Schelling’s Theory of Judgment and the Interpretation of the Copula

This paper aims to reconstruct Schelling’s ‘theory of judgment’ following his own account in The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter).I suggest that Schelling develops a notion of judgment as ‘separation of an indistinct, undifferentiated unity in order to achieve a higher, explicit unity’ throughout his different phases, and that the different ways of interpreting the copula correspond systematically to the moments implied by judgment. Furthermore, I underline how his particular understanding of judgment and its moments (undifferentiated unity, separation, explicit unity), in relation to different senses of the copula, allows Schelling to relate the structure of judgment to existence, to underline the difference between potentiality and actuality, and, especially, to discover a structure of judgment that makes room for freedom. Finally, I briefly connect the tension between an identity ‘previous’ to any subject-object distinction and the free activity of uniting what is separate, as found in Schelling’s notion of judgment, to the tension between ‘embodied coping’ and conceptual normative activity in contemporary debates.