Schelling's Practice of the Wild

Time, Art, Imagination

Jason M. Wirth

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438456782, 9781438456799
• eBook ISBN: 9781438456805
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The last two decades have seen a renaissance and reappraisal of Schelling's remarkable body of philosophical work, moving beyond explications and historical study to begin thinking with and through Schelling, exploring and developing the fundamental issues at stake in his thought and their contemporary relevance. In this book, Jason M. Wirth seeks to engage Schelling's work concerning the philosophical problem of the relationship of time and the imagination, calling this relationship Schelling's practice of the wild. Focusing on the questions of nature, art, philosophical religion (mythology and revelation), and history, Wirth argues that at the heart of Schelling's work is a radical philosophical and religious ecology. He develops this theme not only through close readings of Schelling's texts, but also by bringing them into dialogue with thinkers as diverse as Deleuze, Nietzsche, Melville, Musil, and many others. The book also features the first appearance in English translation of Schelling's famous letter to Eschenmayer regarding the Freedom essay.

Part I

Time

1

Extinction

But this circulation goes in all directions at once, in all the directions of all the space-times opened by presence to presence: all things, all beings, all entities, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, gods—and “humans,” that is, those who expose sharing and circulation as such by saying “we,” by saying we to themselves in all possible senses of that expression, and by saying we for the totality of all being.

—Jean-Luc Nancy¹

One Great Ruin

In Schelling’s dialogue Clara (c. 1810), the doctor advises Clara that if one wants to witness ruins, one does not need to travel to the deserts of Persia or India because “the whole earth is one great ruin, where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where many hidden powers and treasures are locked away, as if by an invisible strength or by a magician’s spell.”² The whole earth is haunted by a mathematically sublime preponderance of ghosts and spirits. Scientists now identify at least twenty mass extinction events, five of which are considered so cataclysmic that they are referred to collectively as the “Big Five” and during which time the conditions for life were cataclysmically altered. Although it is still a matter of some debate, the acceleration of global temperatures and the burgeoning climate emergency due to the increasingly industrial character of human life, the widespread destruction of nonhuman habitats, the alarming rate of rain forest devastation, the unchecked population explosion, and the general degradation of the earth and its resources, is precipitating a sixth. Indeed, the very character of life, given its ruinous history, leaves the earth scarred with fossilized vestiges of former ages of the world, a natural history of the wreckage of past life.

Although Schelling could not have been aware of this current reading of the exuberantly profligate fossil record, nature’s luxurious infidelity to its guests was not lost on him. As he mused in The Ages of the World: “If we take into consideration the many terrible things in nature and the spiritual world and the great many other things that a benevolent hand seems to cover up from us, then we could not doubt that the Godhead sits enthroned over a world of terrors. And God, in accordance with what is concealed in and by God, could be called the awful and the terrible, not in a derivative fashion, but in their original sense” (I/8, 268).³ There is something awful and terrible concealed within nature, and it haunts us through its ghostly and spectral remnants. Or to articulate it more precisely: what is haunting about the prodigal ruin of nature is not only that its remnants indicate what once was but is no longer, nor is it enough to say, as does the skeleton at the base of Masaccio’s Trinitarian crucifixion (c. 1427) in Santa Maria Novella in Florence: “I once was what you are now and what I am you shall be.”⁴ It is certainly true that the presence of the vestiges of past life testifies both to the past and to the past’s capacity to speak to the future. Both of these moments, however, more fundamentally indicate something awful coming to presence concealed in each and every coming to presence, something awful in which all nature partakes as the paradoxical solitude of its coming to presence.

What all of nature shares, this awful and terrible concealment, is not a common and discernible essence, an underlying substance, or any other kind of universally distributed metaphysical property. Rather, it shares the paradox of coming to presence: each and every coming to presence, what each being shares in its own way, is therefore a solitary coming to presence. Each being is exposed as singular, or, as Schelling adapts Leibniz’s Monadology, as a monad in the sense of a “unity” or an “idea.” “What we have here designated as unities is the same as what others have understood by idea or monad, although the true meanings of these concepts have long since been lost” (I/2, 64). The monad is the very figure of shared solitude, sharing the awful secret of the absolute as natura naturans, yet each in its unique fashion, each singularly. The monad is a particular that is not the instantiation of a higher generality, but rather each monad “is a particular that is as such absolute” (I/2, 64). The community that is nature, a terrible belonging together, is the strange one—in no way to be construed as one thing or being—expressing itself as the irreducibly singular proliferation of the many, much in the way that Jean-Luc Nancy claims that the “world has no other origin than this singular multiplicity of origins” (BSP, 9).

This is not merely to mark the awful and terrible secret as a limit, as a threshold beyond which thinking dare not pass. As Nancy further reflects, “its negativity is neither that of an abyss, nor of the forbidden, nor of the veiled or the concealed, nor of the secret, nor that of the unpresentable” (BSP, 12). Merely to designate it as such is to designate it exclusively as the “capitalized Other,” which marks it as “the exalted and overexalted mode of the propriety of what is proper,” relegated to the “punctum aeternum outside the world” (BSP, 13).⁵ This is precisely what is denied in marking the terrible secret as the terrible secret of nature. It is everywhere and therefore everywhere different, the immense dynamic differentiation of the community of solitude that is nature. The “world of terrors” does not merely mark abstractly a limit to thinking. It is the awful secret that expresses itself ceaselessly in and as every single manifestation of the play of nature but which, itself, has no independent standing. It is, as the great Kamakura period Zen Master Dōgen liked to articulate it, the presentation of “the whole great earth without an inch of soil left out.”

The plurality of the origin is not only the shared solitude of birth, but also the shared solitude of ruin. This chapter takes as its prompt the phenomenon of mass extinction events, especially the seeming likelihood of the “sixth,” but it does so in order to engage in a sustained reflection on Schelling’s conception of natural history. I argue that for Schelling all history is ultimately natural history, that is, all nature is radically historical and expressive of what Schelling called the unprethinkability (Unvordenklichkeit) of its temporality. This consequently subverts the common bifurcation of history into human (or cultural) history and natural (or nonhuman) history. The ascendancy of the Anthropocene Age⁶ is widely but erroneously celebrated as the triumph of culture over nature. In order to subvert this duality, I consider carefully the difficult and prescient character of my two key terms: “nature” and “history.” For Schelling, the two terms are ultimately inseparable (that is, they belong together as a unity of antipodes). Already established in the early works of his Naturphilosophie, and dramatically developed in the 1809 Freedom essay and the various drafts of die Weltalter, nature is not a grand object, subsisting through time, and leaving behind it the residue of its past. Such a conception characterizes modern philosophy’s nature-cide by denigrating nature into an object that can to some extent be pried open from the vantage point of the subjective position of scientific inquiry. This assumes that nature stands before us as a vast conglomeration of objects and the eternally recursive laws that govern their manners of relation to each other. As Merleau-Ponty later observed, Schelling “places us not in front of, but rather in the middle of the absolute.”⁷ Schelling’s retrieval of the question of nature is simultaneously the retrieval of its all-encompassing temporality, including its cataclysmic dimensions, but also of its transformative dimension for human thinking.

After a preliminary and orienting reflection on the destructive element of time, I turn to Schelling not by broadly canvassing the vast territory of his thinking, but rather by concentrating on a small number of texts. Although I maintain an eye toward the explosive works of Schelling’s transitional period, including the celebrated 1809 Freedom essay and the third draft of The Ages of the World (1815), I also consider two early writings: “Is a Philosophy of History Possible?” (1798) as well as the beginning of the introduction to Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797, revised edition, 1803).

It is in the latter work that Schelling makes the remarkable claim that “Philosophy is nothing but a natural teaching of our spirit [eine Naturlehre unseres Geistes]” and that, as such, philosophy now “becomes genetic, that is, it allows the whole necessary succession of representations to, so to speak, emerge and pass before our eyes” (I/2, 39). In moving from the being of our representations to their becoming, to the dynamism of their coming to presence, we become present to the coming to presence of nature itself. That is to say, the organic, nonmechanistic, genetic temporality of nature’s coming to presence, that is, nature naturing (natura naturans), comes to the fore. This in part yields a mode of access to the vast, paradoxically discontinuous yet progressive history of nature. As Schelling articulates it in The Ages of the World: “Therefore that force of the beginning posited in the expressible and exterior is the primordial seed of visible nature, out of which nature was unfolded in the succession of ages. Nature is an abyss of the past. This is what is oldest in nature, the deepest of what remains if everything accidental and everything that has become is removed” (I/8, 244).

Amid the current, heartbreaking, and agonizing explosion of ruin, an event that, while staggering, is hardly unprecedented, accreting the already enormous record of wreckage, I turn to what is “oldest in nature.” At the conclusion of the Freedom essay, Schelling designates nature as an “older revelation than any scriptural one,” claiming that now is not the time “to reawaken old conflicts” but rather to “seek that which lies beyond and above all conflicts” (I/7, 416). Now is not the time to reawaken the “sectarian spirit” (I/7, 335), to pit one position against another, but rather to allow to come to presence, to let reveal itself, that which haunts every possible position. It is time for the most ancient revelation, what is oldest in nature, to come forth. That the sixth biotic crisis is not unprecedented does not make it any less of a crisis. It remains not merely an acceleration of death, but more fundamentally a murderous rampage against nature’s natality and hence against its biodiversity (the death of a species is the death of its mode of birth). What does what is oldest in nature enable us to see regarding what is currently the anguish of our earth?

Sifting Through Ruins

If one were to drive one’s automobile to a museum of natural history, one could become aware of two ways in which nature is coming to presence. Parking the car, one could enter the museum and, if it were at all comprehensive, one would encounter primordial indications of the ruinous discontinuity of nature in the remnants of earlier ages of the world. Nowhere is this more dramatically evident then when contemplating the fossilized remains of the great reptiles. Their size and power are haunting relics from a scarcely imaginable age, ghosts that speak not only of themselves, but of a lost world, a vastly different ecology of life. Although such things remain issues of scientific debate, the decline of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals are generally attributed to the fifth great biotic crisis, occurring some 65 million years ago, perhaps as the result of a collision with a meteor (or some other sudden incursion from space) or a dramatic increase in volcanic activity. In either scenario, the earth’s ecological webs were drastically altered and the rate of speciation of macroscopic life was overwhelmed by its rate of extinction.

It is the macroscopic grandeur of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, with the disturbing and compelling specters of the rapacious Tyrannosaurus Rex, the enormous brontosaurus, and myriad other sublime creatures, that make the paleontology divisions of natural history museums the most gripping and unsettling of haunted houses. The imagination reels all the more when it considers that the magnitude of this loss was greatly exceeded by the third great biotic crisis, which concluded the Permian age. This was the so-called Great Dying, which preceded the fall of the great reptiles by some 180 million years. If one then muses at the spectral record of the species that have died since the last great biotic crisis, the “fearful symmetry” of creatures like the saber tooth tiger or the woolly mammoth, or if one considers the plight of the beleaguered Florida panther or the Himalayan snow leopard, their endangered grasps on life symbolic of the immense pressure on so many different creatures, known and unknown, one then grasps the awful truth of what Georges Bataille meant when he claimed that death “constantly leaves the necessary room for the coming of the newborn, and we are wrong to curse the one without whom we would not exist.”⁸ Death makes space for the progression of life, the awful secret of what is oldest in nature, haunting nature, progressing anew as natura naturans.

When one then, unsettled, leaves the museum of natural history, that repository “where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where many hidden powers and treasures are locked away,” and gets back into one’s car, and navigates back into a great sea of automobiles, one could reflect that the car’s capacity for movement depends on fossil fuels. It consumes the very wreckage that had just been haunting one. Not only that, it partakes in a vast network of human industrial life that is exercising immense, even cataclysmic, pressure on biotic communities. Although the debates continue, there is a growing consensus among biologists that we are amid the sixth great extinction event, with predictions running as high as the net loss of half of all macroscopic species by the end of the century. However, one’s automobile is not analogous to a comet or a volcano and catastrophic climate change cannot be attributed to a cosmic or geological accident. We “are” the automobile and the wreckage of the earth is a symptom of our acquisitive wrath. We are the natural disaster.

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have bemoaned that we “suck our sustenance from the rest of nature in a way never before seen in the world, reducing its bounty as ours grows.”⁹ Not only is the rise of the human the diminishment of the earth, but the more we diminish the earth, for example, by clear-cutting rain forests for arable land, the more we increase our numbers, which means the more we need to diminish the earth, and so it continues in a deadly progression of self-destructive self-assertion. “Dominant as no other species has been in the history of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is in the throes of causing a major biological crisis, a mass extinction, the sixth such event to have occurred in the past half billion years” (SE, 245).

Is this self, exorbitantly sucking our “sustenance from the rest of nature,” that is, the self as the occasion of explosive ruin, clearly distinct from the allegedly dispassionate and inquiring self, which gazes “objectively” at the extravagant expenditure of life that haunts biotic relics? One might be tempted to say that in the first instance one finds oneself against nature and in the second instance awestruck, gazing at nature. Yet to stare at nature, as if it were simply before one, is to be no less opposed to nature than to be straightforwardly against it. In both instances one finds oneself in nature, that is to say, surrounded by nature, amid nature, as if nature were an environment. Nature appears as one’s environs when one measures one’s relationship to nature as an object distinct from oneself as a subject. Even when one is in nature, one is more fundamentally opposed to it, cut off from it, which is the condition of possibility for either gazing at it or acting ruinously against it.

It is in this spirit of separ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Time
• Part II. Thinking with Deleuze
• Part III. Nature of Art and Art of Nature
• Appendix A. Schelling’s Answer to Eschenmayer [The Letter to Eschenmayer] (1812), translated with commentarial notes by Christopher Lauer and Jason M. Wirth
• Appendix B. Schelling’s Unfinished Dialogue: Reason and Personality in the Letter to Eschenmayer by Christopher Lauer
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover