Entanglements by Crispin Sartwell

Author:Crispin Sartwell [Sartwell, Crispin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438463872
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

6.

We cannot be released from nature, or the order of causation, in virtue of any particular actual faculty we may possess; we cannot stand above it or outside it, though we engage it in different ways. It is a familiar point, perhaps, that the conception of moral agency that one gets in Kant, for example, presupposes a principled bifurcation—perhaps a distinction of ontological planes—between person and, let’s say, the ordinary world. In Kant, the free moral agent is a transcendental subject. Freedom in this sense means independence from the order of mundane reality, the deterministic sphere of nature. How freedom arises in a natural order is the great ur-question of German Idealism, and it is not too much to think of Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and even Kierkegaard as obsessed with it. It is a version of the Platonic or Pythagorean crisis: what the hell am I doing here? The naturalistic conception of the universe in its revival from classical sources such as Lucretius as well as canons of empirical science articulated by Bacon, for example, was interpreted as a threat to human freedom, as were various forms of deterministic Protestantism that preceded full scientific naturalism by perhaps a century. The Idealists and those connected with them (Goethe, Novalis, the Schlegels, Coleridge) read this as also putting into play reason as against faith, rationality as against passion, and so on into the Romantic dualisms, so centrally embodied by Schelling, who also tried to fend off Idealism as a threat to reality, or to think his way back to reality out of Idealism. Everyone responded to Jacobi’s formulation: “It is impossible that everything is nature and not freedom, because it is impossible that everything which elevates and ennobles man—the true, the good, and the beautiful—are only illusion, deception, and lies.”5 On the other hand, if you believed with Jacobi (and dare I say it, Kant and Plato) that nature itself was incompatible with truth, goodness, and beauty, you might have a motivation to believe that there must be something more, even if there is not. But there is no use arguing with Jacobi, who explicitly (and plausibly) denies the jurisdiction of all rational argument on this sort of question.

The thinkers who made this issue central in these terms—as nature vs. freedom—took a variety of positions on the relation. Some thought that freedom could be achieved by a reduction of nature to self or Spirit, locating reason at the world’s heart, as in Fichte or Hegel. Or it could be sought by an integration of the spiritual and the natural (Schiller and Schelling), or by an act of spiritual self-realization (Kierkegaard) or in an emptying or annihilation of the tortured self (Schopenhauer). But these figures shared this form of the crisis of modernity: trying to figure out who we could possibly be in what seemed more and more like a physical universe in which everything that happens can in principle be fully explained by what happened before and the laws of nature.

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