matriculating my philosophy BA in a couple months so i figured why not acquaint myself with the good folks of german idealism - those three arbitrary stars are reflective of what i did manage to catch in this treatise and my accompanying confusion with the work's less lucid segments (i gather that schelling in general is a rather capricious thinker). schelling basically attempts a massively ambitious dialectical reconciliation of the age-old problem of evil with the notion of a perfect god while 'rescuing' spinoza's pantheism from its lack of ascribed free will. thus his conception of god acts out of free will as opposed to ontological necessity, and the "self-revelation" of divine nature in the "nature of the ground" involves a complete separation of the will that nonetheless retains the larger oneness of god. if complete freedom does not exist in the ground will and we posit a larger system of necessary cause and effect, god does not truly distinguish himself from his subjects, which is obviously untenable.

his arguments up till this point are logically sound but so abstract that they make for a frustratingly opaque ethical system, namely, what does the end goal of the human ground's "yearning and understanding" of the divine will actually resemble in the flesh? what does it practically mean for an individual to assert their peripheral "ground will" in the central place of god's will, and what does this subsequent destabilisation of "the whole" mean for schelling's larger ethical considerations? anyway, i've half a mind to walk around and wait for some epiphany to strike me and the other half to dredge jstor's catalogue right away for some godsend of a german idealist scholar to help elucidate these concepts, but i'm slightly drunk at the time of writing so i'm just going to do the former for now.