Thinking Nature v. 1 /3/ - Unthinking Nature: Transcendental Realism, Neo-Vitalism and the Metaphysical Unconscious in Outline Michael Austin “Nature too remains, so far as we have yet come, ever a frightful Machine of Death: everywhere monstrous revolution, inexplicable vortices of movement; a kingdom of Devouring, of the maddest tyranny; a baleful Immense: the few light-points disclose but a so much the more appalling Night, and terrors of all sorts must palsy every observer.” - Novalis
While it is commonly thought that Freud “discovered” the unconscious through his psychoanalytic dream analysis, the concept was in common use, both philosophically as well as scientifically and therapeutically, prior to the publication of his first psychoanalytic papers.1 The unconscious emerged not simply as a principle of the human psyche, but as a general principle of reality among the Romantics. F.W.J. Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism marks the first appearance of the term in a recognizable form (das Unbewusste), while the term was shortly thereafter taken up by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. The unconscious would function as an important and defining metaphysical principle in 19th Century German thought. This is not an historical essay however, but an outline of how the concept of the unconscious as a metaphysical principle has been used in order to make explicit its continued relevance to contemporary speculative metaphysics. The unconscious is seemingly locked away from contemporary metaphysics as either a quasi-scientific or proto-neurological concept. The only group of thinkers who currently take the concept seriously are the accidentally-ontological Lacanians who, drawing on Freud and Lacan almost exclusively, largely fail to understand the metaphysical history or import of the concept. It is little wonder that Zizek, in The Indivisible Remainder, seems almost shocked to have found the Lacanian unconscious in Schelling’s 1For the following summary, I am indebted to the work of, as well as conversations with, S. J. McGrath on the topic of the history of the unconscious and its relation to both metaphysics and psychoanalysis. For the history of the unconscious in Schelling and others see S.J. McGrath, The Dark-Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2011).
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Weltalter without realizing the direct lineage of the concept as beginning with Schellingian metaphysics before being taken up by Romantic psychology and subsequently becoming cut down to human-only size by the psychoanalytic movement. Rather than presenting an in-depth history of the metaphysical unconscious, we will look broadly at the two traditions which lead to its arrival in 19th Century metaphysics (transcendental realism and metaphysical vitalism). Following this, we will look at what purpose this concept served in its creation and briefly examine its falling out. The metaphysical unconscious will then be shown to be its most relevant today with the rise of speculative realism and other various forms of realism, including its relation to the emerging neo-vitalist revival of nature. The contention of this essay is that the unconscious is an important, if not vital concept for the revival of nature as a category of philosophical speculation. Trascendental Realism By transcendental realism, we mean a specific group of philosophers who emerged in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy. They are those who accepted the Kantian subjective-turn but maintained the autonomy of things-in-themselves in opposition to the Transcendental Idealism of Fichte or the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. More than this however, if we take Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism seriously and accept his categories, they do not only oppose those strong correlationists, but their weak cousins as well. If the strong correlationist is he or she who eliminates things-inthemselves as frivolous, unjustified and irrational, the weak correlationist is the one who maintains them as imaginable but unthinkable. The weak correlationist cannot do away with the possibility of things-in-themselves simply because we cannot know them. The transcendental realist position maintains an opposition to both of these schools, creating a new category not presented in Meillassoux’s After Finitude. On Meillassoux’s reading, there are only three options after Kant short of 2
naïve dogmatic metaphysics: we may emphasize the principle of correlation over the principle of factiality and either accept Kant’s position (also adopted by Husserl and others) of weak correlationism or the Fichtean-Hegelian position (also adopted by Heidegger and Wittgenstein according to Meillassoux) of strong correlationism, or, we may emphasize the principle of factiality over the principle of correlation and accept Meillassoux’s own speculative materialism and the abandonment of all physical and logical laws (except the principle of non-contradiction). The option presented here is that of maintaining against the strong correlationsts that there are things-in-themselves while also maintaining against the weak correlationists that we do indeed have access to them, simply not through thought as such. We do not get to the heart of things through logical cogitation, but through other modes of knowing. This fails the correlationist test on two counts: First, they defy the correlation of Thought and Being, that is, we do not only have access to the correlation-itself as the two forms of correlationism maintain; second, transcendental realism does not (in theory) necessitate a metaphysical anthro-centrism. There is nothing which necessitates the human beings involvement in the metaphysical sphere in order for things to exist; we are not the cause, reason or telos of Being. The relation between transcendental realism and anthro-centrism will be explored more in a further section. For the time being, we should focus on a presentation of transcendental realism and its relation to correlationism as presented in After Finitude. In his On the History of Modern Philosophy (1833-34)2 Schelling critiques Kant precisely for denying us access to the things-in-themselves. In the Appendix to The World as Will and Representation titled “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,”3 Schopenhauer raises a similar critique. 2In German as Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, available in English as F.W.J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3In Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Volume 1), trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 413-534.
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What both Schelling and Schopenhauer maintain is that, indeed, thought does not have access to thingsin-themselves but this neither means that they do not exist, nor that we do not have access to them through some other means. Schelling and Schopenhauer (and we should include Nietzsche and Freud here as well, among others) belong to a tradition which essentially takes psychology as first philosophy. In opposition to the Cartesian project, which proposes essentially the same thing, neither Schelling nor Schopenhauer find a rationally ordering subjectivity inside themselves filled miraculously with the categories of Medieval metaphysics, but instead emphasize something deeper, something darker. In opposition to the Cartesian fantasy (for it is indeed a fantasy) that the subject is entirely transparent and available to itself and indeed, rational, we should instead agree with Nietzsche when he writes: “What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.”4 What lies outside of thought is physicality, feeling, desire, will, hunger, drive. It is felt in the body as well as the mind, but is intuited in the whole of the cosmos, that unthinking monster of stone and gas. Schelling will show in his Naturphilosophie that Nature herself is composed of opposing drives which, in their unending combat, produce things as a consequence, things which continue these very drives that produced them, like howling echoes in the night birthed in pain and carried by stone. Our access to things-in-themselves lies through the one who accesses, in these very feelings and desires. There is no reason to suppose that the real must be rational; we should instead use our own reflexivity, for we have access to the in-itself in us, thus allowing us to understand the in-itself, at least in part, of the whole of the universe, tapping into the dark fire within things.
4Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873),” in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 115.
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Transcendental realism accepts the Kant-event without accepting his conclusions. It is possible to have a philosophy which begins with subjectivity, but that does not mean that is also where it must end. Schopenhauer shows clearly how to philosophize with the body, beginning not only with categories of the understanding, but with intuitions of his cravings and desires. The human being is not reducible to conscious mind, nor even to thought itself, so why assume reality is reducible to our ideas of it? Intuitions of the body allow us to grasp beyond transcendental subjectivity, beyond thought, and take hold of the noumenal. Because I know my own body intuitively, that is, can grasp its essence as growing, desiring, moving, etc, I know something of things-in-themselves. Behind representations lie Will, which surges forth in existents who hunger for being. This is also not limited simply to organisms either, but, like Schelling, Schopenhauer maintains that Will is the root of all of reality, using it to explain scientific phenomena such as gravitation, magnetism and the formation of crystals. Following Spinoza, Schopenhauer emphasizes different modes of knowing, showing clearly that it is possible to have access to things outside of thought. In fact, it seems that Schopenhauer should be a hero to those against correlationism for this very reason; it is Thought that is the problem and so we must approach the world through other means such as sensation or imagination. The corporeality of Schopenhauer, unlike that of Merleau-Ponty for instance, is not a hindrance but an asset to philosophy; we are not locked in knowledge only of our bodies and our flesh, but our bodies provide us with knowledge of bodies as such. In this intuition, we see that beyond conscious, rational thought, is a seething torment of forces, of drives, of Will. It is here where we should pause to consider another such tradition, after which we will turn to their convergence in the concept of the metaphysical unconscious.
Metaphysical Vitalism Understood 5
It is first important to point out that by “vitalism,” I do not mean the old scientific theory of a “vital impetus” or “life force” within organisms which separates them from the inorganic. We should entirely remove such a tired theory from our minds. Instead, we should think of vitalism as a metaphysical system as we do when we hear “materialism” or “idealism” but which, rather than reducing the cosmos to inanimate and deterministic moving particles or to concepts and ideas, instead maintains that reality is essentially driven. That is to say, that the cosmos and all things within it exist as desiring beings of one form or another. The movements of things can be understood not as any effort to change what they are but instead to either a) cease to exist (the conservative drive to extinction) or b) to make everything one (to make all oneself). These drives are then either contractive or expansive. In the case of the latter, we should take Deleuze seriously when he says, “the thing itself is force” in the sense that things are not a static presence, but that to exist is to further instantiate oneself, to project oneself into the future and to therefore will further existence. We should not be confused by the language used, this is not to say we are speaking solely of humans or even only of living things, but rather of a general metaphysics whereby things exist not through some ontological light switch whereby they either exist (on) or don’t (off). Instead we should rethink existence in terms of force itself, that is, in terms not of presence but of time, in terms of future existence; to exist is to exist by degrees. This metaphysics of drive(s) has a long history. We could perhaps place its origin among the Neoplatonists who emphasize the World-Soul. The theory as I have outlined above however, begins with Spinoza and his particular usage of conatus. Conatus is the will to self-preservation found in all modes, the striving to persist within all things. It is also through conatus that things are individuated, as they navigate terrain and negotiate with other willing beings. One can see the relation between Spinoza and what was termed above “transcendental realism;” through our understanding of our own bodies and minds we come to understand more of bodies in general and thus come to understand the universe by
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proxy. As there is no division between mind and body for Spinoza,5 our understanding of the body presents us with an understanding of things themselves, though perhaps not through knowledge in the transcendental idealist sense, as Spinoza allows for different types of “knowledge:” sensation and imagination, reason, and intuition. What is revealed through sensation is our bodily existence beyond rationality. What is revealed then is the nature of things as preserving themselves. While transcendental realism provides the method, neo-vitalism provides the metaphysics. To simply maintain the metaphysics without the method is to fall back into dogmatism. This is ultimately why Schelling is not a Spinozist; Spinoza is so intoxicated with Substance (God or Nature) that he entirely fails to account for subjectivity. On the other hand, Fichte is so blinded by the freedom of transcendental subjectivity and the ethical imperative of rationality that he becomes deluded into thinking there is no autonomy to Nature, that it is entirely constructed by the faculties of the understanding for us to simply overcome in the infinite perfection of justice. It is only in the marriage of Transcendental Idealism and Spinozist metaphysics that Schelling, Schopenhauer and others are able to account for the whole of the cosmos and not simply a world without humans or a world of nothing but humans. By beginning with what we know immediately, intuitively, that is, the fundamental structure of the self, it is possible to move outward, beyond thought, beyond consciousness, to the forces and drives that underlie all things. The opposing drives as presented above emerge out of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, though the influence is clearly Jakob Böhme’s mystical theology which can be described as vitalistic in the sense that all things (including God) exist as desiring beings. This shows itself in Schelling’s middle works, specifically the Freiheitsschrift (1809) and the Weltalter (1815) where God is psychologically exposed
5Ethics, II, Prop. 13, Schol.
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as having a dark side that is hungry, craving, desiring. The drive to existence is the dark ground of God, the Abyss from which all things ultimately emerge. This ground is freedom, spontaneity, productivity and creativity. In his earlier Naturphilosophie, Schelling speaks of Nature in terms of productivity and creativity, allowing us to connect the unconscious, productive ground of God not only with the human unconscious that would become metaphysically castrated by psychoanalysis, but with Nature itself. Nature and Ground are one. Schelling will tell us that Nature is visible Spirit, that it is the ground from which subjectivity (thinking) emerges. Nature is the Unthinking, the network of drives, of willing things which give rise to consciousness. It is Nature as drive or will that we are granted access to through non-cognitive means, through the method of transcendental realism. That is to say, while transcendental realism provides us with a method to escape the correlationist circle, what it gives us access to is reality as willing, craving and desiring. When we move outside of thought, we move naturally outside of consciousness, to the unconscious as a metaphysical principle and not simply as “personal history.” We grasp the dark fire within all things. The Emergence of the Metaphysical Unconscious It is perhaps no coincidence that the metaphysical unconscious emerged when it did. Though mentioned briefly above in relation to Schellingian drives, the forefather of the modern notion of the unconscious, and with it the metaphysical concept, is Jakob Böhme (1575-1624).6 Böhme was a cobbler by trade, but he is remembered for his mystical theology; he experienced mystical visions of the inner life of God, from His own birth in Himself, to the fall of Lucifer. While initially influential among Protestant intellectuals in Germany, Holland and England, his popularity waned for decades until it was revived in the late 18th Century. The gap in importance is due to the rise of Enlightenment 6I must again thank S.J. McGrath for his introduction to Böhme. For the influence of Böhme on Schelling see S.J. McGrath, “Schelling and the Unconscious,” Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 72-91; Robert Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the Works of 1809-1915 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1972).
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thought and the newfound importance placed on rationality. Böhme’s revival is one part of the CounterEnlightenment, a revolt against the primacy of rationality and calculative thinking. This overall reaction to the inevitable future of Enlightenment thinking can be seen in the birth of aesthetics as the science of the lower senses (the physical senses, feeling, memory, imagination); the Sturm und Drang movement, with its focus on extreme emotions like shock and depression; Romanticism, which brought with it an attempt to synthesize art and science, as well as a new appreciation for Nature; Gothic literature, tales of the supernatural, the monstrous and the mad; the movement from the “possessed” to the “mad” and the development of dynamic psychiatry out of practices such as Mesmerism; interest in vitalist science, magnetism, and electricity as refutations of Newtonian mechanics. In short, the mystical had a place again and would prove crucial to the overall attempt to overcome the Enlightenment. More important for this study, what these movements all share is a move beyond reason, beyond or outside of thought. We could perhaps say that correlationism was a problem from the beginning, as the Romantics (to use the term in the broadest sense to include all of those above) were finding ways beyond the finitude of rationality with the belief that the world is not reducible to our ideas of it. The Romantics saw clearly the problems of transcendental idealism, leading two of Fichte’s most well-known students (Schelling and Novalis) to become his greatest critics, and instead returning to figures like Spinoza and Böhme who emphasize the vast swathe of reality untouched by human reason.7 What the Romantics posited was that another modernity was possible, one that encompassed all of reality and not simply those bits and pieces that easily conformed to rationality. We could sit and wonder what history and the present would look like 7For an excellent overview of the history of Romantic philosophy as a reaction to both Fichte and “subjectivism,” see Frederick Beiser’s German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Beiser not only provides a highly readable history that prominently includes many overlooked figures in the history of German philosophy (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel), but contends that the motivation of German Idealism was to build a better realism. He concludes the book, appropriately for our study, with a section devoted to Schelling.
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had this possibility not be quashed by the twin forces of Idealism in the first half of the 19th Century and Materialism in the second half; instead however, we should focus on actualizing that possibility today. Romanticism lies dormant but not dead; the demand of contemporary thought to move beyond correlationism to the great outdoors is the same move the Romantics made to move beyond the narrow confines of thought. Like reactivating an ancient yeast, we must begin the activity of moving outside of thought in earnest. Outside of thought is Nature, and as it is outside of thought and consciousness, it is the unthought, the unconscious. Consciousness is not simply awareness or rationality, but reflection, it is doubling. In Böhme, God creates precisely to know Himself through showing himself, the archetypal model of the cosmos and of knowledge in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, that consciousness is not an immediacy but an imaging. Consciousness emerges out of the unconscious as a reflection of itself, it is the reflection of itself. In the same way, conscious beings emerge out of Nature, they are Nature turned back on itself, made aware of itself by doubling itself. Conscious beings are not different in kind from unconscious ones, they merely reflect them. Schopenhauer will say that my “whole body must be nothing but my will become visble.”8 Nature is blind activity without knowledge, but with the emergence of consciousness, knowledge is possible. This shows the underlying Spinozism of Romanticism: knowledge is power in the sense of capacity (puissance rather than pouvoir). Conscious beings have more power through their knowledge. Vitalism is ultimately a metaphysics of power, of capacity. It is always in danger then of slipping into anthropocentrism. This is clear for instance in the case of Schelling, who maintains that human beings are the telos of Nature, that we are the apex, the goal. Schelling’s Christianity precludes him from making the human being a happy accident. His
8Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation (Vol. 1), 107.
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position is that the human being’s purpose was to become conscious, that it was human destiny.9 We should avoid this. While it may be the case that, from a metaphysical perspective, there is a drive towards consciousness in the sense of doubling, we cannot support the claim that consciousness was the destiny of the human being. There is no reason why it had to have been clever apes who invented knowing and not large cockroaches, amphibious octopi, underground fungal colonies, energized crystals flying through space or a cloud of glowing gas. In short, not only is it not logically necessary for consciousness to emerge among humans, but it is no more valid to suppose consciousness to be necessarily attached to animal life or organisms at all. If we take consciousness to be, at its most basic, a principle of reflection, of doubling or mirroring, then it need not be exclusive to any particular thing in the cosmos. Though ignored or unknown by contemporary thought, the emergence of consciousness from unconscious nature was a very real problem for significant figures of the Romantic period, including Carl Gustav Carus and Gustav Theodor Fechner. Both were influenced by Schelling and Naturphilosophie and would prove important for Romantic psychiatry and its eventual evolution into the more well-known psychoanalytic movement.10 Both Carus and Fechner see mind as no different in kind from Nature. Carus for instance follows Schelling’s scheme of powers (Potenzen), an application to the natural world of a mathematical metaphor. As we move up the ladder of consciousness, we find
9See for instance Schelling’s “On The Relationship of The Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General,” originally published in the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie in 1802, co-edited by Schelling and Hegel. The essay is available in English in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), 363-382.
10For an overview of Carus see Matthew Bell, “Carl Gustav Carus and the Science of the Unconscious,” in Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (eds), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 156-173. For an introduction to Fechner see Michael Heidelberger, “Gustav Theodor Fechner and the Unconscious,” in Nicholls and Liebscher (eds), 200-241; ibid, Nature From Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
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consciousness progressively raised to higher powers. Mind, therefore, is not essentially different from nature; it is nature raised to a higher power: “mind [Geist] is not something apart from nature, it is only nature’s purest creation and therefore its symbol, its language.”11 Consciousness is a case of increased force, of doubling. The Schellingian mathematical metaphor is apt here; against the Hegelian dialectic which posits change through antagonism and absorption, the Schellingian dialectic of powers functions through multiplicity, literally, multiplication. If the Fichtean-Hegelian model is that of x and –x reconciling, the Schellingian model is of x becoming x2, that is of (x) × (x). This means that change is intensity, not opposition. The Schellingian dialectic is worlds apart from the Hegelian one we are so familiar with.12 This difference in psychic intensity mirrors the increased intensity of the body, of awareness through doubling in feeling, in touch. The study of Nature, the focus on the body and desire need not be a wholesale rejection of rationality. I am not claiming that to understand the universe is to throw oneself head-first into irrationalism; what I maintain is that in order to grasp the whole of the cosmos, we cannot limit ourselves in our understanding. If we expect to grasp the whole of nature, we cannot expect to do so with a fraction of ourselves. Along with science and rationality, we must be open to truth from our intestines, from literature, and from the ocean. Thinking Nature, Feeling Nature This essay stands as something of a warning to contemporary thinkers. With the re-emergence of the philosophy of nature with the rise of speculative realism, particularly neo-vitalism, as well as the 11Bell, “Carl Gustav Carus and the Science of the Unconscious,” 169.
12Schelling develops this algebraic dialectic in his Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen (1810), translated as “Stuttgart Seminars” in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 195-244.
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revival of process philosophy, we are in danger of slipping back into dogmatism. It is not enough to simply toss aside Kantianism and revert back to modern metaphysics, nor is it enough to hold to the material origin of our thought as some access to the world outside of thought. I hope however that this essay stands as something of an outline of the task at hand, a program for the future of speculative metaphysics. A return to rationalism (Badiou, Meillassoux) is not an option, for it begins with abstractions (maths) instead of concretes (bodies). To find our way out of the correlationist circle is to follow the body; to get to that which is prior to and all around our thoughts is to approach the unconscious. Both of these combine to form a method (transcendental realism) and a metaphysics (vitalism) which take seriously the Kantian problem, while also being a robust realism independent of human thought, activity or presence. The future of philosophy must approach more seriously the non-cognitive means of grasping things, must take seriously the categories of feeling, desire, drive, emotion, will, imagination and memory over against the distant rational faculty. We should return not to Hegel but again and always to Nietzsche (“Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations — always darker, emptier, simpler”13). Not, however, to the Nietzsche of the post-moderns, with their emphasis on
relativism and the emergence of values, not the Nietzsche who preached the death of God, but to the Nietzsche of the affirmative trilogy (Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science), the Nietzsche of the stomach, of sensation, of the body, of psychic desire and need. Against the emerging neo-rationalism, with its metaphysics of number, we must reintroduce philosophy to the empiricism of the body and the metaphysics of vitalism. Against thinking, we must focus on feeling. Along with Nietzsche, Schelling, Fechner, Carus and Schopenhauer, we should return to Whitehead, to Bradley, to
13Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §179.
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all those who impel us towards feeling before thinking. Only out of this superior empiricism can we grasp the totality of reality, the levels of existence, the world of things.
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