Abstract
This chapter considers Idealism’s encyclopedic knowledge-systems as a “general economy” that deconstructs any panlogical unification of philosophy, history, aesthetics, and the natural sciences, thus yielding a new model of “system.” It argues that as Kant’s “restricted” model of architectonic is displaced in the work of Hegel and Schelling in more dynamic and bio-logical—rather than logical—directions, system becomes “subject” (to adapt Hegel), opening philosophy to its own autobiography.
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Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 691.
- 2.
Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 21, 25.
- 3.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 1, 166.
- 4.
F. W. J. Schelling, “On the Nature of Philosophy as Science,” in German Idealist Philosophy, ed. Rüdiger Bubner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 212. Hereafter “NPS.”
- 5.
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. and ed. David Wood (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 86.
- 6.
For instance, Philip Huneman (ed.), Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007); Maurizio Esposito, Romantic Biology, 1890–1945 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 1–32.
- 7.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York; George Braziller, 1968), 6, 19, 32.
- 8.
F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 6, 105, 160; hereafter FO.
- 9.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980).
- 10.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 254; hereafter CJ.
- 11.
Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 7th ed. (Halle: 1779), #533.
- 12.
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 18.
- 13.
I distinguish deconstruction from post-structuralism in Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press), xii–xvi, 1–54. Briefly, though post-structuralism unsettles stable notions of structure and system, its erasure of depth, consciousness, and the subject in a world of surfaces is often euphoric. More genealogically entangled with phenomenology, and mediated by the French Hegelians’ focus on consciousness as distinct from spirit (10–14), deconstruction, even after the linguistic turn of the 1960s, still assumes what Foucault calls a “modern cogito”: a cogito exposed to its unthought, to ontological concerns, and thus to a certain pathos (187–190).
- 14.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 6; hereafter PN. I use the Miller translation. “Organism” is Miller’s translation of “Organisation”; M.J. Petry translates it as “organic whole” (Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols. [London: Allen and Unwin, 1970], 1.197).
- 15.
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20–22.
- 16.
I borrow Arkady Plotnitsky’s Deleuzian rethinking of Hegelian conceptuality in his brilliant “Curvatures: Hegel and the Baroque,” in Rajan and Plotnitsky, ed., Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 121–125.
- 17.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in Žižek and Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11–12.
- 18.
G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), trans. Stephen A. Taubeneck, in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990), 53.
- 19.
Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 212.
- 20.
Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 125, 60, 137, 101.
- 21.
Ibid., 148.
- 22.
Hegel, Encyclopedia (1817), 51; F. W. J. Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan, ed. Norbert Gutterman (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1966), 42; hereafter OUS.
- 23.
G. W. F. Hegel/F. W. J. Schelling, “On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General,” in Between Kant and Hegel, trans. And ed. George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 366. On the uncertain authorship, see Harris’ introductory note (365).
- 24.
Žižek, “Abyss,” 11–12.
- 25.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 18–19.
- 26.
Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungen über philosophische Enzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Lehmann (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961), 32. Translations mine.
- 27.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 295. This is Part 3 of the 1830 Encyclopedia with additional Zusätze from the 1845 Boumann edition, trans. A.V. Miller. Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (1804/5) is also a typology rather than a historical system of art, in which the Symbolic (equivalent to Hegel’s Classicism) forms a midpoint between the opposite failures of the schematic and allegorical to achieve artistic synthesis (trans. Douglas Stott [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989], 46–48).
- 28.
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1.76–9, 81, 158, 181.
- 29.
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 3.555, 542. Unless otherwise noted, further references are to this edition. In one lecture series, Hegel rationalizes his placement of Schelling in claiming that all “preceding philosophies” find their “final idea” in him, but retains all his criticisms of Schelling (Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–1826, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans Brown, J.M. Stewart and H.S. Harris [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 1.204).
- 30.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 17, 10, 13, 37, 39.
- 31.
Ibid., 39, 37; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark: (One of Hegel’s Bons Mots), trans Céline Surprenant. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 10–13, 61, 48.
- 32.
The four parts of Arthur Schopenhauer’s 1817 The World as Will and Representation (trans. E. F. J. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], Vol. 1) stage a journey through Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Aesthetics, and Ethics, which is meant to deconstruct the Hegelian auto-encyclopedia. But the parts remain in agonistic contention.
- 33.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 50.
- 34.
Schelling, OUS, 79.
- 35.
Jacques Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 67, 78–9.
- 36.
Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 15, 82.
- 37.
Novalis, Romantic Encyclopedia, 76.
- 38.
Kant, Vorlesungen, 31.
- 39.
Schelling, OUS, 33, 37, 76, 80–1.
- 40.
Hegel, Encyclopedia (1817), 53. See Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, ed. And trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4; hereafter MF.
- 41.
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York; Abaris Books, 1979), 45.
- 42.
Kant, MF, 4.
- 43.
Hegel, Encyclopedia (1817), 51–52.
- 44.
Kant, CJ, 41–42.
- 45.
Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography, trans. Olaf Reinhardt, in Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 445.
- 46.
Ibid., 445–447.
- 47.
Kant, MF, 4–7.
- 48.
Kant, Geography, 447–453.
- 49.
Schelling, FO, 44.
- 50.
Kant, CJ, 17, 42, 285.
- 51.
Hegel, Encyclopedia (1817), 53–4.
- 52.
Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (New York: Dover, 1974), 48.
- 53.
Hegel, PN, 6, 19.
- 54.
Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3–4.
- 55.
Rodolphe Gasché, Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3; Hegel, PN, 13.
- 56.
Hegel, PN, 3, 428.
- 57.
Kant, CJ, 243–4, 247.
- 58.
Hegel, PN, 20, 279, 377.
- 59.
Schelling, FO, 53.
- 60.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Passions,” in Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. and J. R. de J. Jackson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 2.1436; “Observations on the Scale of Life,” in Shorter Works, 2.1194.
- 61.
Alison Stone, Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), xviii, 57–8.
- 62.
Hegel, PN, 21; Schelling, FO, 49.
- 63.
Coleridge, “Passions,” 1426–7, 1436.
- 64.
Hegel, PN, 3.
- 65.
Paul Ricoeur, “Hegel and Husserl on Intersubjectivity,” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thomson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 229–31.
- 66.
Joseph Henry Green, Vital Dynamics (London: William Pickering, 1840), 99–102, 107.
- 67.
Hegel, PN, 2, 20–1.
- 68.
M. J. Petry, “Introduction,” to Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 1. 31–2.
- 69.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, trans. A.V. Miller, ed. Michael George and Andrew Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 143n; cf. PN, 20.
- 70.
Hegel, PN, 444, 276; Phenomenology, 16.
- 71.
G. W. F. Hegel, De Orbitis Planetarum, trans. David Healan (Berlin and Yokohama, 2006), 13. http://hegel.net/en/v2123healan.htm.
- 72.
In the Propaedeutic, Division 2 is called “Physics” and subdivided into “Mechanics” and “Physics of the Inorganic.”
- 73.
John Zammito, “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence Toward Epigenesis, 1764–90,” in Understanding Purpose: Kant and the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Philippe Huneman (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 52.
- 74.
Stone, Petrified Intelligence, 46–50, 75; Hegel, PN, 277, 291.
- 75.
Green, Vital Dynamics, 37. 39, 41, 105.
- 76.
Hegel, PN, 6, 27; Encyclopedia, 49–50.
- 77.
Hegel, PN, 22, 27.
- 78.
Ibid., 269, 344.
- 79.
Ibid., 394; Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 69–70.
- 80.
Hegel does not use the word biology, but cites Treviranus’ Biologie (PN, 365n), which coins the term.
- 81.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 106, 202.
- 82.
G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, in Basic Writings, trans. George Montgomery (La Salle: Open Court, 1968), 261, 266, 268. Hegel opposes Leibniz as a thinker who does not quite embrace difference to Spinoza as a thinker of substance, and attributes to Leibniz an ascent of monads from “inorganic” to “organic” to “conscious” that seems more Hegelian than Leibnizian (History of Philosophy, 3.330, 337).
- 83.
Schelling, FO, 44.
- 84.
Foucault defines a counter-science, such as psychoanalysis, as one that “flow[s] in the opposite direction” from, and “unmake[s]” the sciences in which man creates his “positivity” (The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Vintage, 1970], 379).
- 85.
Hegel, PN, 364, 373, 376.
- 86.
Roberto Esposito, Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 25–6.
- 87.
Hegel, PN, 364.
- 88.
Ibid., 361.
- 89.
Ibid., 281, 284, 293.
- 90.
Earth is also extensively covered under physics. Further entangling the levels, the vivification of the earth at the end of the section on the terrestrial organism, while allowing for a transition to plant nature, does so through a regression to physics and chemistry.
- 91.
Hegel, PN, 276, 279.
- 92.
Hegel, PN, 15; History of Philosophy, 3.517; Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Pres of Virginia, 1978), 6.
- 93.
Hegel, PN, 284, 428.
- 94.
Ibid., 361, 429.
- 95.
Ibid., 395, 402–3.
- 96.
Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches Upon Life and Death, trans. Tobias Watkins (Philadelphia: Smith and Maxwell, 1809), 119.
- 97.
Hegel, PN, 396, 404–5.
- 98.
Ibid., 387, 397, 402–3, 405.
- 99.
Hegel, Aesthetics, 1.76–7, 438–9.
- 100.
Hegel, PN, 428–9.
- 101.
Ibid., 275.
- 102.
Ibid., 444.
- 103.
Schelling, FO, 53; “Introduction to the Outline” in FO, 196–7.
- 104.
Hegel, PN, 160; Encyclopedia (1817), 51.
- 105.
Hegel, PN, 104, 80, 99, 77.
- 106.
Ibid., 303, 343.
- 107.
Ibid., 106, 276.
- 108.
Ibid., 6, 278, 358, 428.
- 109.
Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (New York: Zone, 1991), 118; Knowledge, 69–70.
- 110.
Hegel, PN, 438, 428–429.
- 111.
Ibid., 372, 428, 433.
- 112.
Ibid., 432–434, 441.
- 113.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005).
- 114.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 407.
- 115.
Catherine Malabou, “Again: ‘The Wounds of the Spirit Heal and Leave No Scars Behind,’” Mosaic 40:2 (2007): 29–37.
- 116.
Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 69–108; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
- 117.
Smith, Derrida, 3.
- 118.
Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
- 119.
See my articles “Towards a Cultural Idealism: Negativity and Freedom in Hegel and Kant,” in Idealism Without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 51–71; “How (Not) To Speak Properly: Writing ‘German’ Philosophy in Hegel’s Aesthetics and History of Philosophy,” Clio 33:2 (2004), 119–142.
- 120.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 76.
- 121.
See my articles “(In)Digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Nature,” in Cultures of Taste/ Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 217–36; “Hegel’s Irritability,” European Romantic Review, 32:5–6 (2021): 499–517.
- 122.
Schelling, OUS, 41.
- 123.
Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). PMR has not been fully translated, though the Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology (trans. Mason Richey and Markus Zisselsberger [Albany: SUNY Press, 2007]) provides the first ten lectures, and Klaus Ottmann has translated H. G. Paulus’ unauthorized version of the Philosophy of Revelation (1841–42) (Putnam, CT: Spring, 2020).
- 124.
Hegel, History of Philosophy, 3.515, 513.
- 125.
Schelling, Freedom, 5.
- 126.
Schröter’s chronological division consists of Early Writings, Naturphilosophie, Identity Philosophy, Philosophy of Freedom, Historical Philosophy, and Religion (Schelling’s Werke, 6 vols. and Supplements [Munich: Beck’sche Buchhandlung, 1965–1969]).
- 127.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272; “Introduction to the Outline,” in FO, 194.
- 128.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ages (1815), trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 19, 36.
- 129.
Schelling, OUS, 43, 9, 45.
- 130.
Schelling, “NPS,” 210–213.
- 131.
Schelling, Freedom, 18; The Ages of the World (1815), 48.
- 132.
Schelling, “NPS,” 210, 216–217.
- 133.
Schelling, FO, 13; “NPS,” 213.
- 134.
Derrida, “The University Without Condition.” Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202–37.
- 135.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 123–124.
- 136.
Hegel, History, 3.514; Schelling, “NPS,” 215.
- 137.
Michel Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” Language, counter-memory, practice, trans. Sherry and Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 87–8.
- 138.
Schelling, FO, 3.
- 139.
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–8.
- 140.
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3.
- 141.
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith (New York: Continuum, 2002), 47; Schelling, FO, 38n, 113.
- 142.
Schelling, FO, 13–27.
- 143.
Ibid., 21, 19, 43–44.
- 144.
Ibid., 29–32.
- 145.
Ibid., 110.
- 146.
Green, Vital Dynamics, 101–102.
- 147.
Schelling, FO, 53.
- 148.
Schelling, System, 122–127.
- 149.
Ibid., 158–159, 54.
- 150.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 9.
- 151.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 19–22.
- 152.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 3–4.
- 153.
Schelling, Freedom, 4; Ages (1815), 6–7.
- 154.
Schelling, Freedom, 4, 26.
- 155.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 20, xxxvi, 65.
- 156.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World (1813), trans. Judith Norman, in Žižek and Schelling, in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, 182. Schelling uses Entscheidung in the Freedom essay, but uses both words in 1813. See F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter Fragmente in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schröter (München: Biederstein und Leibniz Verlag, 1946), 169–84.
- 157.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 6; FO, 31.
- 158.
Žižek, “Abyss,” 31.
- 159.
Schelling, The Ages of the World (1811), trans. Joseph Lawrence (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019), 67, 128, 133,112.
- 160.
PMR, which occupied Schelling for years, is seen as his final system, because it is his last and most monumental work. But it is itself arguably an archive that the Hegelian narrative of a Stufenfolge of worldviews inserted into it cannot silence.
- 161.
Ibid., 42, 148, 167.
- 162.
Schelling, Ages (1813), 176–178.
- 163.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 12–13, 29, 37.
- 164.
In addition to Ages (1813), see Freedom, 13–14; Ages (1811), 86–87, 124.
- 165.
Schelling, FO, 23–24, 31; “NPS,” 211–212.
- 166.
Schelling, Ages (1815), 48, 68.
- 167.
Schelling, Ages (1813), 182n. Schelling’s actual comment, now lost, would have occurred on 167, just before the discussion of expression. See Schröter’s explanation (Weltalter Fragmente, 169).
- 168.
Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 118
- 169.
Schelling, FO, 77, 187–188, 192; F. W. J. Schelling, “On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature and the Correct Way of Solving Its Problems,” The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy (1801), Nature and Identity, ed. Benjamin Berger and Daniel Whistler (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 51, 47–48.
- 170.
Schelling, FO, 77; Ages (1815), 83.
- 171.
Ibid., 7, 64, 44, 61.
- 172.
Schelling, Ages (1811), 83.
- 173.
Ibid., 97, 242–243; Ages (1815), 91–92.
- 174.
Ibid., 19.
- 175.
Foucault, “Fantasia,” 89.
- 176.
Hegel, Mind, 204; Schelling, “NPS,” 210.
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Rajan, T. (2023). Systems of Knowledge. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_10
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