Pli 9 (2000), 36-52.
The Chemistry of Darkness*
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT
1 The nuclear night of the Unthinged
Bringing Deleuze and Idealism into some sort of contact seems anathema,
a resignation in the face of too many wrong turns having ended up in
confrontation with Hegel. It is an accepted wisdom of the age that
Hegelian difference, as a prelude to its resolution, has nothing to do with
its French avatars over the last thirty years. The horror of it is something
special, however: picture waking up to a grey dawn in which desire has
been successfully transmuted into its negative, where the body without
organs recuperates and gets its parents back, and then shudder at the
realisation that this is indeed only picture thinking, and must be raised
beyond the abjection of mere externality (relation) to total recovery, in and
of the Notion.
But this is not horrific enough; it remains insufficiently visceral, since
we do not yet shudder involuntarily at the prospect of a New World,
revealed in its first and last sunbeam, ruled from the Tübingen Stift.
Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape,
dissolving bit by bit the structure of the previous world, whose
tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms [...]. The
gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut
short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of
the new world. (Hegel 1977: 7)
*
This paper was first presented at a one day Research Workshop on Deleuze,
Schelling, and Schlegel entitled ‘Nature, Materialism, and the Transcendental’
(University of Warwick, 15th May 1999).
Iain Hamilton Grant
37
‘Year Zero: Faciality’; uncanny. These passages from the Phenomenology
of Spirit sound equally at home amidst absolute deterritorialisation,
‘calling forth’ a new earth into which Spirit’s face imperceptibly matures
behind the “outwardly-actual” movements of capital:
Philosophy takes the relative deterritorialisation of capital to the
absolute, carrying it over onto the plane of immanence like a
movement of the infinite, and suppressing [supprimer] it as an
interior limit, turning it against itself, in order to call forth a new
earth, a new people. (Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 95)
‘Supprimer’...: is geophilosophy an adjunct to the progress of the Notion,
a mere sur-face to Spirit’s face? What is the “thought-Nature” to which
Deleuze and Guattari refer? Hegel hated Naturphilosophie, hated
evolution,1 biology, physics and chemistry as false in their self-limitation
to the understanding; but he hated Naturphilosophie more for its empty
equivalences (electricity : magnetism :: South : North Pole) and its
monotonous formalism which “submerges [everything] in the void of the
Absolute, from which pure identity, formless whiteness, is produced”
(Hegel 1977: 30-31). But, as noted, this dissolution of mere nature is also
the maturation of Spirit, so that “the gradual crumbling that left unaltered
the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash,
illuminates the features of the new world” (Hegel 1977: 11).
Fundamentally, Hegel wanted to reduce all movement to that of the
concept: hence his objection to Schelling’s “evolutionary”
naturephilosophy (nature as a Stufenfolge of its Potenzen: a graduation of
intensive stages; it is indeed the latter that Hegel has in his sights). With
real movement goes real forces, and with real forces, bodies evaporate into
1
The philosophy of Minerva’s owlkeeper expresses what, according to John L. Stanley,
constitutes an “anti-diachronic diachrony, a timeless view of time itself” (‘Marx’s
critique of Hegel’s philosophy of nature’, Science & Society 61:4 (1997-8): 467), in
two ways. Firstly, section 249 of the Philosophy of Nature limits all metamorphosis, all
actual change, to “the Notion as such, since only its alteration is development. But in
Nature, the Notion is partly only something inward, partly existent only as a living
individual: existent metamorphosis, therefore, is limited to this individual alone”
(Encyclopaedia §249); secondly, and as a corollary of the foregoing, that section
continues as a critique of “evolutionism” in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, which he
abuses as an “inept conception... of the progression and transition of one natural form
and sphere into a higher as an outwardly-actual production which ... is relegated to the
obscurity of the past” (ibid., Zusatz).
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the grey on grey not of philosophy’s dawn, or of “the self-originating, selfdifferentiating”, as Hegel says is needed, “full body of articulated
cognition”, but of Europa’s last sigh, the frozen breath of the Jovian
satellite. The “vacuity” to which the Absolute as “the night in which ... all
cows are black” reduces (Hegel 1977: 9), is the source of Hegel’s fear: if
nature abhors a vacuum, the New World illuminated by a sunburst (Hegel
1977: 7), the World of the Notion, abhors the vacuity to which it might be
reduced, being already annexed from the conceptual inertia of the
“outwardly actual”.
A “new face” = a “new people”; A=A: the black night resurgent? Do
we conquer grey with blackness, or illumine it from within, glaring white?
Is it light (“formless whiteness”) or darkness (“the night...”)? What lies
beneath the sur-face and the face? Although it may seem ‘premature’ to
ask this, given that Deleuze’s naturephilosophy remains undeveloped
beyond a series of hints (cf. Difference and Repetition: 256; Negotiations:
140), how “like a movement of the infinite” - how like then, the single
flash of Spirit’s maturation - is the presaging of the new earth by absolute
deterritorialisation?
“What a presentiment of the differences swarming behind us”,
comments Deleuze, “when in the weariness and despair of our thought
without image [the ‘night in which all cows are black’] we murmur ‘the
cows’, ‘they exaggerate’, etc.; how differenciated and differenciating is
this blackness... The one external illusion of representation is this illusion
that results from all its internal illusions - namely, that groundlessness
should lack differences, when in fact it swarms with them...”. To save the
earth’s sur-face from the face behind it, what is required is a chemical
sensibility, since chemistry has always been the science and art of the
imperceptible, of what escapes the imprisonment of sensibility behind a
face (the superficial redundancies of recognition and their maturation into
features) to go directly to the earth, or to earths, to be dispersed and
molecularised in the black. Even etymology serves to remind us of this:
“chemistry derives from the Egyptian word for ‘black’, which is itself
named for the black earth of Egypt” (Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers,
1996: 13).2
2
Pursuing the same routes, we may note that chemistry also gives us a geophilosophy
based on manufacture or metallurgy, as Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers continue their
etymological inventory with not an Egyptian, but a Greek root for ‘chemistry’: “cheo...
means to pour a liquid or cast a metal. Greek or Egyptian etymology? The question
cannot be settled, because it sends us back to the great Hellenistic city of Alexandria,
where it was already the subject not only of legends but also of speculations and
Iain Hamilton Grant
39
Hegel’s great task, to crown the illusion of the Notion’s extradition of
exteriority within itself, turns into the expulsion of its absence of
characteristics, as Unbedingt - the absolute as ‘thingless’ or ‘unthinged’ as soon as the outside makes itself felt (we will come back to this), when
in fact what is always felt is the ungrounding of the Ideal (the subject) by
the real, the indifference-point at the rumbling chiasmus at which they
intersect. All that remains is that the hollow Ideal swarm with the real in its
motility, not overcome, cancelled or raised by it: “What after all, are
Ideas, if not these ants which enter and leave through the fracture of the
I?” asks Deleuze (1994: 277).
Given this, and following from the presentation of the Hegelian and
Deleuzo-Guattarian tellurics of new worlds, their near-substitutability, we
must pursue the visceral horror of asking what sort of idealist is Deleuze?
Ant-differences seem to save the day from the sunburst of the New World,
crawling through the sockets of Spirit’s face as it matures, perhaps, too
much. Yet what sort of ants are ideas? Actual ones (do thoughts ant?),
virtual ones, or merely the dark, stochastic glinting of swarming
multiplicity? Or, and again we will come back to this, are ants like ideas?
Let’s return to the differenciation of ‘ungrounding’, as recounted in
Deleuze’s negotiation of Schelling in Difference and Repetition.
Ungrounding consists in the production of depth that becomes genitive
only as it gives rise to a relative extensity; the ‘depth of’ is assumed at the
point where its verticality is marked in relation to the horizon of the
ungrounded, something that is beautifully illustrated by a comment in
Kant’s Third Critique regarding the actions of critique itself, whose task it
is to explore “the terrain... to the depth at which lies the first foundation of
our power of principles independent of experience” (Kant 1987, Ak.V:
168).3 Here depth is a determination of extensity, rather than the “pure
discussions” (ibid.: 13). Note, however, that the metallurgical-manufactorial aspect of
chemistry is overlooked in the authors’ rapid and disappointing conclusion. The lesson
Schelling took from chemistry was not one of domiciliation, but of invention, of the
irreducibility of alloys in the body of the earth, as we shall see below. For the moment,
suffice it to quote again from Bensaude-Vincent in another context, discussing
Lavoisier’s ‘chemical revolution’, “Chemistry creates its own object, manufactures its
Universal” (1994: 671).
3
References to Kant’s works will follow the author-date system, but use the volume
and page numbers of Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königlich
Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900-),
excepting references to the Critique of Pure Reason, where pagination will be given in
standard A/B form, and to Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,
which translation is taken from the 1755 Riga edition.
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Pli 9 (2000)
implex” (Deleuze 1994: 220) of depth tout court. All these determinations
of extensity remain relative to the ascription of the genitive, so that
the relativity of [the] determinations [of extensity - high, low; right,
left, etc.] is further testimony to the absolute from which they come.
Extensity as a whole comes from the depths. Depth as the (ultimate
and original) heterogeneous dimension is the matrix of all
extensity… The ground [fond] as it appears in a homogeneous
extensity is notably a projection of something ‘deeper’ [profond]:
only the latter may be called Ungrund or groundless … (Deleuze
1994: 229)
Now the concept of the Ungrund derives, of course, from the “highest
point” of Schelling’s Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human
Freedom (1809). The Ungrund is “without personality” (SW VII: 412)4
and “precedes all distinction”. Nor is it a “product of antitheses”. We do
not arrive at indifference by cancelling difference (or differences), in other
words, “nor are [antitheses] contained within it”; rather, the Ungrund is a
“unique being, apart from all antitheses” (SW VII: 406) and “can only be
precedent to all basis, that is, the absolute [das Unbedingt] viewed
directly” (SW VII: 407-8). It also becomes, however, the basis on which
the principles can be predicated not on the Ungrund, which would turn it
into a ground, but “in disjunction and each for itself” (SW VII: 407). The
unground remains as absolute, and does not contain, but merely potentiates
differenciation.
When Deleuze writes, therefore that the ground or fond is a projection
of the unground or profond, making depth as such into the groundless or
sans-fond, out of which extensity, ie., relative depths, heights, breadths
and lengths, develops, this seems fully consonant with the Schellingian
version; however, when he writes of depth as “pure implex” from which
4
Taking account of the current unavailability of the majority of Schelling’s works in
English translation, references to Schelling’s works, where either (a) no English
translation exists or (b) where a translation contains the pagination of the following
edition, will be to K.F.A. Schelling, ed., Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg:
J.G. Cotta, 1856-61), hereafter SW followed by volume and page numbers. The only
exception tho this practise in the current context will be references to Schelling’s Ideas
for a Philosophy of Nature, which, while translated by Errol E. Harris and Peter
Heath, does not contain the SW pagination. References to this text will therefore be to
the English translation only.
Iain Hamilton Grant
41
extensity is explicated, he suggests extensity as a Potenz or power of the
Ungrund. Thus
the explication of extensity rests upon the first synthesis, that of
habit and the present; but the implication of depth rests upon the
second synthesis, that of Memory and the past. Furthermore, in
depth the proximity and the simmering of the third synthesis make
themselves felt, announcing the universal ‘ungrounding’. (Deleuze
1994: 229-230; emphasis added)
The Ungrund turns into a product, a synthesis that pre- and succeeds other
syntheses, and into a process, a “universal ungrounding”. Nothing but
syntheses, a “product-process identity”, as the Antioedipus has it, or a
product-process indifference, synthesizing and synthesized through the
unground. Here of course, we are far indeed from Hegel, who cannot think
the absolute without its having been a product of the eradication of things perhaps the basis for the philosopher’s admiration of Napoleon was the
scorched earth he had not yet witnessed - will it have been the sunburst
heralding the New World. But we have not yet distinguished between the
New World and the new earth, the world-historical and the
geophilosophical; nor yet have we answered the question as to the relation
between ants and ideas.
When Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relation between thought and
the earth, it is in the context of Kant’s “copernican revolution”. It is this,
they argue, that puts thought into a “direct relation with the earth”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1991: 82). By virtue of being a revolution, it
eradicates the philosophical territories enumerated in the preface to the
First Critique, reducing them to the “battlefield of metaphysics” (Kant
1958: Avii). Indifference is however feigned here, as Kant readily admits,
rather than itself indifferent; the deterritorialisation was preparatory to the
restoration of metaphysics and the institution of a tribunal. Once again,
depth is genitive (‘the depth of our first principles’, as the Third Critique
has it) and not absolute. What sort of relation to the earth is this? Deleuze
writes that
depth is like the famous geological line from NE to SW, the line
which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes
volcanoes: it unites a bubbling sensibility and a thought which
‘rumbles in its crater’. (Deleuze 1994: 229-230; emphasis added)
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What sort of earth does depth give us? a quasi earth, an “als ob”,
regulative rather than constitutive earth, a merely subjective, or Kantian
earth. Ants are like Ideas (note the capital), and depth is like the heated
profiles of techtonic plates. The purpose of the earth, for Kant and for
Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming of a new people, a kingdom of ends
animated solely by the holy will, or to support revolutions of gifted
peoples, signalled and determined through their enthusiasm (cf. the third
part of Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1979, Ak.VII: 79ff) and
Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary, 1991: 96f). The call to the new earth
finds an audience awaiting the kindgom of ends. But the self-regulating
Kantian subject, responding to revolutionary enthusiasm, is also, by way of
the artifacts and artifactors of purposes that ‘ethicoteleology’ entails
determined as an instance for the redesign of nature and the production of
an unproblematically industrial second nature, from which standpoint the
“archaeologist of nature” will find no evidence of man, only the traces of
the “most ancient revolutions of the earth”. The circumscribed,
retrodetermined limit of absolute deterritorialisation, revealing the earth,
“like a movement of the infinite” as the sans-fond, the limit on the basis of
which alone territory becomes possible for a people is not like the Notion,
expelling exteriority, since its element is the limit-exteriority of the earth;
rather, it is artificially ethicoteleological, exactly like Kant.
2 Making it felt
... in depth the proximity and the simmering of the third synthesis
make themselves felt, announcing the universal ‘ungrounding’.
(Deleuze 1994: 229; emphasis added)
In ... freedom, the final intensifying act was to be found through
which the whole of nature found its transfiguration in feeling, in
intelligence, and ultimately, in will. (SW VII: 350)
Chemistry is nothing else but sensory dynamics. (Schelling 1988:
257)
What are these syntheses that “make themselves felt”? What are these
appeals to an industrial empiricism? It is Schelling’s contention that
Iain Hamilton Grant
43
Naturphilosophie must go by way of an “absolute empiricism” (SW III:
27; 24).
A true chemical revolution, Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie
appeared in 1789. Chemistry is artificial, but not arbitrary; “chemistry
creates its own object [...] it manufactures its Universal” (BensaudeVincent 1994: 671). Accordingly, if Kant drew the affective energies of
enthusiasm from the French Revolution in the direction of the Idea - which
“reduction of the real to the ideal... is the origin of transcendental
philosophy” (SW III: 271) - Schelling, in accordance with the “absolute
empiricism” that is the method of Naturphilosophie, follows the chemical
revolution in the direction of the real. Since the ideal “develops from the
real, [it] must therefore be explained through it” (SW III: 272). This is why
virtually the entire second book of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature is
devoted to “sensory dynamics” (Schelling 1988: 257), to chemistry.
At stake is not only the contention that the ideal is chemically
reducible, but also therefore, if it is so reducible, it can be and is otherwise
instantiated: in other words, the ideal - the highest Potenz on the
Stufenfolge of nature - is substrate independent. Moreover, if the
chemistry of the concept is thus substrate independent, then the scope of
absolute - unthinged - empiricism is extended beyond the bounds of the
anthropocognitive. This is a constant not only in Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie and that of his succesors, but throughout a range of
neuroanatomists of the C18th and C19th. In Von der Lebenskraft (1793),
Johann Christian Reil, for example, attempted to “use Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason as a foundation for physiology and psychology” (Hansen
1998: 393). While this might seem simply reductive, providing, in the finer
fibres, the material pathways through which ideation was created, the
broader agenda was to locate the drives - Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb from which all the Kantian powers (Vermögen) derived. Similarly, Marcus
Herz’ 1791 Versuch über den Schwindel, preceded Freud in “reifying the
Kantian categories of space and time into physiological realities” and
argued - schizophrenically, his successor would add, like most
philosophers - that ideas were material objects (Hansen: 397-8). Just as
Naturphilosoph S.C. Wagener had argued in his 1828 Das Leben des
Erdballs [The Life of the Globe], that all phenomena of nature could be
attributed to a single Urkraft: electricity in the inorganic world; oxygen in
the organic, while “in the human brain it thinks” (Clarke and Jacyna 1987:
79); so, in 1850, physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkyne insisted that “the
working of the nervous system, the organ of mind, must be understood
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with reference to the other forces of nature” and conversely that “even
purely physical phenomena were in a sense psych[ological]... one aspect
of the Intelligenz that... was immanent in all natural processes” (Clarke &
Jacyna: 80). It is, however, in an essay on the Einbildungskraft (1834) that
Purkyne pushes the envelope surrounding the unthinkability of a universal
neuroanatomy. Thus,
in mere lines or series of specific sensations, there resides an
immanent imaginative power through which all perception is
mediated, and without which the mind would act in the world of the
senses in sightless vacancy without spatial and temporal conception,
merely in a chaos of immediate sensations … (Clarke & Jacyna: 68)
By way of Schelling’s assertion in the Ideas that “chemistry is nothing else
but sensory dynamics”, and following Purkyne’s lead, we may imagine the
chemical constituents of “experience” beyond even these “higher forms of
imbecility” (ibid.), and that there are therefore forms in which immanent
sensation might be registered by other physiologies. Indeed, Schelling’s
assertion means that where there is chemistry, there is sensation, and since
there is nowhere in nature an absence of chemical activity, then sensation
too must be universally immanent.
Indeed, the entire body of Schelling’s Naturphilosophisch works aim at
nothing other than that the immanence of chemical activity be construed as
the construction of matter through its qualities: “All quality of matter rests
wholly and solely on the intenstity of its basic forces [Grundkräfte]”
(Schelling 1988: 216). These basic forces are the principal constituents
also of Kant’s dynamics in the Opus Postumum, as well as in Universal
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755): attraction and
repulsion. In Schelling, however, there is also a third force, Schwerkraft,
which although it might be swiftly translated as ‘gravity’, is less
Newtonian than Kantian: Schwerkraft has to do with the degree to which
matter fills space, which the ‘Anticipations of perception’ in the First
Critique calls “intensive magnitude” (Kant 1958 A 166/B207ff). Kant
writes:
In all appearances, sensation, and the real which corresponds to it in
the object (realitas phaenomenon), has an intensive magnitude, that
is, a degree. (A166)
Iain Hamilton Grant
45
From the empirical consciousness to pure consciousness a graduated
transition [Stufenfolge] is possible, the real in the former completely
vanishing and a merely formal a priori consciousness … remaining.
(B208)
Schelling, again, takes the opposite direction from Kant. We do not wish
to reduce, as Kant does, the real to the ideal, but to explain the ideal by
way of the real. Thus, Schelling argues, a “merely formal” consciousness
without the real in sensation is impossible:
Force is simply that which affects us. What affects us we call real,
and what is real exists only in sensation; force is therefore that
which alone corresponds to our concept of quality. But every
quality, insofar as it is to affect us, must have a degree, and that a
specific degree [...]. But so long as we think of these dynamical
forces quite generally - in a wholly indeterminate relationship neither one of them has a particular degree [...]. All quality of matter
rests wholly and solely on the intensity of its basic forces, and since
chemistry is properly concerned only with the qualities of matter,
we have thereby at once elucidated and confirmed the concept of
chemistry ... (as a science which teaches us how a freeplay of
dynamical forces may be possible). (Schelling 1988: 216-7)
In short, in order that we can be affected by anything, it is necessary that
there be a force that affects us, determined as a particular object by being
determined at a particular degree. Physiology and other objects are,
therefore, insofar as they affect us, specific determinations of the intensity
of the basic forces - qualities of matter, and nothing else besides. We can
take this negatively or positively, in a cybernetic sense: negatively, the
affectivity to which we are subject is bound to, and bounds, possible
experience for us; positively, there is the “freeplay of dynamical forces”,
which carries the prospect of absolute empiricism beyond the intensities at
which a subject is possible, into the the field of “unconscious, blind
productivity” that is nature. On both sides, however, we are dealing with
determinations, qualities of matter; hence Schelling’s characterisation of
Naturphilosophie as “Spinozist physics” (SW III: 273).
Unconditioned empiricism therefore not only opens nature to direct
experience, but extends experience beyond the phenomenologically
accessible, opening the prospect of experiences other than ours. Hence late
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C18th journals such as Karl-Phillip Moritz’s Magazin für
Erfahrunsseelenkunde (Magazine for the Study of Soul-Experiences)
(1783-1793). “The magazine was [Moritz’s] attempt to gather empirical
information from a variety of sources, concerning the mostly pathological
formations of the personality” (Hansen 1998 391). Nothing to do with
Enlightenment humanism; everything to do with artifical intelligence
research. “What is it like to be a bat” is perhaps vaguely interesting, but
not so much as how silicon-based organisations “experience”: how do
mountains think, once they have attained sufficient complexity? How can
such a philosophy be termed “idealist”? Schelling’s is a chemical
metaphysics, an electromagnetic ontology, a “geology of morals”.
3 Chemical powers
Chemistry … is itself nothing else but applied dynamics, or
dynamics considered in its contingency [... It] considers matter in
its becoming, and has as its object a free play. (Schelling 1988: 222)
For the concept of matter is itself, by origin, synthetic; a purely
logical concept of matter is meaningless. (Schelling 1988: 188)
If Lavoisier’s “chemical revolution” had chemistry “creating its own
object [...] manufacturing its Universal”, the field was clearly becoming
one of unlimited possibilities, as Freud’s attempt to journey, in a late
reprise of Schelling’s Erfahrungsseelenkunde, ‘beyond the pleasure
principle’ brought him to say of biology. But we are mistaken if we apply
this autoproduction solely to chemistry as a field, and not to the field of the
chemical in general.
Much has, of course, recently been made by chemists such as
Prigogine, concerning the self-organisation of chemical bodies, shifting the
paradigm governing inorganic and organic chemistry ‘from being to
becoming’. Thus we continually discover chemists and philosophers
retrospecting the archives for exemplars: Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler
(1986) finds it in Schelling, and Alicia Juarrero-Roqué (1985) finds one in
Kant, for example, as a modification of his and Blumenbach’s theories of
the Bildungstrieb that drives organic life. Autopoiesis has metastasized, so
that there’s nowhere to turn to avoid it. It is no accident, however, that we
discover such a paradigm in Kant; it is a necessary consequence of the
Iain Hamilton Grant
47
idea of artificial teleology governing the actions of sensate, cognitive and
finite beings. And it is no argument against a Kantian autopoietics that the
language of final causes saturates the chemistry of self-organisation.
Indeed, transcendentalism is entirely necessary to autopoiesis: without it, it
would never be possible to trace the conditions of possibility back from an
existent phenomenon to its causal processes: the ‘self’ that encloses and
recapitulates its ‘organisation’ would be unlocatable. Wherever we look,
self-organisation can only be located retrospectively, like all determinisms
other than that of the antifinal, contrapurposive, determinism of the
contingent that we find in Schellingian chemical metaphysics, in which the
necessary contingency of material determination we find a permanent
chemical revolution. There is no retrospection in chemistry, only becoming
as expressed as Potenzen of possible and impossible experience. As Judith
Schlanger puts it, “nature is neither pure product nor pure productivity, but
rather an infinitely productive product, or a global product engaged in
infinite metamorphosis” (1966: 95).
How, in other words, would it be possible to arrest the global product
engaged in infinite metamorphosis in a single product, a ‘self’? It is only
nature as a whole that can be viewed as self-organizing, insofar as it is
conceived as product + productivity = the process. Nature’s productivity,
meanwhile - natura naturans - “an autonomous current of infinite
transformations” (Schlanger 1966: 86), cannot be deduced from anything;
it cannot be formalized for the ideal insofar as it is only given in
experience as natura naturata, as product. The empirical, undeduced
aspect of nature naturing is synthesis, since, for example, magnetism “in
itself” not only is not an object of possible experience, but only acts
synthetically, binding and repelling in concert with electricity and light, in
the form of Schwerkraft, which is precisely the degree to which matter fills
and particularises an extensity.
Schlanger offers three criteria for what constitutes an absolute
empiricism. Firstly, Schwerkraft, the “third force” that comes to
complicate the Kantian dynamics of attraction and repulsion, is empirical
in that it cannot be deduced, and since, as light, magnetism and electricity,
it only betrays itself in experience. Secondly, although it cannot be
deduced or demonstrated, but only posited, the primary fact of nature’s
productivity can be experienced. Thirdly, it is empirical in the absolute
sense insofar as its final cause is the “actuality of the totality of
experience”, this causality being in nature as a tendency towards
organisation. As such, nature cannot merely be regulated by the idea of
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purposiveness, but must be itself self-organizing. In this latter, however,
we cannot fail to note a sleight of hand: the passage from the actuality of
the totality of experience is mediated by and instantiated in the
organisational tendency that is the actuality of experience insofar as we do
experience; but it is not therefore the actuality of the totality of
experience, merely of experience determined, particularized as organized.
If we cannot, in other words, deduce the process (although Schelling will,
in 1800, attempt an Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozess, SW
IV: 1-78), then neither can we infer its totality from the process’s products
and productivity in their necessary contingency without a transcendental
frame within which to contain it. To attempt this qualification of
experience as the experience of the organized is to reduce the real to the
ideal once again, to formalise it even in the absence of sensation. What is
missing is the unthinged empiricism that resituates experience on the other
side of the possible-for-us.
But experience has its own, immanent determinations, which are
also determinations of matter: these are the powers or Potenzen:
A1 is the lowest, and “acts as a kind of involution, [whose]
principle... is Schwerkraft.
A2 is “activity, thus far only posited as implicit or as potential
[but] is now being posited as explicit or actual, namely, as the actual
life of matter, that is, as the dynamic process”
A3 in nature expresses nothing other than the supreme Being that
has been elevated from nonbeing, that is, the innermost [core] of
nature (Schelling in Pfau 1994: 218-220)
These are the qualities of matter, determined in experience as the forces
that affect us, producing consciousness as A3 - with which we are all
familiar - as conditions of the process. However, following through on the
Einleitung’s commitment to explain the Ideal by way of the real, this
emergence cannot be thought as ideal alone; rather, “every opposition [and
every transition on the Stufenfolge of the process] must, for Schelling,
have a synthetic substrate” (Schlanger 1966: 97). It is here that the ideal
bites back on the real, redetermining it as its own process, appropriating it
ideally as it’s self.
At what point, however, can it be determined that absolute empiricism
has gone to its fullest extent? At what point, in other words, can the
process simply be recapitulated by and for negative consciousness (rather
Iain Hamilton Grant
49
than positive experience)? Where can a particularization particularize the
universal, a product stand in for the process? Schelling’s answer is given
in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), where he notes the
disymmetry between the production of mind and its productivity. Insofar
as mind is productive, it maintains contact with the blind forces of
unconscious production that is nature; insofar, on the other hand, as it
seeks to apprehend itself as product, it isolates its productivity in its selfreflection, which, while still a blind productivity, breaks off its connections
and establishes a broken but recursive circuit of productivity. If therefore,
absolute empiricism, following the utter contingency of the “specific
dynamics” of chemistry, terminates in the blind alley of reflection and
feeds back on itself as its own, internal limit, then the real and ideal flip
without abruption in a möbius looped endofinality turned now outward,
and now inward. Where the loop breaks cannot therefore be a real break,
but only a break for consciousness. And since there is an experience of the
break, there are forces that articulate and particularize it continuously,
which returns us to chemistry as “the science that deals with the quality of
matter” and which “in its principles, is utterly contingent” (Schelling 1988:
201).
Consciousness - a new earth, a new people, even a new world - then, is
not an end of becoming, not a finality around which a self organizes, but
rather the blind synthesis of a chemical recursion with an affective
abruption. “For the concept of matter”, Schelling writes, “is itself ...
synthetic; a purely logical concept of matter is meaningless” (Schelling
1988: 188).
4 The Newest System-Program of Absolute Empiricism
From man it returns to the productivity of nature. First, the matter of
nature. It shows that there is a matter of consciousness just as there is a
matter of the machine, because consciousness is something material.
Anything that is an object of experience is also material. We must
therefore go beyond experience!5
5
Apologies to whoever actually authored the contentious text entitled ‘Oldest SystemProgramme of German Idealism’, which runs: “From nature I come to the works of
man. First of all the idea of humanity. I want to show that there is no more an idea of
the state than there is an idea of the machine, because the state is something
mechanical. Only that which is an object of freedom can be called an idea. We must
therefore go beyond the state!” (Beiser 1998: 3).
50
Pli 9 (2000)
With the break, we return to the Ungrund, to the groundless that by its
indifference, impels the eruption of disjunctions. The further we go in
following the absolute, the more the disjunctions multiply, and because all
synthesis has a material base (because therefore, the idea of a dialectical
process is nonsensical to Schelling, as Schlanger says), the more the
Potenzen set up a recursion from the highest to the lowest, a recursion that
impels experience to the involution of the first Potenz, an engagement with
the groundless productivity of its own intensive basis, prompting the
question: if thought is put into a direct relation with the earth, what is a
philosophy of geology where the genitive is not inverted, but is the product
of geological formations themselves?
Perhaps this is the trajectory of the philosophy of evil, of the “will of
the depths”, whose function it is, as the Philosophical Inquiries tell us, to
particularize. In particularization is contingency, and in contingency, no
project. When the antithesis of the Light and the Dark is finally established
on the indifferent glare of the Unground, the unthinged, it hurtles towards
the absolution of its synthesis by particularizing, through recursve evil, the
will of the depths and is “sealed in darkness to remain as the eternally dark
depths of selfhood [i.e., particularity], as the caput mortuum of his lifeprocess, as potentiality that can never advance to actuality. Then all is
subordinated to spirit...” (SW VII: 408). On the basis of the unground, and
through the medium of the word that introduces the break between the
forces that affect us, the quality and intensity of the matter thus affected,
and the affecting of us, such that there is a continuity coursing through the
sealed particularity of mind; on this basis, evil is sealed off and becomes suddenly necessarily - material as opposed to geistlich. But the opposition
is articulated by synthesis, and the synthesis by the qualities of matter - to
explore absolute empiricism, therefore, we need to descend into the
recursive involute of the chemistry of darkness.
Colchester, May 1999
University of the West of England
Iain Hamilton Grant
51
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