their own right but rather as aspects of the absolute, it becomes nonsensical to speak of any finite being having freedom, or in fact to speak of finite beings at all. The latter has implications not for the freedom of individual beings, but for the nature of the system as a whole: the claim that all content arises from the absolute through rational necessity entails that the open future which was ensured by the Naturphilosophie drops out of the system. If the progression of things from the absolute follows a rationally determined necessary course, then there are no alternative possibilities, and therefore no open future. These considerations therefore contribute to the change outlined above in Schelling’s conception of freedom. This transition is made explicit when we consider Schelling’s account of the freedom of the absolute outlined above: the absolute is free as it is the only being which is fully causally active and is determined only through its own necessary nature rather than by anything external. This conception is remarkably close to Spinoza’s in its claim that freedom does not consist in the ability to actualise any of a number of possibilities, but rather in the ability to be self-determining to the greatest degree possible given the absence of these possibilities. Arguably these changes to Schelling’s conception of freedom are necessitated by his claims in the Ideas and Outline: the Naturphilosophie claims that subjects are part of nature, and that all of nature is an expression of the absolute; which entails that subjects are similarly expressions of the absolute and therefore cannot enact their own wills but rather are appearances of the will of the absolute. This conclusion, which informs the conception of freedom based on pre-established harmony in the System of Transcendental Idealism, and which then gives way to the Spinozist account of freedom in the Identitӓtssystem, is therefore the logical consequence of the compatibilism that we find in the Naturphilosophie. As Kosch argues: Schelling’s achievement, in contrast with Hegel and the later Fichte, is to have recognised that this [compatibilist] position becomes absurd when taken to its logical conclusion – to have realised that the Kantian conception of freedom is not preserved in this form of absolute idealism, and to have shown that this view is no different, in its moral consequences, from Spinoza’s. Transition to the Freiheitsschrift: Bruno and Philosophy and Religion
absolute to the world, individuals to the whole, human freedom, causation, and many other aspects of his system. This highlights that what underpins Schelling’s entire account is that it is fundamentally holistic: the claims that Schelling is able to make depend on his ontology as a whole. Not only is his power-based ontology central to his account, but his wider claims about the nature of the natural process ground his conceptions of causality, organism, and essence on which his solution to the problems of individuation and human freedom is based. The natural process in turn is derived from Schelling’s account of the absolute: the nature of the natural process follows from the nature of the absolute and the particular part/whole relation which characterises it. All of this indicates a difficulty for the contemporary metaphysician hoping to utilise some of Schelling’s solutions: his system is so fundamentally interlinked as a whole that it is difficult to reject some of his commitments while retaining others; his philosophy comes as a whole, or not at all. It may be possible for the contemporary pan-dispositionalist to attempt solutions along similar lines, but I have shown above that these solutions come with their own difficulties. What I want to demonstrate below is that these solutions will fail if they are attempted against the backdrop of an ontology which does not support this kind of account. What Schelling’s holistic solution to these problems demonstrates is that securing individuation, control, and ultimately agency requires a rethinking of our concept of nature as a whole rather than just some aspects of it. Schelling’s solution depends on rejecting mechanistic, dualistic, and reductive conceptions of nature; this allows him to provide an account of causality as reciprocal, and to give the account of the nature of natural objects and agency that I have been outlining throughout this project. Mayr and the Importance of Holism In this section I want to demonstrate that unless this problematic conception of nature is challenged, the problems that I have outlined above will be difficult for the pan-dispositionalist to solve. I do this by looking a chapter of Mayr’s Understanding Human Agency where he deals with a form of one of the worries that I have been discussing in this chapter: the question of whether the causal