Abstract
My chapter will seek to suggest something of the character of Schelling’s philosophical accomplishment and it will do so by discussing the manner in which philosophy, natural science, art, and history all belong together (without thereby sacrificing their autonomy) as the reawakening of the question of nature. Quite simply: for Schelling, one cannot do philosophy only by doing philosophy. Philosophy, as such, entails a commitment to these other modes of thought without thereby usurping their autonomy. I will carefully detail this complex set of relationships in order to bring forth Schelling’s intuition into nature as the image of thinking as such. What guides Schelling’s very sense of what matters as philosophy, what belongs to the philosophical enterprise by right?
The past is known, the present is discerned, the future is intimated.
The known is narrated, the discerned is presented, the intimated is prophesied.
Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gegenwärtige wird erkannt, das Zukünftige wird geahndet.
Das Gewußte wird erzählt, das Erkannte wird dargestellt, das Geahndete wird geweissagt.
— F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1815)
(AW xxxv [SW I/8:199])
The consciousness of eternity can only be articulated in the phrase: “I am the one who was, who is, who will be.”
— F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1813)
(WA 263)
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Notes
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 19–20. For more on the problem of the image of thought with regard to Schelling’s thinking, see Chapter 3 of my Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 218; henceforth WP.
This is the innocent child of forgetting, the last of the three metamorphoses: “... ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen” (Friedrich Nietzsche, “Von den drei Verwandlungen,” Also Sprach Zarathustra, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1988], 4:31).
Despite his hasty dismissal of Schelling, Antonio Negri strikingly comes to the same kind of conclusion about love in his remarkable study of the Book of Job. Turning to, of all philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, he describes the virtue of charitās as “our extraordinary capacity to love God as he loves himself.” Such love “is beyond measure, not because its immeasurableness is chaotic but simply because it cannot be measured; it cannot be measured because love, charity, creativity are not measured but are measuring.... Charity cannot be measured because it allows us to participate in the power of creation.” This for Negri was the revolution by which labor reclaims the dignity of its creativity. “When power opposes Power, it has become divine. It is the source of life. It is the superabundance of charity. The world can be reconstructed on this basis, and only what is reconstructed in this way will have value; it will continue to not have a measure, because the power that creates has no measure” (Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini [Durham: Duke University Press, 2009], 74–75). Negri, in his own way, especially with regard to the belonging together of immeasurable immensity (smisurato), love, and creativity, comes upon a space and image of thinking that we can also associate with Schelling.
Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 52.
See Dale E. Snow, “Genius: The ‘Sunday’s Children’ Problem,” in Schelling and the End of Idealism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 62–66.
John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 42.
I am alluding to the lectures that he gave in Berlin called Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy. For an excellent analysis of this remarkable lecture course, see Marcela Garcia, “Schelling’s Late Negative Philosophy: Crisis and Critique of Pure Reason,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 3, no. 2 (fall 2011): 141–63.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France, ed. Dominique Séglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 70, 160.
The English translation is available as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
For more on Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to Schelling on the question of nature, see Jason M. Wirth and Patrick Burke, eds., The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
Despite his admiration of Schelling, in the end Heidegger demoted him to a precursor to Nietzsche’s will to power because both consummated the Occidental Seinsgeschichte in its culmination in subjectivity and in our self-contained lordship over the earth. As an analysis of modernity and post-modernity, Heidegger’s diagnosis of the ascent of subjectivity has much merit. As a reading of Schelling (or Nietzsche for that matter), it is severely lacking. As we can see in the context of the present discussion, Schelling’s diagnosis of the problem of modernity anticipates Heidegger’s analysis. To use Schelling’s own critique of the triumph of subjectivity against Schelling himself is perverse and uncharitable. For a much needed and more balanced reappraisal of Schelling’s relationship to Heidegger, see Lore Hühn, “A Philosophical Dialogue between Heidegger and Schelling,” trans. David Carus, Comparative and Continental Philosophy 6, no. 1 (spring 2014): 16–34.
For Arendt, a totalitarian regime operates “neither without guidance of law nor is it arbitrary, for it claims to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or of History from which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring.” Such a regime “executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the behavior of men. The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] [New York: Schocken, 2004], 595). This chilling execution of Nature and History, with their ironclad rules and mercilessly deductive rigor, is the fully unleashed terrorism of the dogmatic image of thought.
Adapted, with revisions, from Diana I. Behler’s translation of “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 162–63. “Das sogenannte ‘Älteste Systemprogramm,’” in Materialien zu Schellings philosophischen Anfängen, ed. Manfred Frank and Gerhard Kurz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 110–12.
F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (1842), trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 174.
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Wirth, J.M. (2014). Nature of Imagination: At the Heart of Schelling’s Thinking. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_23
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