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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Art of Nature

CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Art of Nature On the Agony of the Will in Schelling and Merleau-Ponty Jason M. Wirth Abstract This essay takes up the problem of Nature in Schelling and MerleauPonty (especially in his late lecture course on Nature) as it comes to be thought from the perspective of the problem of art. The problem of the kinship (Verwandtschaft) of art and Nature is developed through an analysis not only of their respective writings on the problems of Naturphilosophie and Kunstphilosophie, but also through the related problems of the relationship between the polarizing forces of light and gravity as well as the unity of willing and knowing in artistic creation. The moralist desires to see Nature not as living, but as dead, so that he can tread upon it with his feet. —Schelling (I/7, 17) It is not only remarkable that Merleau-Ponty, near the end of his life, turned to Schelling, but that he turned to Schelling at the moment that he did. Merleau-Ponty turned to Schelling, albeit not without some reservations, as a companion to help him think through the question of Nature. At this time, Merleau-Ponty was also again engaged with the 321 322 Jason M. Wirth question of art, working on the remarkable late essay, Eye and Mind (1961). The Western philosophical tradition has, with scant but notable exceptions, long subscribed to the bifurcation of Nature and art. (Nature does what Nature does while art has its provenance in human activity; art imitates Nature by representing natural things, etc.) In Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, however, this bifurcation is untenable. If one looks at Schelling’s enterprise, one sees that his preoccupation with Naturphilosophie (1797– 1801) and his so-called Indentitätsphilosophie (1800–1803) included the watershed work of his Kunstphilosophie (1802–1804 as well as an important public address in 1807). Schelling’s philosophy of art was not a break or change of itinerary from his Naturphilosophie. It was not another example of Schelling, as Hegel accused him, pursuing his education in public. For Schelling, the Kunstphilosophie was another manner of retrieving and reactivating the question of Nature. In what follows, I pursue the fundamental relationship and kinship of art and Nature as it figures in the philosophies of Schelling and Merleau-Ponty and I do so through a consideration of the experience of thinking that opens up in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Schelling. I. The Guiding Question I pursue an articulation of this relationship between Nature and art across two opposing forces that exemplify for Schelling and MerleauPonty the composite unity of Nature, namely light and gravity. I pay special attention to this “and”—the circle of Nature itself—that conjoins as a single process light and gravity in their opposition. This expanding and contracting, diastolic and systolic circle, which Merleau-Ponty argues that in Schelling “places us not in front of, but rather in the middle of the absolute” (N2, 47), is located in the complex activities of art and philosophy. These two activities do not surrender their autonomy to each other. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “The access to the Absolute by philosophy is thus not exclusive. There are experiences that teach something to philosophy, but that does not mean that philosophy has to lose its autonomy” (N2, 46). Nonetheless there is something in philosophy that draws it into proximity with art and there is something in art that draws it into proximity with philosophy. In The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling names this proximity a Verwandtschaft (I/3, 628), an affinity or kinship. Art and philosophy are kindred spirits. In what way, however, are they related? What is their common blood, given that they are not the same activities? What is their shared parentage? 323 The Art of Nature Their kindred lights are united by their shared original darkness—“the Absolute was Night” (N2, 45). How then do philosophical reflection and artistic production preserve their respective autonomies given their kinship? How do they reflect their shared parentage differently? Merleau-Ponty provocatively characterizes Schelling’s philosophy of philosophy itself not as a “science of Nature,” not as a theory about Nature as a discernable object for a thinking subject, but as a thinking of the Ungewußt, as a “phenomenology of pre-reflexive Being” (N2, 41). Thinking attempts to retrieve its original oblivion, not as something wholly other and utterly elsewhere, but rather as its...