Abstract
Schelling’s treatise On Human Freedom is one of the most important texts in the history of German philosophy. The main concern in his treatise is the question of the Absolute, which he also calls absolute identity, indifference, or just non-ground. Schelling introduces the non-ground in addition to the ontological difference of existence and ground of existence. As that which first makes this difference possible, the non-ground is a part of everything that exists, but also lies behind the existence of the so-called world and thus does not technically exist. The question that arises is why we need a non-existing absolute, indeed what the function of such an absolute is. In my view, Schelling tries to show with this new model of the Absolute that there is a fictional place where philosophy, poetry, and art meet each other.
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Notes
- 1.
See F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom [hereinafter cited parenthetically as HF], trans. J. Love and J. Schmidt (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), 29–30; SW, I/7: 360–361. Citations of Schelling provide the pagination of the English translation if one exists, followed by that of the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61), unless a text was not published as part of it. References to the K.F.A. Schelling edition are given by the abbreviation SW, division, volume and page number. The translators opt to render ‘Regelloses’ as ‘anarchy’ instead of the more literal ‘ruleless’.
- 2.
See Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967).
- 3.
Derrida, L’écriture et la différence, 225.
- 4.
Ian Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London/New York: Continuum, 2008), 1.
- 5.
Quoted from: Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 1.
- 6.
Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1.
- 7.
David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), 1.
- 8.
See F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: University Press, 1982), 115; SW, I/10: 100–1.
- 9.
Markus Gabriel, Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology [hereinafter cited parenthetically as FS] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 166.
- 10.
F.W.J. Schelling, Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie: Münchner Vorlesung WS 1832/33 und SS 1833, ed. H. Fuhrmans (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), 222; quoted from Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, by Slavoj Žižek and F.W.J Schelling (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3.
- 11.
However, we should be careful here. It is not that Schelling understands Kant’s philosophy by making the transcendental ideal into something determinate; instead, he understands Kant’s first Critique in purely ontological—and therefore precisely not in transcendental—terms, as Wolfram Hogrebe has shown. That means, once again, he understands it in terms of the question ‘Why is there something and not nothing?’ See Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings ‘Die Weltalter’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 66–71.
- 12.
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing,’ in Poetry, Language and Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971), 163–164.
- 13.
Heidegger, ‘The Thing,’ 178–179.
- 14.
Žižek, Abyss of Freedom, 4.
- 15.
Žižek, Abyss of Freedom,15.
- 16.
See F.W.J. Schelling, Stuttgart Seminars, in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. Thomas Pfau (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 199–201; SW, I/7: 424–425; and for a discussion, Cem Kömürcü, Sehnsucht und Finsternis. Schellings Theorie des Sprachsubjekts (Vienna: Passagen, 2011).
- 17.
David F. Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God [hereinafter cited parenthetically as TA] (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 72.
- 18.
Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 53.
- 19.
Wolfram Hogrebe, ‘Imi Knoebel: “Amor Intellectualis” [hereinafter cited parenthetically as AI],’ in Imi Knoebel: Werke von 1966 bis 2006: Works from 1966–2006, ed. Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007), 83.
- 20.
Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction into Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133.
- 21.
Williams, Problems of Knowledge, 133.
- 22.
Williams, Problems of Knowledge, 133.
- 23.
Williams, Problems of Knowledge, 133.
- 24.
Williams, Problems of Knowledge, 132–134.
- 25.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. J. Beer (London/New York: Everyman’s Library, 1974), 337.
- 26.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biograpia Literaria: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge [hereinafter cited parenthetically as BL], ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 252.
- 27.
J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1982), 93; GA, I/2: 255. Citations of Fichte provide the pagination of the English translation followed by that of the J.G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 42 vols, ed. Erich Fuchs, Reinhard Lauth, and Hans Gliwitzky (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1964–2012). References to the Akademie edition are given by the abbreviation GA, division, volume and page number.
- 28.
J.G. Fichte, ‘Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre [hereinafter cited parenthetically as Concept],’ in Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 102; GA, I/2: 114: ‘Eins, ein Ganzes sein.’)
- 29.
Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, 53.
- 30.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 24. For the German, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen, in Über Gewißheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,1984), 483.
- 31.
David Schalkwyk, ‘Wittgenstein’s ‘Imperfect Garden’: The Ladders and Labyrinths of Philosophy as Dichtung,’ in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huebner (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 56.
- 32.
Schalkwyk, ‘Wittgenstein’s ‘Imperfect Garden,’ 56.
- 33.
Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig von Ficker, quoted from Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Ney York: The Free Press, 1990), 177.
- 34.
Schalkwyk, ‘Wittgenstein’s ‘Imperfect Garden,’ 57.
- 35.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and other Poems (San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt, 1962), 43.
- 36.
Martin Schulz, ‘Not I and yet I!,’ in Imi Knoebel, 87.
- 37.
Schulz, ‘Not I and yet I!,’ 87.
- 38.
See Schulz, ‘Not I and yet I!,’ 87.
- 39.
Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvre Complètes, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1972), 249.
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Kömürcü, C. (2016). The Non-existence of the Absolute: Schelling’s Treatise On Human Freedom . In: McGrath, S., Carew, J. (eds) Rethinking German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53514-6_5
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