Clarity and Virtue – Schelling on Necessity, Freedom and the Good

The paper aims to demonstrate that a proper understanding of the identity of necessity and freedom, as revealed in tragedy, is crucial for interpreting Schelling's dense and complex theory of good and evil in the Freiheitsschrift. Building upon this, the paper will propose a conception of the good that not only avoids but actively rejects the conventional view of the subject as self-determining through self-conscious activity. The central claim is that the identity of necessity and freedom should be understood as a process of clarifying the element of necessity, which tragedy presents as fate and the Freiheitsschrift as "the ground". This clarification, in turn, provides the foundation for understanding goodness or virtue, and their connection with the first-person perspective.