Can We Be Both Free and Unfree?
On Friedrich Schelling and His Paradoxical System
One of the questions that the philosopher Friedrich Schelling asks is how the world can be a system defined by both logical necessity and personal freedom. If everything exists for a reason, there is no contingency, no serendipity, no caprice, no surprise, no natality. On the other hand, if there is no reason or logical integrity to the world, how could anything exist in the first place?
Schelling scholars debate whether Schelling’s arguments are a reductio against systematic thought, or a systematic attempt to show that the world is a system that is paradoxically non-definitive.
They also debate whether Schelling’s arguments amount to naive, metaphysical speculation, a return to a pre-Kantian, pre-critical worldview, or whether he is more radical.
Assuming Schelling is a post-Kantian philosopher and not simply a thinker who lost his way and regressed into mysticism, his thought is even more fascinating. Here is someone who writes theological treatises not because he knows what God is all about, but because he posits that human consciousness would be incoherent if God were not the way he describes. Whether or not the world is both systematic and free, in fact, we can’t but experience it that way, he says.
Paradoxically, Schelling argues that, to be selves, we must be paradoxically split. A world with no necessity and a world of total necessity are equally untenable.
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