Philosophical Inquiries Into The Essence of Human Freedom - A Debated Transition

A Debated Transition

Schelling placed the Freiheitsschrift at the end of the first volume of his Sämmtliche Werke (Collected Works). The correct periodisation of his philosophy is still a contentious area, and there are differing views of what kind of punctuation mark it really represents in Schelling's work. It is admittedly important that the book itself begins with an outright rejection of “system”. The publication of this book is said, on the one hand, to mark the beginning of Schelling's “middle period”. As such it marks the break with the “identity philosophy” on which he worked in the first decade of the nineteenth century, after his beginnings as a follower of Johann Fichte and developer of Naturphilosophie.

The divergence of Schelling and Hegel becomes clear from around this year, with Hegel's ambitions being systematic and explicitly encyclopedic, notions of freedom being quite different, and the use of dialectic becoming obviously distinct on the two sides. Hegel's star was in the ascendent, while Schelling's other road led into the wilderness, at least as far as academic respectability was concerned. Academic recognition for Schelling's work as important to philosophy, as opposed to an idiosyncratic contribution to philosophy of religion, was indeed slow to come. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Schelling's contemporaries and followers, rated it highly.

When recognition did come in Martin Heidegger's Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit of 1936, Heidegger largely treated the Freiheitschrift as continuous with the "identity philosophy" period leading up to it. Heidegger by 1941 had hardened his line to the position that Schelling is still a theorist of an enclosing subjectivity, while treating the Freiheitsschrift as the apex (Gipfel) of the metaphysics of German idealism. This view is still contested: other authors read the book as the start of something new in philosophy. Schelling's Stuttgart Vorlesungen of 1810 reformulate and build on the freedom essay, and the Weltalter manuscripts go further in trying to work out details of the Behmenist insights. The debate is therefore really whether the Freiheitschrift is culminating, seminal, or possibly both.