0791457931.State.University.of.New.York.Press.The.Conspiracy.of.Life.Meditations.on.Schelling.and.His.Time.Nov.2003.pdf

The

Conspiracy

of Life

Meditations on

Schelling and His Time

Jason M. Wirth

State University of New York Press

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany

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

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wirth, Jason M., 1963–

The conspiracy of life : meditations on Schelling and his time / Jason M. Wirth.

p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7914-5793-1 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5794-X (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854. I. Title. II. Series.

B2898.W57 2003

193—dc21

2003057265

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

1 The Nameless Good

2 Theos Kai Pan

3 Nature

4 Direct Experience

101

5 Art

131

6 Evil

155

7 The Haunting

191

8Puru≥ottama

219

Notes

235

Bibliography

265

Index

281

vii

Introduction

What is Life?

Resembles life what once was held of light,

Too ample in itself for human sight?

An absolute self? an element ungrounded?

All, that we see, all colours of all shade

By encroach of darkness made?

Is very life by consciousness unbounded?

And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath

A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1804)

In Alan Loehle’s remarkable painting “Dark Room” (1998), mutton hangs from

a meat hook while a large dog, toys at its feet, muscles rippling through its body,

hunches over, surveying the territory. At first glance, the painting appears to

contrast the vitality of the dog with the once living meat of a sheep. Upon closer

examination, this is an unconvincing contrast. Everything in the painting, right

down to the paint itself, sparkles with life. Even the dark background accentu-

ates the vitality of the foreground and in this activity is itself somehow vital.

Everything—even what we dismiss as dead—scintillates with life. I too

endeavor to speak to a life beyond the illusion of living things and dead things.

In this book I want to capture some of the spirit of this life that conspires

beyond and within life and death. This book is a series of eight meditations

on the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), a great—and greatly

neglected—philosopher of life. It is the hope of this book to reinvigorate the

site of his philosophical thinking. In this sense, it would be best not to cate-

gorize this book as a history of philosophy. It is an attempt to think with

Schelling philosophically, to rejuvenate some of the pulsating life that circu-

lates through his philosophy.

Many have long thought that we are done with Schelling, that he is a “dead

dog,” so to speak. As a result, only the work of the curators of philosophy

I NTRODUCTION

remains. One dissects the corpus of Schelling into its various periods and

phases, while another situates him in relationship to his contemporaries. Still

others expose inconsistencies in his thinking, attach various isms to his argu-

ments, or situate him in some narrative within the history of philosophy.

Spinoza was also once called a dead dog because it was thought that Chris-

tian Wolff and others had finally refuted his atheism and that his pernicious

contagion had been removed from the proper conduct of philosophy. In the

Pantheism Controversy at the end of the eighteenth century, occasioned by

Lessing’s insistence that Spinoza was not a “dead dog,” Spinoza’s thinking

slowly came back to life. It was Schelling who most facilitated this resuscitation.

It is my hope then to do a little for Schelling of what Schelling did for

Spinoza. Neither are dead dogs.

In the 1809 Freedom essay, 1 perhaps Schelling’s most daring work and one

of the treasures of the nineteenth–century German philosophical tradition, he

spoke of a “unity and conspiracy,” a Konspiration (I/7, 391). When something

or someone falls out of the conspiracy, they become inflamed with sickness

and fever, as “inflamed by an inner heat.” Schelling used the Latinate-German

Konspiration, which stems from conspêro, to breathe or blow together. Spêro, to

breathe, is related to spêritus (the German Geist ), meaning spirit, but also

breath. Geist is the progression of difference, the A 3 , the breathing out of the

dark abyss of nature into form and the simultaneous inhaling of this ground,

the retraction of things away from themselves. The conspiracy is a simultane-

ous expiration and inspiration, and each thing of nature is both inspired yet

expiring. This is what I call the conspiracy of life, that is, the life beyond and

within life and death.

It is the endeavor of this book to speak of this conspiracy.

In the following eight chapters one will find, to use the phrase that Hei-

degger employed in the Gesamtausgabe to describe his own paths of thinking,

not “works” but “ways.” They comprise eight meditations on different ways of

entering into the thinking of Schelling. As such, they are more like monads,

each reflecting the subject, but in its own unique fashion. They are eight ways

of articulating a general economy of nature, the circulation of a superabundant

subject (or nonsubject predicating itself through negation in the subject posi-

tion) and innumerable and inexhaustible predicates (or partial objects). For

Schelling, the way in to the circular movement of the conspiracy is always

what is most necessary and most difficult.

It should be obvious from such language that I consider Schelling’s con-

cerns to be relevant to contemporary philosophical discourses. In what fol-

lows, I will rely on figures like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Deleuze,

Bataille, Foucault, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and the Kyoto School to help

excavate the site of Schelling’s thinking.

Although I proceed, roughly speaking, chronologically through Schelling’s

writings, this is a book about the circle of time, and just as a circle has no point

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