tonight I received some questions about philosophy from Kevin Mitchell. This discussion may interest some of my other friends. Kevin: Im wondering if you have an opinion on Schellings Die Weltalter, especially the three potencies that he discusses. They seem kind of mystical to me. Ive been kind of taking liberties with them, like, making them conform to our contemporary situation. Kind of weird, I know. Why Schelling? Because Im sick of Hegel, frankly. Marx and all the other people who made a meaningful contribution to our current version of critical theory have no time for Schelling, its all Hegel all the time. And, as you know, Hegel learned his shit from Schelling. I think there are untapped resources in Schelling, which have been systematically overlooked by Hegel (no pun intended?). One example is the unconscious. For example McGrath The Dark Ground of Spirit (2012). Zegreus: I think Zizek may have mastered the discursive movements around German Idealism - he does elaborate recursive modelling, flipping between different phases. He is very interested in Hegel because he takes a next step to objectify the traditional ideality. Its the fact that Hegel opens a new relation with religion that makes him the most important. All of German Idealism is closely aligned, and the different writers are distinguished by emphasis and glossing. Zizek is following Deleuze a program tracks after a point between Ficthe and Schelling. Schelling was probably the most popular philosopher during the 19th century - this is important if you want to appreciate someone like Bergson, and his followers like Proust, Duchamp or Deleuze (i.e. the three syntheses). So Schelling is and always was a hugely important thinker, and I dont think hes under-respected as you suggest. I would say we are in a Schellingian age, where Hegel remains uncharted waters. I would emphasize the debate BETWEEN Hegel and everyone who went before. His attack on Schelling is Logic of Science, which is his most important book. Or, better to say, its an attack on the Spinozist influence in German Idealism. It is an attack on how ontological univocity enters Kantian philosophy under the guise of the manifold of the sensible. The problem is that SPinozist (Schellingian) philosophy has no subject, and because of that it looses the capacity for determination, which concerns the inherent negativity of any finitite. So spinoza and Schelling slid into this quagmire of the infinite. And today Deleuze represents the Spinozist side of this argument - he rejects the subjective negativity, which he dismisses as part of representation (identity, opposition, analogy, similarity) that operates against difference. So the Spinozist (Schelling, Deleuze) side asserts difference, usually as some materialist mysticism, against identity. But now I think is the time for a Hegelian (Lacanian) response, and so today we are asserting identity (instead of difference), and reasserting the old religious interiority of the spirit. And the whole return to Hegelian idealism today is channelled through Badiou. Now, if you want to take up the Spinozist side Kevin, i completely understand where you are coming from, which is the 20th century. I just think you are a decade or two behind the action in philosophy, because now we are asserting spiritual identity against the material difference of the old Spinozists. So I dont have any real disagreement with you, its just a question of where the dialectical action is today, and which way we are translating. I think Zizek has it right, and Hegelian religious translation is just warming up. This is not a debate about who is right absolutely, its just a matter of timing.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 13:29:15 +0000
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