The Barbarian Principle

Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature

Jason M. Wirth, Patrick Burke, Jason M. Wirth, Patrick Burke

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438448466, 9781438448473
• eBook ISBN: 9781438448480
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ecology

Toward the end of his life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty made a striking retrieval of F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of nature. The Barbarian Principle explores the relationship between these two thinkers on this topic, opening up a dialogue with contemporary philosophical and ecological significance that will be of special interest to philosophers working in phenomenology and German idealism.

PART I

Orientations

CHAPTER ONE

The Reawakening of the Barbarian Principle

Jason M. Wirth

φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ

—Heraclitus (DK frag. 123)¹

In what follows, I would like to speak both to our motivation for this collection of essays and then to the character of the essays themselves.

I

In his provocative essay in Signs on Husserl and the problem of non-philosophy and non-phenomenology, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty takes up the question of what eludes philosophy but which cannot nonetheless be dismissed from philosophy. “What resists phenomenology within us—natural being, the ‘barbarian’ source Schelling spoke of—cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light” (S2, 178).² In the working notes to the Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty proposes a “psychoanalysis of Nature” that takes up the question of the “ever new” and “always the same” in Nature, that is, “the barbarian principle” (VI2, 267), that which haunts the face of Nature.

Let us be clear: To take up the project of a psychoanalysis of Nature is to enter into an analytic relationship with the ψυχή of Nature, but that in turn assumes that Nature is both whole (Nature as such is thinkable) and animated. In a sense, it asks that we reengage the anima mundi of the Ancients, Nature as a living creature, animated by its ψυχή or anima. Otherwise, what is there to psychoanalyze? At the same time, the sensibilities that have largely governed Western (and increasingly global) thinking for the past four centuries would find such a project absurd. Merleau-Ponty’s proposal is an affront to the manner in which the environment appears as something obvious to us. But this is not at all lost on Merleau-Ponty. The question of a psychoanalysis of Nature is at the same time the task of rethinking Nature as no longer something obvious, or quaint, but fundamentally as something worthy of being questioned and having the dignity of the question (fragwürdig in Heidegger’s celebrated sense). Indeed, the question of Nature cannot be separated from Schelling’s barbarian principle. A Naturphilosophie (in the manner of Schelling) or a psychoanalysis of Nature (in the manner of Merleau-Ponty) demand that both philosophy and analysis take up the question of their respective shadows.

What is this barbarian principle, this nomadic force, this source that always comes to being unexpectedly from within being, that resists our settled modes of thinking, rendering them ceaselessly plastic, but which thinking can neither wholly include nor exclude? Schelling, in the 1809 Freedom essay, calls this shadow erste Natur, that which is an “incomprehensible ground” and a nie aufgehender Rest, an irreducible remainder that cannot be resolved by reason even with the greatest exertion (I/7, 360).³ Merleau-Ponty speaks of “this excess of Being over the consciousness of Being as what Schelling wants to think in all its rigor [Cet excès de l’Être sur la conscience de l’Être, voilà ce que Schelling veu penser dans toute sa rigueur]” (N1, 62/N2, 38). Schelling strives to think das Übersein, that is, he wants to bear the shadow of Nature without self-deceit and without the expecation that it can be contained in (any) advance.

Deleuze and Guattari, at the end of their great period of productivity, argued in What is Philosophy? that “We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought. It is the base of all planes, immanent to every thinkable plane.”⁴ A plane of immanence is the planomenon that determines the horizon of a philosopher’s conceptual creativity, indicating what belongs by right to thinking. The horizon of philosophical concept creation, of thinkability as such, casts a shadow that the philosopher must bear. The problem of nonthought, what simultaneously must and cannot be thought, is not another tiresome lamentation about the sorrows of finitude. It is the effort to unleash the powers of thinking’s shadow. “Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane” (WP, 59).

The Barbarian Principle: Perhaps the Supreme Act of Philosophy?

It is worth noting that in calling the philosopher to bear her shadow, Merleau-Ponty evokes Schelling, who at the time was a largely neglected thinker, at best on the shadowy periphery of the philosophical canon. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty would more expansively turn to Schelling when he gave three remarkable courses on the question of Nature (1956–1957, 1957–1958, and 1959–1960) at the Collège de France. Although, as Robert Vallier explains, the notes from these courses were in a less than optimal form (N2, xiii), it was nonetheless a boon for our appreciation of his late work that, more than three decades after his death in 1961, they appeared in an edition prepared by Dominique Séglard called La nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France (1995). In 2003, Robert Vallier’s welcome English translation appeared (Nature: Courses Notes from the Collège de France). In addition to providing a critical context for his unfinished magnum opus, The Visible and the Invisible, they also provide a striking philosophical inquiry into this present volume’s organizing question.

In the first course, as Merleau-Ponty ruminates over some of the key figures in the Western legacy of the Naturphilosophie, he retrieves, in an extended investigation that also includes Bergson and Husserl, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. The latter, despite it meteoric arrival on the philosophical stage of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century post-Kantian thinking, had largely become a philosophical relic by the twentieth century (discredited by natural science, aufgehoben by Hegel, discarded by Marx, and largely enigmatic to prevailing philosophical sensibilities). Fortunately, Schelling’s dormancy was not to last in all quarters, and early rumblings in France could already be detected in Samuel Jankélévitch’s Schelling translations (Essais, etc.) and his son’s study, L’odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling.⁵ In the mid-century, Germany saw an explosion of confrontations with Schelling (Schulz, Tillich, Heidegger, Jaspers, Löwith, Habermas, Frank, Jähnig, et al.). Merleau-Ponty, for his part, remained sensitive to the philosophical developments across the Eastern border.

Merleau-Ponty, more so than some of these early readers in the renewed Schelling reception, was also presciently receptive to the problem of Nature in Schelling’s thinking, and, despite some quibbles with Schelling, he could see the power of a mode of thinking that sought to place “us not in front of, but rather in the middle of the absolute” (N2, 47). The thought of Nature, despite the many ways in which Schelling experimented with articulating its various dimensions and potencies, always remained at the heart of Schelling’s enterprise. As Iain Hamilton Grant recently contended in his provocative monograph, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, even in the 1830 lecture course (Introduction to Philosophy), “which claims to have found the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ of history running through the ‘true Proteus of Nature,’ ” it does not follow that Schelling abandoned Naturphilosophie for a new project of freedom and history. The former “remains ‘the substrate of the entire system’ of philosophy.”⁶

Schelling, like a reawakening volcano, prophetically argued, “The idea of Nature as exteriority implies immediately the idea of Nature as a system of laws” (1/3, 6). Nature’s exteriority, its presence, its face, so to speak, conceals its unruly interiority. Viewed merely as the real, without the intervention of what Schelling called “speculative physics,” Nature seems to reduce to the interaction of bodies or forces according to set laws. This is the Verhängnis, the fateful curse, of modernity: Nature as a calculable and determinable system of objectively representable relations that can be studied scientifically. Moreover, as the representation of a closed set of recursive laws, Nature is something before us, in front of us, at the receiving end of the scientist’s discerning gaze. We are no longer of Nature, but rather in Nature, as if we were separate from it, albeit surrounded by it as an environment surrounds an independently standing investigative subject or fly finds itself in a bottle.

Schelling’s intervention did not foreswear science in favor of vague intuitions, idle musings, random conceptualizing, or the Schwärmerei of reducing the question of Nature to affective raptures. Schelling, deeply immersed in science, was fighting for a robust expansion of the range and character of science. Schelling understood this with admirable clarity: The struggle was not between philosophy (or art, or any or the other humanities) and science. The latter domains are not in the end an exclusive disjunction and there is no call to reconfigure all modes of knowing in accordance with the natural sciences. It was a struggle over the nature of science itself and, as such, its relation to other modes of knowing. In his beautiful 1807 essay on the relationship of the plastic arts to Nature, for example, Schelling reflected on the intertwining of the artistic imagination and the Ineinsbilding, the coming into form and image within Nature. As Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback artculates this relationship in the penultimate essay in this volume:

While in Nature the formlessness of the life of form (formation) appears immediately as forms of life, in art, the art forms make visible the disappearing of the formless life within form itself. In Nature, the formless life of form (formation, die Formung) appears from the point of view of its appearing as form. In art, it appears from the point of view of its disappearing in forms. Both Nature and art are alive, are ways of life.

Science can either decimate Nature, reducing it to the representation of bodies or forces subject to the laws that govern them (or any other closed system that seeks to fundamentally represent Nature), or it can provide new ways of retrieving the wisdom of the ancients regarding the question of Nature. It is important to note here that the former option has not won out in all quarters and that some significant enterprises in science (especially quantum physics, string theory, neuroscience, and some exciting developments in biology) have independently rediscovered the question of Nature beyond the flatlining that comprised modern positivism. In Schelling’s time, the picture was becomingly alarmingly less complicated—a fate that we have not wholly evaded. In the Freedom essay, Schelling charged that the former view of science with its representation of Nature, or more precisely, its view of Nature as representable, is Nature-cide, the fatal flaw that epitomizes modernity: “Nature is not present to it” for modernity “lacks a living ground [die Natur für sich nicht vorhanden ist, und daß es ihr am lebendigen Grunde fehlt]” (I/7, 361). Nature therefore becomes an abstraction; its forces become mere repetitions of the same. Natural laws are its inviolable operators, and Nature is bereft of the miracle of natality, incapable of real progressivity, so that it merely repeats what it has always already been, “swiveling in the indifferent circle of sameness, which would not be progressive, but rather insensible and non-vital” (I/7, 345). Unless thinking illuminates the gap that allows one to think Nature as the eternal beginning, Nature occludes what is most forceful, most valuable, and most transformative within itself. As Schelling posed the question in Von der Weltseele: “How can Nature in its blind lawfulness lay claim to the appearance of freedom, and alternately, in appearing to be free, how can it obey a blind lawfulness” (I/6, ix)?

In Schelling’s 1797 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, we find a remarkable line: “The ancients and after them the moderns quite significantly designated the real world as natura rerum or the birth of things [die Geburt der Dinge]; for it is in the real part that the eternal things or the ideas come into existence” (I/2, 187–188). In this brief formulation, we can hear clear echoes of Plato, especially the Timaeus, a dialogue with which Schelling was occupied since his time at the Tübingen Stift.⁷ We also can hear an allusion to Lucretius’ great atomist poem De rerum natura, which had finally appeared in a German translation by Franz Xaver Mayr thirteen years earlier.⁸ Mayr translated the poem into prose as Von der Natur der Dinge, On the Nature of Things, which, although certainly correct, inadvertently falls prey to the suggestion that Lucretius is explaining the essence (nature) of things, that is, telling us what things fundamentally are. For Lucretius, however, things are not a property of matter and the idea of matter does not entail things. Matter is still matter whether or not matter is configured into things. Things are an accident of matter, the power of Lucretius’ famous clinamen or swerve of the atoms (book 2, lines 216–224). The clinamen happens in an “uncertain time” and an “uncertain space,” prompting Deleuze to insist that the “clinamen is by no means a change in direction in the movement of an atom, much less an indetermination testifying to the existence of a physical freedom … ‘Incerto tempore’ does not mean undetermined but non-assignable or non-localizable.”⁹ The natura rerum names not the essence of things, but their coming into being, their birth and emerging into presence from nonassignable or nonlocalizable space and time.

Although Deleuze is right to warn that the “Epicurean atom still retains too much independence, a shape and an actuality” (DR, 184), the clinamen nonetheless provocatively suggests the interiority of Nature, its shadow so to speak. The nonassignable or nonlocalizable ground of things does not suggest that there is some kind of unknowable thing at the origin of all other things. Rather, things in their formation as things do not come out even, but rather leave an irreducible remainder, a trace of chaos in the originary se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Sigla
• Part I: Orientations
• Part II: Schelling and the Question of Nature
• Part III: Merleau-Ponty and Schelling in Conversation
• Contributors
• Index