Being in centro: The Anthropology of Schelling’s Human Freedom Michael Vater Abstract: Schelling presents the 1809 freedom essay as the idealistic flowering of a vision of system he always held. He is not disingenuous but somewhat perplexing in claiming that the system always was complete in nuce, even though not expounded completely. Tilliette captured the ambiguity nicely in designating Schelling’s oeuvre «une philosophie en devenir» 1 . This mid-career essay must be read backwards to the earliest essays republished with it—especially to their views of willing, freedom, and moral responsibility—and simultaneously forward to the late philosophy’s analysis of God’s freedom as freedom from being, even necessary being. I locate Freedom’s fulcrum in the novel anthropology or affective psychology that Schelling brings to the philosophy of will. Material freedom, capacity for good or evil, is assessed by norms of psychological maturation, whether conscious or unconscious forces determine behavior. If ‘moral necessity’ or normativity is the lens for assessing agency, formal self-determination moves from the domain of deliberation to a pre- or unconscious option for good or evil, and one’s character unfolds necessarily. _________ The 1809 Investigations appeared in a collection of Schelling’s earlier essays meant to announce his turn from a transcendental idealism aligned with realism or Naturphilosophie to an explicit idealism 2 . Schelling remarks that this essay and its sole precursor, Philosophy and Religion, are conversational in tone although much of their contents might be rigorously argued, and that they merely signal the turn to idealism that subsequent studies will develop 3 . The essay’s title, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, invites reflection on what Schelling’s previous versions of system offered as the basis of philosophy and how the turn to the problem of freedom alters the program of objective idealism. The new direction replaces previous static accounts that made absolute identity or subject-objectivity 1 «Le développment demeure la grande énigme,, et la principal intérêt de la philosophie schellingienne. . . A condition que l’on enlève à l’image sa resonance pejorative, nous n’aurons pas de repugnance à récupérer l’enseigne de Protée». X. Tilliette, Schelling, une philosphie en devenir. I: le Systéme vivant 1794-1821, Paris, 1969, pp. 14-15. 2 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling Historisch-kritische Ausgabe I, 17, C. Binkelmanm, T. Buchheim, T. Frisch, V. Müller-Lüneschloss, eds., Stuttgart, 2018, pp. 25-26/ Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters, P. Hayden-Roy, tr., in Philosophy of German Idealism, Ernst Behler, ed., New York, 1987, pp. 217-18. The earlier essays had argued that transcendental idealism is oriented toward action and presupposes freedom, that freedom is absolute necessitation or self-determination, and that the absolute identity is best viewed as the end of action, not a state of consciousness abolished in a singular intuition. 3 Ibid. p. 174 n./p. 279 n. 36. 1