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

CHAPTER NINE Freedom as the Experience of Nature

189 CHAPTER NINE Freedom as the Experience of Nature Schelling and Merleau-Ponty on the Open Space in Nature Annette Hilt Abstract How to bring together the lawfulness of freedom and necessity poses the main problem for Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Yet for humans, being natural emerges in a new perspective and experience: realizing that human freedom brings an openness toward Nature, transgressing its eternal recurrence toward an open future, an open history of natural existence, but also as the possibility of destroying this natural existence. This “open history,” which is one of freedom and of Nature, will be outlined by a confrontation between MerleauPonty ’s monistic concept of the chair du monde and Schelling’s internal dualism of the will, of the divine and the human person, which leads to an historical concept of existence. Because MerleauPonty fails to show human belonging to nature in its particularity— the human differential unity with all other natural beings in its possibility of rupture with this unity, he misses a central point that Schelling emphasizes in his Freedom essay: to take into account a dualism in conceptualizing Nature, which Schelling experienced in the reality of evil appearing in human history. Here, he envisages the kind of overcoming of dualism that Merleau-Ponty claimed for his phenomenological ontology. For Schelling, such reconciliation is bound to a concept of responsibility in the historicity of human 190 Annette Hilt freedom, only to be found in experiencing alterity, both of Nature and the human Self. The main problem to be solved with regard to Nature, as Schelling articulates it in his Weltseele, where he draws together his previous reflections on Naturphilosophie, is: “How can Nature in its blind lawfulness lay claim to the appearance of freedom, and alternately, in appearing to be free, how can it obey a blind lawfulness” (I/6, ix)?1 In his early Naturphilosophie, Schelling discusses this question as part of his opposition to both the mechanistic account of natural forces and the notion of simple, unilinear teleology. In opposition to this reductionist point of view, he posits the idea of natural organization internally differentiated by the interplay of opposing principles: “Organization is for me nothing other than the impeded current of causes and effects. Only where Nature has not inhibited this current does it flow forwards (in a straight line). Where there is inhibition, the current turns (in a circle) back into itself” (Weltseele, I/6, ix). Formation as such is grounded in the interplay of the first force of Nature (expansion) continually striving toward an end, or at least seeming to act in such a teleological way, and the second force (attraction), whose action is the inhibition of expansive movements, bending them back to an eternally circular movement. Expansion and attraction are in mutual conflict because neither can be without the other, but they can never come to anything but a punctual equilibrium. Only by inhibition does the expansive force gain the particular form of its action: This form emerges through the movement, its telos, and this telos is only found in its opposite, and never in itself. On the other hand, attraction can only unfold as the antagonist of something positive, namely, the form-willing expansion. Thus, Nature is not truly teleological; teleology oversimplifies the problem because in Nature there is never a final end. Rather, Nature is free in an eternal interplay of irreducible forces. Nature never comes to a standstill; such an end or closure would mean the finitude of death. Building on this, a parallel question that occupies Schelling in the 1809 Freedom essay is the following: How do natural beings experience themselves as natural and, as such, nonetheless as free? How is the uniting ground of freedom and necessity found in this very experience? A natural being can never be conceptualized as an abstract entity (a “Ding”) as Spinoza’s dogmatism does with its conception of all things being in God, or as Kant does with his formal Ding an sich. Because it has an inner record of itself, the natural living being cannot be cognized in abstract terms, but can only be adequately grasped by self-awareness (Selbstbewußtsein), which is bound to its source of creation and creativity. 191 Freedom as the Experience of Nature This problem of how all creatures experience themselves is intensified when it comes to what is distinctive in human self-awareness. Humans have an immediate awareness, a...