SCHELLING’S TREATISE ON HUMAN FREEDOM (Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit). Heidegger published this book in 1971. It contains the text of his summer semester 1936 lecture course on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s treatise on human freedom and some notes from his Schelling seminars in the early 1940s.
After a short introduction on Schelling’s life and work, and the background of his philosophy, Heidegger gives a section-by-section interpretation of Schelling’s essay. This interpretation is part of his attempts to overcome metaphysics. In the history of the forgottenness of being, Schelling’s philosophy is the transition between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s system of absolute knowing and Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power. The inaugural thesis of Schelling’s essay is that will is primal being.
Heidegger’s interpretation centers on two problems: (1) Schelling’s core distinction between ground and existence; and (2) the possibility of philosophy as a system.
The starting point of Schelling’s treatise is the fact of human freedom. In his essay, he attempts to develop a system of freedom. As Heidegger points out, there are no pure facts. Every fact needs an interpretive context or system. Schelling’s system is nothing other than the exposition of the fact of human freedom. It presupposes Immanuel Kant’s joining of the two modalities, possibility and necessity, in his formal concept of freedom as self-determination on the basis of its own lawfulness. Yet, this does comprehend the fact of human freedom in its facticity. The third modality comes into view only when the fact of evil is taken into account Schelling therefore defines freedom as the capacity for good and evil. Evil is the revolt that perverts the ground of the essential will into the reverse of God’s. Because the act that determines the whole of man’s being occurs beyond or above all time, freedom is necessity and necessity is freedom.
According to Schelling, we must distinguish between the ground and the existence of an entity. The ground of an entity is its foundation; its existence is its self-emergence as self-revelation. The root of its core distinction is the will. The becoming of the will is the unifying division and dividing unification. This process is the systematic unfolding of subjectivity. The center of Schelling’s system is human freedom. In God, the ground of existence is joined inseparably with the existence of the ground. In human beings, this original accord is separable, allowing for the discord of evil. Here is the rift that threatens the system. As Heidegger sees it, the fatal flaw that makes the conjuncture of archaic being as system impossible is Schelling’s positing of the ground in opposition to existence. In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger developed another kind of textuality to avoid this flaw. He did not write a systematic work, but a nexus of jointures to mark the place where being manifests itself to thinking.
In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger recasts the question of human freedom in light of the turning relation of being to man, thereby circumventing the subjectivity of the will. When viewed in this context, Heidegger’s lectures on Schelling provide an important transition on the way to overcoming metaphysics.
In his seminar notes, Heidegger works out in further detail some parts of his lecture courses.