Schelling on Eternal Choice and the Temporal Order of Nature

Despite his commitment to the thesis that the essence of the moral world is the same as the essence of nature, Schelling’s philosophy is fundamentally incompatible with naturalism as commonly conceived. He rejects the notion that freedom is nothing but a natural capacity, declaring “the highest goal” of his philosophical pursuit to be the “reduction of the laws of nature to mind, spirit, and will”. This paper explores Schelling’s idealistic conception of nature in Philosophie und Religion and the Freedom Essay by focusing on his reception of Kant’s idea of an “eternal choice” or “intelligible deed” at the root of personality and the way Schelling deploys that idea in developing a theory of time. He sees the natural order’s most basic features, e.g. its spatio-temporal self-externality and the existence of (externally) necessitating “laws of nature” as grounded in an essentially free and morally pertinent action on the part of the individual.