Chapter 7 - Idealism and freedom in Schelling’sFreiheitsschrift

Summary

At the most general level of description, formal freedom as spontaneous self-determination on the basis of concepts of ends, the account that Schelling attributes to idealism is in fact common to Immanuel Kant and Fichte. Kant and Fichte shared a conception of substantive freedom as the autonomy of the rational will. The distinction between Kant's account and Fichte's is that the former understood substantive self-determination in terms of a law that rational agency gives itself, whereas the latter understood it in terms of an end that rational agency sets for itself. The idea that the exercise of human freedom is actually responsible for the introduction of chaos into the order of things, prefigured in Philosophy and Religion, is a staple of Schelling's late philosophy. But this view becomes dominant only with the Ages of the World drafts, and coexists in the Freiheitsschrift alongside remnants of Schelling's earlier view.