#friedrich schelling

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

“For the Romantics, nature was, as the philosopher Friedrich Schelling remarked, ‘visible spirit’. […] Such notions of ‘spirit-matter’ dualism are in the tradition of Neoplatonic thought, in which all existence is believed to have derived from a single source with which individual souls can be mystically reunited. However, these ideas also drew upon a specific national legacy of nature mysticism inherited from the Renaissance physician Paracelsus and the seventeenth-century visionary Jakob Böhme […] regarded nature as the Book of God written in the language of ‘signatures’, and saw ‘the entire visible world with all its beings ... [as] a sign or figure of the inner, spiritual realm.’ […] revelations of a sacralized nature.

[…] state of mystical oneness, providing them with children and flowers as spiritual guides. […] Böhme's ‘primal fires’, the originating state of all matter, are encircled by a serpent biting his tail, the Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for eternity. […] [Philipp Otto] Runge rooted his cosmology in the beliefs and symbols of ancient mystical, alchemical, and astrological wisdom […] rejected the academic illusionism and narrative methods of Neoclassicism […] The Romantics treasured the concept of the hieroglyph, comparing it to the sacred languages of nature and art […] as vestiges of an ancient world, symbolized for the Romantics a secret knowledge that was impenetrable to modern-day, educated people except during states when the faculties of imagination and intuition dominated reason, as in childhood and during dreams. The Romantic celebration of night as the time of poetic revelation […] dreams provide access to a ‘mythical primeval age’ containing wisdom indecipherable to the waking mind.”

— Marsha Morton; “German Romanticism: The Search for “a Quiet Place”

[twtuwuowo]

Save me german philosophers named friedrich

[quod-quid-erat-esse]

"El absoluto Yo es lo propiamente eterno, pero, precisamente por ello, el Yo finito, que anhela ser idéntico con él, debe aspirar también a esta pura eternidad; de manera que lo que en el Yo infinito es puesto como entitativo se exprese en éste como cambiante, poniendo en sí mismo una duración infinita, esto es, una eternidad empírica. El fin último del Yo finito es, pues, la ampliación hasta la identidad con el infinito. En el Yo finito hay unidad de la conciencia, es decir, personalidad. El Yo infinito no conoce, sin embargo, objeto alguno, y, por tanto, tampoco ninguna conciencia ni unidad de la conciencia (personalidad). Por ello, el fin último de todo anhelar puede ser representado como ampliación de la personalidad hacia la infinitud, es decir, como su destrucción. El fin último del Yo finito, así como el del No-Yo, esto es, la finalidad del mundo, es su destrucción, en tanto que destrucción del mundo, esto es, de la sustancia finita (del Yo finito y del No-Yo). Respecto a este fin último no tiene lugar más que una infinita aproximación, de ahí la persistencia infinita del Yo (inmortalidad)"

Schelling Del Yo Como Principio de la Filosofía o Sobre Lo Incondicionado en el Saber Humano

[quotessentially]

From Friedrich Schelling’s On University Studies

[rjzimmerman]

Opinion | What a Young Philosopher Discovered More Than 200 Years Ago About Nature

Friedrich Schelling’s ideas might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival.

Excerpt from this New York Times Op-Ed:

There is a “secret bond connecting our mind with nature,” the professor, Friedrich Schelling, told the students. His idea, that the self and nature are in fact identical, was as simple as it was radical. He explained this by pointing to the moment when the self becomes aware of the world around it.

“At the first moment, when I am conscious of the external world, the consciousness of my self is there as well,” he said, “and vice versa — at my first moment of self-awareness, the real world rises up before me.” Instead of dividing the world into mind and matter, as many philosophers had done for centuries, the young professor told his students that everything was one. It was an idea that would change the way humans think about themselves and nature.

To me it seems that we sometimes forget that we’re part of nature — physically of course, but also emotionally and psychologically — and this insight is missing from our current climate debates. As a historian, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature, and I believe that Schelling’s philosophy of oneness might provide a foundation on which to anchor the fight for our climate and our survival.

Unlike Isaac Newton, who had described matter as being essentially inert, or the French philosopher René Descartes, who had declared animals to be machines, Schelling’s so- called naturphilosophie (nature philosophy) questioned these mechanical models of nature. Instead, Schelling pronounced that everything — from insects to trees, stones to birds, rivers to humans — was part of one great organism.

For millenniums, thinkers had turned to their gods to understand their place and purpose in the unknowable divine plan. Then, in the late 17th century, a scientific revolution began to illuminate the world in a new way. Scientists peered through microscopes to see the minutiae of life and lifted telescopes up to the heavens to discover our place in the universe. They classified plants, animals and minerals into tidy categories to impose order on the natural world, and they dissected human organs and investigated blood circulation to comprehend how the body functioned. The ticktock of new and precise clocks became the rhythm of a productive society.

Once nature is understood as a web, its vulnerability becomes obvious. If one part is damaged, other parts might suffer, too. This concept of nature still shapes our thinking today.

We live in a world of climate emergency — from rising sea levels and torrential floods to a striking loss of biodiversity and mass human migration. This summer there have been extreme and terrifying heat waves across Europe, Asia and the Americas and devastating floods in Pakistan but also in Yellowstone, Kentucky and St. Louis.

Today, the Jena set’s ideas of unity with nature have been imbued with a new and desperate urgency. For decades scientists and activists have tried to convince us with predictions and statistics — but somehow they don’t change our behavior. Most of us understand on an intellectual level what’s at stake, but that doesn’t seem to be sufficient.

[anaxerneas]

A radical difference between symbol and allegory has been definitely established by Romantic theorists, who have, however, dangerously identified the symbolic with the aesthetic.

Originally, a symbol was produced by the mutual relationship of two pieces of a coin destined to acquire their full purport through their actual or potential rejoining. In other sorts of signs the signans becomes irrelevant at the moment at which its signatum is caught (the signans is thrown away, so to speak); instead, in the signs that Romantic philosophers and poets called symbols, the signatum acquires its full purport only in so far as it is continually compared to the physical presence of its signans.

Schelling identifies works of art with symbols because they are hypotyposes, self-presentations, and, instead of signifying an artistic idea, they are that idea in themselves. There is no “semantic” interpretation of a work of art. Schelling distinguishes schemas, where the general provides us with an understanding of the particular, from allegories, where the particular provides us with knowledge of the general; in aesthetic symbols both procedures are at work simultaneously.

In the same line of thought, Goethe says that allegories designate directly, whereas symbols designate indirectly (1797: 94). Allegories are transitive, whereas symbols are intransitive. Allegories speak to the intelligence, whereas symbols speak to perception. Allegories are arbitrary and conventional, whereas symbols are immediate and motivated. A symbol is an image which is natural and universally understandable. Allegories employ the particular as an example of the general; symbols embody the general in the particular. Moreover, symbols are polysemous, indefinitely interpretable; they realize the coincidence of contraries; they express the unexpressible, since their content exceeds the capability of our reason:

"Symbolisms transform the experience into an idea, and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed by the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains unexpressible. Allegory transforms an experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image."

In this sense the aesthetic and the symbolic come to coincide definitely, but they define themselves in terms of each other, in a circular way. As a matter of fact, Romantic aesthetics does not explain the semiotic strategy by which, in the poetic use of languages, particular meanings are conveyed: it only describes the effect that a work of art can produce. By doing so, Romantic aesthetics flattens the concept of semiosic interpretation (which undoubtedly acquires a particular status in aesthetic texts) into the one of aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand, semiotics can explain the phenomenon of symbolic mode, but it cannot fully explain aesthetic enjoyment, which depends on many extrasemiotic elements.

Umberto Eco, On Symbols

I find one of Peirce's brief definitions of the icon relevant here (and Eco does note in this paper that Peirce uses "icon" where others would use "symbol"):

…an Icon is a mere image, a vague form. It makes no distinction between its Object and its Signification. It exhibits the two as one.

[simplesubstance]

But this decision [to be moral or immoral] cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time and, hence, together with the first creation. Man, even if born in time, is indeed created into the beginning of the creation. The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eternity; it also does not temporally precede life but goes through time unhapered by it as an act which is eternal by nature. Through this act the life of man reaches to the beginning of creation; hence, through it man is outside the created, being free and eternal beginning itself. As incomprehensible as this idea may appear to conventional ways of thinking, there is indeed in each man a feeling in accord with it as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time. ... How frequently does it occur that, from childhood on, from a time when, considered empirically, we can hardly attribute to him freedom and self-reflection, an individual shows a propensity to evil from which it can be anticipated that he will bend neither to discipline nor to doctrine, and which consequently brings to ripeness the wicked fruit that we had foreseen in the earliest sprout; and yet no one doubts his capacity to deliberate, and all are as convinced of this individual's guilt as they could only ever be if each particular action had stood within his power. This general assessment of a propensity to evil as an act of freedom which, in accordance with its origin, is utterly unconscious and even irresistible points to an act and, thus, to a life before this life, except that it is not to be thought just as prior to this time since that which is intelligible is altogether outside of time.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom)

[perkwunos]

Every experiment is a question addressed to nature that nature is forced to answer. But every question contains a hidden a priori judgement; every experiment which is an experiment is prophecy; experimentation is itself a production of a phenomena. . . . The fact that experiment never leads to . . . [absolute] knowledge is evident in the fact that it can never get beyond the natural forces which it itself uses as its means . . . the last causes of the phenomena of nature no longer appear themselves. . . . [If] every new discovery throws us back into a new ignorance, and as one knot is untied, another is tied, then it is conceivable that the complete discovery of all connections in nature, that therefore our science itself, is also an endless task.

F.W.J. Schelling, as quoted by Arran Gare, “The Roots of Postmodernism: Schelling, Process Philosophy, and Poststructuralism” in Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms