Notion of Nature in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift

Baksa, Goran. (2018). Notion of Nature in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Philosophy. [mentor Jurić, Hrvoje].

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Abstract

A discussion about endangerment of human and nature as a whole, due to technoscientific power, has located the root of such situation in subjectivistic turn of modern age. At this point, a mechanistic concept of nature was introduced as a key problem, observed as a purposeless causal aggregate of objects of possible experience. Therefore, as a necessary condition of responding to such a situation, it required a turn to comprehensive understanding of relation between human and nature. This paper attempts to present such comprehensive understanding of mentioned relation in philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling based on the development of metaphysics of freedom, and the focus will be on the Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. In it, Schelling tried to define the concept of freedom, formulated in German idealism, as a principle not only of human but of nature. The notion of freedom would thereby be set as the central point of the knowledge system and at the same time it would gain its own complement and expansion. Nonetheless, this is not just epistemological interest for certain and grounded knowledge. Horizon of nature was necessary for correct notion of freedom. The problem of impossibility to understand evil within the notion of freedom determined by the idealistic framework, motivated Schelling’s focus on nature as locus for resolving that problem. Main difference was found within the philosophy of nature as a difference between ground and existence constitutive for being of everything. That difference was settled first in God as a basis for whole existence. Through the path of moral problem of evil, the horizon was opened for the necessary reconceptualization of that foundation or God himself. In other words, evil has become a thread by which human and nature were tried together to conjoin in freedom. That comprehensive notion of freedom was gained on determination of freedom as a possibility of good and evil.

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