Introduction
I would like to take the time in the very short space that I have to introduce the main themes of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s (1775-1854) last published work, the riveting and difficult Freedom Essay [Freiheitsschrift] of 1809. There are several reasons why I would like to focus exclusively on this last piece of Schelling’s work. The first main reason is that Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich, Karl Jaspers, Luigi Pareyson, and Slavoj Žižek have taken great lengths to popularize this work. All five philosophers have written in depth on the Freedom Essay. The second reason is that it is the best place to start for any new reader who wants access to Schelling’s complex system. Many short articles on Schelling’s thought tend to focus on his distinct philosophical phases, but this gesture tends to bog down the reader with different concepts and positions. This essay is intended for first-time readers to jump head first into the Freedom Essay. What I think will intrigue any reader is the series of critical and philosophical debates surrounding Schelling’s many interlocuters like Plotinus, G.W.F. Hegel, Baruch Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, and J. G. Fichte.
Spiritual and Philosophical Background to the Text
The Freedom Essay represents Schelling’s most mature writing and captures essential themes from his philosophical past such as his great love of the Platonic and cosmological receptacle of the Timaeus. The text also exhibits a certain spiritual dynamism that owes a great debt to the German theologian, Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782). It is quite possible that Schelling was introduced to Oetinger’s writings early on in his adolescence by family members and friends devoted to the speculative theological writings of the Würtembergian Pietists.1placeholder As a young boy, Schelling was drawn to one of Oetinger’s main followers, the theologian Phillipp Matheus Hahn (1739-1790).2placeholder
One cannot speak of the Freedom Essay without mentioning two pivotal figures: Schelling’s friend the Catholic philosopher Franz von Baader (1765-1841) and the mystical theosopher Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). These two figures are perhaps the biggest influences on the writing of the Freedom Essay. Schelling spent a lot of time in Munich with Baader exploring the occult and the spirit world. This also led to the occasional group séances.3placeholder
At this time in Schelling’s life, he was reintroduced to many theosophical and occult texts. As a result, Schelling gravitated towards the 17th-century theosopher Jakob Böhme. Towards the end of the Freedom Essay, Schelling invokes the exciting Böhmean language of the non-ground or [Ungrund]. Our imagination is taken to the furthest depths of being and submerged into the abyss of the darkest ground, for “how can we call it anything other than the original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]?”4placeholder
Schelling’s main logical task in the Freedom Essay is connecting Baruch Spinoza’s realist philosophy with the idealist philosophy of Fichte.5placeholder Schelling believes idealism needs a living foundation like any other living being. According to Schelling, the main problem with the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz are that they remain too empty and abstract. A philosophy that lacks a living basis loses the richness and vitality of reality. This prompts Schelling to state that “idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is its body only both together can constitute a living whole”.6placeholder
The System of Freedom
According to Schelling, a philosophical system must have freedom as its main center. The system that Schelling has in mind ties together both philosophy and the world.7placeholder The world and philosophy are brought together by a living logic or logos that express a living relationship. This logos refers to the logic of identity and its copula, which penetrates deep into the fabric of our internal and external ontological reality.8placeholder Schelling’s primary goal is to present a different form of system that allows the necessary space for the freedom.
When Schelling was writing the Freedom Essay, he had in mind several criticisms that he had received prior to its publication. His most hostile interlocutors were Jacobi, and Eschenmayer, who thought that Schelling’s combination of system and freedom would end up in total failure. In a letter to Schelling, Eschenmayer states that he thinks Schelling’s system of freedom will collapse into itself. For Schelling, a living system can never be opposed to the possibility of freedom. Freedom is interconnected and entangled in the world. Only an ontology that grounds individual wills and allows each will to determine its own center can produce freedom and personality.9placeholder Schelling’s main mission is to disclose the concealed essence of freedom as a worldview. This is precisely where Schelling’s Freedom Essay begins, with human freedom and an investigation on how to reveal its inner essence.
Spinoza Contra Pantheism
It would be unfair to dismiss the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy on Schelling’s thought. Schelling’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy in the Journal of Speculative Physics II mirrors the structure of Spinoza’s Ethics.10placeholder However, with the looming threat of pantheism hanging over the thought of Spinoza, Schelling sought to distance himself by attempting to spiritualize Spinoza by animating his philosophy with “the warm breath of love”.11placeholder
Schelling aimed at exposing the problematic nature of Pantheism in Spinoza’s philosophy. Schelling thought that absolute causality in only one being (substance) would leave all other modes of being unconditionally passive. The problem was not so much that the world and reality were somehow in God; many speculative theologians had stated to have found the same claim in biblical sources. The problem for Schelling was the idea that God and all things in the world were somehow smashed together in one homogeneous substance that would leave no room for individual freedom. Schelling would call it “a blending of the creator and created being”.12placeholder
According to Schelling, the form of philosophical Pantheism abolished all living individuality and reduced each being to mere things. Schelling’s underlying critique of Spinoza’s Ethics was that it identified God/Nature with all things and blurred all ontological distinctions. This Spinozist line of argumentation leads to everything becoming “a modified God”.13placeholder But as Schelling investigates further into Spinoza’s Ethics, he slowly realizes that Spinoza’s system looks far more like a form of fatalism than pantheism, a fatalism which determines the autonomy of all its willing agents.
For Schelling, the human will can never be determined, nor can an agent’s path be predestined as this cancels out the authenticity behind all possible forms of radical freedom and choice. Schelling will go so far as to say that “Will is primal being, to which all predicates of being apply: groundlessness, eternality, independence of time, and self-affirmation”.14placeholder The proposition that [Ursein ist Wollen] or “Will is primal being,” is philosophy’s highest expression, one that all philosophers should aim for.15placeholder
The Law of Identity (to save or not to save Pantheism … that is the question?)
Schelling’s own solution to the pantheist problem required a complete reformation of its principles. He began by applying the law of identity to his new living system to solve the previous problems.
In Schelling’s Identity philosophy, the subject and object form a necessary unity in which the subject and predicate were bonded together [das Band] by the logic of identity. This can be understood by a simple proposition that A is B or, to use an example from the Freedom Essay, that “the body is blue.”16placeholder A, the body, is B, blue, is not to be understood as if A’s identity was blended into B’s own identity, or vice versa. Instead, their relationship is grounded in the logical connection between antecedent and consequent. In other words, A is implicitly enfolded, while B is explicitly unfolded.17placeholder The logical identity of the copula [is] binds both predicates (A and B) into an unconditional unity where both A and B, as formal opposites, are grasped as two sides of one coin (heads and tails). Each predicate respectively represents one side of the whole. This is Schelling’s way of preserving the identity and difference of both predicates while trying to solve the philosophical problem between the parts and the whole.
The Ground of God
After solidifying the logic of identity, Schelling introduces the main metaphysical issues of the Freedom Essay. The Freedom Essay now focuses on the theological and cosmological origins of nature, God and humanity. Schelling begins to formulate the essence of divine freedom, which will provide a ground that will spawn the principle of generation for all life.18placeholder This explanation takes the reader to delve into God’s freedom prior to the creation of nature and finite spirit and leads to the philosophical question of what comes before God and world.19placeholder This very line of questioning is an attempt at correcting Leibniz’s harmonious theogony while also resuscitating Plato’s cosmogony in the Timaeus. As Werner Marx states, Schelling presents us with the moment when God creates himself, but this creation is not complete or present at the primordial beginning: “God must bear within himself the reason for his existence”.20placeholder Schelling explains that this ground of God is not a concept, a basic principle, or an axiom. Instead, we are speaking of a living ground that is both actual and real.21placeholder
Ground and Existence
Schelling proceeds by stating that since nothing can be prior to or outside of God, God must have within himself the ground of his existence.22placeholder This ground in God is paradoxically both part of God (as his living basis or essence) and not God. God and his ground are co-eternal. According to Schelling, this ground in God is nature-in-God. This nature or essence in God is still distinct and yet inseparable from his divine essence. In Philosophical terms, God’s Ground is the real or the particular, while the essence of his Existence remains as the ideal or the universal. This line of argumentation harkens back to Schelling’s argument regarding the living copula and its bond in the law of identity (or A is B).
“God has in himself an inner ground of his that in this respect precedes him in existence, but, precisely, in this way, God is again the Prius [what is before] of the ground and in so far as the ground, even as such, could not exist if God did not exist actually”.23placeholder
These two principles are introduced by Schelling to explicate his highly unique ontological difference.24placeholder Essentially, God’s essence is split into a form of indifference (non-ground) that allows for the possibility of difference to emerge through the two principles of ground and existence.25placeholder This splitting of God’s essence is meant to express both the diverse language of Jakob Böhme’s claim that “God gives birth to himself;” and also mirrors the Kabbalah’s zimzum that God’s creation is a process that involves a contraction and a negation of his sacred light (ein sof).26placeholder
Schelling is no mystic, but he firmly believes that philosophy can use theosophical images to construct more organic concepts. God’s ground is an essential concept for the Freedom Essay as it invokes the imagery of biblical fall. In a sense, beings are separated from God and exist in the mere ground. This independence of being is another crucial distinction for Schelling. Beings/creatures do not dwell in the immanence of God, as the immanence of God describes a pure, unblemished divinity. Beings/creatures are engaged in the process of becoming in the mere ground of God.
The Metaphysics of Evil and Personality
The background to Schelling’s arguments for the metaphysics of evil and his theory of personality are both deeply inspired by Jakob Bӧhme and Franz von Baader.
This Ground in God is a dark ground because in some sense it is both connected and separated from God. The dark ground yearns for revelation and anticipates the moment of being reunited with the eternal father. This separation from God is key to maintaining the necessity behind all beings/creatures’ freedom and individuality. We can relate this original separation to the biblical fall. Schelling will state that … “the real and vital concept of freedom, is the capacity for good and evil.”27placeholder The only real way for freedom to emerge in the cosmos is to give birth to a radical form of Freedom. Each individual being/creature is part of a primordial decision [Urentscheidung] that activates in them the power of choice (for good or for evil).
This radical root of freedom also allows the individual being/creature to create their own ontological center. We must now ask the question where does evil come from? According to Schelling, it is this original darkness or yearning for one’s own selfhood that sparks the beginning of an egotistical-evil at the root of the ground. Schelling calls the form of anarchy that lies at the basis of the ground unruliness. Why is God’s ground dark if it is still connected with Him in some sense? The darkness that engulfs the ground begins with its original separation and independence. Schelling relates this unruly anarchy to a “wave-wound whirling sea akin to Plato’s matter.”28placeholder What Schelling is describing in historical terms is the point in which the ground lacks reason or the Word/divine Logos. We are meant to picture the moment of unreason that comes before all reason, or disharmony and chaos that arises before all order and harmony. In essence, the ground lacks a conscious understanding because its being is unconscious. It is unconscious because it lacks the living logos to overcome the darkness. The principle of darkness and its unruly state is meant to explicate the irrational principle at the heart of all reality or what Schelling calls the indivisible remainder. Schelling uses the language of darkness and light to describe the ongoing struggle that is at the basis of all reality: “For all birth is birth from darkness to light; the seed kernel must be sunk into the earth and die in darkness so that the more beautiful shape of light may lift it and unfold it in the radiance of the sun.”29placeholder The biblical word or the divine logos represents for Schelling the divine understanding as an expansive light which stands against the egotistical dark self-will of the ground.
The Center of Being and (Darkness and Light)
The deepest depths of the darkness of the ground must be transfigured in the light. From this expansive light grows an individual will with its own center. In the beginning, the human will is a seed developed out of the eternal yearning. Locked up inside the depths of each being/creature is the essence of God. Unlocking this divine essence and allowing it to flow into the center is how each creature overcomes their own individual darkness. However, because all creatures are born in the ground, they contain within themselves both principles of darkness and light (the dark, self-will of the ground and the light of the universal will). For Schelling, God contains his own self-hood and humanity is raised to spirit or personality through the incarnation of God’s personality in the Christ event.
According to Schelling, it is the human will that grounds the power of freedom, and because this will is a combination of both light and darkness, the human can detach itself from its spiritual essence and be led astray by the self-will of the ground.
To describe the battleground in the depths of being, Schelling invokes a concept that he borrows from Franz von Baader, the centrum, which becomes a primal fire, and the periphery, which is a primal moisture within the fire. When the ego or centrum shifts to the periphery, all order fades and evil remains. For when the centrum disappears into the moisture of the periphery, there is only closure, and darkness spreads throughout the soul.30placeholder
This is precisely what happens to all people consumed by the fire of the self-will. The fall of humanity or the story of the fall of Lucifer, represents the reverse God. This reverse God contains the very moment where the centrum is driven out, marking illness, and evil.31placeholder Rather than overcoming the darkness, the light is subordinated by the selfish drive in the ground, locking the light into its depths.
At this point in the Freedom Essay Schelling explains that there are two eternal beginnings. The first represents the birth of God, and the other represents the birth of humanity. All beings by the sheer power of their own will choose their internal character outside of time. They stand in this moment of eternity that is grounded by the will and they determine the subject that they will become. This is an act of self-determination and a leap out of reason. Schelling gives an example of the self-creation of one’s character with his explanation of Judas’ betrayal of Christ.
Judas was not made a sinner by the act of betraying Christ. Judas had already chosen for himself (before time began) that he would be led by the dark ground of the self-will. To use Bohmean language, his greed would be consumed by the fire and the moisture of the periphery.32placeholder Judas would put his own personal being first, before anyone else, even his own friends. In this moment, Judas allowed the light to be consumed by the darkness.
This essay was meant to be an introduction into some of the main themes of the Freedom Essay. My goal in writing this piece was to popularize some of the most interesting and intriguing elements of Schelling’s 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.
Works Cited
Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801. (Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 2008).
Brown, Robert F. The Late Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Böhme on the Works of 1809-1815 (Bucknell Univeristy Press, London, 1977).
Freydberg, Bernard. Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy: Then and now (Albany: State U of New York, 2006),
Gabriel, Markus. Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (Continuum International Publishing Group, London, 2011).
Krell David, Farrell. The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God. (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2004).
Marx, Werner. The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling: History, System and Freedom Trans. Thomas Nenom. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
McGrath, Sean J. The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, New York, 2012).
Norris, Benjamin. Schelling and Spinoza: Realism, Idealism and the Absolute. (Albany: State U of New York, 2022).
Schelling, Friedrich, Wilhelm Joseph. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom Trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. (Albany: State U of New York, 2006).
Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1999).
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 45.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 45.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 21.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 68.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 22.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 26.
Freydberg, Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay, pg. 2.
Freydberg, Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay, pg. 2.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 10.
Benjamin Norris, Schelling and Spinoza, pg. 6.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 21.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 12.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 13.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 21.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 21.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 13.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 14.
Werner Marx, The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling, pg. 65.
Werner Marx, The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling, pg. 65.
Werner Marx, The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling, pg. 65.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 27.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 27.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 28.
Markus Gabriel, Schelling’s Ontology in the Freedom Essay, pg. 76.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 138.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 138.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 23.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 31.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 29.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 55.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, pg. 55.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, pg. 52.