Schelling’s Moral Argument for a Metaphysics of Contingency

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination. They mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and hence with the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition while not being weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) or Freiheitsschrift takes as its topic the moral problem of fr..