs; and a reason to think that his late thought has a deep Kantian root and is not merely an abreaction to Hegel or to his own earlier Identity Philosophy.

Schelling on the Compatibility of Freedom and Systematicity

Schelling’s Freedom essay revolves around a division between two aspects of the essence or “non-ground” of human freedom: “ground” and “existence”. This distinction structures Schelling’s anti-dogmatic solution to the metaphysical placement problem, which in turn provides the basis for his resolution of various puzzles surrounding the compatibility of freedom and systematicity. The first part of this essay accordingly interprets Schelling’s ontology as committed to a neutral monism. Further, reflection on the very possibility of reflection on the domain of which nature and mind are aspects leads to a top-down epistemological architecture, which constrains any metaphysical explanation of how natural creatures can become finite knowers. The second part of the essays then explains how this ontology enables Schelling to move beyond a “formal” in favour of a “real” concept of freedom as a capacity for good or evil.

Schelling on Eternal Choice and the Temporal Order of Nature

Despite his commitment to the thesis that the essence of the moral world is the same as the essence of nature, Schelling’s philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism as commonly conceived. He rejects the notion that freedom is nothing but a natural capacity, declaring “the highest goal” of his philosophical pursuit to be the “reduction of the laws of nature to mind, spirit, and will”. This paper explores Schelling’s idealistic conception of nature in Philosophie und Religion and the Freedom Essay by focusing on his reception of Kant’s idea of an “eternal choice” or “intelligible deed” at the root of personality and the way Schelling deploys that idea in developing a theory of time. He sees the natural order’s most basic features, e.g. its spatio-temporal self-externality and the existence of (externally) necessitating “laws of nature” as grounded in an essentially free and morally pertinent action on the part of the individual.

From World-Soul to Universal Organism

What is the world-soul referred to in Schelling’s 1797 treatise? Is he committed to the untenable view that the cosmos is alive? First, I argue that Schelling deploys a strategy pioneered by Maimon: the retrieval, within a post-critical framework, of Platonic and kabbalistic traditions consolidated in the Renaissance. In his essay on the world-soul as hypothesis, however, Maimon’s argument, though motivated by Kant’s interest in Blumenbach, remains pre-critical. Then I offer an interpretation of Schelling’s world-soul as an organizing principle intended to unify organic and non-organic matter, a principle that organizes forces by means of feedback and equilibration, and that is intended to provide the non-teleological basis for evolution into non-living bodies, living bodies, and ultimately conscious agents. According to Schelling’s understanding of Kant’s critical turn, the world-soul is a physicalized version of a Platonic-kabbalistic concept that plays a role within a post-critical, dynamic and evolutionary account of nature.

Freedom as Productivity in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature

In his works on the philosophy of nature, Schelling often attributes freedom not just to human beings, but also to nature and to organisms. I give an account of Schelling’s notion of productivity as unifying these attributions of freedom, and I explain how freedom as productivity differs in human beings, organisms, and nature as a whole. Human beings are consciously productive; organisms and nature are unconsciously productive. The unconscious productivity of non-human organisms is in harmony with the lawfulness of nature as a whole, while human freedom conflicts with nature’s lawful kind of freedom. However, since Schelling regards human freedom as building upon natural freedom, human beings can, through certain activities, experience a repose from this conflict between our freedom and the laws of nature.

Nature as the World of Action, Not of Speculation

The essay traces closely Schelling’s criticism of Kant’s postulates, to wit, that Kant cannot consistently hold that theoretical reason’s cognition of the Unconditioned from the practical perspective (i.e., the assent of theoretical reason to the postulates) is possible while having the same conception of ‘weak’ theoretical reason to which the same cognition from the theoretical perspective remains closed. Schelling’s solution is a demand to realize the Absolute, i.e., the Unconditioned that grounds the unity of the realm of freedom and the realm of nature, solely through one’s own action. By the latter Schelling does not understand a moral action but the action of a ‘creative reason’. Critical philosophy conceived thusly, to wit, in its complete form, would be able to “deduce from the essence of reason” both systems: dogmatism (the Unconditioned as the object of theoretical knowledge) and criticism (the Unconditioned as the object of infinite realization in moral practice).