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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Eye and the Spirit of Nature

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Eye and the Spirit of Nature Some Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Schelling Concerning the Relationship between Art and Nature Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Abstract This essay analyzes Merleau-Ponty’s reception of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie by focusing on their shared vision regarding the relationship between art and Nature. In discerning how both thinkers understand this relationship, I argue that the meeting point between these two philosophies is the experience of the tragic nature of appearing as the experience in which Nature appears as the excess of being in relation to the consciousness of being. Schelling’s insistence that human consciousness is Nature’s own continuity precisely in being Nature’s own discontinuity also appears in Merleau Ponty’s philosophy, especially in his interpretation of the paintings of Paul Klee. I further claim that Paul Klee’s own work also allows us to see the tragic structure of appearing in a manner that resonates with the core of the philosophies of Schelling and Merleau-Ponty. Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; art makes visible. —Paul Klee 307 308 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback As most of the essays in this volume indicate, Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Schelling is most systematically presented in his 1957 lecture course on the Concept of Nature. Here he interprets Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a “phenomenology of pre-reflexive Being” and, as such, as fundamentally distinct from any possible rational foundation of natural science (a science of Nature). This “pre-reflexive Being,” prior to any possible reflection, corresponds to what Schelling variously called “the ground,” “the irreducible remainder,” “the barbarian principle,” “the brute fact of being,” that which is “older than God Himself,” “the abyss of the past,” “the groundless ground,” “the anger of God,” “destructive fire,” “chaos,” “erste Natur,” and so on. Merleau-Ponty understands this primordial, abyssal, and groundless ground, or irreducible remainder, as Nature’s “barbarian principle,” and its “excess of being” delimits what opens up at the limit of our consciousness of being: “Cet excès de l’Être sur la conscience de l’Être, voilà ce que Schelling veut penser dans toute sa rigueur” (N1, 62). Merleau-Ponty’s Schelling therefore opens up a, so to speak, “surrealistic” Naturphilosophie in the literal sense of the Übersein, that which is over and above being. This term does not refer to the traditional metaphysical commitment to an object or dimension that transcends being (God in heaven vs. His creation in the profane world). In Schelling’s view, Nature names the excess of being within being itself. It does not name any particular being or entity that somehow exceeds being. It names the force of Nature that is otherwise than being but nonetheless within being. Merleau-Ponty consequently regards Schelling as a turning point in the traditional ontology of Nature, which defines Nature as a process. Schelling, however, did not regard Nature as any kind of determinate process or set of processes, but rather as ontological excess. Nevertheless, the explanatory key to understanding Nature as either a process or an excess at first glance seems to be the same for both accounts: Nature is that which works and produces (i.e., that Nature is, in the ancient register of the word, “poetical” power). The ancient ontology of Nature is grounded in the prima facie very “natural” and seemingly obvious identification between the process of Nature and the production of natural works. But in what sense can the excess of Nature be explained through Nature working and producing? Merleau-Ponty responds that Nature “is a producer which is not all-powerful, which does not succeed in ending its production: it is a movement of rotation which produces nothing definitive” (N1, 61). As excess, Nature is neither an omnipotent nor a successful producer. Nature’s excess is not a supplement, but rather a strangely intensive and rich deficiency. One might say, borrowing Georges 309 The Eye and the Spirit of Nature Braque’s beautiful term: Nature is not definition but rather infinition.1 In such passages we can hear the echo of the decisive definition of the relationship between art and Nature that Aristotle offered in the Physics. “Indeed, as a general proposition, the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further than Nature can, or they imitate Nature.”2 In defining art in this way, Aristotle is...