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

CHAPTER ELEVEN Nature and Self-Knowledge

CHAPTER ELEVEN Nature and Self-Knowledge On Schelling’s Ambiguous Role in Merleau-Ponty’s The Concept of Nature Carolyn Culbertson Abstract This essay takes issue with Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Schelling in his lecture course, “The Concept of Nature.” For Merleau-Ponty, Schelling’s idea of nature remains bound to the Idealist tradition with its focus on the unity of nature in the Absolute Subject. The limit of this Romantic concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty suggests, is its willingness to subsume the meaning of nature to the order of thought. Drawing primarily from Schelling’s Erlangen lecture, The Nature of Philosophy as a Science, I explain how Schelling challenges such idealism, arguing for a “living” philosophical system whose principle is not reason or abstract thought but an ecstatic mode of being-in-the-world. In his 1956–1957 lectures on “The Concept of Nature,” Merleau-Ponty sets out to discover, through examining the history of the concept of Nature, the meaning of Nature beyond what is posited by thought. From this description, it is not hard to appreciate the tension that must plague such a project: How should the history of thought reveal to us something that is beyond thought? Merleau-Ponty does not, however, shy away from this tension. Rather, he suggests that the history of conceptualizing Nature provides a path precisely toward the desired end. He supports this claim by describing a life of language that is 225 226 Carolyn Culbertson “neither fortuitous nor a logical, immanent development” (N2, 3). To study Nature, in other words, one does not put down books, but to study books, one does not shield oneself from Nature. In these short introductory comments, we are already given a clue into the investigations that lie ahead. Along the path, Merleau-Ponty takes up a number of thinkers—from Descartes to Kant to Whitehead, but it is in his engagement with the work of Schelling that Merleau-Ponty is brought most forcefully to the presupposition of his own methodology, namely, that the conceptualizing of Nature is a mode and not a betrayal of Nature. For Schelling, too, the thinking of Nature does not require abandoning the achievements of reflection, nor does it amount to presenting these achievements as either causa sui or independent. Perhaps the most powerful formulation of this idea is in Schelling’s 1821 “On the Nature of Philosophy as a Science,” which argues for the nonidentity of philosophy, that is, its lack of a single, self-same principle. It is this feature of Schelling’s philosophy that Merleau-Ponty praises, contrasting it with the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. The nonprinciple of philosophy is, in truth, as Schelling goes on to say in this Erlangen lecture, a negative determination. Schelling nonetheless also speaks positively of this principle as freedom (i.e., the “freedom to adopt a form”).1 Systemic philosophy errs, then, when it attempts to make one form, such as consciousness, the absolute principle or ground of all of Nature. Merleau-Ponty’s lectures do, however, offer a couple of criticisms of Schelling’s philosophy. For example, he questions Schelling’s conception of the absolute standpoint as the standpoint of the organism, pointing out that the teleological view of Nature that Idealism first powerfully questions seems oddly salvaged in this model. Moreover, at one point he sides with Hegel in accusing Schelling of not understanding “the internal movement of what exists” (N2, 48), although he is quick to point out that Hegel’s “pretended inner movement is only the movement of the thinker [or the concept], not of existence” as Hegel had boasted (N2, 49). But whereas Nature is impotent for Hegel, Merleau-Ponty says that it is stubborn and obstinate for Schelling. It maintains itself relentlessly as a unity, a system. And so Schelling misses the determinant content of situations, focusing more on the failures (e.g., of determinant judgments), rather than working from the successes. It is only this point on which any part of Merleau-Ponty’s opening comments for the lecture may be understood as a criticism of Schelling. There he says: There is Nature wherever there is life that has meaning, but where, however, there is not thought; hence the kinship 227 Nature and Self-Knowledge with the vegetative. Nature is what has meaning without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning. Nature is thus different...