Abstract
The crisis of reason in the nineteenth century? As if there were but one ‘crisis.’ As if one could reasonably circumscribe what we call ‘the nineteenth century.’ As if, even granting that one might decide to remain within the confines of philosophy and intellectual history, one could reduce such events as Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to a single unified fable.
Our age is the proper age of critique, to which everything must be subjected. Kant, KrV, A xi
Thus the ground, in its freedom, achieves Allotment [die Scheidung] and Judgment (κρίσις), and precisely thereby the complete actualization of God. Schelling, S.W., 7, 404
I know my lot. One day the memory of something monstrous will attach itself to my name — the memory of a crisis the likes of which has never been seen on earth ... Nietzsche, StA, 6, 365
- ‘Well, Bannadonna’, said the chief, ‘how long ere you are ready to set the clock going, so that the hour shall be sounded’? ... - ‘To-morrow, Excellenza, if you listen for it, — or should you not, all the same — strange music will be heard. The stroke of one shall be the first from yonder bell,’ pointing to the bell, adorned with girls and garlands, ‘that stroke shall fall there, where the hand of Una clasps Dua’s. The stroke of one shall sever that loved clasp.’ Melville, ‘The Bell-Tower’ (Emphases mine throughout)
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Notes
F.W.J. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860 and seq.), 7, 355. I shall cite this edition throughout my text. The text I have actually used is the fine edition by Horst Fuhrmanns (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964). The currently available English translation is unfortunately full of errors and inconsistencies — thus I do not refer to it.
See, e.g., 7, 366, 380, and 404. Cf. in the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen of 1810 (7, 483) a similar passage on Krisis and Scheidung in nature. In both texts Krisis means a series of decisive cuts and separations, Scheidungen. Scheidung, the root of Entscheidung, ‘decision’, and Unterschied, ‘distinction’, means separation, divorce, discrimination, apportionment, allotment, expulsion, elimination, ‘scission’. Scheiden, related to the English word ‘to shed’, derives from the Greek σχίζω, to split or sunder. Die Scheide may be a limit or boundary, a ‘watershed’, or a ‘sheathe’. At the end of the seventeenth century it becomes a translation of the Latin word vagina.
7, 366. I will not attempt to discuss the various ‘sources’ of Schelling’s center/periphery imagery. One might well search the pages of Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) for instances of such movement from center to periphery and back again. Schelling himself cites Franz Baader, who through Jakob Böhme would take us back to Plato’s Timaeus, the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the Cabala, and all the hermetic doctrines, so that we could neither find a particular center for such ‘sources’ nor circumscribe their periphery. Baader himself (cited at 366-67n.) invokes the ‘center (mysterium)’ of primal fire, the ‘periphery’ of primal moisture within fire, and their economy of peaceful coexistence and discord (Zwietracht). When the center (ego) shifts to the periphery (egoism) and seeks to occupy the entire circle, evil reigns.
Doubtless, Origen. Schelling will thus not have mentioned him at the outset, relying on Hamann to introduce him at the end.
Corybants, i. e., the priests of Kybele (once again!), known for their frenzied dance — they are often compared to Whirling Dervishes — and their initiation rite of self-castration. Gallier, from the Latin Galli, Greek Γάλλοι, means not the Celtic Gauls but (yet again!) the Phrygian priests of Kybele. The singular, Galius, is sometimes written in the feminine form Galla, ‘humorously’, the dictionaries say, inasmuch as gallus in the cock. Cf. in anatomy the crista galli, cited by Hegel in his Jena lectures on the philosophy of nature, Gesammelte Werke, 8, 173.
See my presentation of ‘The Oldest Program toward a System in German Idealism,’ The Owl of Minerva, vol. 17, no. 1 (Fall 1985), 5–19.
In the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (e.g., 7, 434, 458, and 475) and in the 1810 dialogue on the nexus of nature and the spirit-world (‘Clara’, at 9, 75) Schelling writes: Er Selber.
See Fuhrman’s note, p. 147; for the Schelling-Eschenmayer correspondence, see 8, 137–89.
See Krell, ‘Female Parts in Timaeus,’ Arion, New Series 2/3 (1975), 400–21, esp. 413. In Schelling’s text (390) ‘bastard reasoning’, λογισεωυóθω, becomes ‘false imagination’. The Zweibrücken edition which he cites (9, 349) offers Ficino’s translation adulterina ratione. Yet falsche Imagination has as its opposite wahre Ein-Bildung, ‘true, in-forming imagination’, in the womb of knowledge (362), in such a way that one cannot divorce one from the other. For my earlier suggestion that imagination is the crisis of reason in the nineteenth century, it would be crucial to juxtapose Schelling’s adulation of Ein-Bildung as the gestation of intellect and reason and his fear of ‘false imagination’ as the very faculty of evil. Which is more than one can do on the periphery.
The notion of ‘absolute indifference’ is crucial for Schelling’s thinking from early on — for example, in the period of his struggles with the subjective idealism of Fichte, the period of his 1795 essay, ‘Vom Ich als Prinzip.’ (I am grateful to Peter Dews for this reminder.) Cf. the crucial role of ‘absolute indifference’ in Hegel’s Logic, as the ‘Becoming of Essence’, the culmination of the doctrine of Being, which I can only note here without commentary. (See Wissenschaft der Logik, Part I, ‘Objective Logic’, Division 3, ‘Measure’, Chapter 3, ‘The Becoming of Essence’.) Perhaps it is also worth noting that in his account of human genitality (in the 1805–06 Jena lectures on Realphilosophie) Hegel designates the uterus as das Indifferente. See Krell, ‘Pitch: Genitality/Excrementality: From Hegel to Crazy Jane’, boundary 2, 12, 2 (Winter 1984), 113–41, esp. p. 120.
See De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 207–34 and 441–45.
Cf. the phrase der notwendige Weg zur endlichen wirklichen Differenzierung, from the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (7, 426).
On this system which ‘is no longer system’, a system destroyed by the scission of ground and existence, a cut no Seynsfüge can anneal, see M. Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809) (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1971), esp. p. 194. See also Heidegger’s remarkable account of longing (die Sehnsucht) as longing for the other (ein Anderes), p. 150.
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Krell, D.F. (1988). The Crisis of Reason in the Nineteenth Century: Schelling’s Treatise on Human Freedom (1809). In: Sallis, J.C., Moneta, G., Taminiaux, J. (eds) The Collegium Phaenomenologicum, The First Ten Years. Phaenomenologica, vol 105. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2805-3_2
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