Abstract
Among the different interpretations of the philosophy of Schelling, there is no doubt that the ones developed by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers played a prominent role within the most recent Schelling scholarship. Both Heidegger and Jaspers focused on Schelling’s discourse on freedom, pointing out the fundamental incompatibility of its key elements, i.e. ‘ground’ and ‘existence’, as well as the fallacious conception of Seynsfuge that emerges from it. Moreover, Heidegger argues that Schelling’s ontology ultimately falls back into traditional metaphysical subjectivism, ignoring the question of Being as such and in fact paving the way to nihilism. Similarly, Jaspers criticizes Schelling’s arbitrary account of the relation between freedom and existential being and his misleading conception of transcendence. However, I argue against Jaspers that Schelling’s discourse on freedom must be read as a philosophy of immanence, which aims at maintaining the concreteness of the concepts and at avoiding any form of transcendence. Consequently, I also argue against Heidegger that not only does Schelling’s discourse successfully show the compatibility of ground and existence, but that Schelling’s understanding of the ‘subject’ does not comply with Heidegger’s notion of ‘metaphysical subjectivism’ and is immune to Heidegger’s criticism.
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Notes
I am referring to F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in SW I.7, 331–416. All the English citations from this work are taken from Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated and with an introduction by J. Love and J. Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
The first draft of The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) dates back to 1811, while the second one was written in 1813, and then, Schelling definitively abandoned the project in 1815.
Incidentally, Heidegger also criticizes Jaspers’s ontology, claiming that Jaspers “rejects the possibility of ontology in general because he also understands by ontology only what it has previously been taken for and which has remained a mechanical manipulation of rigidified concepts” (Heidegger 1985: 64), in turn failing to properly address the fundamental question of Being as such.
That is to say, Schelling maintains that in Being there is an incomprehensible ground and an ‘invisible remainder’; however, such incomprehensibility does not lead Schelling to the conclusion that Being is transcendent and that its ‘invisible remainder’ is a sheer metaphysical occurrence. On the contrary, “the understanding is born in the genuine sense from that which is without understanding. Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance” (Schelling 2010: 29; Schelling 1860: I.7, 360). In other words, just as there can be no light without a preceding darkness to be overwhelmed, Being can only occur and be grasped as that immanent life which arises from the tension between ground and existence. According to Schelling, denying this point means to turn Being itself into a sheer arbitrary and transcendent idea, namely, into an ungrounded concept.
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Fulvi, D. Schelling as a Thinker of Immanence: contra Heidegger and Jaspers. SOPHIA 60, 869–887 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00784-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00784-7