ABSTRACT
In 1809, when Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling wrote his essay on Human Freedom (Philosophische Untersuchung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit), the German provinces were under French occupation. Schelling himself had gained his appointment at the new University of Munich after the French had taken over the former Bavarian university in Ingolstadt. Schelling wrote in a context of immediate threat to the principles of freedom. Although he endeavoured to develop his argument upon Kantian principles of ‘general’ and ‘necessary’ action, he was not content to reiterate the ‘categorical imperative’ on purely rational grounds. Like William Hazlitt, he sought to humanize the argument for social, political, and individual ethics by addressing the primal triggers for action. Although Hazlitt's Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) bears obvious similarities with the aesthetics of disinterestedness and the concept of freedom in Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790), there is also much in his argument that also anticipates Schelling's frustration with ‘wandering the honourable way of Kant’. 1 In examining the concept of aesthetic disinterest as elucidated in Kant, Hazlitt, and Schelling, I will demonstrate how ostensible ‘disinterest’ actually contributes to a broader range of arguments on human freedom, in relation both to the older free will and determinism debate as well as to the more current ideological concerns with benevolence and progress. In refuting the mechanistic implications of associationist doctrine, Hazlitt and Schelling address the workings of the brain, perceptual response, and cognitive process.
