The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: sciborg2 on October 22, 2019, 08:02:07 pm
-
Looking at Gord Barenstan's paper SCHELLING’S DARK NATURE AND THEPROSPECTS FOR ‘ECOLOGICAL CIVILISATION’ (http://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/770/1366)
In other words, sexuality becomes a pharmakon, both a toxin and antidote for Nature. Schelling writes of the separation of the sexes within Nature’s ‘infinite metamorphosis’ that ‘each organism has a level of formation at which [this] separation is necessary. [But this] highest point of disturbed equilibrium is [also] the moment of the reestablishment of equilibrium’ (FO 36, 40-41). This dis/equilibrium describes the production of the genus against the individual in a systolic-diastolic movement of expansion and contraction foregrounded in Schelling’s later work. But sexual separation does not fold the organism back into a teleological hierarchy of developmental stages. Instead, it opens the organism up to Nature’s radical productivity: ‘from the moment of the [separation] onward, the product no longer completely expresses the character of the stage of development at which it stood.’ Schelling describes this as ‘derangement’ [Störungheit], and this trope of illness marks the ‘most intense moment of natural activity’ in the organism (FO 39). Nature blossoms through ‘abortive’ experiments on itself, seizing on its own aberrations, ‘pursuing’ its individuative derangement as far as possible in a given manifestation (FO 41 n). And precisely this derangement, this illness, is a drive toward absolute knowledge as what Tilottama Rajan refers to as ‘a following of the particular wherever it might lead, regardless of its consistency with a larger whole.’14 Each organism is a tumescence in Nature, a derangement of the Stufenfolge, a symptom of radical auto-alterity in Nature which resists Schelling’s attempt, in the later Introduction to the First Outline, to contain it in an anterior organisation which ‘must have existed as a whole previous to its parts’ (FO 198). But Schelling still faces the question which dogs him throughout his oeuvre: why is there something and not nothing? How do things come to be from within Nature as the ‘most primal fluid–the absolute noncomposite [. . .] receptive to every form [. . .] a mass wherein no part is distinguished from the other by figure’ (FO 6)?
Schelling’s answer to this question in the First Outline is inhibition – an intrinsic, primordial self-limiting force which engenders the phenomena of the natural world.
=-=-=
The First Division of the First Outline tries to work through its unruly textual excess by turning from the metaphysical overgrowth of the first section on the actants (‘The Original Qualities and Actants in Nature’) to something closer to dramatic narrative in the following section (‘Actants and Their Combinations’). Here, Schelling describes the creation of matter as ‘the drama [Schauspiel] of a struggle between form and the formless’ (FO 28). For Schelling, Nature’s universal fluidity is always already inexplicably ‘solidified’ by the actants in this drama without beginning, which transpires in ‘infinite multiplicity’ between fluid and solid. That is, the actants, in their creation of natural products, are always already subject to a drama of (de)combination in their infinite multiplicity.
This dynamic of coalescence and dissolution is ultimately pathologised by Schelling as the actants’ mutual derangement [Störung] into universal fluidity, which is in turn – indeed, simultaneously resisted by each actant’s individuality (FO 26, 28). This derangement describes what we have seen as Nature’s auto-alterity, a Nature divided against itself yet compelled to form products in a tension which creates generative fibrillations in Nature. And again, the language Schelling uses here is significant: the actant’s ‘constant drive [Trieb] toward free transformation’ is inhibited by the ‘compulsion’ [Zwang] of its combination with other actants in a productive coimplication of freedom and necessity (FO 33). In the Introduction to the Outline Schelling writes that discovering the ‘intermediate links’ in natural products with the unknowable ‘last conditions’ of Nature is the task of experimentation in Naturphilosophie – not the experimentation of the empirical natural sciences which assumes that one day the circle of its knowledge will complete itself and which imposes principles on Nature from without, but rather an ‘infinite task’ of ‘collect[ing] the fragments of the great whole of Nature [. . .] into a system’ (FO 199) which is always on the cusp of itself. It involves investigating the internal necessity of principles and not assuming their a priori nature, and this process is ultimately a psychoanalytic moment – ‘doing Naturphilosophie’ as an encounter in Wirth’s sense – where, in Schelling’s words, ‘Nature speaks to us to the extent to which we ourselves fall silent.’18 We must let Nature question us.
But what kind of ‘questions’ does a deranged Nature ask? What does its facticity present to us? The natural products we see in the world are, after all ‘nothing other than productive Nature itself determined in a certain way’ (FO34), inhibited according to inscrutable laws into the unique, terrible, and solitary forms which surround us. Each one of them is part of Schelling’s Stufenfolge, the graduated series of stages with which Nature hopes to achieve the Absolute, or ‘the most universal proportion in which all actants, without prejudice to their individuality, can be unified’ (FO 35). Yet each natural product is also a ‘misbegotten attempt’ at this proportion (ibid.), a wayward line of flight away from the absolute ideal for which Nature strives, but can never achieve, caught in an ‘infinite process of formation’ (ibid.) which constitutes these lines of flight to begin with. Nature is caught within its actantial dynamics – within the derangement of a free drive to create infinite products and the compulsion to combine them into a ‘universal proportion.’ It is from this derangement that the materiality and historicity of Being emerges. This infinitely productive derangement of the actants forms an onto-aetiology which Schelling locates in disease. Disease, for Schelling, is coterminous with life itself: because disease ‘is produced by the same causes through which the phenomenon of life is produced[, it] must have the same factors as life’ (FO 160). So although in the First Outline’s Appendix on disease (FO 158ff) the term Aktion is not used, Schelling in effect transposes the actants’ deranging dynamism of activity and receptivity into physiology: here, the organism is not a static ‘being’ but a ‘perpetual being-produced,’ an ‘activity mediated by receptivity’ (FO 160) against a series of external stimuli which prevent the organism from ‘exhausting’ its activity in a final (dead, inorganic) object. In this ‘being-produced,’ the organism reproduces an ‘original duplicity’ whereby it generates itself ‘objectively’ in response to external conditions (its receptivity to the world) as well as ‘subjectively’ – that is, as an object to itself (its activity). Disease is precisely the ‘othering’ of the organism’s presence to itself as object, a ‘disproportion’ within its economy of excitability, or susceptibility to external stimuli (FO 169). And this force of disease is ultimately predicated on a ‘uniformly acting external force’ which acts on the organism while at the same time it ‘seems to sustain the life of universal Nature just as much as it sustains the individual life of every organic being (as the life ofNature is exhibited in universal alterations)’ (FO 171). Both life and disease, then, emerge from a constitutive tension between the world of external forces and the higher-order dynamical force which sustains the organism against the barrage of stimuli from without (FO 161). Extending the premises of the Naturphilosophie into the human and divine domains of theodicy, the Freedom essay, to which we now turn, aligns this diseased productivity with both the energy of evil and the yearning nature of God itself.
=-=-=
This darkness which recedes from knowledge in the Freedom essay is ‘a being before all ground and before all that exists [and] before any duality [. . .] the original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]’ which exists even before God (Freedom 68). The Ungrund is a state of ‘absolute indifference’ (Freedom 68) between opposites which does not nullify them (it is not Hegel’s ‘night where all cows are black’) but rather suspends them in relation to each other. Thus, Schelling writes that even though the Ungrundis before all opposites and duality, it is ‘neutral’ towards them, which is precisely why opposites and polarities can ‘[break] forth immediately from the Neither-Nor’ of its indifference (Freedom 69).For Schelling, the Ungrundprovides a resolution to the problem of thinkingbecoming for a God that is ‘infinitely’ different to the world of things (28), a resolution which marks the materiality of Nature as the dark ground of spirit, the receding origin of Being and becoming. The world of becoming must emerge from God; but how can things separate from a God which encompasses all things? Schelling’s answer is that things are ultimately grounded in ‘that which in God himself is not He Himself, that is, in that which is the ground of his existence’ (Freedom 28). In other words, the Ungrundmarks the not-God within God, that within God which God cannot know and which always already implicates God in the history of Nature. In a broadly psychoanalytic sense, the Ungrund is God’s unconscious; it harbours ‘the yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to itself’ (Freedom 28), the drive to individuation in and through Nature’s materiality. But we have seen from the Naturphilosophie that this materiality is deranged, ambivalent toward its own existence; perhaps this is why Schelling writes early in the Freedom essay that Naturphilosophie is the only project adequate to the task of freedom (Freedom 26-27). As life, then, God’s yearning is driven by unknown forces, and in this God is like man. Both God and man are confronted with an un-grounding Other which becomes an existential pharmakon, both the cause of and cure for the melancholic desire of an endless approximation to wholeness. Both God and man are destined to ‘the deep indestructible melancholy of all life’ (Freedom 63).
This tension between the essay’s sense of futurity (its desire for love that unites all) and melancholy (the acknowledgement that this desire must find and re-find itself) is central to the text’s complexity, resonating through the optative proclamation that ‘the good should be raised out of the darkness [. . .] whereas evil shouldbe separated from the good in order to be cast out eternally into non-Being’ (Freedom 67; my italics). This tension and melancholy is the medium from which personalityemerges as the core concept which fuels the Freedom essay’s futurity.This melancholy is the basis for the analogy Schelling draws between God’s relationship to the not-God of the Ungrund and the human being’s relationship with the centrum, a term Schelling takes up from Jakob Böhme to describe ‘the undivided power of the initial ground’ as it exists in the person (Freedom 44). Through the freedom of the not-God within God, ‘a fundamentally unlimited power is asserted next to and outside of divine power’ (Freedom 11) that is conceptually unthinkable, and which inaugurates a divine individuation marking Schelling’s radical turn from the notions of emanationism and theodicy prevailing in his time. This not-God within God marks the (un)beginning of all things as a difference always already operating in Being, and this (un)beginning’s human equivalent is in Schelling’s formulation of personality. In contrast to Hegel’s assertion that dialectical progression is always already attributed to Being – that ‘substance is essentially subject’ and inherently logical21 – the Freedom essay emphasises the emergence of personality in an unprethinkable ‘moment’ of creation analogous to God’s entry into time and history, a non-egoic ‘free act’ from the abyss of the unconditioned...
=-=-=
Key to the specifically idealist intensity of the Freedom essay’s theodicy is a recasting of the First Outline’s Stufenfolge as God’s progression toward an ultimate apocatastasis, a ‘final, total separation’ reminiscent of The Book of Revelationwherein ‘everything true and good’ is ‘raised into bright consciousness’ and the ‘eternally dark ground of selfhood’ is locked away (Freedom 70). In this resolution, everything is ‘subordinate to spirit’ and temporality and contingency are gathered up into an idealist regime (ibid.). Yet its disclosure of the Ungrundas God’s unconscious, and the centrum as its human iteration, necessarily harbours a dark kernel of indeterminacy which frustrates this teleology. Individuation can go awry, and the power of the centrum can always be falsely appropriated in the ego’s being-for-itself, which Schelling will describe as the basis of evil. Freedom is the necessary introduction of chaos and the anarchy of the Ungrundinto time and history, a fracturing of the Freedom essay’s Idealism which reflects Schelling’s turn away from prevalent teleological or systematic explanations of Being. Evil is the energic force of movement without which existence would founder and congeal, unable to move.
In other words, self-will attempts to bend the centrum to its own designs. Outside the harmony of the centrum’s ‘divine measure and balance’ self-will, as ‘a bond of living forces,’ can no longer rule the rebellious dominion of forces as ‘cravings and appetites,’ which leads to a ‘peculiar life [of] mendacity, a growth of restlessness and decay’ (Freedom 34). Evil is a disruption of cosmic harmony which thereby shows this harmony’s constitutive self-difference; it is the force whereby ‘things feverishly move away from their nonthingly center.’22 But this evil is productive, and in precisely the same way as Nature’s ambivalence toward its products in the First Outline. This productivity’s connection with historicity and materiality risks the individual’s annihilation in ‘restlessness and decay’ as the ego proclaims: I am the centrum. But it is also a connection with the the Freedomessay’s apocatastatic drive, and is thus essential to the individual’s existence in the world.
-
I'm not up on Schelling like I no doubt I should be, considering how often I find myself in German Idealism, or something based off it.
I'll read up and get back to you.
-
I'm not up on Schelling like I no doubt I should be, considering how often I find myself in German Idealism, or something based off it.
I'll read up and get back to you.
Yeah I'm definitely curious what you make of it. It just seems that a lot of Bakkerian ideas are there - the chaos of the Outside matching the darkness of Schelling's Nature, the veneer of shame that seems to overlie all sex in the Bakkerverse, the movement toward God and the striving toward the Absolute, the existence of free will in tandem with Eternity...
-
From Matthew Segall: (https://matthewsegall.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/the-re-emergence-of-schelling-philosophy-in-a-time-of-emergency-feb-2019.pdf)
The Naturphilosoph comes to understand “Nature as subject.” This is not the Kantian position that nature necessarily conforms to the transcendental structure of the human mind, but rather the inverse proposition that human consciousness is itself a recapitulation of the uncanny subjectivity of nature. Where Kant says we can't know nature in itself, and Fichte says nature is my own projection, Schelling turns us back upon the strangeness of our own humanity to ask "do we really know who and what we are, or where we came from?"
Joseph Lawrence follows Schelling in calling for a renewed inquiry into the nature of good and evil, an inquiry now even more untimely than it was in Schelling’s day—untimely because such theologically-laden concerns run counter to the self-understanding of the secular Enlightenment, whose founding myth involves the throwing off of traditional religion in favor of the supposedly self-grounding power of instrumental rationality. Lawrence asks how we are to understand modernity’s hubristic elevation of rationality to a secular religion at the same time that it prohibits genuine metaphysical or theological investigation.
Our uniqueness as humans is that we recapitulate the very essence of nature itself. Further, because nature remains our ground, the reflection of our consciousness upon this ground generates self-consciousness: humanity is nature become conscious of itself as subject. While other organisms remain submerged in the unity of natural becoming, the human, like the divine, is eternally beginning, always deciding anew to re-create itself in an attempt to overcome the irreducible otherness within itself (i.e., evil). Unlike the divine, however, for the human there is no necessary assurance that love will overcome evil, that the otherness will be dynamically re-engaged in the eternal circulation of sacred marriage. Hence the fall into history, the rise of the state, and the suffering and confusion of earthly human life wherein evil is constantly externalized and projected.
Even the divine has to pass through the purifying fire of the abyss and overcome the fear of existence in order to realize its creative freedom. Unlike human beings, who have the ethical community to console them, for God, the primal being, there is no one else to come to its aid: “in its stultifying solitude...[God] must fight its way through chaos for itself, utterly alone.” Human beings can take refuge in the social mores of the day, which, in the consumer capitalist context, offer an untold number of options for temporary escapist diversion from the soul’s inevitable encounter with the purifying fires of eternity. When radical evil does break through the thin veneer of bourgeois social order, it is always neatly localized in a deranged criminal who can be impersonally (and so guiltlessly) executed by the state.
-
Well, that first paper was super opaque to me. This second one seems more helpful.
Considering that my default position was off the Outside as a sort of Hegelian Geist-Realm, now I think actually it does make a bit more sense as a Hegelian-Schelling Geist-Nature "system."
From what little I have been able to gather though, Schelling's "System" (which is what he does actually refer to it as and is likely not a coincidence that Bakker uses that same word in "System Resumption") is actually more apt to the whole of Earwa, only with Hegel's sort of "Wir sehen hiemit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes" layered over it. Which, thinking along those lines, actually makes some sense as to what the Outside seems differentiated from the Real.
Obviously I need to delve deeper though.
-
"Wir sehen hiemit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes" ?
Can you elaborate on this? Thanks!
-
"Wir sehen hiemit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes" ?
Can you elaborate on this? Thanks!
So, Hegel basically says "language is the Dasein of Geist" in the Phenomenology. Now, most english translation makes Dasein into "being-there" but this hardly make the sentence more comprehendible. In fact, because Hegel uses the purposely "philosophical" term, one that was often used in Idealism terms. While "being-there" is a literal translation, Heidegger would later use the term to mean something more like "being-in-the-world" as indicating a more participatory role, something I guess one could call "active" Being, rather than just a passive being, say, mere existence.
So, to me, what Hegel is saying there, or what Hegel says to me, is that language, that is, the action of using language to describe or communicate, is the active participatory creation of what we might call "spirit." Minus language, notions of temporality, intentionality, meaning fall away, since even if they are thing-in-themselves absent language, what manner would we have to describe them minus it?
So, the sort of "spirit-world" or if you want it, a spiritual "Soul," is born out of language and language is the "Dasein," the actual participation in and so the actual Being-in-the-world, of something "transcendental." Consider, if the Spirit is transcendental, that is, is not "of matter/material" then where could it be in this world so that we might conceive of it? In the mind, it would seem, and the mind's manner of forming and articulating such mental content must be, in some way, language? Right?
Well, I hope this made some sense, but I just got up and haven't had coffee yet.
On a related note, I am trying to read Žižek's book on Schelling, since Schelling's work itself is a bit hard to find.
-
I stumbled up a thesis from someone named Benjamin Berger, who says:
As will become clear over the course of this study, ‘spirit’ is nothing ‘other-worldly’ for Schelling or Hegel, but is simply the inner freedom which defines a distinctive way of being. What makes spirit non-natural is not, therefore, that it is ‘supernatural’, as if there were a spiritual reality above and beyond nature. Rather, spirit is non-natural in that it is structured in a very different manner than any natural forms and is consequently capable of a range of activities which no natural entity—not even highly developed non-human animals—are capable, activities which are expressions of spiritual freedom.[/i]
So, that makes me feel a little better than my likely incoherent rambling is at least somewhat grounded, or at least there is someone else who has a similar idea.
Also, I found this video (which is unlisted, so it wouldn't come up in a search, if you had looked): Schelling's Discovery of the Meaning of History (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX4D1T0JvUE)