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ABSTRACT
Schelling’s “Bruno” provides a provocative illustration of his conviction that early modern science has adopted a radically flawed and impoverished concept of matter, and therefore of nature. The “Bruno” has been read as a settling of scores with Fichte, with whom Schelling had recently quarreled, and as a critique of Kant’s idealism. I propose to look at how the dialogue reveals Schelling’s developing understanding of pantheism, as reflected in the arguments he borrows from Giordano Bruno and then transforms. “Bruno” is a dialogue with four interlocutors, and ranges widely. I will discuss two central sections, in which the two main roles are played by Bruno (Schelling) and Lucian (Fichte). Lucian begins by restating their agreement in an earlier section of the dialogue that when it is considered in the light of the supreme idea, the distinction of knowledge and being is untrue, a tantalizing claim. He then goes on to pose the question of how it can be possible to understand the departure of the finite from the eternal.
Notes
1 See Vater’s introduction in Schelling, Bruno, On the Natural and Divine Principle of Things, 3–15.
2 Fisher and Mager, “Schelling Responds to Kant”, 23–44.
3 I will refer to this translation as Vater (see note 1), to minimize confusion about which author is being referred to. Vater, 158.
4 Vater, 159.
5 Vater, 205; see also endnote 99. Wirth, “Who is Schelling’s Bruno?”, 181–90.
6 Vater, 205.
7 Vater, 205.
8 Vater, 206.
9 Vater, 206.
10 The character of Teofilo, or some works Fileoteo, is identified with Bruno’s own views.
11 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 57.
12 Vater, 206
13 Vater, 208; Schelling may also be referring to passages like this claim from Metaphysics 987a29–988a17: “the Platonists theory is illogical, for whereas the Platonists derive multiplicity from matter although their Form generates only once, it is obvious that only one table can be made from one piece of timber, and yet he who imposes the form upon it, although he is but one, can make many tables. Such too is the relation of male to female: the female is impregnated in one coition, but one male can impregnate many females; yet these are analogues of those first principles”. Aristotle here seems to both be criticizing the Platonists and according the male principle a more important role, while ignoring the fact that the female can, at least in principle, produce many children.
14 Physics, 192a 10–12.
15 Physics, 192a 20–3.
16 Schelling, Timaeus, 50 d.
17 Schelling, Timaeus.
18 Baum, “Die Anfänge der Schellingschen Naturphilosphie”, 199.
19 Schelling, Timaeus, 213; the only English translation of this text is by Adam Arola, Jena Jolissaint, and Peter Warnek, Epoché, 12 (2008), 205–48.
20 Schelling, Timaeus, 210.
21 These themes are a central focus in Žižek’s “The Abyss of Freedom”, 1–104.
22 Vater, 208.
23 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 32; the line of poetry is from Orlando Furioso.
24 Vater, 208.
25 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 81.
26 Goethe published the Metamorphosis of Plants, in which the Urpflanze plays a prominent role, in 1797. He describes the typical development of an annual plant: “Here doth Nature close the ring of her forces eternal; Yet doth a new one, at once, cling to the one gone before, so that the chain be prolonged for ever through all generations, and that the whole may have life, e’en as enjoy’d by each part”.
27 Vater, 208.
28 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 66.
29 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 61.
30 Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, 65.
31 Ibid.
32 Bruno, Cause, Unity and Principle, 69.
33 Ibid.
34 Bruno, Cause, Unity and Principle, 87.
35 Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe, and the Worlds, 28.
36 Schelling to Fichte, 3 October 1801, in The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling, tr. and ed. Vater and Wood, 62.
37 See Philosophical Investigations into Human Freedom, tr. Love and Schmidt, 11, 27, where Schelling remarks approvingly about “these minds that sought the living ground of nature without fear of the ever trite words of slander against real philosophy, like materialism, pantheism, and so on”.
38 “We said that the universe brought itself forth from one original product by means of an always advancing explosion. I urge the reader not to think of mechanical forces when I use this expression, which begin to operate much later in Nature. The forces which acted in this explosion are without doubt the original repulsive forces in Nature”. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 90f. Peterson adds that this is clearly an anticipation of the theory of the Big Bang.
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Dale E. Snow
Dale E. Snow is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, U.S.A. Her research is focused on German Idealism and the history and philosophy of science. Her most recent book is a translation of F.W.J. Schelling’s Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine (SUNY, 2018).