- Length
- 176 pagesLove and Schmidt, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, SUNY, 2006
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom
The book in which German idealism admits that something in reality resists reason, written by the man who had been its most precocious talent and became its least read major figure. Its subject is evil, and its answer requires a darkness inside God.
- Date
- 1809
- Author
- F. W. J. Schelling
- Region
- Munich
- Language
- German
- 1845 English, James Gutmann's predecessors Early partial versions Consensus
- 2006 English, Love and Schmidt The standard modern version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 132 years
Ignored for a century while Hegel's reputation absorbed everything around it, and read seriously again from the 1930s onward.
What the book says
A short and strange book about why evil is possible, written to answer a charge that idealism cannot allow real freedom. Schelling takes the accusation head on. A system in which everything follows from a single principle looks like fatalism, and freedom looks like an exception that no system could contain - so either there is no system or there is no freedom. His answer is to redefine both. Freedom is not the ability to have done otherwise, which he thinks is empty; it is the capacity for good and evil, and that capacity is real only if evil is something positive rather than a mere absence. To make room for it he introduces a distinction inside God: between existence and the ground of existence, a dark, unruly, prior element that is not itself God but is in God as the condition of there being anything at all. In human beings the same two principles are separable, and that separability is what makes a person able to invert the proper relation and put self-will above the universal. Evil, on this account, is not a lack but an achievement, available only to a creature capable of good.
What it argues
That a system can contain genuine freedom only if it contains something that is not fully rational, and that this is what the tradition had been unable to accommodate. The key move is the distinction between what exists and the ground of its existence - a principle of longing, resistance and darkness which is prior in the order of explanation and is never fully absorbed into what follows from it. In God the two are inseparable; in human beings they can come apart, and a person can raise their own particular will above the principle that should govern it. That is what evil is: not weakness or ignorance but a positive inversion, and one that only a being capable of the opposite could perform. Freedom, correspondingly, is not indifference between options but a self-determination that expresses what a person essentially is.
What it answered
Spinoza on the fatalism charge, and Fichte and his own earlier work on the adequacy of a purely idealist system. Schelling had spent a decade developing a philosophy of identity in which nature and spirit are two aspects of one absolute, and this book is where he concedes that such a system, as he had it, could not explain why anything determinate exists at all or why it can go wrong. He is answering himself as much as anyone.
How it argues
By dense compressed statement, and by images that are doing argumentative work he does not fully cash out - ground, longing, the dark basis, the flash of life. This is why the book has been read as mysticism by some and as rigorous metaphysics by others, and why it has attracted readers hostile to systematic philosophy. It is also unfinished in a real sense: the last pages announce a continuation that never came, and the argument stops rather than concludes.
The moment
Munich in 1809, with Schelling in his mid-thirties, out of the university world, and reeling from the death of his wife Caroline the year before - which readers have long connected to the book's preoccupation with suffering and with a darkness that is not merely privation. He had been the wonder of German philosophy at twenty-three, had broken with Fichte, and was about to be eclipsed by Hegel, who had once been his employee and had attacked him publicly in the Phenomenology two years earlier.
How it travelled
By being rediscovered when Hegel's reputation fell. For most of the nineteenth century Schelling was the man Hegel had surpassed, and the late lectures were treated as a mystical decline. Heidegger gave a lecture course on this book in 1936 and called it the high point of German idealism, which changed its standing; Tillich, Jaspers and later Žižek and the speculative-realist writers took it up. Its rise has been steady since, and Schelling is now more read than at any time since his own celebrity.
The strongest objection
That the ground is asked to do explanatory work and is described in terms that cannot be checked. Schelling needs something prior to and other than rational order to explain both why there is a determinate world and why it can go wrong, but a principle defined by being what does not yield to explanation cannot be argued for, only invoked - and every characterisation of it borrows the vocabulary of what it is supposed to precede. Hegel's charge against him was of exactly this shape: a beginning that cannot be developed is not a philosophical beginning. Schelling's defenders answer that the alternative is a system which pretends to explain everything and therefore explains nothing about existence, which is a real point and does not dispose of the objection.
Why read it
It is short, and the first thirty pages set out the problem of freedom and system as clearly as anyone has. The middle section on the ground is where readers divide. Read it after Kant and Fichte rather than cold, and with a translation that notes the terminology; the argument turns on a handful of German words with no settled English equivalents.
- First printed
- 1809
- First in English
- 1845
- Digitised
- Yes
The late lecture courses on mythology and revelation, delivered for decades and published after his death, develop the position further and are what recent scholarship increasingly works from.
Gutmann's 1936 English is dated. Love and Schmidt's 2006 translation is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived. The book is central to current work on German idealism, on the problem of evil, and on the question of whether a philosophy can acknowledge something that resists conceptual comprehension without abandoning argument.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain, but the accurate English versions are modern and in copyright and the older ones render the central terms unreliably. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the book is continuous with Schelling's earlier identity philosophy or breaks with it is the standing scholarly question, and the answer determines whether there are two Schellings or several. Whether the ground is meant literally, as a real element in the divine, or as a structural feature of any account of existence, is disputed. Heidegger's reading has been enormously influential and is criticised for finding his own concerns in the text. And the connection between Caroline's death and the book's content is biographically plausible and philosophically unprovable.