Philosophy's Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking by Hagi Kenaan & Ilit Ferber

Author:Hagi Kenaan & Ilit Ferber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

While relative equilibrium is a state that characterizes life in Schelling’s proto-universe, it promises to reemerge with the ultimate self-realization of that universe, at a metaphoric point where the two inaugural grounds prove to be part of a single totality. Even then, equilibrium may not wholly supplant conflict. And, while we discern ongoing conflict, or resistance, throughout nature as well as in humans, it is not the fundamental characteristic of the world—or not the sole characteristic, as that would lead to one of two things: the destruction of one of the terms, and therefore both ultimately (since the one depends on the other), or to an oscillation of dominations from which nothing new could arise. For this reason, the Absolute holds together two modalizations of its “self,” whose symptom or expression is the troubled Sehnsucht. In the Absolute, the presence-in-indifference of these two processes generates their own third term in the contraction of the Absolute into the One. In nature, too, the tension between material and form-giving forces likewise produces a third term. Schelling argues that this third term cannot itself be a force, lest it join or replace one of the other two. Instead, we find at work a third term analogous to the relationship between the dualist base and its contraction into the One. For his natural philosophy Schelling proposes to call this third term “soul” or “principle of life,” because the separation of thinking and extension is a difference of expression. In this, he is a Spinozist. More importantly perhaps, he understands that any logic that separates the concept from what it collects and specifies, will prove as inadequate to grasping life as the vitalism that imposes life-force extrinsically. In order to comprehend [the] union of concept and matter, you assume a higher divine intelligence…who designed his creations in ideal forms and brought forth Nature in accordance with these ideals. But a being in whom the concept precedes the act, the design, the execution, cannot produce, [it] can only form or model matter already there, [it] can only stamp the impress of the understanding and of purposiveness upon the matter from without. What he [the higher divine intelligence] produces is purposive, not in itself, but only in relation to the understanding of the artificer… only contingently. Is not the understanding [thereby made into] a dead faculty? (IPN: 33)

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