Charlotte Alderwick's book Schelling's Ontology of Powers situates Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling's metaphysics of reality in the contemporary power-based ontologies of the analytic tradition. Conversely, she also draws inspiration from Schelling to deal with issues that these contemporary approaches fail to address—mainly on how to accommodate human freedom within such ontology. This theme reflects Schelling's own central concern in his essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, namely, whether a systematic ontology can accommodate freedom. Alderwick thus recuperates an important issue in Schelling in a new way by drawing parallels between Schelling's philosophy and contemporary power-based ontologies. She considers Schelling's ontology of powers a holistic account of reality, which urges us to broaden the scope of these contemporary approaches and to take freedom as a particular constellation of powers. This is because even if contemporary scholars, including Rani L. Anjum and Stephen Mumford (2018), try to explain different areas with power ontology (e.g., causation, ethics, human freedom), they never come up with an overarching account which connects these separate areas together (9). And without such a holism of powers, human freedom cannot be truly thought.
The main content of the book is as follows: In Chapters One and Two, Alderwick situates Schelling's philosophy of nature within contemporary ontologies of powers on the one hand and in the historical context in which Schelling develops his own systematic notion of human freedom on the other hand, i.e. she positions him in relation to Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Chapters Three and Four interpret Schelling's philosophy of nature as a power-based ontology, understood as ‘an ontology which posits powers as the fundamental unit of reality’ (11), which must be a holistic account as it concerns reality as such. But, according to the author, this holistic account of reality alone is insufficient to do justice to human freedom. Alderwick argues in particular, that the underlying universal identity philosophy does not account for individuality: by identifying the essence of all finite beings with the absolute, individuals become a mere appearance of the absolute. On the basis of this first result, Alderwick demonstrates the urgency of the problem of human freedom in Chapter Four. Step by step, she shows that Schelling's philosophy develops from an approach that lacks individuality and freedom in Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801) and Further Presentations (1802) to an account of the lawful freedom of individual beings in Bruno, or On the Natural and Divine Principle of Things (1802) and Philosophy and Religion (1804) and eventually to a full-blown account of human freedom in the Freedom essay (1809).
The systematic core of the book is formed by Chapters Five and Six, in which Alderwick argues that human freedom can be integrated into a holistic ontology of powers. Schelling takes human freedom to be actual or real precisely inasmuch as it is grounded in nature. Freedom is situated in the difference between ground and existence, i.e. the difference between the universal will and the particular will. The bond between these two wills is severable, and a particular moral agent can be good only if the universal will grounds the particular will, and not vice versa. The traditional interpretation of Schelling's notion of freedom takes freedom to manifest itself in an eternal act of choice, prior to the agent's existence in time. Moreover, it takes this timeless choice as constitutive of one's essence as either good or evil. Alderwick, however, points out that in this reading, ‘the possibility of free choice in the temporal realm is completely ruled out; every choice the agent makes is pre-determined by her essence’ (151). By contrast, she ascribes to Schelling a libertarian notion of freedom in time.
To solve this problem, Alderwick appeals to Schelling's redefined notion of identity. According to the Schelling of the Freedom essay, the identity relation is not sheer sameness but a grounding relation. Schelling's argument concerning the identity of essence and form in the absolute can be used to illustrate the point. The essence and the form of the absolute are identical, and yet there is a difference between the two: the form expresses the essence in time by the mediation of potencies and their instantiation in particular beings. The essence determines to a certain extent what a being can be, but only if it is instantiated in particular beings by taking on specific forms. A certain degree of freedom is established in the instantiating form and thus is a reciprocal relation between essence and form, the eternal and the temporal. Alderwick argues that human freedom can be understood in this manner, too. Even if human freedom is determined a-temporally and a priori, it must be manifested by individuals in this world. Human freedom has both eternal and temporal components: ‘the agent chooses the kind of life she endorses and constitutes herself as that kind of agent throughout her temporal life’ (161).
This interpretation of Schelling's notion of human freedom, according to Alderwick, can help us deal with the problem that all contemporary power-based ontologies would encounter, i.e. the problem of ‘control’—of how the agent can be understood as the ultimate controller of her actions and powers (174). She formulates the issue in the following way: ‘If nature is composed of systems of powers at various levels, we need a principled account of why it is that we take some of these systems to be objects and to have a special causal relevance rather than others’ (176). In other words, she argues that in order to have a libertarian notion of freedom in contemporary ontologies of powers, ‘an account of how objects are individuated must claim that this individuation happens when a system of powers manifests itself in an emergent object with causal powers over and above those of its parts’ (180).
Alderwick takes Schelling to precisely present such an account of libertarian freedom. Human freedom is essentially dependent on the indeterminate emergence of agents—and hence on the severability of the two principles of ground and existence. The agents then must actively determine their essences. That is, ‘the essence of the agent simply contains the fact that the agent must choose, therefore the content of the agent's essence is filled in by that agent herself” (181). Unlike other products of nature, agents have control over their actions and future possibilities. Overall, Alderwick argues that Schelling's solution to the problem of freedom is that, on the one hand, nature has a particular teleological disposition to produce certain kinds of objects, on the other hand, agents also have a telos by virtue of which they are individuated and which affords them control over their parts (182).
These issues are particularly novel and noteworthy in Alderwick's work: first, whereas Schelling's philosophy is mostly read historically in the context of German Idealism and history of philosophy, Alderwick shows the affinity between Schelling's metaphysics of nature and contemporary power-based ontologies, demonstrating that Schelling's philosophy can contribute to contemporary philosophical debates and deal with issues that are relevant even today. Schelling's philosophy can be viewed as a bridge between the historical and the contemporary, the continental and the analytical philosophical traditions. Second, her way of reading Schelling's early and middle philosophy shows a fresh approach to his work. Alderwick demonstrates that there is a continuity between Schelling's early philosophy of nature and his Freedom essay. By taking his works from the late 1790s to 1809 into account, from the early approaches to nature to identity philosophy and beyond, she is able to demonstrate the urgency of the problem of human freedom in all these texts. This is in contrast to Schelling scholars who take the Freedom essay to be a break from Schelling's early philosophy. In her own way, Alderwick shows that Schelling does not simply deal with various unconnected issues at different times as some readers of Schelling have thought; he is rather a deeply systematic thinker (3). Third, she reinterprets Schelling's notion of freedom to have both a-temporal and temporal components, i.e. a libertarian notion of freedom closer to what we usually take freedom to be, rather than the obtrusive eternal freedom that appears in most Schelling scholarship.
While taking Schelling's philosophy as an ontology of powers can be fruitful, this way of reading Schelling is not without problems. One question is whether Alderwick is aware that Schelling is moving from an absolute idealism towards an ideal-realism, which means that even the ideal emerges from the real, when he moves from his philosophy of nature to identity philosophy and to the Freedom essay. This distinction is crucial in developing a fully fledged notion of freedom, since true freedom as actuality must be grounded in the real rather than the ideal. If Alderwick argues that there is no individual freedom in Schelling's identity philosophy, only the freedom of the absolute, this has radical consequences: in the end, there would be no true freedom in this system at all since even the absolute itself is a mere concept or idea. What is more, the so-called actualization of the possible in the actual individuals is impossible if there is not a real power to propel the movement from the possible to the actual. At most, there is conceptual freedom of the absolute, which is peculiar to idealism.
Only the Freedom essay starts to argue for the actuality of freedom—defined as the interplay of forces in nature, as Alderwick notes. This is why Schelling's philosophy is no longer an idealism but an ideal-realism. It is a middle path between one-sided idealism and one-sided mechanistic realism, as Schelling argues in his Freedom essay. I assume this is what Alderwick wants to show. However, surprisingly, she seems to think that Schelling's philosophy is an absolute idealism through and through (187). Indeed, in ‘Notes’, she clarifies that ‘arguably, absolute idealism is best thought of as realism about concepts or ideas, as the claims that these have a real existence independent of individual thinkers and that play some role in the structuring of reality’ (110–11). But it is still not clear to me why an idealism can become a realism of concepts and ideas, since, by definition, idealism and realism are two opposite ideas. Why is it not simply a realism? Committing to idealism inevitably prevents one from developing the actuality of freedom. For this reason, even though Alderwick brings this piece of writing in line with Schelling's early works, pace Alderwick, one should realize that the Freedom essay is Schelling's turning point away from idealistic philosophy.
Along this line, the author also sidelines the distinction between the absolute and God (188). The actuality of freedom established in the Freedom essay is not only human freedom but also God's freedom, a point that Alderwick does not explore. God's actual freedom shows that he cannot be a concept, i.e. the absolute, but a free agent. For Schelling, only a free and living God can make room for human freedom. Humans are dependent on God, but he allows humans to be free. Without realizing a free God, Alderwick cannot argue for human freedom. Moreover, Alderwick holds that God himself needs to be born or to become himself via the interplay of potencies, since Schelling holds that God is a life (144). This reading is not unproblematic because it leads to the consequences that, first, God's creation is not only the creation of the world but also the creation of God himself, which would render the notion of God as the creator absurd. Second, God's creation would become a necessity—contradicting Schelling's own repeated claim that God is free to create or not to create. Alderwick herself realizes this a few pages later, where she argues that God's self-revelation was ‘not a matter of necessity but was based on a positive choice’ (147). This again can be traced back to her way of reading the Freedom essay as a continuation of Schelling's early work, marginalizing its transitory role in relation to his late philosophy. This certainly is not the most urgent question for Alderwick's project. After all, she has made it clear that her main focus is on the early Schelling.
Above all, Alderwick's book is well written. It opens a new path to Schelling's philosophy by using it to engage it with contemporary philosophical issues in the analytical tradition. In so doing, Schelling's philosophy gains a new life. The book will also be of great benefit for anyone who is interested in Schelling's philosophy in general.
