Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom

Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitschrift is one of Žižek’s favorite philosophical works of all time. Schelling therein strives to develop an account of evil as a positive ontological reality unto itself, rather than a negative rendition of it as a simple privation of goodness. In so doing, he is led to elaborate a metaphysics in which determinism, à la a Spinoza-inspired ontological monism, and freedom, à la the self-legislating subject of German idealism, are rendered compatible. As part of this vision, Schelling distinguishes between “ground” and “existence”—with free subjectivity depicted as the resurgence, within the pacified, stable reality of existence, of the… show more.