Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Ontological Distinction between Ground and Existence in Friedrich Schelling’s System of Freedom

The Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is the most coherent form of Schelling’s attempt to describe the absolute system or the system of freedom. For the first time in the twentieth century, with Heidegger's careful reference to his treatise on freedom and his repeated commentary in 1936 and 1941, the importance of this treatise in the history of Western thought became apparent. Heidegger focuses on Schilling’s thinking, especially with Schilling’s treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, research into the formation of the system, and the question of the possibility of a system of freedom as a question of the essence of being. Schilling bases his research on the system of freedom on a correct ontological basis in order to transcend formal freedom as an independent determinant of mechanical causation and to achieve the true definition of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. And after proposing the inadequacy of formal freedom in the idealist systems before it, it introduces the real and living concept of freedom as the ability to do good and evil. Heidegger demonstrates the independence of the Schelling system in comparison with the Fichte and Hegel systems, and his innovations in response to issues such as evil, freedom, identity, and the relation of being and “is” are most evident in the metaphysical realm of the will; however, remaining within the metaphorical framework also prevents Schilling from approaching the question of the truth of existence. Schilling’s important issue is the elimination of the opposition between freedom and necessity, which, in his view, is the focus of philosophy. For this reason, the discussion of freedom is at the heart of the system in its true sense, and in his opinion, his dissertation is for the first time the design of a system based on the idea of human freedom. The possibility of a system of freedom must be created in accordance with the principle of identity, which does not ignore the meaning of the relation of theology. In Schelling’s Heideggerian interpretation of the principle of identity, the priority of ontological issues in matters of theological nature such as all theism is given more importance and the question of all theism as a question of the system to the question of “is” and how to connect the structure of beings as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Heidegger’s interpretation of the concept of the system of freedom according to Schelling with emphasis on the ontological distinction between ground and existence. This study seeks to answer these two questions: how does the design of the real concept of freedom open the way to explain the ontological foundation of the possibility of evil and the possibility of freedom in the system? Also, how does the distinction between ground and existence lead to Schelling's main goal in resolving the conflict between system and freedom? Moreover, according to Heidegger, to what extent does this distinction arise from Schilling’s metaphysical and subject-centered thinking?