The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling. History, System and Freedom, and: Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (review)

302 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:2 APRIL 1987 which Hume withdrew after 176o, and which he in 1753 described as "too frivolous" to be included with the rest of his essays? And what of his deletion, after ten editions (not three, as Livingston says), of all but three paragraphs of the first Enquiry discussion of the association of ideas, another textual segment on which the present interpretation depends? Whether we read Hume narratively or conventionally these alterations in the corpus are too significant to be ignored or dismissed as merely stylistic. I raise these questions because I hope that Livingston will in due course respond to them. He has provided us with an interpretive study of great scope and, as I believe time will show, fecundity. But the interpretation is not finished; as it stands it raises issues which Livingston himself must address if his readers are to be able to build on his work. That this should be so is not surprising given the scope and originality of this work, but based on this beginning I look forward to Livingston's further explications of Hume's philosophy of common life. DAVID FATE NORTON Institute for Advanced Study Princeton University Werner Marx. The Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling. History, System and Freedom. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, x984. Pp. xvi + 2o2. $24.95. Alan White. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Pp. xi + 2ol. $20.00. Alan White notes that Schelling is a philosopher who has become obscure, one no longer included in our operative consciousness of the history of philosophy. And even were he in our living memory, the metaphysical categories and constructions Schelling pursued would seem questionable and of questionable pertinence to our situation. But as Werner Marx reminds us, "the old questions present themselves ever anew," and among them are certainly questions about the possibility of human freedom and about the nature and meaning of history. Each of these concise studies is devoted to removing the obscurity and to the portrayal of the intriguing fifty-year career of the 'Last Metaphysician', who was ever challenged by the tension he experienced between the demands of system and those of freedom. And each of them achieves its goal with remarkable clarity and philosophical vigor. There are no deep differences in Marx's and White's interpretation of Schelling. The starting point of his philosophy is an ideological commitment to defend human freedom precisely by reconciling the natural and the moral worlds which Kant had left sundered. But the transcendental construction of human experience as a totality (the absolute, if you will) brings with it its own difficulties. When the philosopher descends from the indeterminacy of the absolute to the determinate knowing self, the intermediate structures of limitation and finitude take on the cast of law and physical necessitation, and freedom disappears. Then there is the other problem of BOOK REVIEWS 303 whether the philosopher can systematically deduce determinacy out of indeterminacy , the finite from the absolute. These two problems bedevil Schelling his whole life long, the dialectic of freedom and necessity and the dialectic of the absolute and the individual. White is correct in seeing Schelling's significance as negative. He tried, and publically failed, to resurrect metaphysics first as ontology, then as theology, but in doing so he introduced a new generation of thinkers, among them Kierkegaard and Engels, to anthropological or existential themes. The very frankness of his anthropomorhic attempts to think God would seem to move his audience rather readily into admitting that we really do have only ourselves to think about. Marx chooses limited systematic topics in the three essays collected here, but by confining his attention to the 18oo Systemof TranscendentalIdealismand the 18o9 Essay on Human Freedom, he is able to underline Schelling's significant themes and problems. It is interesting to note that White chooses to emphasize the same two works. His first essay contrasts the explicitly teleological, indeed theological, foundations of the theory of history enunciated in the 18oo system with the problematic, apparently unfounded teleology of Habermas's vision of history as voiced in...