Charlotte Alderwick

This paper is a response to Stern's 2023 ‘Schelling on Freedom, Evil and Imputation: a Puzzle’, where he argues that (contra what he terms the ‘standard account’) the conception of freedom that Schelling puts forward in the Freedom essay is not an account of freedom as constituted by choice, but as constituted by acting in accordance with essence. Stern takes my reading of Schelling to be an example of the standard view; I want to demonstrate that in fact I agree with Stern's claim that Schelling's account is essentialist. However, I argue that there is an important nuance here in Schelling's view that is missed on Stern's account: Schelling is providing both a theory of freedom in general and an account of specifically human freedom. I therefore argue that Stern is right to claim that Schelling's account of freedom in general is essentialist, however in the case of human freedom I demonstrate that this account gives way to a view which is closer to existentialism. One reason, I argue, for Stern's overlooking of this distinction is that he reads the Freedom essay in isolation from Schelling's broader philosophical project, in particular from his Naturphilosophie, therefore I show that when we bring this broader project into view we are able to think more effectively about Schelling's conception of freedom.

This paper draws a number of parallels between Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and contemporary work in the metaphysics of powers. This concept is being applied to a range of debates, however a distinct lack of work exists focusing on extending this concept to ontology as a whole. I argue that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie provides insight into what this kind of system would look like. I begin with a brief outline of the characterisation and use of powers in the contemporary literature to show the marked similarities between these accounts and Schelling’s. I then present my reading of the Naturphilosophie as a power-based ontology, and gesture towards some ways in which this account could help to fill some of the gaps in the current literature. Because of the centrality of powers to the Naturphilosophie, and because of the holistic nature of Schelling’s work, the role of powers and relationship of powers to a range of other concepts is carefully specified here. Thus a number of the implications and advantages of this kind of view are already worked out and presented in the texts on Naturphilosophie. Finally, I argue that Schelling’s Naturphilosophie also demonstrates some possible problems that will arise for any ontology of this kind.

This chapter focuses on Schelling’s philosophy of nature and shows that it contains an original theory of freedom. I argue that human freedom is a potentiated form of a kind of freedom that can already be found in organic life: my claim is that human freedom and other forms of productivity within nature are instances of the same process. I argue that we should see the relationship between different forms of natural productivity and human freedom in the same way that the Schelling of the Naturphilosophie argues that we should see the relationship between mechanical, chemical, and organic phenomena. To say that there is no difference between these phenomena would be absurd; the claim is rather that they are all different manifestations of the same process (the process which drives nature as a whole), and therefore that their difference is one of degree rather than kind. I further demonstrate that Schelling’s Freedom essay builds upon this notion of freedom introduced in the philosophy of nature and offers a solution to the problem of the human ownership of freedom.

Although it is clear in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift that he takes an agent's atemporal choice between good and evil to be central to understanding human freedom, there is no consensus in the literature and no adequate account of how to understand this choice. Further, the literature fails to render intelligible how existential freedom is possible in the light of this atemporal choice. I demonstrate that, despite their differences, the dominant accounts in the literature are all guilty of these failings and argue that this is due to their misunderstanding of Schelling's conception of the relationship between essence and form. After outlining what I take Schelling's account of this relationship to be, I return to the Freiheitsschrift to demonstrate that with this account in mind we can make intelligible Schelling's claims about the agent's atemporal act, and the possibility of existential freedom on his account.