Abstract
In this paper, by following the hint given in Heidegger’s noteworthy statement in his lectures on Schelling that “freedom is not a property of man, but man a property of freedom,” I first consider Schelling’s Notion of “Freedom” and “Unground.” Behind this new conception of freedom (i.e., as the capacity for language) lies that “peak” of Schelling’s treaties on freedom, namely, the “Un- ground,” a notion which now can be interpreted as the “Background of silence.” Behind the basic philosophical thesis of the text that “Willing is original Being,” the religious dimension of the “ineffability” of the Unground is hidden. By using the notion of a “non-dualistic difference between form and background” in our interpretation, we can understand anew the relation of the Unground to the distinction between existence(A) and ground(B). The Unground would be neither A(existence/form) nor B(the ground/background), but would be whole which transcends both A and B, that is, the hidden manifestation, the self-forgetting, non-abiding, all-present Background of silence which lies the fundamental openness of the possibility of human freedom (i.e. language). The Unground as Background, more than simply a matter of “undifferentiation” or an “abyss,” would be rather, as “pure affirmation,” “love,” or the “inner sky”(i.e. the soul), the open place of freedom as the essence of the expressional nature of a freedom embracing the world.
