The logic of longing: Schelling's philosophy of will

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 89-107

  Norman, Judith ^a  

^a TRINITY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949556381     PISSN: 09608788     EISSN: 14693526     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09608780110099886     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr., 'Introduction' to Friedrieh Schelling, Ages of the World, trans. by Frederick de Wolte Bolman, Jr. (Columbia University Press. 1942) p. 5.
2. In Manfred Frank, 'Identity and Subjectivity' in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. by Simon Critchley and Peter Dews (SUNY Press, 1996) p. 144.
3. Wolfram Hogrebe. Prädikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings 'Die Weltalter' (Suhrkamp, 1989) pp. 105-19.
4. Throughout the paper, I will use the following convention to cite works by Schelling. Quotes from the second draft of the Ages of the World (WA II) are taken from: F. W. J. von Schelling. Die Weltalter: Fragmente, in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 ed. by Manfred Schröter (Munich. C.H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1946).
5. Translations are from Schelling: The Ages of the World trans. with an introduction by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman (New York, Columbia University Press, 1942). References to the Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (FS) are from the same edition of Schelling's works, vol. 7. Translations are by James Gutmann (La Salle, IL, Open Court. 1936).
6. David Farrell Krell explores not just the generally biological nature of these metaphors, but their specifically sexual significance in 'The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom (1809)' in The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, J. C. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux. eds, (Kluwer, 1985).
7. As such, Schelling's logic of succession can be equated with an organic theory of time. This thesis is developed by Peter Lothar Oesterreich in 'Schellings Weltalter und die Ausstehende Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus' in the Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 39 (1985) pp. 74-6.
8. This might be profitably compared to the beginning of Hegel's Logic; one of Schelling's later criticisms of Hegel's logic is that it lacked an internal dynamic principle: thought itself is unable to motivate succession. Schelling finds a dynamism built in to the structure of the will. For an account of the virtues of the WA in comparison with Hegel's Logic, see Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schellings Hegelkritik und die Anfange der Marxschen Dialektic (Suhrkamp, 1975).
9. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: an Essay of Schelling and Related Matters, (London, Verso, 1996) p. 28.
10. An alternative way of making sense of primal nature is offered by Joseph Lawrence who states that 'Schelling was able to incorporate nature into his system, because he maintained the Aristotelian sense that nature is itself implicitly rational'. Joseph Lawrence, 'Schelling: A New Beginning' in Idealistic Studies, 19 (3): 200 (n. 8).
11. As does David Clark in 'The Necessary Heritage of Darkness': Tropics of Negativity in Schelling. Derrida, and de Man' in Intersections: Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory, ed. by Tilottama Rajan and David L. Clark (SUNY. 1995) 119-40.
12. Like other commentators who stress the radical unknowability of the will in Schelling, Clark is concentrating on the FS, where the will is not given the attention it is in the WA. But in his otherwise perceptive study, even Andrew Bowie suggests this view to a certain extent when he writes: 'Schelling deliberately uses the metaphor of "longing". . . to suggest that this is not a causal or logical move. The "lack of being" in the ground, that leads nature beyond itself into articulated self-revelation, cannot finally be understood' in Schelling and European Philosophy: An Introduction (Routledge, 1993) p. 121; see also p. 140.
13. Against Bowie's contention, I believe that longing is not a metaphor that serves as a placeholder for an incomprehensible alternative to logical succession. I have been concerned to argue that Schelling uses the term longing to help extend the notion of the comprehensible by suggesting a new logic of succession, one based on the relation between ground and consequent. Similarly, Lanfranconi argues against Habermas' attempt to read the WA in metaphorical terms; in Jürgen Habermas, Das Absolute und die Geschichte: Von der Zwiespaltigkeit in Schellings Denken (Ph.D. diss., Rheinishe Friedrich Wilhelms Universität, 1954) p. 373;
14. see Aldo Lanfranconi, Krisis: Eine Lektüre der 'Weltalter' Texte F. W. J. Schellings (Frommann-Holzboog. 1992) pp. 96-7.
15. This. then, would be Nietzsche's response to the debate in the literature concerning the degree to which the WA admits of a secular reading. For a strong account of Schelling's theological import, see Horst Fuhrmans, III: Der Ausgangspunk der Schellingschen Spät-philosophie (Dokumente zur Schellingforschung)' in Kant-Studien 48 (1956/57). pp. 302-23. For a strong secular reading of the WA see Bowie (1993).
16. For a different account of this aspect of Schelling's thought, see Fiona Steinkamp, 'Primal Nature in The Ages of the World'. Idealistic Studies 24 no. 2 (Spring. 1994). Steinkamp argues that primal nature has no contradiction but rather the possibility of contradiction. As I have tried to demonstrate, this is neither what Schelling said (as Steinkamp admits) nor what he thought; I believe her notion of primal nature as possibility falls short of Schelling's rather more Kantian notion of primal nature as ground. As a ground, primal nature is distinct from the existence it grounds, but its status is that of transcendental condition rather than possible being.
17. See Edward Allen Beach, The Potencies of God (s) (Albany, SUNY Press, 1994).
18. For this reason. I do not entirely agree with the tendency of recent Schelling scholarship that, as Beach writes, 'celebrated him for pointing beyond the ideal of a philosophy modeled on logic', Beach (1994) p. 100.
19. (Representatives of this tendency include Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom (Yale University Press. 1983) pp. 134 ff.
20. as well as Habermas (1954) and Walter Kasper, Das Absolute in der Geschichte: Philosophic und Theologie der Geschichte in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Matthias-Grunewald, 1965) -who. as the title of his book suggests, believes Schelling pushed back the bounds of logic to make way, not for historically contingent acts of freedom, as Habermas thought, but rather for theology.) Contrary to these interpretations, I believe that in the WA at least, Schelling does not abandon logic so much as reconfigure it to respond to the challenge of thinking the will. Schulz gives a strongly rationalistic account of the later Schelling. although he aims to recuperate the freedom of the divine essence for thought more than the notion of primal chaos, to which he pays insufficient attention; see Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings. second, expanded edn (Neske, 1975).
21. The notion of a retroactive constitution of a cause has resonance with the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit, which involves the reconstitution of some hitherto innocuous past event as the traumatic cause of present neurotic symptoms. In The Indivisible Remainder. Žižek gives a fascinating account of some of the many homologies between Schelling's narrative and (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, with occasional reference to mythologizing. The function of Schelling's theory of temporality specifically in relation to myth is given by Beach (1994). The mythic and epic context of the WA is explored in Oesterreich (1985) pp. 70-85.
22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York, St. Martins Press, 1956).
23. A term aptly applied to Deleuze by Alistair Welchman, 'Deleuze' in The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 1998).