Ben Woodard

This study addresses the conceptual affinities between F. W. J. Schelling and Félix RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix by focusing on the genesis of the link between nature and thought in their respective philosophies. To achieve this, it considers the role of diagrammatic representation in depicting this link—particularly in the figure of the spiral. I argue that, for Schelling, the spiral is a real pattern that suggests the polarity of the mental and the physical whereas, for RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix, it is a memory of the condition of action and a condition of grace. I cash out this argument by considering not only Schelling’s philosophy of nature, where the spiral is manifest in the vortex of the First Outline of the System of the Philosophy of Nature, and RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s OfHabitHabit, but also RavaissonRavaisson-Mollien, Félix’s essays on fine art, Leonardo da Vinci and the serpentine line.

The following investigates the work of the still too neglected thinker Gilles Châtelet with a particular emphasis on how his understanding of intuition functions across philosophy, science, and mathematics. The question is whether intuition (as Châtelet understands in a generally Schellingian formulation) trivializes the processes of scientific and mathematical thought subjecting them to an experimental errancy of chance. While it is common to dismiss Schelling’s notion of intellectual intuition as god-like knowledge following Kant, even a cursory examination of how Schelling uses the term throughout his career, and how it relates to other forms, demonstrates that intuition is more of an experimental immediacy that is imperfectly conceptually laden yet effective. Though Schelling is often considered an anti-formal or anti logical thinker (at least in contradistinction to Hegel) this is surely not the case if one allows the diagram to be considered as formal as the statement of logic. For Châtelet, Schelling’s philosophy of powers is what allows for a suspension of things in such a manner that necessitates understanding the map of nature in terms of vectors, lines, and fields. What immediately comes into question is the status of this expanded notion of the formal vis a vis the metaphysical and of the egress of thought into nature and nature into thought.

For too long, the Earth has been used to ground thought instead of bending it; such grounding leaves the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, or other forms of anthropocentric philosophy. In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold, dead place enlivened only by human thought--either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia. Geophilosophy seeks instead to question the ground of thinking itself, the relation of the inorganic to the capacities and limits of thought. This book constructs an eclectic variant of geophilosophy through engagements with digging machines, nuclear waste, cyclones and volcanoes, giant worms, secret vessels, decay, subterranean cities, hell, demon souls, black suns, and xenoarcheaology, via continental theory (Nietzsche, Schelling, Deleuze, et alia) and various cultural objects such as horror films, videogames, and weird Lovecraftian fictions, with special attention to Speculative Realism and the work of Reza Negarestani. In a time where the earth as a whole is threatened by ecological collapse, On an Ungrounded Earth generates a perversely realist account of the earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.

Theorists such as Jussi Parikka, Jakob von Uexküll, Eugene Thacker, Sadie Plant, and others have utilized the figure of the insect as a particularly salient way of reading the materialization of information. Certain affinities of insect anatomy and behavior with technology aesthetically collude with technologies of communication. But is such use of the insect figure merely metaphorical, or does it drag with it other aspects of the insect body and its bearing on the physicality of information? In either case, the notion of the insect body proves an interesting point for recognizing a tension between communication and language in contemporary posthuman discourse. As Lacanian psychoanalysis is invested in this difference, and in unfolding the post-, in-, or non-human human the human, a guiding question issued to Lacan in the name of the insect body could be: Did he have a vested interest in the non-discursive or “primordial” materiality of the world other than as an instructive disruption of language? In other words, does materiality have a role in his theories other than that of the speaking of/as the symptom, thereby cutting through, but ultimately mutating, communication?

In the present essay I address the apparently problematic status of epistemology in F.W.J. Schelling’s work. Given the overblown emphasis on Schelling’s anti-Kantianism, there would seem to be little hope in articulating anything like a theory of knowledge in Schelling’s thought. For the sake of brevity I emphasize knowledge’s spatial and navigational functions in Schelling’s texts. For Schelling, the navigational is that which locates, and constructively constrains, the capacity of the subject to synthesize. This is accomplished, I argue, via a spatialized reading of Schelling’s concept of intellectual intuition. While this form of intuition initially resembles that of Fichte’s, Schelling transforms the term, using it in tandem with construction, in order to maintain both the sensory immediacy, yet abstract form, of intuition as the initial means a knowing subject, immersed in the activities of nature, comes to recognize its own capacities and begins to form claims about the world.