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At long last...Romantic Metasubjectivity!
Gord Barentsen posted a Blog entry in Fractal Points: News & Information
This is embarrassingly late, and my only excuse is that I've been caught up with reading for the next project and dealing with COVID-related issues (restrictions - not sickness, thankfully! đ¶). But Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject (Routledge, 2020) came out May-June of this year. Propaganda material below! Here's a link to the book on Routledge: Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the R WWW.ROUTLEDGE.COM Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject explores the remarkable intellectual isomorphism between the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling and...- 4 comments
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Schelling's Dark Nature and the Prospects for an 'Ecological Civilization' Contents Abstract Introduction Schelling's Naturphilosophie: Inhibition and "Unnatural Nature" The Actant: Drive, Disease, Derangement The Freedom Essay: The Ungrund and the Energy of Evil Conclusion: Giving Indeterminacy Its Due Abstract âEcological civilisationâ establishes ecology as an ur-science which informs a radical rethinking of humanityâs relationship with Nature, fuelled by the acknowledgement that neoliberalist assumptions about Nature and science ultimately pose dire threats to the survival of the human species. Friedrich Schellingâs thought, and specifically his Naturphilosophie, has rightly been seen as a precursor of the process philosophy underwriting contemporary notions of ecological civilisation and the critique of the Cartesian gap between humanity and Nature perpetuated by neoliberalism. Yet the psyche-Nature isomorphism cemented early in Schellingâs Naturphilosophie by his description of Nature in protopsychoanalytic terms such as drive [Trieb] and compulsion [Zwang] point to a dark, indeterminate Nature which resisting Idealist projections of unity or harmony. This leads us to ask: Is it possible to underwrite transformative political action with a Nature ambivalent toward its own products? This essay explores this question by examining first the Nature articulated by Schelling in his First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799), then turning to this Natureâs recrudescence as theodicy and a theory of personality in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809). I conclude without concluding, with more questions than answers in the form of brief observations on the implications of Schellingâs dark Nature for ethical metanarrative and its relevance to the future. Introduction âAcorn.â âAsh.â âBeech.â âCygnet.â âDandelion.â âFern.â âHeather.â âLark.â âMistletoe.â âNectar.â âNewt.â âOtter.â âPasture.â In early 2018 the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary decided to remove these and other words describing Nature from their childrenâs dictionary in favour of contemporary substitutes such as âanalogue,â âattachment,â âbroadband,â âblog,â and âcut and paste.â In fact, these changes were made back in 2007 â they only recently attracted scrutiny when, in 2015, a group of writers including Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Sir Andrew Motion (UK Poet Laureate from 1999-2009) wrote to protest the decision.[1] Although this attempt to trim and prune Natureâs linguistic proliferation may not be an overtly political position, it nevertheless aligns with the uniquely neoliberalist trajectory of pathological monetisation â a pathology which objectifies Nature as a source of capitalist gain just as it marginalises discourses which question or challenge it. Arran Gare aptly describes this project as paradoxically both materialist and idealist: on the one hand, a governing scientific materialism naturalises the premises of empirical science as capable of explaining all aspects of human experience, stripping Nature of its depth to enforce a hegemony of the distinct and measurable. On the other hand, neoliberalismâs Idealism reduces Being and the world to a social construct and, âwhile sharing [scientific materialismâs] commitment to the domination of nature, differs in treating human subjects as above nature and in celebrating human rationality.â[2] This paradox has precipitated what can only be described, from an anthropocentric perspective, as an ecological crisis our species has never before seen. "to what extent can we ground ecological civilisation on a dark, indeterminate Nature â in essence, to ground civilisation on the ungrounded?" One proposed solution to this crisis is to nurture an âecological civilisationâ â in other words, to cultivate a âreligiousâ relationship with Nature in the broadest non-denominational sense.[3] To be sure, this idea ultimately comes rom the First System Programme of German Idealism, written most likely in the final years of the eighteenth century by either Schelling, Hegel, or Hölderlin. The Programme is a manifesto of both German Idealism and Romanticism; it envisions the âabsolutely free individualâ as the starting point for a âmythology of reasonâ which unites the sensuous with the world of ideas to achieve âthe equal formation of all forces, in particular persons as well as all individuals.â[4] But in turning to the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schellingâs 1799 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, we will see that these forces are not so easily enlisted into the service of either human consciousness or a post-Kantian kingdom of ends. Although Schellingâs conception of Nature merits him a place among the first process philosophers, this conception is also protopsychoanalytic; Schelling is already describing a dark, indeterminate Nature in the register of compulsion, drive, and derangement â a Nature which cannot be contained by the rubric of âovercomingâ in either individual or collective political senses, and a Nature which would become so important to the major psychoanalytic theories of the 20th century. In this spirit, I ask a crucial question meant to productively interrogate the idea of ecological civilisation: to what extent can we ground such a civilisation on a dark, indeterminate Nature â in essence, to ground civilisation on the ungrounded? Put differently: can we feasibly underwrite a new social contract with a Nature that is itself deranged and schizophrenic toward its own products? Gare rightly recognises Schelling as a seminal thinker in the tradition of process thought with which the notions of ecological civilisation and speculative naturalism are closely aligned.[5] Moreover, ecological civilisationâs drive to make ecology an ur-science which constellates other disciplines makes a working-through of Schellingâs engagement with the problem of Nature all the more important. Thus, I begin with the Naturphilosophie of Schellingâs First Outline to articulate his first and most radical conception of Natureâs infinite productivity. I will then turn to Naturphilosophieâs extension to theodicy in the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (the âFreedom essayâ), which offers crucial insights into how Natureâs derangement operates in the domains of the human and divine. I will end by revisiting the idea of transformative action which underwrites âecological civilisationâ and explore some of the implications of Schellingâs framework for issues of ethics and morality. Schelling's Naturphilosophie: Inhibition and "Unnatural Nature" In contrast to a scientific mechanism which understands Nature solely in terms of surface relations between phenomena, Schellingâs Naturphilosophie is a âspeculative physicsâ which aims to discover the fundamental dynamic forces and drives â the ground of Natureâs infinite productivity. In other words, Naturphilosophie âassumes that the sum of phenomena is not a mere world, but of necessity a Nature (that is, that this whole is not merely a product, but at the same time productive).â[6] Thus Naturphilosophie operates in a register not of stasis but of process, drive and compulsion: in the Introduction to the Outline, Schelling writes that âNature can produce nothing but what shows regularity and purpose, and Nature is compelled [gezwungen] to produce itâ (FO 194). This Nature is one of âabsolute activity,â which is marked by âthe drive [Trieb] to an infinite developmentâ (FO 18). Through this productive drive, Nature is also compelled to create organic and inorganic natural products as part of a general economy[7] of infinitely productive relations. And like Nature, the organism in turn self-organises according to principles irreducible to a conceptual system, recapitulating Natureâs infinite productivity in ways which anticipate a mind-Nature parallelism which Schelling will later explore in the Freedom essay. As Robert Richards writes, â[Naturphilosophie] suggested that nature might furnish a path back to the self [. . .] the exploration of nature might even be regarded as a necessary propaedeutic to the development of the self.â[8] Nature is a Deleuzian fold, entangling interiority and exteriority: one finds oneself within Nature, but in going back through Nature one can move forward through Natureâs âexploration.â And Jason Wirth offers a compelling case for considering the Naturphilosophie psychologically: âdoing Naturphilosophieâ is not âdoing a science,â but rather âdoing philosophy in accordance with nature,â as âa gateway into the originating experience of philosophizingâ itself.[9] In sounding the depths of Nature, one explores oneself. Schellingâs particular formulation of Naturphilosophie derives from the broader field of German nature philosophy which, at the turn of the nineteenth century, encompassed Romantic biology and other disciplines. Contrary to Kantâs conception of the archetypes of species as transcendental entities of an ideal reality, Schellingâs Naturphilosophie begins with the ârealâ instead of the âideal,â existence instead of categorical consciousness: âthe ideal must arise out of the real and admit of explanation from itâ (FO 194). Schelling moves against Kantâs noumenal-phenomenal bifurcation of existence on the one hand, and on the other hand he also moves against Fichteâs âabsolute I,â which makes Nature an epiphenomenon of subjective consciousness. In the architectonic of Kantâs Critique of Pure Reason, organicism is a regulative idea which denies Nature any genuinely aleatory force. In contrast, Naturphilosophie is âan a priori study of the âIdeaâ of nature [. . .] [it] is not a mechanical system but a series of basic âforcesâ or âimpulsesâ that mirror at the basic level the same kind of determinations that are operative in us at the level of freedom. [Thus Naturphilosophie] must construct an account of nature that is continuous with our freedom.â[10] And although Schelling critiques Kantian formalism by conceiving Nature as radical productivity, he does not jettison the a priori. Rather, anticipating Deleuzeâs transcendental empiricism, Schelling relocates the a priori in experience. In the Introduction to the First Outline he writes: In the Naturphilosophie, then, the a priori is no longer separated from phenomena, but is now imbricated with thoughtâs (revisable) experience of natural objects as external stimuli as âjudgments of experience.â Not only do we know this or that through experience, but we originally know nothing at all except through experience, and by means of experience, and in this sense the whole of our knowledge consists of the judgments of experience. These judgments become a priori principles when we become conscious of them as necessary [. . .] every judgment which is merely historical for meâi.e., a judgment of experienceâbecomes, notwithstanding, an a priori principle as soon as I arrive, whether directly or indirectly, at insight into its internal necessity. [. . .] It is not, therefore, that WE KNOW Nature as a priori, but Nature IS a priori. (FO 198) Written after the First Outline, and as an attempt to rein in Natureâs infinite productivity by synchronising it with transcendental Idealismâs emphasis on self-consciousness, Schellingâs Introduction describes Natureâs productivity is âthe most perfect geometry [. . .] a mode of explanation whereby the real itself is transported into the ideal world, and those motions are changed into intuitions which take place only in ourselves, and to which nothing outside of us correspondsâ (FO 193). But even here, in introducing psychology and appealing to experience as the criteria for a priori principles, Schelling does not rein in this indeterminacy so much as redouble it on the level of psyche.[11] And in stating that âNature is a prioriâ he folds the a priori back into contingency, which makes the Naturphilosophie forever resistant to encapsulation by self-consciousness just as it opens up self-consciousness to the contingency of Nature. In the Naturphilosophie, then, the a priori is no longer separated from phenomena, but is now imbricated with thoughtâs (revisable) experience of natural objects as external stimuli as âjudgments of experience.â These judgements are part of an anterior organisation that is paradoxically, simultaneously constituted by its parts in events where the individual realises a thoughtâs âinternal necessity.â This internal necessity offers a way through what would otherwise pose a logical problem for Schelling: how far one can move from the deductive principles of natural science to experiential Nature if âthe ideal must arise out of the real and admit of explanation from itâ? This movement is the sole means of discerning the a priori structures of Natureâs infinite unfolding. Schelling sees the âregularityâ and purposeâ of both Natureâs productivity and thoughtâs âinternal necessityâ (FO 194) as a graduated scale of development [Stufenfolge]. The Stufenfolge is a development of increasing complexity in Natureâs products, directed toward an âabsolute productâ that âlives in all products, that always becomes and never is, and in which the absolute activity [of Nature] exhausts itselfâ (FO 16, 43 n). This gradient is meant to culminate in man as its âgreatest and most perfect formâ (FO 144), but the sexual generation of these beings both troubles and corroborates this Stufenfolge. In other words, sexuality becomes a pharmakon, both a toxin and antidote for Nature. Schelling writes of the separation of the sexes within Natureâs âinfinite metamorphosisâ that âeach organism has a level of formation at which [this] separation is necessary. [But this] highest point of disturbed equilibrium is [also] the moment of the reestablishment of equilibriumâ (FO 36, 40-41). This dis/equilibrium describes the production of the genus against the individual in a systolic-diastolic movement of expansion and contraction foregrounded in Schellingâs later work. But sexual separation does not fold the organism back into a teleological hierarchy of developmental stages. Instead, it opens the organism up to Natureâs radical productivity: âfrom the moment of the [separation] onward, the product no longer completely expresses the character of the stage of development at which it stood.â Schelling describes this as âderangementâ [Störungheit], and this trope of illness marks the âmost intense moment of natural activityâ in the organism (FO 39). Nature blossoms through âabortiveâ experiments on itself, seizing on its own aberrations, âpursuingâ its individuative derangement as far as possible in a given manifestation (FO 41 n). And precisely this derangement, this illness, is a drive toward absolute knowledge as âa following of the particular wherever it might lead, regardless of its consistency with a larger whole.'[12] Each organism is a tumescence in Nature, a derangement of the Stufenfolge, a symptom of radical auto-alterity in Nature which resists Schellingâs attempt, in the later Introduction to the First Outline, to contain it in an anterior organisation which âmust have existed as a whole previous to its partsâ (FO 198). But Schelling still faces the question which dogs him throughout his oeuvre: why is there something and not nothing? How do things come to be from within Nature as the âmost primal fluidâthe absolute noncomposite [. . .] receptive to every form [. . .] a mass wherein no part is distinguished from the other by figureâ (FO 6)? Each organism is a tumescence in Nature, a derangement of the Stufenfolge, a symptom of radical auto-alterity in Nature which resists Schellingâs attempt to contain it in an anterior organisation. Schellingâs answer to this question is inhibition â an intrinsic, primordial self-limiting force which engenders the phenomena of the natural world. As a homogeneous âuniversal organismâ Nature, as âabsolute activity,â is âinhibited at sundry stagesâ which produce natural objects (FO 6-7). Inhibition is at the root of all conflict and difference as âan original diremption in Nature itself [. . .] that original antithesis in the heart of Nature, which does not [. . .] itself appearâ but nevertheless constitutes Nature as object to itself (FO 205; my italics). As the agent of Natureâs auto-alterity and the differential movement within an always already universal organism, inhibition infinitely counterbalances Natureâs infinite productivity. Schelling writes: âIf nature is absolute activity, then this activity must appear as inhibited ad infinitum. (The original cause of this inhibition must only be sought in [Nature] itself, since Nature is absolutely active)â (FO 16). Schelling is well aware of the âirresolvable difficultyâ of this deadlock between infinite activity and infinite inhibition (FO 17). David Farrell Krell sums up the problem in terms of Freudian Eros and Thanatos: Schelling [must] conceive of an original duplicity, a dyas, in which infinite activity and infinite inhibition work together to produce the natural world. [But sexuality and its relation to illness disturb this balance. Both] alike tend toward the universal and the infinite. It is as though infinite activity itself, the absolute as such, were both sexually active and subject to ultimate passivity and even an inevitable infection or malignancy. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, for Schelling to locate the duplicitous source of life without colliding against the ultimate source of illness and demise.[13] Here Krell emphasises sexuality and illness as markers of the organismâs highly ambivalent, indeed âunnaturalâ relationship with Nature. With sex, both an Erotic drive toward the absolute product and a Thanatotic drive back to universal indifference explode on to this primal site. Nature craves its original state of indifference, a zero-point that can only be hypothesised behind the original diremption: âNature contests the Individual; it longs [verlangt] for the Absolute and continually endeavors to represent it. [. . .] Individual products, therefore, in which Natureâs activity is at a standstill, can only be seen as misbegotten attempts to achieve such a proportionâ (FO 35; my italics). But just as the Stufenfolge is disrupted by the sexual proliferation of beings, each âmisbegotten attemptâ also recapitulates Natureâs intrinsic dynamism (FO 25). As the propensity to reproduce such misbegotten attempts (and consequently Natureâs self-inhibition), sexuality is a pestilent force to a Nature yearning for primordial indifference. There is a compulsion, then, in Nature which is recapitulated in its âmisbegotten attemptsâ and their persistent strife with Nature. Perhaps nowhere is this made clearer in the First Outline than in Schellingâs contention that Nature hates sex, and where it does arise, it arises against the will of Nature. The separation into sexes is an inevitable fate, with which, after Nature is once organic [. . .] it can never overcome.âBy this very hatred of separation it finds itself involved in a contradiction, inasmuch as what is odious to Nature it is compelled to develop in the most careful manner, and to lead to the summit of existence, as if it did so on purpose; whereas it is always striving only for a return into the identity of the genus, which, however, is enchained to the (never to be canceled) duplicity of the sexes, as to an inevitable condition. [. . .] Nature develops the individual only from compulsion. (FO 231 n) Thus Nature is hostile to the organism, which is an obstacle to its backward yearning for indifference. But the organism is also necessary for the forward unfolding of an absolute product, the consummation of the Stufenfolge which already exists as potential in Nature. Faced with this pharmakon, Natureâs stance toward its own products can only be one of ambivalence and anxiety. Nature is hostile to the organism, which is an obstacle to its backward yearning for indifference. But the organism is also necessary for the forward unfolding of an absolute product, the consummation of the Stufenfolge which already exists as potential in Nature. The Actant: Drive, Disease, Derangement The First Outlineâs structure is rhizomatic, a body without organs consisting of intersecting and mutually determining systems and disciplines which are constellated in a text with numerous âundeveloped tendenciesâ (Rajan, âFirst Outlineâ 329-330). Indeed, one can say that this performativity of the First Outlineâs Naturphilosophie (un)grounds Schellingâs oeuvre as its metaphysical unconscious, the âfluidityâ from which the other strands of his philosophy emerge and in which they entwine (FO 29). Never fully plumbing the depths of his Nature, but in opposition to Hegelâs philosophy of nature which is âstructured by an anthropomorphism that reads nature as pathologized spirit,â[14] Schelling nevertheless privileges Natureâs productive aporiae in subsequent works and phases of his thought. The Naturphilosophie reveals a uniquely idealist intensity in its invocation of a philosophical creation myth, a âProteusâ drawing all possible forms into a circle âdetermined for it in advanceâ (FO 28). Yet this gathering requires âinfinitely many attemptsâ (FO 28), which makes the circle both determinate and immanent. But to articulate the dynamic of how this âgatheringâ comes about, we must turn to what Schelling calls the actant as the constituent part of this dynamic productivity. In the first of the First Outlineâs three Divisions, Schelling develops the actant [Aktion][15] as the nonmolar, monadic force articulating Natureâs absolute productivity, which is the first principle of the Naturphilosophieâs âdynamic atomismâ (FO 5). As unrepresentable combinatory forces in the natural world, actants collectively constitute an âinfinite homogeneity,â combining in various relations and ratios to form different natural products. Schelling writes: [Actants are] the most originary points of inhibition of Natureâs activity. [As]the most originary negative presentations of the unconditioned in Nature [they] are not themselves in space; they cannot be viewed as parts of matter. [They are, rather,] action in general. (FO 19-21) Actants collectively constitute an âinfinite homogeneity,â combining in various relations and ratios to form different natural products. The actant plays an important role as the fundamental component of âthe original multiplicity of individual principles in Nature. [. . .] Each [actant] in Nature is a fixed point for it, a seed around which Nature can begin to form itselfâ (FO 21 n. 1). Taking up atomism to define the actant as a factor of Natureâs productivity, Schelling concedes that the intangibility of the actants is precisely what makes them necessary: Our opinion is [. . .] not that there are such simple actants in Nature, but only that they are the ideal grounds of the explanation of quality. These simple actants do not really allow of demonstrationâthey do not exist; they are what one must posit in Nature, what one must think in Nature, in order to explain the originary qualities. (FO 21 n) Not existing in space or as matter (but nevertheless âconstituent factors of matterâ), and âtruly singularâ yet infinitely decomposable, the actant is a liminality between the ideality of the unconditioned and the materiality of space. The First Outline's First Division turns from the metaphysical overgrowth of the first section on the actants (âThe Original Qualities and Actants in Natureâ) to something closer to dramatic narrative in the following section (âActants and Their Combinationsâ). Here, Schelling describes the creation of matter as âthe drama [Schauspiel] of a struggle between form and the formlessâ (FO 28). For Schelling, Natureâs universal fluidity is always already inexplicably âsolidifiedâ by the actants in this drama of (de)combination in their infinite multiplicity. He writes: While the actants are decombined, left to itself each one will produce what it must produce according to its nature. To that extent, in every product there will be a constant drive toward free transformation. While the actants are continually combined anew, none of them will remain free with respect to its production. Thus, there will be compulsion and freedom in the product at once. Since actants are constantly set free and recaptured, and since infinitely various combinations of them are possible (and in every combination a slew of various proportions are possible), then continually new and singular materials will be originally produced in this product. It is indeed possible to find the elements of these materials through the art of chemistry, but not [. . .] the proportion of the combination. (FO 33) This dynamic of coalescence and dissolution is ultimately pathologised by Schelling as the actantsâ mutual derangement [Störung] into universal fluidity, which is in turn â indeed, simultaneously resisted by each actantâs individuality (FO 26, 28). This derangement describes what we have seen as Natureâs auto-alterity, a Nature divided against itself yet compelled to form products in a tension which creates generative fibrillations in Nature. And again, the language Schelling uses here is significant: the actantâs âconstant drive [Trieb] toward free transformationâ is inhibited by the âcompulsionâ [Zwang] of its combination with other actants in a productive coimplication of freedom and necessity (FO 33). In the Introduction to the Outline Schelling writes that discovering the âintermediate linksâ in natural products with the unknowable âlast conditionsâ of Nature is the task of experimentation in Naturphilosophie â not the experimentation of the empirical natural sciences which assumes that one day the circle of its knowledge will complete itself and which imposes principles on Nature from without, but rather an âinfinite taskâ of âcollect[ing] the fragments of the great whole of Nature [. . .] into a systemâ (FO 199) which is always on the cusp of itself. It involves investigating the internal necessity of principles and not assuming their a priori nature, and this process is ultimately a psychoanalytic moment â âdoing Naturphilosophieâ as an encounter in Wirthâs sense â where, in Schellingâs words, âNature speaks to us to the extent to which we ourselves fall silent.â We must let Nature question us. But what kind of âquestionsâ does a deranged Nature ask? What does its facticity present to us? The natural products we see in the world are, after all, ânothing other than productive Nature itself determined in a certain wayâ (FO 34), inhibited according to inscrutable laws into the unique, terrible, and solitary forms which surround us. Each one of them is part of Schellingâs Stufenfolge, the graduated series of stages with which Nature hopes to achieve the Absolute, or âthe most universal proportion in which all actants, without prejudice to their individuality, can be unifiedâ (FO 35). Yet each natural product is also a âmisbegotten attemptâ at this proportion (ibid.), a wayward line of flight away from the absolute ideal for which Nature strives, but can never achieve, caught in an âinfinite process of formationâ (ibid.) which constitutes these lines of flight to begin with. Nature is caught within its actantial dynamics â within the derangement of a free drive to create infinite products and the compulsion to combine them into a âuniversal proportion.â It is from this derangement that the materiality and historicity of Being emerges. This infinitely productive derangement of the actants forms an onto-aetiology which Schelling locates in disease. Disease, for Schelling, is coterminous with life itself: because disease âis produced by the same causes through which the phenomenon of life is produced[, it] must have the same factors as lifeâ (FO 160). So although in the First Outlineâs Appendix on disease (FO 158ff) the term Aktion is not used, Schelling in effect transposes the actantsâ deranging dynamism of activity and receptivity into physiology: here, the organism is not a static âbeingâ but a âperpetual being-produced,â an âactivity mediated by receptivityâ (FO 160) against a series of external stimuli which prevent the organism from âexhaustingâ its activity in a final (dead, inorganic) object. In this âbeing-produced,â the organism reproduces an âoriginal duplicityâ whereby it generates itself âobjectivelyâ in response to external conditions (its receptivity to the world) as well as âsubjectivelyâ â that is, as an object to itself (its activity). Disease is precisely the âotheringâ of the organismâs presence to itself as object, a âdisproportionâ within its economy of excitability, or susceptibility to external stimuli (FO 169). And this force of disease is ultimately predicated on a âuniformly acting external forceâ which acts on the organism while at the same time it âseems to sustain the life of universal Nature just as much as it sustains the individual life of every organic being (as the life of Nature is exhibited in universal alterations)â (FO 171). Both life and disease, then, emerge from a constitutive tension between the world of external forces and the higher-order dynamical force which sustains the organism against the barrage of stimuli from without (FO 161). Extending the premises of the Naturphilosophie into the human and divine domains of theodicy, the Freedom essay, to which we now turn, aligns this diseased productivity with both the energy of evil and the yearning nature of God itself. The Freedom Essay: The Ungrund and the Energy of Evil Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is Schellingâs attempt at a theodicy which surpasses the Leibnizian notion of evil as lack of Being and Hegelâs somewhat more complicated understanding of evil as negation ultimately gathered up into the grand teleological Aufhebung of absolute Spirit. Watermarked by the trauma and anxiety of the First Outlineâs Nature, the Freedom essay recasts this anxiety in the contexts of God, man, and their complex relations as Schellingâs self-described âtheory of personality.â[16] The question of how Nature creates its products is translated into the question of how God and its human analogue, personality, enter time and history. More specifically, the issue here, as it was for the First Outline's Nature, is that of individuation, or how individual entities come into being and persist in the world. The Freedom essay returns to the First Outline's Stufenfolge but casts it as the series of stages through which God himself must proceed. In other words, where the First Outlineâs speculative physics theorised the emergence of entities in Nature as part of Natureâs individuation toward the absolute product, the Freedom essay turns to God, who for Schelling is ânot a system, but rather a lifeâ that must also individuate (Freedom 62). Alan White explains that in contrast to the idealist intensity of Schellingâs earlier work such as the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), in the Freedom essay âthe ground as such is said to have all content within it and to resist being grasped or explained by the power of understanding, to resist revealing itself in actual existence [. . .] the source of content is obscurity and darkness rather than clarity and light.â[17] This darkness which recedes from knowledge in the Freedom essay is âa being before all ground and before all that exists [and] before any duality [. . .] the original ground or the non-ground [Ungrund]â which exists even before God (Freedom 68). The Ungrund is a state of âabsolute indifferenceâ (Freedom 68) between opposites which does not nullify them (it is not Hegelâs ânight where all cows are blackâ) but rather suspends them in relation to each other. Thus, Schelling writes that even though the Ungrund is before all opposites and duality, it is âneutralâ towards them, which is precisely why opposites and polarities can â[break] forth immediately from the Neither-Norâ of its indifference (Freedom 69). The Ungrund marks the not-God within God, that within God which God cannot know and which always already implicates God in the history of Nature. Schelling's Ungrund provides a resolution to the problem of thinking becoming for a God that is âinfinitelyâ different to the world of things (28), a resolution which marks the materiality of Nature as the dark ground of spirit, the receding origin of Being and becoming. The world of becoming must emerge from God; but how can things separate from a God which encompasses all things? Schellingâs answer is that things are ultimately grounded in âthat which in God himself is not He Himself, that is, in that which is the ground of his existenceâ (Freedom 28). In other words, the Ungrund marks the not-God within God, that within God which God cannot know and which always already implicates God in the history of Nature. In a broadly psychoanalytic sense, the Ungrund is Godâs unconscious; it harbours âthe yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to itselfâ (Freedom 28), the drive to individuation in and through Natureâs materiality. But we have seen from the Naturphilosophie that this materiality is deranged, ambivalent toward its own existence; perhaps this is why Schelling writes early in the Freedom essay that Naturphilosophie is the only project adequate to the task of freedom (Freedom 26-27). As life, then, Godâs yearning is driven by unknown forces, and in this God is like man. Both God and man are confronted with an un-grounding Other which becomes an existential pharmakon, both the cause of and cure for the melancholic desire of an endless approximation to wholeness. Both God and man are destined to âthe deep indestructible melancholy of all lifeâ (Freedom 63). Melancholy [Melancholie] is only mentioned once in the Freedom essay, but it is pervasive within the textâs individuative economy. This tension between the essayâs sense of futurity (its desire for love that unites all) and melancholy (the acknowledgement that this desire must find and re-find itself) is central to the textâs complexity, resonating through the optative proclamation that âthe good should be raised out of the darkness [. . .] whereas evil should be separated from the good in order to be cast out eternally into non-Beingâ (Freedom 67; my italics). This tension and melancholy is the medium from which personality emerges as the core concept which fuels the Freedom essayâs futurity. This melancholy is the basis for the analogy Schelling draws between Godâs relationship to the not-God of the Ungrund and the human beingâs relationship with the centrum, a term Schelling takes from Jakob Böhme to describe âthe undivided power of the initial groundâ as it exists in the person (Freedom 44). Through the freedom of the not-God within God, âa fundamentally unlimited power is asserted next to and outside of divine powerâ (Freedom 11) that is conceptually unthinkable, and which inaugurates a divine individuation marking Schellingâs radical turn from the notions of emanationism and theodicy prevailing in his time. This not-God within God marks the (un)beginning of all things as a difference always already operating in Being, and this (un)beginningâs human equivalent is in Schellingâs formulation of personality. In contrast to Hegelâs assertion that dialectical progression is always already attributed to Being â that âsubstance is essentially subjectâ and inherently logical[18] â the Freedom essay emphasises the emergence of personality in an unprethinkable âmomentâ of creation analogous to Godâs entry into time and history, a non-egoic âfree actâ from the abyss of the unconditioned: Man is in the initial creation [. . .] an undecided beingâ [. . .] only man himself can decide. But this decision cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time and, hence, together with the first creation (though as a deed distinct from creation). (Freedom 51) Freedom is the freedom to exist as one must, and this free necessity is the kernel of Schellingâs philosophy of freedom. Like Natureâs original diremption in the First Outline, âdecisionâ [Entscheidung] cannot be an act of conscious volition, since it precedes ego. Rather, it is a primordial scission which inaugurates becoming. This paradoxically free and necessary act means that freedom is the freedom to exist as one must, and this free necessity is the kernel of Schellingâs philosophy of freedom. For Schelling this paradox, as personality, is âthe connection between a self-determining being and a basis [centrum] independent of himâ (Freedom 59). And crucially for the Freedom essayâs protopsychological dimension, this act leaves in each individual a residual feeling of personality in time and history, as the mark of both what one has always been and what one must also be. This feeling is âa feeling in accord with [this act] as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time. [Thus this act] cannot appear in consciousness to the degree the latter is self-awareness and only ideal, since it precedes consciousness just as it precedes essence, indeed, first produces itâ (Freedom 51). Key to the specifically idealist intensity of the Freedom essayâs theodicy is a recasting of the First Outlineâs Stufenfolge as Godâs progression toward an ultimate apocatastasis, a âfinal, total separationâ reminiscent of The Book of Revelation wherein âeverything true and goodâ is âraised into bright consciousnessâ and the âeternally dark ground of selfhoodâ is locked away (Freedom 70). In this resolution, everything is âsubordinate to spiritâ and temporality and contingency are gathered up into an idealist regime (ibid.). Yet its disclosure of the Ungrund as Godâs unconscious (and the centrum as its human iteration) necessarily harbours a dark kernel of indeterminacy which frustrates this teleology. Individuation can go awry, and the power of the centrum can always be falsely appropriated in the egoâs being-for-itself, which Schelling will describe as the basis of evil. Freedom is the necessary introduction of chaos and the anarchy of the Ungrund into time and history, a fracturing of the Freedom essayâs Idealism which reflects Schellingâs turn away from prevalent teleological or systematic explanations of Being. Evil is the energic force of movement without which existence would founder and congeal, unable to move. Freedom is the necessary introduction of chaos and the anarchy of the Ungrund into time and history. In the Freedom essay, Schelling closely aligns evil with disease; what disease is to Nature, evil is to human spiritual life. Evil results from the selfâs estrangement, as the âdark principle of [. . .] self-will,â from the centrum. In this estrangement, the will âsteps out from its being beyond natureâ to âelevate the ground over the cause, to use the spirit that it obtained only for the sake of the centrum outside the centrum and against creatures; from this results collapse within the will itself and outside itâ (Freedom 34). Self-will attempts to bend the centrum to its own designs. Outside the harmony of the centrumâs âdivine measure and balanceâ self-will, as âa bond of living forces,â can no longer rule the rebellious dominion of forces as âcravings and appetites,â which leads to a âpeculiar life [of] mendacity, a growth of restlessness and decayâ (Freedom 34). Evil is a disruption of cosmic harmony which thereby shows this harmonyâs constitutive self-difference; it is the force whereby âthings feverishly move away from their nonthingly center.â[19] But this evil is productive, and in precisely the same way as Natureâs ambivalence toward its products in the First Outline. This productivityâs connection with historicity and materiality risks the individualâs annihilation in ârestlessness and decayâ as the ego proclaims: I am the centrum. But it is also a connection with the Freedom essayâs apocatastatic drive, and is thus essential to the individualâs existence in the world. Thus, Schellingâs account of freedom both diagnoses creaturely existence as what the First Outline called a âmisbegotten attemptâ â here, a miscomprehension of the proper relation to âuniversal willâ â and prognoses âtransfigurationâ by which the person (as creature) unites with âthe primal willâ of understanding so that âa single whole comes into beingâ (Freedom 32). In this prognosis, individuation is the blind willâs elevation into something more than itself as part of the universal will or âprinciple of understanding.â Personality is âselfhood raised to spiritâ (Freedom 38), both a cision in the individual and a connection with the ideal as âwill that beholds itself in complete freedom [as] above and outside of all natureâ (33). In Schellingâs drama of freedom, individuation is not driven by a process of identification or the unfolding of something preformed. Rather, the âmutation and division of all forcesâ drives self-will from its darkness into a transfiguration where it paradoxically becomes particular and universal as âselfhood.â Yet this prognosis is nevertheless of a completed individuation. But if will is groundless Being, what does it mean to unify with the centrum, the primal will? Is it not to expose oneself to Natureâs derangement? In the Freedom essay, this imperilment is the evil nature of the world â the inevitable suspension of this transfiguration as the condition for time and history. This positive force of evil persists in spite of Schellingâs efforts to fold individuationâs productivity back into an Idealist economy through the Freedom essayâs scriptural traces of âdarknessâ and âlight.â Likewise, the Freedom essayâs bright horizon of spirit is clouded by the dark indeterminacy of the relationship between existence and the Ungrund: the âanarchyâ of the ground can always seep into existence (Freedom 29). Personality can always be derailed, deranged, or mutated by one force or another being for-itself. And with this productive derangement and indeterminacy at the heart of Nature and its human actors, we turn now to the implications of such un-grounding potency for ecological civilisationâs transformative project. Conclusion: Giving Indeterminacy Its Due Ecological civilisation and its desire for a transformative ethics is informed by what Gare identifies as a specifically Schellingian speculative naturalism, one which, based on Schellingâs Naturphilosophie of opposing forces, gravity and magnetism, ultimately aims at the constructive transformation of culture and the âovercomingâ of contemporary neoliberalist nihilism in the ecological, social, and economic spheres.[20] Schelling is thus understood as the progenitor of âa system that overcame the oppositions between idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism.â[21] But can we speak with confidence in terms of âovercomingâ and positive political action in a framework where drive and compulsion, in possessing psyche and Nature, dispossess them from each other and themselves? When human beings can never be guaranteed as ârational actorsâ? Can we speak with confidence in terms of âovercomingâ and positive political action in a framework where drive and compulsion, in possessing psyche and Nature, dispossess them from each other and themselves? Bruce Matthews has more directly advocated for an âactivistâ reading of Schellingâs Nature, suggesting that Schellingâs mythology of nature harbours a âutopian potentialâ with âan emancipatory power capable of liberating an engaged hope from its bondage to the ideology of irony that currently emasculates transformative political action.â[22] But he nevertheless gathers up this differentiation into an Idealist project of âbalanced relationship [and] reciprocity with natureâs nexus of living forcesâ in the name of âredemptive harmony.' (Matthews 212). Matthews ultimately resuscitates an anthropocentric fantasy of ârealizing a unity with natureâ (213) which, in an ideological sleight-of-hand, reinstates human freedom in its idealist intensity as a future which âoffers unseen possibilities and thus an open-ended orientation to what should beâ (Matthews 215). Transforming Schellingâs âshouldâ from an optative to an ethical imperative, Matthews acknowledges the aleatory energy of this self-differentiation but asserts transformative political action as an unproblematic possibility within this stochastic matrix, insisting on a âsubversive and emancipatory powerâ in Schellingâs âmythology of natureâ which cannot be corroborated by this Nature. Casting Schellingâs Nature as a platform for a neo-Kantian kingdom of ends, Matthews ultimately eclipses Natureâs radical productivity by assuming, as part of his desire for transformative politics, that humanity can and will one day overcome the very Nature articulated by Schellingâs Naturphilosophie. By invoking Schellingâs later idea of a philosophical religion, the concept of an ecological civilisation aims to uncover what Gare calls âa Weltanschauung inclusive enough to overcome philosophyâs compulsive tendency to splinter off into mutually exclusive schools of thoughtâ (Gare, âFrom Kant to Schelling to Process Philosophyâ, p. 68). To this end he draws on C.D. Broad, who writes that speculative naturalism seeks âto take over all aspects of human experience, to reflect upon them, and to try to think out a view of Reality as a whole which shall do justice to all of themâ (qtd. in Gare, âSpeculative Naturalismâ, p. 302). But âdoing justice to themâ paradoxically involves exploring the ways in which one paradigm, one force, one entity, one psyche in a system troubles and risks unworking, even deranging another; it involves being attuned to the paradox of the actants, both individual and inextricably bound to and prehended by the others. And given the productive nature of Schellingâs evil, the drive to be for-itself which marks Broadâs philosophical splintering, is this movement not part of the dynamism which drives existence itself in its peril and risk? Should it be âovercomeâ when it so crucially informs Broadâs conception of âthe whole range of human experienceâ (ibid.)? And yet is it feasible to resist the human, all-too-human urge to overcome such divisions? I suggest that Schelling ultimately â perhaps against his will â issues an inconclusive challenge to the necessary anthropomorphism of speculative naturalism in conceding that âemergent levelsâ of organisation (Gare, âSpeculative Naturalismâ, p. 321) may have nothing to do with the privileging, and little to do with the survival of a humanity which will always follow to some extent the derangement of Schellingâs Nature. At the point where Schellingâs thought touches Speculative Realismâs disavowal of the correlation between thought and Being, his Naturphilosophie explicitly reserves the right to see humanity collectively as a âmisbegotten attempt.â And this right (to use human terms) includes the right to deploy discursive vehicles including (but not limited to) neoliberalism itself as the means to discard such aberrations and continue its scrabbling both back and onward to the stasis of the Absolute. Neoliberalist capitalism as telluric autoimmunological response; a less than cheery prospect for the species to be sure. To what extent are we collectively willing to hear objections to our way of life and the rationalist fantasy, promoted perhaps first and foremost by the United Nations, that a species of more than seven billion is somehow one âhuman family,â each of whose members deserve everything the world has to offer? What, then, is to be done? Does this mean we have no other choice than the nihilism Nietzsche tried unsuccessfully to dispel, or the cognitive dissonance of political leaders when faced with the destructive and seemingly uncontrollable autonomy of military, industrial and capital economies? If we are to listen to Natureâs interrogations and deranged whisperings, to what extent are we collectively willing to hear objections to our way of life and the rationalist fantasy, promoted perhaps first and foremost by the United Nations, that a species of more than seven billion is somehow one âhuman family,â each of whose members deserve everything the world has to offer? No organism in the history of the planet has numbered in the billions and survived in perpetuity by according each of its members such privilege, and yet our collective ethics seems to demand no less. But does the answer lie in an ethics? John Caputo distinguishes between the âthou shaltâs of the ethical and the freedom of what he calls a poetics of obligation, a species of morality which âhappensâ in an event unbound by the discursive confines of ethics.[23] Nomadic and not architectonic, this happening is morality as obligation, which contains an undecidability that destabilises ethics even as it insists on decision, albeit decision freed from the guarantees of the ethical. This poetics of obligation is the outcome of a deconstruction of ethics which preserves a connectedness with others, both human and nonhuman. For Caputo, it is the feeling that comes over us when others need our help, when they call out for help, or support, or freedom, or whatever they need, a feeling that grows in strength directly in proportion to the desperateness of the situation of the other. The power of obligation varies directly with the powerlessness of the one who calls for help, which is the power of powerlessness (Caputo 5; my emph) This obligation is a chemical binding, a magnetic pull between the person and âthe Otherâ in its most general sense as âa deep anonymity in things, in the world, in the stars as in ourselves,â the uncanny force within ethics that ethics cannot contain (Caputo 18). The chemical-magnetic bind of obligation, then, is bound to bring some together in moments of morality while leaving others on the outside. As a dissolution of the guarantees of the ethical the poetics of obligation, and its due diligence paid to the uniqueness of personality which moves, corpuscular, through and across all discourse, always risks what others will inevitably call obscenity â in Caputoâs words, the risk that Yahwehâs command that Abraham sacrifice Isaac stands on the same footing as the commands Nazi officers gave to their soldiers to kill Jews (Caputo 10). And yet this risk of obscenity is the very condition of freedom. Is there an ethics of the future which can do justice to the magnetism of obligation? One which can incorporate its indeterminate remainder? One capable of sustaining a humanist equilibrium between the desire for system and the drive to derange the whole in the name of free transformation? Or must we ultimately forsake ethics and the architectonic of a decrepit, seven-billion âstrongâ body politic in favour of the nomadic, the corpuscular, and the âorganicâ â that is, organs separating from the metaphoric body as actants both for-themselves and bound to others according to the inscrutable intensities of magnetism? If there is a âsolutionâ to this dilemma, perhaps it lies in cultivating a willingness to forsake â the strength to deprive ourselves of comfort and consumption not only as a pragmatic duty in a world with finite resources, but also as a philosophical sensitivity to our membership in a Nature which surpasses us. Footnotes ^ Alison Flood, âOxford Junior Dictionaryâs replacement of ânaturalâ words with 21st-century terms sparks outcryâ, The Guardian, 13 Jan 2015, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words>. Referenced 30 Mar 2019. ^ Arran Gare, âThe Roots of Postmodernismâ, in Catherine Heller and Anne Daniell (eds.), Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 32. ^ Put simply, Arran Gare defines âecological civilizationâ as a mode of human existence based on a âtransformation of the relationship between science and other domains of cultureâ which reworks current âdeep assumptionsâ about humanityâs relationship to Nature (Arran Gare, âToward an Ecological Civilizationâ, Process Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2010, p. 12. While Gare does not define this transformation as âreligious,â the wordâs complex etymology compellingly addresses the nature of this relationship. âReligionâ is perhaps based on the Latin religare (âto bindâ), but in his âOn the Nature of the Godsâ Cicero derives it from relegere (âto re-readâ), suggesting a practice of careful attention and, in this sense, âdevotion.â Both senses speak to the ethos of care and attention demanded by an ecological civilisation. ^ I refer to David Ferrell Krellâs translation of the Programme. See David Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 25-26. ^ Arran Gare, âSpeculative Naturalism: A Manifestoâ, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014, pp. 307f., 308 n. 17. ^ Friedrich Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2004, p. 197. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as FO. ^ In The Accursed Share (3 vols., 1946-1949), Georges Bataille juxtaposes a restricted economy (a network of limited and discernible relations between things, such as the act of changing a tire which involves predetermined actions and tools) with a general economy, which accounts for the excess of energy in complex systems. Whether this non-recuperable energy is expressed in culture as art or more broadly as war (Batailleâs main examples), it poses a risk to the prevailing system. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, 3 vols., New York, Zone Books, 1991, pp. 23-26. ^ Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 134. ^ Jason Wirth, Schellingâs Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2015, p. 17. Schellingâs use of fundamentally psychological terms such as drive [Trieb] and compulsion [Zwang] to describe Nature prefigure their deployment in depth psychology, particularly Jungian metapsychology. For the connection between Schellingâs Naturphilosophie and Jungian metapsychology see Gord Barentsen, âSilent Partnerships: Schelling, Jung, and the Romantic Metasubjectâ, Symposium, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 71ff. ^ Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 178, 181. ^ Peterson translates versetzt as âtransported,â but versetzt can also mean âtranslate,â an interpretation which profoundly troubles Schellingâs Idealist project in the Introduction. Read as âtranslate,â Nature retains some degree of originary authority as that which is rendered by a consciousness which can never fully articulate or replace it. ^ Tilottama Rajan, âFirst Outline of a System of Theory: Schelling and the Margins of Philosophy, 1799-1815â, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 46, no. 3, 2007, p. 315. ^ David Krell, âThree Ends of the Absolute: Schelling on Inhibition, Hölderlin on Separation, and Novalis on Densityâ, Research in Phenomenology, vol. 32, 2002, p. 65. ^ Tilottama Rajan, âPhilosophy as Encyclopedia: Hegel, Schelling, and the Organization of Knowledgeâ, Wordsworth Circle, vol. 35, no. 1, 2004, p. 9. ^ Peterson (FO 244 n. 1) translates Aktion as âactantâ instead of âactionâ (which for him is too general) or actor (which for him is too intentional). But Peterson does not mention the âactantââs provenance both in narratology and the thought of French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour. In the narratological framework of Greimasian semiotics, actants âoperate on the level of function rather than content. That is, an actant may embody itself in a particular character (termed an acteur) or it may reside in the function of more than one character in respect of their common role in the storyâs underlying âoppositionalâ structure. In short, the deep structure of the narrative generates and defines its actants at a level beyond that of the storyâs surface contentâ (Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, 2nd ed., London and New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 70-71). ^ Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2006, p. 73. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Freedom ^ Alan White, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 119-120 ^ G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Michael Inwood, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 13. ^ Jason Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003, p. 170. ^ See Gare, âSpeculative Naturalismâ, pp. 314-315, 300-301. ^ Arran Gare, âFrom Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilizationâ, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011, p. 28. ^ Bruce Matthews, âThe New Mythology: Romanticism Between Religion and Humanismâ, in Dalia Nassar (ed.), The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 203. ^ John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 4-5.
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Hello all, I've been invited to give a one-hour talk at the Complex Processes Research Group (CPRG) at Swinburne University in Melbourne. The present theme for talks is, broadly speaking, "neoliberalism and the environment." I've included the abstract from Dr. Arran Gare's inaugural talk to give a sense of what issues are being discussed. My talk, which will involve Schelling's Naturphilosophie and its possible relations to a critique of neoliberalism, is slated for 2 May. I'll post more here when I have more information.
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Hello, I'm pleased to announce that LiquidFractal, with the permission of the MSCP, is hosting the online space for "Schelling and 'Philosophical Psychology'," a summer course lasting from Jan-Feb 2018 and run through the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. You can get to it in the SPACES menu above, but only registered members can access its content. If you're interested in enrolling for this or any other course offered by the MSCP, please visit their website here: Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. All courses are available for distance enrollment and are made available as downloadable recordings.
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