Abyss of freedom

Schelling's Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809) takes up the great philosophical problematic of freedom, a problematic that is rarely mentioned in contemporary philosophical discourse, as if the question of freedom is now passé, or already exhausted by the determinations that have been applied to it. In other words, as Adorno (1987: 214–15) puts it, freedom appears to have now become ‘obsolete’ or aged. Yet freedom is precisely that which no predicates can ever exhaust and no determinations saturate. If the question of freedom no longer appears to us as compelling, this shows us only that, now more than ever before, the ecstasy or excess of freedom consists in its releasing itself, while summoning up predicates and determinations, from these very determinations and predicates. Likewise, if the question of freedom no longer appears to us as a prominent question in our contemporary critical discourses, this only shows us that those discourses – being no longer able to release the unconditioned in us – are languishing in that self-satisfaction which consists in being enclosed in the immanence of self-presence, or in various closures of totalisation, which is then predicated and determined on the basis of presently given entities. To most of us, then, it appears that the thought of freedom is no longer a requirement for our ‘post-metaphysical’ discourses; and yet at the same time, whenever we invoke an idea of ‘right’ or of ‘justice’ in our practical political debates, we presuppose the possibility of freedom; in other words, these ideas are grounded on the very possibility of freedom as such, whether explicitly or tacitly. In such debates we no longer feel it is a requirement to ask: But whence is this freedom? While on the one hand, freedom is the ‘catchword’ or ‘password’ in various debates, most often determined by the mass media, in which issues like ‘rights’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ are evoked, its absence in our contemporary critical-philosophical discourses is more decidedly marked. There the question of freedom is regarded as an obsolete metaphysical problem.