«Ma una difficoltà incombe ancora sulla libertà...»

The famous Critical Elucidation of the Analytic in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason names two difficulties for human freedom: the one and first consists in how a deterministic mechanism of nature is to be reconciled with actions arising from free- dom; the other consists in the question of how it could at all be thought consistently that a being determining its actions freely through itself could at the same time be the creature of an omnipotent originator of the world. The essay shows that Schelling takes up, above all, the second difficulty repeatedly throughout almost his entire work, at times even explicitly, and that he attempts to find a better solution than the one Kant himself was able to offer. For the latter has the disadvantage that human freedom could have no real co-shaping influence on the historical course of things in the world itself. Only in his last work, the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philos- ophy, does Schelling arrive at a conceptual solution that also satisfies himself, one that truly withstands the pre-emptive objections that Kant had already anticipated in that critical elucidation.