CONTRIBUTI / Gregor Schäfer
The Real Accomplishment of Freedom. On “the Tendency Towards Historicity” in Schelling’s Impossible System
Schelling calls his later philosophy a ‘philosophy of history’ or a ‘historical philosophy’. This terminology does not designate a separate discipline but rather can be understood as an integral part of what becomes – in late Schelling – positive philosophy. The concept of history as the performative enactment of freedom positive philosophy intends is constitutive for both human and, in a Christian tradition, divine freedom. Against the reduction to a merely negative philosophy, this positive understanding of history includes the possibility of the events of ruptures within history. It thinks historical time not as an empty progress or linear evolution but implies the – specifically – eschatological tendency towards something unprecedentedly new, connecting the present with the past and the future. At the very same time, it is focusing on a place for free human responsibility against the background of a profound crisis as Schelling discerns it as characteristic for modernity. The essay presents some constellations of this historical philosophy and argues for its critical potential.
