Junshuo Bian

What does true freedom mean? For Plato and Spinoza, freedom requires finding the true self and becoming like God. This paper demonstrates their philosophical communicability by showing that both thinkers ground freedom in a metaphysical division between two orders of existence, one external and temporally determined, the other internal and eternal, and that the ethical life consists in one’s progressive identification with the latter. For Plato this means the soul’s ascent toward the intelligible realm through self-mastery, requiring detachment from and devaluation of the sensible world. For Spinoza, freedom is not a transition between realms but a transformation in causation, from external determination to joining God’s self-causation as causa sui. Since Extension and Thought are equal attributes of God, Spinoza does not devalue the sensible world, and self-realization is equally expressed in political life through the rational preservation of conatus. The comparison illuminates how Spinoza transforms the Platonic ideal by grounding freedom in a metaphysics that gives equal weight to the bodily and political dimensions of human life.

In this essay, based on the text of the Ages of the World, Schelling’s solution to the pantheism controversy is analyzed and commented on concerning the unification of God’s necessity and freedom in creation. Schelling has distinguished two wills of God, the first is called ‘self-will’, the second is called ‘love’. A God in ‘equilibrium of choice’ is described by the process of the emergence of self-will and the interaction between the two wills. In this equilibrium the two wills are equal in power: self-will does not want to create, whereas love wants to create. With the incomprehensible freedom of God creation is decided, this decision is of ‘necessity of fact’ in that it has to be accepted without any explanation of ‘necessity of reason’. According to Schelling, the unification of God’s necessity and freedom in creation can be summarized as follows: Firstly the creation itself is factual necessary because it is the result of the incomprehensible freedom of God. Secondly the creation is realized on the basis of the ‘character’ self-will provides, which is also factual necessary because it is the result of the incomprehensible freedom of ‘Godhead’. The freedom in creation is realized by overcoming this factual necessity. Thirdly the incomprehensible freedom of creation is in accordance with the ‘necessity of nature’ of God, which is love. Thus creation is the only option for God. It is clear that Schelling’s solution is highly religiously transcendent. However, a rationalistic description underlies his religiously transcendent description of God’s creation. These two kinds of descriptions are irreconcilable, in that the first seeks to give rationally necessary explanation to creation, while the second excludes any explanation and emphasizes on the incomprehensibility of freedom in creation. On the basis of textual analysis it is proved that both necessity of fact and necessity of nature are in fact deduced from dialectics. This use of dialectics is called the ‘principle of equilibrium’, which indeed stands for necessity of reason, conflicting with the incomprehensibility of freedom. Thus Schelling’s solution is paradoxical, and his response to Spinoza’s pantheism controversy is not successful.