The Problem of Freedom and Evil in Kant’s Thought (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone) and Schelling’s (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom)

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show the influence of Kant’s concept of freedom and evil on Schelling’s thought presented in his so-called writing on freedom. In the first part, I show the difficulties with explaining evil as a moral category within the framework of Kant's conception of freedom as rational autonomy, which is presented in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and in Critique of Practical Reason: Kant identifies freedom with obedience to moral law and in this manner he is not able to lay the foundations for making a choice between good and evil, nor the personal and individual nature of freedom of man as a sensual-rational totality. Then I show the unsatisfactory attempt to solve them in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, in which he takes up the issue of the possibility of evil as an act of freedom within the framework of the theory of maxims: Kant is not able to define the status of the propensity for evil as the extra-empirical basis for evil nor its generality. In the second part, I show Schelling’s original concept of freedom, in which he exhibits the individual and personal nature of freedom. This concept allowed him to make an attempt to solve the problem of evil taken over from Kant.