Monism and Mistakes: Schelling's 'Puzzle of All Puzzles'
Link to the blog post with readings and additional info:
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Moderated by: Sepid Birashk
Video: Shaum Mehra
Programmer and Organizer:
Sepideh Majidi
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Over the course of the past few decades, the German idealist F.W.J. Schelling has come to attract renewed interest amongst philosophers working in a number of areas. More recently, Schelling's corpus has become a point of reference for those working on the inter-linked issues of idealism, materialism, naturalism, and realism in contemporary Continental metaphysics. In this intervention, I reconstruct Schelling's lengthy and protean philosophical odyssey as unfolding along the lines of an incompatibility between two fundamental ontologies: a hen-kai-pan ontology of the Absolute as harmonious, homogeneous Identity (i.e., as All, God, Indifference, Infinity, natura naturans, One, Whole, etc.) and a conflict ontology of the Absolute as discordant, heterogeneous Difference. On my reconstruction, although Empedoclean notes are sounded throughout Schelling's corpus, only in the 1815 third draft of his unfinished Weltalter project does a conflict ontology momentarily win out over an ontology of Unity sounding not only Parmenidean notes, but also notes echoing the neo-Platonists, Spinoza, and Hölderlin too. The latter has the upper hand throughout most of Schelling's oeuvre. At the same time, Schelling intermittently registers fatal flaws to his repeatedly affirmed hen kai pan. Through an immanent-critical employment of these intermittent registrations, I seek to outline a contemporary naturalistic conflict ontology inspired by, but moving beyond, Schelling's foreshadowings of such a philosophical program.
About the Author:
Adrian Johnston is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (2005), Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008), Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (2009), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (2013), all published by Northwestern University Press. He also is the author of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He is the co-author, with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013). His most recent books are Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s “The Freudian Thing” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism (Columbia University Press, 2018), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone (Northwestern University Press, 2019). He also co-edited, with Boštjan Nedoh and Alenka Zupančič, Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). With Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek, he is a co-editor of the book series Diaeresis at Northwestern University Press.
