Causa sui

Abstract: Preface: The Multitude and the Moving Train, Jason E. Smith Introduction 1 Causa Sui or Wechselwirkung: Engels between Hegel and Spinoza 2 Spinoza: An Ontology of Relation? 3 'The World by Chance': On Lucretius and Spinoza 4 The Primacy of the Encounter over Form 5 The Syntax of Violence between Hegel and Marx 6 The Many Times of the Multitude Bibliography Index

Abstract: substance, strives to overcome all limits, especially the forced detour it must take through the field of commodity production. Money wants to beget money independently of a world or a ground—m-m1-m2, ad infinitum—to become an autonomous spiritual substance. Money desires to be causa sui, eternal and absolute. The problem, as Schelling, Hegel and Marx all point out, is that this is a possible impossibility and, 16 between the promise and its fulfillment, there exists the unresolvable contradiction of ground and existence, and the absence of any definable world. Chapter 5, “Losing Ground/Losing Time,” continues where Chapter 4 concluded, showing how Die Weltalter is already tackling the problem of a “de-worlded” world, where ground and existence have yet to become active in the “agon” of existence. One of the central innovations of the Freiheitschrift and Die Weltalter is that they are thought and experienced together in terms of love and evil, or that which “in” god is not yet “of” god. Schelling’s handling of these “movements” and “counter-movements” makes it possible to understand how a world comes to be lost and how it might be saved. Schelling often thinks of them in terms of spirit’s outward longing for existence and the evil that would thwart it, as he tries to reawaken a genuine “apprehension of life,” to summon us again to the possibility of life created in the midst of life’s contradictions. But if we read Die Weltalter as symptomatic of the modern dilemma of undecided existence, we begin to see that the forces intrinsic to life have lost their native force, becoming indifferent, impelled more by inertia rather than an act of will. Life has lost its edge and danger, becoming predictable, safe, immobilized, human. Hence, we become insensible to the question of the meaning of Being, indifferent to the wonder and terror of existence, unresponsive to the call to act, to be. Indifference is primordial, the mise en scene of creation, and the great stumbling block to existence and real acts of creation. Part II, “Inhuman Beginnings,” will continue to explore the meaning of this loss but now with a view to how it opens thought to the chance of new beginnings and new worlds. In this part we strive to show that the underlying idea Schelling is wrestling with is the concept of “imaging-machines” and this concept is most fully realized in the life of 17 children. This represents the second new way of encountering Die Weltalter. While there is a certain unity to our arguments, many of which are carried over into later chapters, it is important to stress the fragmentary nature of what follows, as we strive to remain faithful to the spirit of Schelling, his Die Weltalter, children and the creative life more generally. Chapters 6, “Imaging the ‘Figures Wild’: Bergson, Deleuze and the Powers of Cinema” explores Schelling’s Die Weltalter in relation to Bergson’s concept of duration and movement, Deleuze’s theory of cinema, and how both open thought to the free-form play of images and the countless meanings they inspire. We will argue Die Weltalter and creation itself is an “imaging-machine” and that it challenges the indifference and paralysis that seizes and undoes time. Time, as Heidegger shows us, is always already in the grip of an interpretation of Being. And the ontological consensus and underlying mode of conduct that now prevails, denies time its meanings. Schelling confronts this problem the only way he knows how, by linking it to the problem of divine creation. It is important not to miss the reason for this. God does not yet exist in Die Weltalter because god does not yet exist in Schelling’s time. God can only really exist in and through us, and we, as Schelling and Heidegger both argue, lack the courage to be. This is yet another reason for thinking primordial time as the void at the center of our present moment and for implicating not just ourselves in this time but god as well. Part of the originality and incredible audacity of Schelling’s vision is the “suggestion” that creation 22 By image we do not mean that which “copies” or “models” something else, as Plato had argued, though images do function in this way, but as the consecrated site for the creation and interplay of new and always evolving meanings. As Stephen David Ross argues, “The image always escapes into another meaning, opens into fascination, flees into the other of all meaning, which is semblance, infinitely rich in meaning while at the same time altogether empty.” See “Moving Images of Eternity,” in Schelling Now, ed. Jason M. Wirth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 47. 18 has yet to be created, because god does not yet exist because we don’t exist. Schelling means this both figuratively and literally. Schelling’s novel solution to this problem is to think the event of creation independently of any subject, divine or human. This was already presaged in the Naturphilosophie with its emphasis on the pre-subjective becomings of spirit. And while the Naturphilosophie thinks these becomings in terms of psycho-physical contractions of substance, its primary concern is not the freedom that ultimately grounds this process but the process itself. Schelling first tackles this problem in the System of Transcendental Idealism, and he does so in an unexpected way, thinking creation as an imaging-machine that creates countless durations of time, among them, god and us. In this chapter we will briefly acquaint ourselves with Schelling’s aesthetic ideal, which he develops in System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) as he begins to think imaging-machines as key to understanding the mystery of creation. We will see that the primal invocation of the Word, which Schelling still aims to understand, depends upon something still deeper and more originary, images. But art, not philosophy, comes closest to realizing this truth. Art alone is capable of gaining access to the traumatic core of creation—to time’s durations—without betraying it. Art alone can produce and preserve the incalculable meanings of primal Being and in a way that preserves the dignity it seeks to encounter and creative forces it seeks to engage. But it is not just a means of engaging life, the imaging-machines are Being’s highest truth, even preceding god’s supreme act of self-affirmation, even though it cannot be summarized solely as god’s work, because it contains only the image of god, a mere premonition of divine existence. God does not produce the vision but is its monstrous 19 effect. The image is of a world not yet formed, vague and indeterminate, still caught in the interminable flux of an eternal beginning. God sees all that is but just as important, is what god does not see, the counter duration this image produces, that looms and grows in the background, the mirror image of all that will one day “be” already hampered by all that will “not be” and “can never be.” It is that which “can never be” that is the “groundless ground” of all that “is.” Chapters 7 and 8, “The Voice that Crieth in the Wilderness” and “Beloved and the Ghosts of Creation,” show how Schelling and Toni Morrison hope to affect the “turn” Heidegger speaks of, to move beyond the “destitution” and violence of time to its fulfillment. As Heidegger argues, “The turning of the age does not take place by some new god, or the old one renewed, bursting into the world from ambush at some time or other.” Their return demands a place to return to, and this demands a “turn” in us. But such a reformation in Being cannot be forced or anticipated. The best we can do is to heighten our sensitivity and openness to the call of Being and the “divine radiance” that always, already “shines forth in everything that is.” But how is this openness to Being affected and sustained? In the “Metaphysics Lectures” (1929-30), Heidegger finds in profound boredom, as he did with anxiety in Being and Time, a mood that gives him a way of thinking Dasein out of the “world” and 23 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1990), 90. 24 This is what Morrison’s Beloved so powerfully gives us to see. Sethe’s tragedy is that she has nowhere to live out the becoming of family, no place to raise and love a child, and no world to call home. But at the end of the story, a “turn” is achieved that transforms the pain of this loss into the promise of a future.

Abstract: In this most recent of his seminal studies on Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion brings together essays on the topics of the ego and of God, most of them previously unavailable in English. More than any other of Marion's works, the book illustrates the profound connection between his phenomenological concerns and his writings on Descartes. Liberating God and the self from the constrictions of metaphysics are fundamental tenets of Marion's theological and phenomenological work. This book highlights the same topics in the philosophy of Descartes. In Part I (On the Ego), Marion explores the alterity of the Cartesian ego, arguing that it is not as solitary as has often been assumed, and shows how Descartes' writings themselves are framed by dialogue. He explicates the status of the "rule of truth" in the Meditations, on the one hand highlighting how Descartes' argument is not circular, on the other hand showing how Pascal responds to and alters Descartes. He also elucidates the ambivalent status of the concept of substance in Descartes by returning to its roots in the philosophy of Suarez. In Part II (On God), Marion returns to the important Cartesian thesis of the creation of the eternal truths, setting it in the context of the claims of earlier thinkers and showing its demise in philosophies following Descartes. The study closes with a careful delineation of the concept of causa sui and a detailed survey of the idea of God in seventeenth-century thought.

Abstract: How are we to understand causal relations and analysis in socialscience? This paper takes R. G. Collingwood’s writing aboutcausation as its point of departure for the answering of thisquestion. Two ...