Agency and Absolute Identity

Abstract

Abstract During the later 1790s Schelling stakes out an original position in the debates concerning the relation between “rational will” (Wille), power of choice (Willkür), and freedom. Criticizing both Kant and Reinhold, he argues that our power of choice is the manifestation of the rational will under finite conditions. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) he then seeks to reconcile this view with history’s teleological structure, regarded as the most general expression of rational will, arguing that aesthetic experience discloses a coincidence of free choice and rational necessity which philosophy cannot grasp theoretically. However, dissatisfaction with the dualism of “transcendental idealism” and the “philosophy of nature” leads to Schelling’s adoption of a philosophy of absolute identity, where the problem of freedom eventually emerges again for his now quasi-Spinozist position. He begins to address the problem in a new manner in the 1804 text, Philosophy and Religion, with the theorem of a “fall” (Abfall) from the absolute, which results in the finite, contingent world.