The ontology of Evil : Schelling and Pareyson

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the question of Evil in the philosophies of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Luigi Pareyson. Both Schelling and Pareyson shift the discussion of Good and Evil from the more traditional sense in which those notions have been understood as moral matters to regarding them rather as ontological forces that ground human life. One of the primary goals of this dissertation is to think through the meaning and importance of this shift for both Schelling's and Pareyson's philosophies.The first chapter analyses Schelling's understanding of Evil and Freedom by arguing for a strong degree of continuity between Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and his early Philosophy of Nature. By so doing, the thesis argues that Schelling's philosophy can be understood more effectively as an ontology of immanence, aimed at grasping the material conditions of the possibility not only of Evil, but also of life. That is, the thesis argues that Schelling's discourse on Evil is ontological, since it relates Evil itself to the grounding forces of Being, and immanent, since it excludes any form of transcendent or supernatural Being.The second chapter is devoted to Pareyson's interpretation of the question of Evil by focusing on his reading of Schelling's philosophy and by highlighting the religious and transcendent nature of Pareyson's speculative reading of the issue. Drawing on the conclusions of the previous chapter, it is argued that Pareyson's approach is unviable - or problematic at best - for two main reasons: first, Pareyson's transcendent account of being is abstract and arbitrary and does not fit with Schelling's thought; second, maintaining the discourse of Being on the level of immanence leads both to avoiding the abovementioned unviability of a transcendent explanation and to building a more robust understanding of such a question.Building on the results of the two previous chapters, the final chapter further advocates for the fruitfulness of a philosophical perspective that addresses Evil in the context of an ontology of immanence. Such a perspective, it is argued, can also lead to a better comprehension of the grounding conditions of life and experience, and to an understanding of freedom in terms of Widerstand (resistance). In this context, resistance has to be conceived of as a fundamental ontological disposition of human beings, which means the inevitability of being in opposition to something and of resisting its occurrence because of the impossibility of being (and doing) otherwise.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English