Schelling's Practice of the Wild

Jason M. Wirth

Description

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.
Preface

Part I. Time

1. Extinction

2. Solitude of God

Part II. Thinking with Deleuze

3. Image of Thought

4. Stupidity

Part III. Nature of Art and Art of Nature

5. Plasticity

6. Life of Imagination

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

Sujets

• Philosophie générale
• Philosophie
• History of philosophy
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438456805
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

SCHELLING’S PRACTICE OF THE WILD
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Schelling’s Practice of the Wild
Time, Art, Imagination

JASON M. WIRTH
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 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, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wirth, Jason M., 1963-
Schelling’s practice of the wild : time, art, imagination / Jason M. Wirth.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5679-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-5680-5 (e-book) 1. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. Aesthetics. I. Title.
B2899.N3W57 2015
113—dc23
2014027723
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Elizabeth Myoen Sikes in gratitude for sharing a practice of the wild
None of our spiritual thoughts transcends the earth.
—Schelling to Eschenmayer (1812) (I/8, 169)
Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated …
—Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (10)
CONTENTS

Preface
Part I. Time
Chapter 1. Extinction
Chapter 2. Solitude of God
Part II. Thinking with Deleuze
Chapter 3. Image of Thought
Chapter 4. Stupidity
Part III. Nature of Art and Art of Nature
Chapter 5. Plasticity
Chapter 6. Life of Imagination
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
PREFACE

T he last two decades have enjoyed a considerable renaissance and reappraisal of Schelling’s remarkable body of philosophical work. In addition to the laudable feat of bringing the long neglected works of Schelling to our philosophical attention, this shift in the philosophical terrain allows for new kinds of work to appear. Now that the basic case for both Schelling’s intrinsic interest and contemporary relevance has been made, there is an opportunity to move beyond issuing reports on Schelling and merely explicating these admittedly difficult texts. We can now think with and through Schelling, accompanying him as an opportunity to explore and develop the fundamental issues at stake in his thought. One need not restrict oneself to reportage—even of the most hermeneutically savvy kind. One can also appreciate the questions that Schelling often developed in such startling and original ways as philosophical problems that are worthy in their own right. Moreover, one can insist that these are commanding issues, problems that speak to some of the great matters of human living and dying.
Following a range of remarkable texts to have appeared in Germany and France and elsewhere since the middle of the twentieth century, some bold and original new studies of Schelling have appeared in English, including the works of Iain Hamilton Grant, Bruce Matthews, Sean McGrath, Tilottoma Rajan, Markus Gabriel, Bernard Freydberg, and many others. 1 It is to this burgeoning tradition that I aspire with this book.
Continental philosophy has to some extent earned the bad rap of becoming a kind of philosophical ventriloquism, obsequiously satisfied with becoming a puppet for the voice about which one writes. There are increasingly many inspiring counterexamples to this practice, and it is this latter kind of company that this book desires to keep. This book is not a report about a philosopher. It seeks to engage Schelling the philosopher philosophically and its line of inquiry is the problem of the relationship of time and the imagination , both in Schelling’s remarkable thought and as a worthy problem in its own right. I call this relationship, both in terms of its concepts and the modes of human living that it endears, Schelling’s practice of the wild . It is a problem that bears on the questions of nature, art, philosophical religion (mythology and revelation), and history.
Wild Nature and Its Practice
Schelling argued, in as many different ways as he could throughout his long philosophical career, that nature is alive. Famously in the Freedom essay, Schelling charged that the prevailing modern view of natural science with its positivistic representation of nature, or more precisely, its view of nature as representable, is nature-cide, the fatal flaw that epitomizes thinking in the wake of the Enlightenment: “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 a vague abstraction and its forces become mere repetitions of the same (so-called natural laws). Elsewhere Schelling speaks of the “the true annihilation [ Vernichtung ] of nature” (I/5, 275) as it becomes a dead object under the control and interests of the human subject. In his early Naturphilosophie , Schelling creatively retrieved the ancient doctrine of the anima mundi , living nature, animated by its ψυχή or anima , what Plato in the Timaeus dubbed the ψυχή κόσμου, the soul of the cosmos, or what Schelling called die Weltseele , the soul of the world. There is good reason for the natural sciences to be suspicious of such descriptions. Life is reserved for the things that are alive, not for rocks and houses. Moreover, the analogy between a living being and a vital universe is quite loose and doubtless falls short in many respects.
This, however, is already Schelling’s point. To say that the universe is alive is not to say that it is a living thing, the superorganism that contains all other organisms. 2 The life of nature holds together organically the living and dying of living things and the coming and going of nonliving things. This should not be confused with some élan vital or vitalism or life force ( Lebenskraft ). Life is not external to the living, coming into the living from afar. As we see in the remarkable essay Über das Verhältniß des Realen und Idealen in der Natur, oder Entwickelung der ersten Grundsätze der Naturphilosophie an den Principien der Schwere und des Lichts , written in 1806 to complete Von der Weltseele :

It is undeniable that apart from the external life of things, an inner life is manifest, whereby they are capable of sympathy and antipathy and of the perception of other, not even immediately present things; it is also undeniable that the universal life of things is at the same time the particular life of the individual.
Since this is the principle by which the infinity of things is posited universally as eternity and present, so it is equally that which forms the permanent in time, individual circuits, as it were, in the all-enclosing circle of eternity, that adorn the years, months and days; and must we not agree with Plato in naming this all-organizing and improving principle of global and universal wisdom and the majestic soul of the all? (I/2, 371) 3
Life is the sovereign presentation of nature, its free coming into form and necessity. Schelling’s turn here to the Timaeus and the χώρα at the heart of nature marks a different conception of life, a way of life that I am marking by the word wild that I am borrowing from the American poet Gary Snyder. Nature is through and through alive because it is wild .
Although I discuss this in more detail in my opening chapter, we can say that the wild is not the mere opposite of the tame and the ordered. Schelling is not glibly inverting the obvious regularity and clear patterns of the universe in some infantile plea that we should go wild and embrace the Dionysian as an alternative to what we suffer as the iron cage of ordered life. The wild is at the dark ground of the tame, or 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). The wild is the free or sovereign progress of the necessary, the creative life of the world. It is the self-organizing, self-unfolding, self-originating, middle voice of nature.
The wild is not, for instance, what Kant in his Über Pädogik characterized as die Wildheit , wildness or savagery, as “independence from laws.” 4 Without discipline and tutelage, humans are unruly. Without dismissing the value of education, it does not follow that the default state, while untutored, is therefore without form and shape and law. The unruly as such is found nowhere—it is a fantasy about what tutelage supposedly conquers (and hence Kant, typical of his epoch, imagined with trepidation whole races of untutored savages). Schelling himself may not always have escaped his culture’s prejudices, 5 but his intuition of the autogenesis of being as a system of freedom provides extraordinary resources to rethink what we could mean by the wild, not as the antithesis of the cultured or domesticated, but the wild as seen from the wild itself in its natality and self-originating creativity.
At the heart of Schelling’s practice of the wild is, to use Deleuze’s felicitous phrase, an imageless image of thought, an ontological