“What Kant, at the end of his sober discourse, conceives of as a dream, I want to LIVE and FEEL”. The “sober” writings of Descartes and Kant are giving way to a new style of Being: one that includes, or even starts from feelings, imagination and life. This quote in Merleau’s lectures on Nature is from another neglected philosopher: Friedrich Willhelm Joseph Schelling. We recall that Merleau-Ponty’s work was somewhat eclipsed by that of his friend Jean Paul Sartre; Schelling (who like Merleau is coming back into public awareness) was the tutor of Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel, who similarly became famous. (Funnily enough I just read that Hegel and Schelling edited a philosophical journal together, as had Merleau and Sartre!) I’m not an expert on Hegel but it seems to me that he took a lot of his best ideas from Schelling and systemised them into a massive architectonic structure that was an early “Theory Of Everything” but, you could say he “freeze-dried” those ideas somewhat, rather than “lived” them. (This is very different to Merleau’s relationship with Sartre: they fell out of having very different ideas about things.)
Schelling’s philosophy was by contrast a continual exploratory “work in progress”: unlike Hegel, Kant and Descartes he doesn’t want to “fix” the world into neat definable categories, and unlike them he is a true Romantic. To be fair to Kant he did admit to being perplexed at the world and in spite of saving the imagination as a producer of meanings was unable to bridge the abyss between our subjective experience and thoughts and the phenomenal world outside. He was unable to overcome the “solipsism” that Descartes‘ “Cogito” had forced upon us. When it comes to both the isolation of the self, AND the unpredictability of the whole he admits to a certain fear: “Unconditional necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. Eternity itself, in all its terrible sublimity,…is far from making the same overwhelming impression on the mind; for it only measures the duration of things, it does not support them.” (From the “Critique of Pure Reason”, quoted in “Nature”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Northwestern University Press, 1995, p 36.)
Perhaps he is here thinking of the Cartesian way of thinking that can analyse, describe and “measure” things, but cannot give us any reason why they are so. He continues: “We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: “I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will, BUT WHENCE THEN AM I?” All support here fails us, is unsubstantial and baseless…” (Ibid) “Pascal had his abyss, it followed him. But the abyss is ALL-action and dream, language, desire!-and who could count the times the wind of fear has made my blood run cold! each way I turn, above and below, tempting and terrible too the silence, the space…By night God traces with a knowing hand unending nightmares on unending dark.” Wrote Baudelaire towards the end of the Romantic movement. (“Les Fleures Du Mal”, Picador Classics 1982, p16.) Such vertigo still haunts us, when we contemplate the “heat death” of the Universe: we seem to live in “the indifference of the void.” (Ibid.) Or do we? Is it not our way of thinking that has shut us off from what is still a wonderful universe, and surrounding us, full of life and consciousness?
For Kant (and Pascal) the universe seemed dark and fearsome and even though they still believed in God it seemed that even he wasn’t happy! (In a strange way that reminds me of the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad: “The Self looking around, saw nothing other than himself. First he said ‘I am’…and he was afraid.” (Quoted in “Imagination is Reality”, Roberts Avens, Spring Publications 1980, p21) Suddenly the Cogito sounds hollow, fragile and lonely. This is the position of the western ego that has sundered itself from the universe and is only certain of its own thought, and the “self” that we are told has been “deconstructed”.
Yet, Merleau-Ponty points out that Schelling found that “abyss” a cause for exultation. He knew of “negative theology” in which all that the Absolute is not, is stripped away: “What appeared to Kant as an abyss appears to Schelling as the definition of God.” (“Nature”, M.P. P37.) As a Romantic the untameable wildness of the world was no problem for Schelling’s “sublime”: “it is a sort of pure, unmotivated surging-forth”, “…recognition of an unknown being.” (Ibid.) In Schelling’s philosophy the many and the One, the infinite and the finite contain one another; in our smallness we too are part of the One and it is a part of us: “Finitude is nothing other than this drawing of the finite from out of this potency of an infinite being.” (Ibid)
As I’ve explained elsewhere this thinking that overcomes or makes boundaries “porous”, that combines opposites, embraces paradox and re-unites us with the whole phenomenal world is characteristic of Merleau’s own project. He clearly has an affinity with the Romantic though he retreats from being named one himself, or allying himself with mysticism. “For Schelling, sympathy is not telepathy, at least at the beginning, for, as Jaspers says, he often ends up by falling into Gnosticism. But this Gnosticism, even if tempting , is in fact condemned by Schelling himself, as it transforms the subjective into the objective and falls into a description conceived in terms of objectivity: it fabricates a false science.” (Ibid, p41.) There was indeed a tendency to dualism in Gnostic thought, and Merleau sees Schelling attaining “a phenomenology of prereflexive Being.” (Which sounds pretty much what Merleau’s own phenomenology was aiming for!) That experiential oneness is more like mysticism proper.
Merleau appears to have a distrust of esotericism: he may have changed his mind on that had he lived into the late 1960s; at the time he was writing people were still very much immersed in Marxism (which is Hegel “upended”.) He draws attention to Lukacs’ criticism of Schelling that he “borders on mysticism” (Ibid, p50. “And why not!” I wrote in the margin!) Today it seems that a reconsidering of Schelling (AND Merleau) is valuable to our thinking about how we belong in what has come to be called “the environment.” The Romantic vision of “Nature” was far richer. Schelling revolts against the “mechanistic model” that “dissolves everything into thought and dissolves all forms with obscurity, this barbarically principle, the source of all grandeur and beauty.” (Ibid p38.) At times he sounds like William Blake!
Sadly the ascendant of Hegel pushed Schelling back into dark obscurity and Merleau accuses Hegel himself of this where he suggested Schelling’s philosophy was like looking for black sheep in the depths of night! But Schelling knew that there has to be room for obscurity and ambiguity if one is to approach understanding the “why” of things, like Merleau who suggested we need to consider the “invisible” as well as the visible: not as an opposite negation, (like Sartre’s “Nothingness”) but as part of the greater whole.
Thus: “What Schelling means is that we rediscover Nature in our perceptual experience PRIOR to REFLECTION.” (Ibid, p39.) “Reflection” here meaning the tendency to turn phenomena into mere descriptions of things a la Descartes shining a harsh cognitive light on them. By contrast: “Nature is both passive and active, product and productivity, (or perhaps better: PROCESS) but a productivity…which ceaselessly repeated without end. The is a double movement of expansion…compared to respiration, which never goes on to the end of its movement except in death.” (Ibid, p38.) As Heraclitus had said long before: there is only change, flux and flow and the suggestion is that we too are a part of that flow (IF we let ourselves realise it!) We “breathe in the world” and breath of ourselves out into it: that is our participation in Being. We are of the pulse of the world and we exist in it “as the heart is in the organism” Merleau had said in “Phenomenology of Perception”.
Schelling anticipated a lot of ideas and discoveries such as “self-organisation” of matter, and holism; he reversed Fichte’s Idealism “I is everything” to “I am IDENTICAL to Nature, I understand it just as well as my own life.” (Ibid, p40.) This reversal overcomes the solipsism of Descartes, Fichte and perhaps Kant also: the realising that we belong in the world; we relate to it and the other beings we share it with: “Schelling likewise wants to attend to the genesis of living beings while coexisting with the Nature that perceives in me.” (Ibid, p41.)
There is a “circularity” of thought such as Eliot spoke of “In my end is my beginning”: this Merleau describes as “the Schellingian Circle.” “Schelling’s philosophy seeks to restore a kind of non-division between us and Nature considered as an organism (anticipating Gaia!)…a non-division conditioned by the non-division of subject-object.” (Ibid, p46.) Yet Merleau points out that the development of a separate western subjectivity cannot be overthrown so we all “go native” and leave our Cartesian past behind us: “…this attempt to return to a non-division…can no longer be primitive non-division and must be conscious. We must retrieve at a higher level what had been lived organically, must pass from the pre-dialectical to the meta-dialectical, must pass from what Schelling calls “negative philosophy”, which is the dialectic feeling of this dismemberment of reflection from the non-known, to what he calls “positive philosophy”. (Ibid, p47) (One thinks of Ken Wilbur’s saying “transcend AND include”.)
And here you have the positive aspiration of the philosophy of the two men: Schelling’s in contrast to the “dismembering” ideals of western science (“Newton’s Sleep”, Blake) and Merleau-Ponty’s in contrast to Sartre’s “nothingness” at the heart of subjectivity. Man’s (sic!) place in the world is dire indeed according to Sartre, “condemned” to a “freedom” that, well yes, resembles “slavery”! Schelling (and Merleau) indeed see the human as having a better potential life: “Schelling presents the appearance of human being as a species of the re-creation of the world, as the advent of an opening.” (Interestingly ancient Zoroastrian’s believed something similar!) “By this opening, Nature, when it succeeded in creating human being, finds itself overcome by something new. But the inverse is also true. Not only must Nature become vision, but human must also become Nature: ‘Philosophers, in their visions, became Nature’” (ibid.)
“Nothing exists alone, but EVERYTHING becomes.” Friedrich Willhelm Joseph Schelling
Laurence Burrow (Monty Oxymoron) Brighton, 2025