The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Throughout this book I will use the standard pagination, except where otherwise noted. Said pagination follows the original edition published after Schelling’s death by his son, Karl. It is preserved in Manfred Schröter’s critical reorganization of this material. See the first section of my bibliography for more information. CHAPTER ONE 1. The Ages of the World (1815 draft), trans. Jason Wirth, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 237. Henceforth AW, with the standard German pagination found in the translation. 2. In Wegmarken, 2nd edition, (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 347. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), 95. Henceforth OB. It is not the case, however, that Levinas, with his deflated or strawman reading of the Western philosophical tradition, would likely have agreed to the proximity of his thought to Schelling’s project. As for the conatus, Levinas argued that “the essence thus works as an invincible persistence in essence, filling up every interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise. . . . And what can positivity mean but this conatus? Being’s interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together” (OB, 4). The conatus is Spinoza’s term for that which endeavors to remain itself. [C.f., Proposition 7 of Part III of the Ethics (1677): “The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.”] The conatus, a thing’s drive towards its own self-maintenance and enhancement, is a classical term at least as old as Cicero. Thomas Hobbes, who influenced Spinoza, also made use of it. The conatus rides the wave of modernity’s relatively untroubled insistence on self-interest as the ground of human action. 235 Notes 4. Clara: Or on the Relationship Between Nature and the Spirit World, trans. Fiona Steinkamp, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Henceforth C. I cite the original German pagination that Dr. Steinkamp uses in the body of her translation. I occasionally deviate from her translation to emphasize certain ideas in my analysis. 5. For a discussion of the debate, see David Farrell Krell, “The Oldest Program Towards a System in German Idealism,” The Owl of Minerva 17 (Fall 1985), 5–19. I also use his translation of the fragment, which is found in the body of the article. Henceforth referred to as OS. 6. Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” trans. Seán Hand and Michael Temple, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 76. 7. Although Hegel implicitly recanted this principle in his Philosophy of Right, Schelling held on to it until the end, even as the communists marched by the windows of his Berlin residence in 1848. 8. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Karl Vorländer, 7th, expanded edition , (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), 11. Henceforth KU. 9. Nishida Kitaro\, “The Union Point of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” Art and Morality (1923), trans. David Dilworth and Valdo Viglielmo, (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1973), 100. Henceforth AM. 10. I rely, with my own emendations, on the A. V. Miller translation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Henceforth PG. 11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and The Discourse on Language (1971), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 235. 12. Philosophie der Offenbarung 1841/1842, 2nd, enlarged edition, ed. Manfred Frank, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 121–22. Henceforth PO. 13. On the History of Modern Philosophy (1827), trans. Andrew Bowie, (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994), 124–25/133. Henceforth HMP. I list first the standard pagination followed by the pagination of Bowie’s translation. I use Bowie’s translations, with very slight alterations (chiefly for the sake of consistency with my translations of other Schelling passages appearing elsewhere in this book). 14. Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie: Münchener Vorlesung WS 1832/33 und SS 1833, edited with commentary by Horst Fuhrmans, (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), 222. Henceforth GP. See also HMP, which five years earlier made almost the identical claim. “Everything can be in the logical Idea without anything being explained thereby, as, for example, everything in the sensuous world is grasped in number and measure, which does not therefore mean that geometry or arithmetic explain the...