D. C. Schindler’s The Perfection of Freedom: Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel between the Ancients and the Moderns presents a sustained philosophical attempt to unseat the tacit hegemony of a merely possibilistic conception of freedom and to recover, through an exacting dialogue with Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel, an account of freedom as actuality, completion, and form. Schindler’s wager is that the modern identification of freedom with an abstract capacity to choose—an identification that often masquerades as neutrality precisely because it withholds any determinate content—secretly hollows out the very good it professes to exalt. When freedom is proclaimed as an end yet defined as a means, it is converted from a bonum honestum into a bonum utile and so deprives itself of intrinsic intelligibility; in such a conversion, the absence of orientation becomes the purpose, an inversion that bears, for Schindler, the unmistakable signature of nihilism. In place of that reduction, the book advances an ontology of freedom: to be free is not first to be able to posit alternatives, but to participate in a form that, by determining and completing, liberates potency into actuality. The book’s title is thereby literal; form is not freedom’s external brake but its perfection.
The stakes of this proposal become felt once Schindler clarifies the deep grammar of the reigning modern intuitions he opposes. If the contemporary political imagination often begins from an image of the person as an unencumbered chooser whose power stands above and prior to any specific good, then a standard liberal architectonic follows: institutions must be arranged to radiate and receive this sovereign power so that agents may advance their preferred conceptions of the good while remaining unbound to any of them. John Rawls becomes emblematic at this point: freedom as the moral power to form, revise, and rationally pursue a conception of the good, together with the status of persons as self-authenticating sources of valid claims, renders freedom into an absolute that is independent of any particular good and justified by nothing beyond itself. Such a concept of liberty may be subtle and generous in its procedural aspirations, but the very characterization of freedom as a freestanding power that stands over ends manifests precisely the possibilistic posture Schindler means to interrogate. It is not that determinate ends are proscribed in practice, but that, conceptually, ends are subordinated to the indeterminate primacy of choice. What results, Schindler argues, is an entire family of oppositions—between freedom and limit, person and community, freedom and nature, subjective will and objective order—that recapitulate the initial abstraction at every level of ethical and social life. To recover freedom as actuality is therefore to retrieve the intrinsic bond between freedom and form, where the latter names not mere exterior shape but the structured completeness of a living whole.
The recovery proceeds by way of three German interlocutors whose common resolve, differently accented, is to hold together what a polarized discourse too quickly pries apart: the modern affirmation of the subject’s spontaneity and the ancient intuition of purposive order. It is not insignificant that Schindler reads these thinkers in a Goethean key: form is not the negation of life but its manifestation, the inner law in which self-limitation and self-articulation coincide. The Goethean reminder that definiteness of form is a mark of excellence—because it is a power to set one’s own bounds—provides a conceptual overture to Schindler’s treatment of Schelling’s ontology of organization and, more deeply, to the book’s thesis that limit, rightly understood, is a perfection rather than a privation. The argument is not antiquarian but diagnostic: only a conception in which form and freedom mutually implicate one another can address the pathologies of a culture that praises freedom as supreme yet experiences its exercise as fragmentation.
Schindler’s account of Schiller turns on the emergence of lebende Gestalt, the living form, as a decisive philosophical discovery. Beauty, for Schiller, is not a merely decorative supplement to cognition or morality; it is the appearance in which the inner principle of a being takes hold of itself and so radiates unity, a phenomenon in which the polarity of form and matter is reconciled without being flattened. Schindler insists that the term living form does not dilute rigor with mere aestheticism; it deepens the earlier Schillerian meditations on form by preserving the irreducible polarity of matter and form within an expressive whole, and in doing so, it locates freedom in the very vitality with which form becomes inwardly enacted. The point is not that marble breathes, but that a sculpted block may manifest a spontaneity proper to its unity such that what appears is a self-ordering presence rather than the imposition of an alien schema. This is why Schiller can describe beauty as the manifestation of freedom in appearance, the sensible signature of a being’s self-possession without arbitrariness, and why the noble soul in Schiller becomes emblematic of freedom’s expansive form: not content to be free in itself, it liberates by giving things around it the stamp of autonomy, thereby disclosing that freedom is inherently generous and communicative.
Interpreting Schiller in this way allows Schindler to claim that the turn beyond modern subjectivism is already underway in the very phenomenon of beauty as living form. But he is not naïve about the fragility of this achievement. If living form is to avoid dissolving into aesthetic surface, there must be a deeper ontological rooting of freedom in being itself. Here Schindler’s transition to Schelling is both historical and argumentative: the passage from aesthetic heautonomy to organic order requires a philosophy of nature in which the organism functions as the point at which freedom and necessity no longer compete but are shown to be structurally coincident. Otherwise, form’s inner spontaneity risks either collapsing into sheer contingency or being reduced to the projection of a subject. The answer, for Schindler’s Schelling, is the organism as self-limiting infinity, a closed system in which the reciprocity of cause and effect is not a mechanical stalemate but the very signature of life. Such organization is not the loss of freedom but its condition of possibility, because only a form that determines itself from within can be genuinely complete, and only such completeness can be free.
Schelling’s mature reflections, as Schindler reconstructs them, therefore unfold as a patient articulation of how the highest freedom appears as the power to set one’s own bounds. The decisive reversal here is elemental: definiteness is not negation, and limitation is not the enemy of spirit; rather, the integrity of a form announces the triumph of spirit as organization. In this scheme, true infinity is not formlessness but the power of self-containment that bestows wholeness; in modern terms, the sheer expansion of subjective spontaneity proves less free than the complex interplay of self-affirmation and self-limitation that organization embodies. Consequently, a mechanistic physics that dissolves nature into discrete parts has as its twin a conception of freedom as sheer capacity for arbitrary choice; both evacuate form of intrinsic significance. Schelling’s organicism, by contrast, displays the simultaneity of freedom and form, and thus nature itself becomes the prelude in which spirit recognizes its own order as already intimated in the world. Only an organism can be free.
Schindler presses this insight further by showing how Schelling’s life-long project can be read as a pursuit of an ontological conception of freedom, a freedom that reverberates beyond the human will because it is rooted in the depths of being. The literary ambitions of Schelling’s late writings—dialogue, novella, epic—are not an aesthetic dalliance but a formal discipline: philosophy must take an organic form if it would think freedom according to its object. For this reason, Schelling’s claim that in the highest instance there is no being other than will must be heard not as a voluntarist indictment of order but as the affirmation that form and will coincide in a living articulation. The turn from organism to incarnation in the late Schelling then appears, in Schindler’s rendering, as an attempt to think how finite form suffers fall and redemption without abandoning the identity of freedom and order that organic nature had already revealed.
If Schiller offers an aesthetic breakthrough beyond subjectivism and Schelling an ontological recovery of organic order, Hegel, in Schindler’s hands, advances a social articulation of freedom as Sittlichkeit. It is here that the book’s thesis reaches its most public concretion. Hegel’s concept of spirit, Schindler emphasizes, is irreducibly communal; only in and as a social whole does freedom become wirklich, a substantial actuality, rather than an abstract potential lodged in an isolated will. To say that freedom is the soul of philosophy and the goal of spirit is, for Hegel, at the same time to say that freedom assumes a body in the structures of ethical life; the “I” that is “We,” and the “We” that is “I,” is not a rhetorical flourish but a metaphysical formula for the form of freedom. In this sense, Sittlichkeit names the living good, the concept of freedom that has become the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness; it is neither a utopian projection nor a minimal juridical order but the second nature in which reason’s normativity has been acculturated into shared practices, institutions, and forms of life.
Schindler’s exposition brings out the architecture of Sittlichkeit not as a mere taxonomy of institutions but as an ontology of social form. Because objective spirit is the actuality of freedom, ethical life is a substantial entity that grounds the self-consciousness of its members. The paradox is deliberate: laws and institutions, in Hegel’s view as read by Schindler, have being in and for themselves; they are not simply instruments at the disposal of sovereign subjects but the objective condition in which subjective spirit comes to its own. Freedom thus appears as a twofold belonging: individuals possess rights and realize their autonomy precisely as members of an ethical whole, and that whole is actual only in and through the differentiated subjectivity of its members. This reciprocity, which refuses the false choice between collectivism and individualism, is what Schindler means by freedom as social form.
Because Schindler never treats the three figures as museum pieces but as partners in a philosophical drama, he also thematizes the internal tensions that threaten each contribution from within. The Schillerian discovery of living form is haunted by the risk of a bourgeois aestheticism in which appearance is severed from ontological depth; only if living form is anchored in nature and sustained by the social can it continue to mediate freedom and law without colluding with sentimentality. Thus Schindler suggests that Schiller’s gestures toward a philosophy of nature and a political philosophy that recognizes the social character of subjectivity require systematization; this is what Schelling and Hegel in different registers supply. Schelling’s own project confronts the perennial oscillation between system and freedom; Schindler shows that the mature Schelling refuses the explosion of system in the name of liberty and instead labors at an integration in which the very closedness of organic form is the seal of freedom. In Hegel’s case, where form becomes the objective shape of ethical life, the risk is a rational formalism that dissolves the living contingency of spirit into conceptual necessity; Schindler argues that this is avoided only when Sittlichkeit is grasped as the living good rather than as an abstract ideal, an understanding that depends upon the notion of freedom as actuality rather than as bare capacity.
At several decisive junctures, Schindler returns to the theme that the great modern debate between the “ancients” and the “moderns” is misdescribed if presented as a sterile opposition. The German tradition he reconstructs neither abandons classical teleology for subjective arbitrariness nor evacuates modern autonomy into premodern heteronomy; it seeks a synthesis in which the modern insight into self-determination is saved from self-cancellation precisely by reintegration into the classical sense of form. Hence the book is not a call to surrender modern liberty to an external order but to think order as the inner actuality of freedom. The continuous insistence that polarized thinking leaves out the unity that precedes opposition allows Schindler to re-locate familiar distinctions—negative and positive liberty, freedom and law, self and other—within a more capacious horizon where limit is not an alien imposition but the mode through which a power becomes itself.
The point is not primarily historical, as Schindler himself remarks; it is systematic. That is why the book refrains from giving pride of place to the standard loci of the contemporary free-will debate. It says almost nothing about the mechanics of choosing, compatibilism with causal necessity, or the delimitation of responsibility by coercion, not because these are unimportant, but because they presuppose the very framework he wishes to question: they treat libertas as a faculty of choice and so leave intact the instrumentalizing reduction. Against this horizon, the project proposes a reconstrual of freedom as a formed reality to be enjoyed rather than a tool to be wielded—enjoyment here naming a participation in a perfection whose intelligibility does not derive from something beyond itself.
What follows from such a reconstrual is neither quietism nor authoritarianism but a different image of moral, cultural, and political life. If the achievement of form is the achievement of freedom, then education is not the arming of sovereign subjects with techniques of choice but the initiation into living forms that liberate potencies into act; architecture becomes legible as a pedagogy of space; marriage appears not as the contractual management of preferences but as a school of form in which duty becomes nature; scientific method is seen not as the domination of facts by hypotheses but as a patient apprenticeship to the forms of things. Schindler is explicit that the question of freedom is inextricably bound up with questions that seem, from within a possibilistic frame, merely tangential: the nature of light, the distinctiveness of organisms, the texture of good style, the relation of academic disciplines, even the theological consideration of creation. Such breadth is not eclecticism but a test of the thesis: if freedom is actuality, it must show itself in the formed realities we inhabit, not only in the interior punctum of decision.
The resulting portrait of freedom has a striking ethical and political profile. In Hegelian terms, Sittlichkeit as social form means that the ethical whole—the family, civil society, and the state—constitutes the second nature in which subjectivity attains its freedom. The living good is not an evaporated ideal but the concrete substance of communal life; its objectivity never effaces individuality because the whole only exists through the differentiated agency of its members. Inversely, individuality is not a pre-social monad but the interiorization of a common form. The rights that moderns prize are not thereby negated but embedded; they become intelligible as moments of the ethical life rather than as trumps projected from a presocial nowhere. This is why Schindler can read Hegel as violating the logic of liberal individualism in the name of the very freedoms liberalism wishes to defend, and why the apparent tension between freedom and institution is, in his view, a symptom of the initial abstraction he opposes.
Throughout the study, Schindler’s methodological decision to read these figures in the spirit of Goethe—without suppressing their fidelity to Kant—proves more than an interpretive flourish. It supplies the hermeneutic that allows form to be seen as both transcendent and immanent, surpassing matter without abandoning it, and thus capable of appearing in beauty, organizing nature, and taking a social body in ethical life. Schiller’s living form shows freedom’s grace as the harmony of soul and body; Schelling’s ontology exhibits freedom’s dignity as the inner law of organization; Hegel’s Sittlichkeit displays freedom’s substance as the communal form in which reason becomes second nature. In each case, freedom is not exhausted by the act of choice but is the mode of being of a formed whole that liberates through determination.
The book repeatedly returns, finally, to the theological horizon implied in its series context and explicit in its concluding gestures. If form is the perfection of freedom, then the deepest reconciliation between the true and the free cannot be a compromise between an external law and an interior spontaneity; it must be an identity in which law is the shape of love and freedom the radiance of truth. To speak, as Schindler sometimes does, of the gift of self is not to moralize aesthetics or politicize metaphysics but to name the inner logic by which form communicates itself: the whole, precisely as whole, expands. Within such a frame, it is intelligible why Schindler would suggest that a modernity organically rooted in ancient and classical Christian wisdom might overcome a nihilism born of means without ends. The proposal is neither restorationist nor polemical; it is constructive, because it reasons that freedom cannot survive on a diet of indeterminate possibility. It must be fed by form.
The strength of Schindler’s intervention lies not only in the expository care with which he reads difficult texts but also in the unembarrassed boldness of the claim that form and freedom coincide. When he writes that the conventional view’s fixation on possibility sets in motion predictable oppositions—individual against community, freedom against reason, law, nature, and desire—he is not indulging in a rhetorical algebra; he is inviting the reader to test the hypothesis across the whole field of human concerns. The test yields a coherent result. Where form is treated as an alien limit, freedom shrinks into assertion, and the space of common life fractures into procedures designed to keep assertions from colliding. Where form is recovered as actuality, limit is experienced as enabling and measure as liberation, and the human good can again be named without embarrassment.
None of this requires that the great liberal achievements be discarded; on the contrary, Schindler’s analysis proposes that they be retrieved within a higher synthesis. When Hegel calls the state the ethical whole and the absolute end of reason, this is easily misheard as an apotheosis of the political that threatens personal dignity; Schindler’s patient reconstruction insists that such a reading rests on the very individualist premises Hegel rejects. The question is not whether the person is sacrificed to the state, but whether the person can be a person apart from the living forms that make personal existence possible at all. To the extent that ethical life really is a second nature—neither a prison nor a mere convention—freedom is not lost in it but, paradoxically, found.
What the book finally offers is not a system to be assented to once and for all but a disciplined mode of attention. It asks the reader to notice how frequently the modern imagination equates freedom with the subtraction of form and how often that subtraction produces impotence rather than agency. It then leads by example through three thinkers who, each in his idiom, exposes the abstraction at the root of this imagination and supplies an alternative in which actuality is not the death of freedom but its life. Schiller discovers that freedom becomes visible as living form; Schelling uncovers that freedom is the world’s own principle of organization; Hegel shows that freedom becomes substance in the structures of ethical life. Taken together, they allow Schindler to claim that form is the perfection of freedom in aesthetic, organic, and social registers alike.
The result is a philosophical intervention that is quietly radical. To think freedom as form is to reconfigure what counts as a liberation. It is no longer the transition from limit to limitlessness, from determination to indeterminacy, but the ascent from potency to act, from scattered capacity to a measured fullness in which a power possesses itself by being at work. Such a conception preserves the modern experience of interiority without isolating it from the world; it honors the ancient reverence for order without subsuming persons into anonymous wholes. In a time tempted to treat the highest good as the institutionalization of choice and the deepest justice as the management of rival claims, Schindler’s book dares to say that a culture becomes more free when it becomes more formed, and that the highest dignity of the person is not to remain unbounded, but to belong to a living whole worthy of devotion. That this claim is argued not by denunciation but by a rich retrieval of German thought, carefully placed between ancients and moderns, gives the book a distinct intellectual nobility.
Measured by its own criterion, the book succeeds where it matters. It does not invite the reader to admire a shapely ideal from afar, nor does it consign freedom to the instantaneous will. It invites participation in a formed reality—first aesthetically, then ontologically, then socially—so that freedom can be recognized in the texture of life rather than only in the moment of decision. If the contemporary reduction of liberty to choice contains, as Schindler argues, an interior contradiction that yields a subtle nihilism, then to receive his argument is not merely to accept a thesis but to be re-educated in the love of form. The liberation that follows is not spectacular; it is steady and expansive. Duty becomes nature; organization becomes the intelligible splendor of being; ethical life becomes the home of spirit. In this way, freedom ceases to be a lonely power and becomes again what it was for a different wisdom: the flourishing of form.
Schindler’s closing conviction is transparent across the book’s architecture and its chosen exemplars. The path beyond the impoverishment of our political and philosophical vocabularies is not the multiplication of permissions but the cultivation of forms in which human powers are perfected. The modern anxiety that any such cultivation will oppress is answered by the insistence, everywhere in these pages, that genuine limit is a gift because it is the shape of a power’s own act. To accept this is already to have passed over from the barren security of pure possibility into the abundant risk of actuality. That passage is what the book names the perfection of freedom.
Simon Gros 
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