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Interpretation of the Introduction to Schelling's Treatise

understand and inquire into the "dependence" of great thinkers on each other. That all essential thinkers at bottom always say the same thing does not mean that they take over the identical thing from each other, but rather that they transform their own primordial thought which is different back to what is essential and to the origin. And for this reason one can find that what became known only in later ages—after it became known and could thus be seen—was also found in traces in the earlier thinkers without being able to say that the earlier thinkers already thought and knew the same thing in the same way. What was just said must be noted with regard to the concept of freedom, too.

Although the true, that is, "formal" concept of freedom as independence in the development of one's own nature in its metaphysical scope is only comprehended and developed in German Idealism, traces of it can be found earlier. Still, or rather precisely because of this, Schelling can and must say that "in all the more recent systems, in Leibniz's as well as Spinoza's, "the true concept of freedom" is lacking.

Leibniz's system and similar ones, however, may certainly not-this is the interim thought-be thought of as pantheistic, fatalistic systems. A non-positing of true freedom may be present, and fatalism and pantheism in the fatalistic sense are not necessarily posited along with it. Conversely, pantheism can be posited, and freedom is not necessarily denied. Thus the denial or assertion of freedom must rest on something quite different from pantheism in the sense of the doctrine of the immanence of things in God. Thus, if the compatibility of pantheism and freedom is to be shown, pantheism, that is, system and freedom, must be explained in the direction of this other ground. We already know that the foundation for the question of the compatibility of pantheism and freedom and thus for the question of the possibility of a system of freedom is an ontological one. More precisely, with regard to pantheism and the statements proclaiming it, it is the adequate understanding of Being and the fundamental determination of Being, identity. Thus, we shall recognize as the true metaphysical accomplishment of the treatise on freedom the grounding of a primordial concept of Being—in Schelling's language the more primordial grounding of absolute identity in a more primordial "copula."

Schelling had pointed out a new solution to the whole question by showing that man's most lively feeling of freed om placed him not outside of God and against God, but as belonging to the "life of God." Freedom demands immanence in God, pan theism. Now it must be shown on the other hand that pantheism correctly understood demands freedom. If this evidence is successful, the assertion set up as the key phrase—that pantheism as the sole possible system is necessarily fatalism—is refuted in every respect. Then the way is at least free for the possibility of a system of freedom.

How about the idea that pantheism correctly understood demands the positing of human freedom? What does that mean-pantheism correctly understood? We


Martin Heidegger (GA 42) Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom