Schelling's Plan

When Kant had emerged from his dogmatic slumber thanks to David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (https://research.library.mun.ca/9605/), where he argued that because of deterministic cause-effect relationship there could be no metaphysical freedom of will, and only freedom in contrast to external constraints (e.g. prison), the former was perturbed. Kant's problem of how to square the circle of the need for free will so that accepting God would have to be a conscious act has defined philosophy essentially to this day. Kant decided on a noumenon (thing-in-itself domain) and phenomenon (thing-as-perceived domain) and suggested that there was a "back door" to the thing in itself. What that back door could be and how to access it, I am not sure if he had ever concluded. There is the a priori synthetic category that he preached but could not seem to bring into being, described in the Prolegomena as a more accessible version of the Critique of Pure Reason. Short of an exhaustive searching of everything not-X (an Ariadne's Thread logical approach), however, it is not clear what approach could be taken within the phenomenal world.

The major thinkers after Kant (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer) all took on the task of completing Kant's idea. Schopenhauer published his Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will in 1839, and agreed with Hume: there is no such thing as freedom of the will. Everything is either Will or Representation (Vorstellung), and the Will remains inaccessible from the phenomenal world, though it is what drives both humanity and nature and we are connected subconsciously through, e.g. somnambulism and oneirogonorrhea (Freud owes a debt to Schopenhauer). Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all argued for some sort of free will as necessary, and Schelling's declaration was the most to the point and interesting. He suggested that we are like characters in a play, and our one free act is to choose our role at the beginning of time and then play that role. It is interesting that this notion comes up in conversations that I have with others, especially when they have been through some form of trauma or conflict that has defined their life: this was the role they chose to play and they provide support to others within their circle.

This idea of a free choice of roles is an interesting one. It can even be contextualized within Eastern religions (which Schopenhauer was essentially one of the first to embrace given that they were only accessible for the first time to Western audiences in the early 19th century due to colonialist and Orientalist attitudes of Eastern culture as inferior). For example, karma states that your behaviour in one life decides what you will be in the next life. If you are good, then you will come back as something better (an animal, a more caring, gentler human being). If you are evil, you will come back as something worse (a mosquito, a more loathed individual). One can then suggest that you make your Schellingian choice of your first role, and then you play each role within the world and once you die, you wait on the sidelines to be "tagged in" again to play your next role. For a long time, I worried about death and non-existence with the most haunting words in humanity being The Future Lasts Forever, the name of the famous existential schizophrenic Louis Althusser, as it implies that there is an infinite amount of time when we do not exist. However, I have since wondered about whether non-existence could actually be a trait that would be selected for, and there seems to be at least a partial connection through DNA to offspring, etc. Besides, when we come to exist in this world as an "I", there is no "pre-I" that we could ever be aware of. So why not just assume that we are here for awhile and then get tagged in at some point in the future, and put the existential angst of death to rest once and for all?

In addition to this, one could suggest that limits to freedom go far beyond what we are aware of in the phenomenal world (e.g. a pair of handcuffs), since we are all also bags of hormones and magnetic fields. How do the positions of gigantic magnetars or the Sun giving off its radiation affect our minds, bodies, and souls? It's impossible to know. Perhaps it is all scripted and path-determinate due to the laws of physics stemming from the very first particle. Whilst in one of my more active periods of thinking recently, I conceived of how it could be possible that we live in a cyclotronic universe where particles and forces simply conserve forces of motion ad infinitum through the path-dependent recycling of momentum from the first particle / anti-particle / wave / bubble (or whatever happened... some stuff in there about non-linear Mendeleevian sequences and other crazy stuff) movement. It helps me sleep at night. Sometimes.