“Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom” by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt)

This short treatise is the summation of Schelling’s reconciliation between causal necessity and freedom. Thus, it is also a meditation on theodicy, individual free will, and the capacity for evil. He begins, “The concept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with [a philosophical] system.” Schelling continues on the matter of individual freedom, “But the real and vital concept is that freedom is the capacity for good and evil…. It affects most noticeably the concept of immanence; for either real evil is admitted and, hence, it is inevitable that evil be posited within infinite substance or the primal will itself, whereby the concept of a most perfect being is utterly destroyed, or the reality of evil must in some way be denied, whereby, however, at the same time the real concept of freedom vanishes…. God appears undeniably to share responsibility for evil in so far as permitting an entirely dependent being to do evil is surely not much better than to cause it to do so.”

Schelling relates his view on the nature of philosophy in general. “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole. The latter can never provide the principle but must be the ground and medium in which the former makes itself real and takes on flesh and blood.” He continues by defining his dual concepts of general and individual will, “The understanding as universal will stands against this self-will of creatures, using and subordinating the latter to itself as a mere instrument…. In man there is the whole power of the dark principle and at the same time the whole strength of the light. In him there is the deepest abyss and the loftiest sky or both centra. The human will is the seed—hidden in eternal yearning—of the God who is present still in the ground only; it is the divine panorama of life, locked up within the depths, which God beheld as he fashioned the will to nature.”

Finally, Schelling returns to the concept of individual freedom, “Man is placed on that summit where he has in himself the source of self-movement toward good or evil in equal portions: the bond of principles in him is not a necessary but rather a free one. Man stands on the threshold [Scheidepunkt]; whatever he chooses, it will be his act…. The intelligible being can, as certainly as it acts as such freely and absolutely, just as certainly act only in accordance with its own inner nature; or action can follow form within only in accordance with the law of identity and with absolute necessity which alone is also absolute freedom. For free is what acts only in accord with the laws of its own being…. True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, the likes of which we perceive in essential cognition, when spirit and heart, bound only by their own law, freely affirm what is necessary.”