The Conspiracy of Life Meditations on Schelling and His Time Jason M. Wirth State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Michael Haggett Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wirth, Jason M., 1963– The conspiracy of life : meditations on Schelling and his time / Jason M. Wirth. p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5793-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5794-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854. I. Title. II. Series. B2898.W57 2003 193—dc21 2003057265 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Introduction 1 1 The Nameless Good 5 2 Theos Kai Pan 33 3 Nature 65 4 Direct Experience 101 5 Art 131 6 Evil 155 7 The Haunting 191 8Purus≥ottama 219 Notes 235 Bibliography 265 Index 281 vii Contents What is Life? Resembles life what once was held of light, Too ample in itself for human sight? An absolute self? an element ungrounded? All, that we see, all colours of all shade By encroach of darkness made? Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath A war-embrace of wrestling life and death? —Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1804) In Alan Loehle’s remarkable painting “Dark Room” (1998), mutton hangs from a meat hook while a large dog, toys at its feet, muscles rippling through its body, hunches over, surveying the territory. At first glance, the painting appears to contrast the vitality of the dog with the once living meat of a sheep. Upon closer examination, this is an unconvincing contrast. Everything in the painting, right down to the paint itself, sparkles with life. Even the dark background accentu- ates the vitality of the foreground and in this activity is itself somehow vital. Everything—even what we dismiss as dead—scintillates with life. I too endeavor to speak to a life beyond the illusion of living things and dead things. In this book I want to capture some of the spirit of this life that conspires beyond and within life and death. This book is a series of eight meditations on the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), a great—and greatly neglected—philosopher of life. It is the hope of this book to reinvigorate the site of his philosophical thinking. In this sense, it would be best not to cate- gorize this book as a history of philosophy. It is an attempt to think with Schelling philosophically, to rejuvenate some of the pulsating life that circu- lates through his philosophy. Many have long thought that we are done with Schelling, that he is a “dead dog,” so to speak. As a result, only the work of the curators of philosophy 1 Introduction remains. One dissects the corpus of Schelling into its various periods and phases, while another situates him in relationship to his contemporaries. Still others expose inconsistencies in his thinking, attach various isms to his argu- ments, or situate him in some narrative within the history of philosophy. Spinoza was also once called a dead dog because it was thought that Chris- tian Wolff and others had finally refuted his atheism and that his pernicious contagion had been removed from the proper conduct of philosophy. In the Pantheism Controversy at the end of the eighteenth century, occasioned by Lessing’s insistence that Spinoza was not a “dead dog,” Spinoza’s thinking slowly came back to life. It was Schelling who most facilitated this resuscitation. It is my hope then to do a little for Schelling of what Schelling did for Spinoza. Neither are dead dogs. In the 1809 Freedom essay, 1 perhaps Schelling’s most daring work and one of the treasures of the nineteenth–century German philosophical tradition, he spoke of a “unity and conspiracy,” a Konspiration (I/7, 391). When something or someone falls out of the conspiracy, they become inflamed with sickness and fever, as “inflamed by an inner heat.” Schelling used the Latinate-German Konspiration, which stems from conspêro, to breathe or blow together. Spêro, to breathe, is related to spêritus (the German Geist), meaning spirit, but also breath. Geist is the progression of difference, the A 3 , the breathing out of the dark abyss of nature into form and the simultaneous inhaling of this ground, the retraction of things away from themselves. The conspiracy is a simultane- ous expiration and inspiration, and each thing of nature is both inspired yet expiring. This is what I call the conspiracy of life, that is, the life beyond and within life and death. It is the endeavor of this book to speak of this conspiracy. In the following eight chapters one will find, to use the phrase that Hei- degger employed in the Gesamtausgabe to describe his own paths of thinking, not “works” but “ways.” They comprise eight meditations on different ways of entering into the thinking of Schelling. As such, they are more like monads, each reflecting the subject, but in its own unique fashion. They are eight ways of articulating a general economy of nature, the circulation of a superabundant subject (or nonsubject predicating itself through negation in the subject posi- tion) and innumerable and inexhaustible predicates (or partial objects). For Schelling, the way in to the circular movement of the conspiracy is always what is most necessary and most difficult. It should be obvious from such language that I consider Schelling’s con- cerns to be relevant to contemporary philosophical discourses. In what fol- lows, I will rely on figures like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Deleuze, Bataille, Foucault, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and the Kyoto School to help excavate the site of Schelling’s thinking. Although I proceed, roughly speaking, chronologically through Schelling’s writings, this is a book about the circle of time, and just as a circle has no point 2 INTRODUCTION that can properly be considered the beginning, there is no point in Schelling’s thinking that serves as his proper commencement.There are infinite beginnings and infinite endings—errors only emerge when such natalities and fatalities become clogged and trapped within themselves. Each of my beginnings, so to speak, endeavors to find a way into the circle of Schelling’s thinking, indeed, into the circle of thinking and of nature itself. As such, none of these chapters are meant to be the proper way into an appreciation of Schelling’s contribution. They are merely attempts to enter the circle in whatever way they can. The first three chapters attempt to situate Schelling’s project both within debates contemporary to Schelling and those that speak to our philosophical climate. The first chapter concerns the superiority of the question of the Good over the question of the True. Levinas and others have alerted us to the pos- sibility of ethics as first philosophy. I argue that Schelling already had this concern. In so claiming, I also try to differentiate Schelling’s concerns from those of his former roommate and friend, Hegel.The second chapter attempts to locate Schelling’s early project within the so-called Pantheism Controversy. It begins by taking seriously Jacobi’s analysis of the narcissism of reason. I then consider the limitations of Jacobi’s approach and finally conclude with a sym- pathetic analysis of the miraculous appearance of Johann Georg Hamann, the precursor to Schelling. The third chapter concludes my analysis of Schelling’s place within the Pantheism Controversy. Both the second and the third chap- ter argue that Spinoza is an important clue to appreciating Schelling’s so- called Philosophy of Nature. In the third chapter I distance Schelling’s read- ing of Spinoza from that of Herder. I also here take up the difficult question of Schelling’s relationship to Kant and conclude with a discussion of the pro- ductive imagination. In the fourth chapter I turn to the difficult question of the role of the intellectual intuition in Schelling’s thinking. Critics have long considered this to be some kind of mystical shortcut and fancy bit of epistemic privilege that jumpstarts Schelling’s project. I argue against this assumption. In so doing, I hope to show that the question of the propaedeutic for philosophical activity is irreducible to mastering intellectual gymnastics and reading copious philo- sophical texts. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the early philosophy of Nishida Kitaro\, the patriarch of the Kyoto School. In so doing, I hope to suggest some affinity between Schelling’s general economy of nature and the Buddhist account of the dependent coorigination of things. The fifth chapter is concerned with Schelling’s aesthetics in particular and the relationship between philosophy and art in general. For Schelling, who championed much of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, nature was in some sense an aesthetic progression. Close attention is paid to tragedy as an acute mode of presentation of the conspiracy of life. The sixth chapter attempts to enter into the crises that mark Schelling’s so-called middle period by analyzing his account of the nature [Wesen] of evil. It is a close reading of the Freedom essay, 3INTRODUCTION and I argue that this is a text of decisive importance both for Schelling and for contemporary philosophy. In the seventh chapter I analyze Schelling’s enig- matic and unfinished dialogue the Clara (c. 1810). If Hegel’s Phenomenology was an odyssey towards spirit, the Clara is a journey from the spiritworld, an explication of the haunting of nature. I conclude with a chapter that considers a small piece of Schelling’s volu- minous later writings on the Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation. Although for many critics the critical figure in this period is Jesus Christ, I attempt to offset this prejudice by analyzing Schelling’s remarkable reading of the Bha- gavad-Gêta\. In so doing, I hope not only to find another opening into the site of the conspiracy of life. I also hope to suggest some of the breadth, cultural plurality, and delicacy of Schelling’s later thought.The Gêta\, I argue, has much in common with Schelling’s account of the conspiracy of life. Although there is a clear continuity between the second and the third chapters, the rest of the book does not demand that one read the chapters in chronological order. Readers are invited to pick and choose, to roam through the book’s terrain, following various lines of thought. What yokes this book together dwells within these chapters’ subterranean depths, rather than in the result of any linear demonstration. Historians may wish that I spent more time cross-referencing additional texts and the philosophically impatient may wish that I spent less time doing so. Schelling was a generous thinker, endeavoring to include rather than exclude and to widen and reinvigorate the parameters of philosophy, not to reduce them to his own particular perspective on things. I have endeavored to proceed in the same spirit. Schelling’s insignia was a sphinx that pointed to the wheel of time, as if such a wheel spoke to the sphinx’s carefully guarded enigma about the being of nature and the human. Over three years after the death of Schelling’s first wife, Caroline, he wrote a poem to her memory (“To the Beloved”). His insignia, which had sealed and signaled the mournful letters written in the wake of her death, no longer simply spoke to her loss. It also pointed to life itself, demanding that the love of life—all of life—be also the life of love. The sphinx “points me full of spinning not towards variability. It points me towards the constancy of inner love, blessed peace in the movement of the world, under the rotation of time.” It is time to resurrect a dead dog. 4 INTRODUCTION One cannot say of the Godhead that it is good since this sounds as if the “good” were supplementing its Being as something distinct. But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as the Good itself. —Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815 version) 1 Wie soll denn der Mensch der gegenwärtigen Weltgeschichte auch nur ernst und streng fragen können, ob der Gott sich nahe oder entziehe, wenn der Mensch unterläßt, allererst in die Dimension hineinzudenken, in der jene Frage allein gefragt werden kann? Das aber ist die Dimension des Heiligen How should the human of contemporary world history be able to ask at all seriously and rigorously if the god nears or withdraws when the human above all neglects to think into the dimension in which the question alone can be asked? But this is the dimension of the Holy —Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1946) 2 In a striking passage in the Freedom essay, Schelling argued that the human is “formed in the mother’s love” and that “the light of thought first grows out of the darkness of the incomprehensible (out of feeling, Sehnsucht, the sovereign mother of knowledge)” (I/7, 361). In this dark longing, in the paradoxically object-free striving of Sehnsucht, one finds, as the dark, concealed origin of the understanding, the “desire for the unknown, nameless Good” (I/7, 361). We are confronted with two aporias. In the first, the aporia of desire, Sehnsucht 5 1 The Nameless Good strives, but it does not have a specific object towards which it strives. Sehnsucht is a ceaseless striving without a clearly delineated desideratum. In the second, the aporia of naming, in so far as this desire can be spoken of as having an object (which, strictu sensu, it does not), Schelling named this quasi object the “nameless Good.” But what manner of name is the “nameless Good”? On the one hand, this quasi object is named the Good, and on the other hand, this Good is qualified as being nameless. What manner of naming is this that names without naming and, without naming, nonetheless names? Furthermore, the desire for the nameless Good, Sehnsucht as the sovereign mother of knowledge, places the drive towards knowledge as more funda- mentally the longing for the Good. The Good precedes the true and it is in such a priority that Schelling agreed with his Munich colleague Franz von Baader that the drive to knowledge is analogous to the procreative drive (I/7, 414). It is the production or birthing of truth as the aporetic longing for the nameless Good. The generation of truth, it must be here emphasized, is born from the primacy of the call of the Good. When Levinas charged occidental philosophy for betraying the primacy of the Good by insisting on the primacy of the True (the Good as resolved or aufgehoben into thinking), thinking was brought back to the site of its found- ing crisis. In his genealogical critique of the value of values, Nietzsche also had a somewhat similar concern, namely that the reactive mode of thinking sought to make all that is outside a normative community into something compati- ble with that community and, to the extent that it could not do so, its ressen- timent condemned the barbarian remainder to the category of evil. Granted Levinas and Nietzsche’s provocation, is it the case that the nine- teenth century did not provide us with other models of articulating the pri- macy of the Good over the True? Are there other thinkers that might aid us in articulating this Copernican revolution in thinking and ethics? I am argu- ing, both in this chapter and throughout this book, that Schelling, unduly overshadowed by Hegel, provided one of the first and most extensive (and not simply dialectical) models of the disequilibrium between the Good and the True. In this respect, Schelling emerges, almost a century and a half after his death, as a deeply contemporary figure in continental philosophy, contribut- ing directly to the current debate about the primacy of the Good (beyond good and evil) in the wake of Nietzsche and Levinas. Schelling, like Levinas, puts “forth the Platonic word, Good beyond being. It excludes being from the Good, for how could one understand the conatus of being in the goodness of the Good?” 3 In this chapter, I contextualize Schelling’s contribution by situating it in reference to the System fragment, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I will then turn to some critical texts in Schelling’s middle period, as he is negotiating the relationship between his earlier nega- tive philosophy and his later positive philosophy, sometimes called the Philos- 6 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE ophy of Mythology and Revelation. Schelling’s middle period, in the wake of Hegel’s Phenomenology, straddles both the negative and positive directions of thinking and tries to reconstruct these parts into a sense of the Whole. Of the middle period texts, which I consider to be Schelling’s most remarkable, I will concentrate primarily on the Freedom essay (1809), that strange and startling unfinished dialogue, the Clara (c. 1809–1812), 4 and Schelling’s never com- pleted magnum opus, The Ages of the World (1811–1815). I The Oldest System Program fragment (c. 1797), written in Hegel’s hand, but reflecting a complex cross-fertilization of the thinking of the Tübingen trio (Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin), immediately proclaims that the fundamen- tal concern of German idealism is ethics. In fact, the very first words are sim- ply the restatement of the title as “an Ethics [eine Ethik].” It is certainly not my concern here to ferret out whose voice, despite Hegel’s physical writing of the fragment, predominates the fragment and hence which philosopher could lay claim to primary authorship. I find such a question of dubious value. 5 Rather, I simply begin by noting that all three implicitly agree that in some way the primary concern of thinking, the question that births philosophy’s noblest endeavors, is not the True, but the Good. Long before Levinas claimed that the “correlation between knowledge and being, or the thematics of contemplation, indicates both a difference and a difference that is overcome in the true,” 6 one finds immediately in the System fragment a claim that implies that ethics, not epistemology or ontology, is first philosophy. “Inas- much as the whole of metaphysics will in the future be subsumed under moral philosophy [künftig in die Moral fällt]—a matter in which Kant, with his two practical postulates, has merely provided an example, and has exhausted noth- ing—this ethics will be nothing else than a complete system of all ideas, or, what comes to the same, of all practical postulates” (OS, 8). These claims are as straightforward as they are revolutionary. Following Kant, but claiming that Kant was only a beginning, that his thinking has not at all exhausted the matter at hand, the System fragment argues that all true ideas are fundamentally ethical statements and that this is so because the Good implicitly precedes the True. Indeed, in some way, one would only desire the true if somehow desire came to relate to the True as worthy of desire. For the True to become a desideratum, its goodness as such must already have announced itself. One values the True only insofar as it is good to do so; hence a relationship to the Good stands in advance of a relationship to the True. Yet what does it mean to demand that the True follow from the Good? This is a question of decisive importance for all of German Idealism, indeed perhaps for all of thinking. 7THE NAMELESS GOOD [...]... unsurpassable, gulf, and hence for Kant no transition [Übergang] between the two is possible.8 The Good and the True fundamentally oppose each other Nonetheless, Kant goes on to argue, the region of the Good should have an influence on the region of the true If the region of the Good is the region of ethical imperatives, this region commands reason to bring the True under the influence of the Good Hence there must... constituted themselves remove themselves from continuity with the life of things and the band of the living, antinomic potencies of the Good and the True The human, however, in attempting to know and preserve their own, THE NAMELESS GOOD 25 can and do sunder themselves from the nexus of life forces and pursue their own will as against the universal will The conatus, the Fall of the human in the sundering of the. .. can be no more poetry and no more art Instead of all this magnificence in history and art, there is but only a single surrogate: this philosophy ends with the deification of the state In this deification of the state this philosophy shows itself as fully immersed in the great error of the time The more the state includes the positive in itself, the more it belongs on the side of the most negative against... can stand at the center of the cision of the conspiracy of life This faculty for the Fall, for the sundering of principles, for the alienation of the light from the dark and the rational from the mad, is a necessary condition for the very possibility of the Good to transfigure itself into the True As Tanabe Hajime later reflected in a slightly different context, this is a “web in which even the absolute... the world from its predecessor Their goal is the revelation of the depth of Spirit and this is the absolute concept The goal, absolute knowing, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection [Erinnerung] of Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm” (PG, §808) These are the relics of the Good, preserved in the pantheon of the. ..8 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE The fragment is quite clear about what this question does not mean It is not a new state program, a new project for the civil servants of the truth The idea of the Good is clearly equated with the idea of Freedom and this idea excludes the possibility of a mechanical conception of thinking “I want to show that there is no idea of the state, because the state is something... something like what the Buddhists called bodhicitta, enlightened consciousness, which is, at the same time, the falling away of the ego and the commencement of the Great Compassion, the maha\ karuna\, the love of all beings There is no longer the need for the Vinaya-pièaka, the code of monastic behavior, no longer the demand for the safety valve of morality In this fashion, Schelling spoke of Gewissenhaftigkeit... Can the Good be coopted to accompany the historical life of Reason and the natural history of the True? “Therefore all knowledge must pass through the dialectic Yet it is another question as to whether the point will ever come where knowledge becomes free and lively, as the image of the ages is for the writer of history who no longer recalls their investigations in their presentation” (AW, 205) What then... and self-possession is exposed as idolatrous Evil, on the other hand, is the life of the conatus on the periphery of the Good, “hungering” for itself as it anxiously reacts to the center The anxiety [Angst] of life itself drives the human from the center out of which it was created” (I/7, 382) The creaturely is born out of the specifically human proclivity to flee from the ego-consuming fires of the. .. freedom? Schelling s answer is as elusive as it is startling The “real and living concept of freedom,” as opposed to the on the one hand most general and on the other hand merely formal” freedom that idealism offers, the “point of profoundest difficulty,” is that the concept of human freedom, the Wesen that holds together opposite forces, is the “faculty for good and evil” (I/7, 353) On the surface this . The Conspiracy of Life Meditations on Schelling and His Time Jason M. Wirth State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University. other. Nonetheless, Kant goes on to argue, the region of the Good should have an influence on the region of the true. If the region of the Good is the region of ethical imperatives, this region. each other? In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant had named the space between the region [Gebiet] of the True, 8 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE that is, concepts of nature, and the region of the Good,