Abstract

Against the traditional – that is to say, Judaic – conception of morality as a submissive obedience to God’s commandments, and contrary to Kant’s moral doctrine that would consider both morality and religion as the consciousness of an object that the individual must attempt to reach, Schelling’s System from 1804 puts forward the idea of an « absolute morality » wherein knowledge and being are identical, the self is one with God – and thus also with himself – and can only act morally as a result of this union. We propose a new translation of this passage preceded by a short presentation.