The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature

CHAPTER FOUR Schelling on Plato’s Timaeus

CHAPTER FOUR Schelling on Plato’s Timaeus Kyriaki Goudeli Abstract This essay investigates the intricate relationship between Schelling and Plato’s major cosmological works, The Ages of the World and the Timaeus, respectively, with a special focus on the controversial and intriguing notion of the platonic χώρα, which proves to be of major significance for the question of Nature. The first section extracts substantial conclusions from Schelling’s early essay on Plato’s Timaeus regarding Plato’s implicit notions of invisible matter and the parallel eternities operating both throughout cosmic becoming in general and entities in particular. Schelling’s early notes on Timeaus, although at times critical, seem to constitute the seeds, which fertilize his later cosmological thought. The second section attempts to provide a reconstruction of Schelling’s transformations of key Platonic concepts, especially the χώρα, by taking Plato’s Philebus and Sophist into consideration. Schelling’s exuberant and fearless thought not only provides a fresh insight into the Platonic legacy but also an impressive dynamization of his own Neoplatonic identity system. Here we find that the Other of God, the Platonic μη όν, Nature, is the Godhead itself in its barbaric love for existence. In Schelling’s early studies on Plato, we can detect his fertile critical tension with the Platonic corpus. On the one hand, he is a severe critic, but on the other hand, there is a creative anxiety driving him to decipher the seductive elusiveness of Plato’s words, as if he could somehow recollect “the unwritten writings [τα άγραφα δόγματα].” 59 60 Kyriaki Goudeli In this essay, I will examine some aspects of this interesting dynamic, which deepened precisely when Schelling was breaking with his most “Neoplatonic system”—the philosophy of Identity. This dynamic opens an important perspective on the question of Nature for Schelling. I. The 1794 Commentary on the Timaeus Schelling’s extensive commentary on Plato’s Timaeus is among his very earliest writings. The commentary, a student essay apparently not intended for publication, consists of a thorough exegesis of selected extracts of the Timaeus and as whole, although coherent, it nonetheless appears as an aggregate of step-by-step notes for his personal use in his reconnaissance of an unknown but promising land. As such, the commentary follows the dialogue’s own order of presentation. As a preliminary remark, we note that Schelling, throughout the whole of the interpretative comments in the first section of the text, consistently applies Kantian terminology. Hence, the Platonic ideas are seen from the standpoint of the concepts of the pure understanding, and Nature as an organized whole is viewed under the causality of an a priori regulative concept, namely, time as a pure form of intuition. Since “the key to the explanation of the entire Platonic philosophy is the remark that he carries the subjective over to the objective,”1 Schelling operates the reverse movement on Plato’s behalf, as if Plato’s confrontation with the abyssal antinomian crisis of reason in its search for the absolute would instigate a shock to the dogmatism that lurks in one-sided objectification. But, we might already ask, how dogmatic is Socrates’ and Timaeus’ constant solicitation of the gods and the goddesses, beseeching them to grant the requisite enthusiasm to develop a more likely story? Despite Schelling’s Kantian framework, which may justifiably strike the reader as infelicitous for accommodating a cosmological poem like the Timaeus, Schelling nonetheless has a fertile engagement with it, one that results in the seed of Schelling’s own future cosmological poem, The Ages of the World. As already mentioned, the text raises a large number of points, following a thorough commentary on many of the interesting ideas in the Timaeus. Here, I would like to point out three major issues, which are, to our view, most critical as far as the interpretation of the Platonic legacy is concerned. 1. Throughout the variety of his comments, a recurrent issue of major significance for Schelling, at least at this early stage of his thinking, was the refutation of dualistic thinking, which opposed matter 61 Schelling on Plato’s Timaeus to spirit, time to eternity, becoming to being, and, moreover, contributed to a modality of thinking associated with an hierarchical evaluation of the poles of the dichotomous antithesis. The Platonic chorismos was somehow reminiscent of Cartesian dualism transferred “to the objective.” Schelling, referring to the preexisting material that the demiurge takes over for creating the cosmos, claims: “Plato assumed, after...