Joseph P. Lawrence

In Socrates among Strangers, Joseph P. Lawrence reclaims the enigmatic sage from those who have seen him either as a prophet of science, seeking the security of knowledge, or as a wily actor who shed light on the dangerous world of politics while maintaining a prudent distance from it. The Socrates Lawrence seeks is the imprudent one, the man who knew how to die. The institutionalization of philosophy in the modern world has come at the cost of its most vital concern: the achievement of life wisdom. Those who have ceased to grow (those who think they know) close their ears to the wisdom of strangers—and Socrates, who stood face to face with death, is the archetypal stranger. His avowal of ignorance, Lawrence suggests, is more needed than ever in an age defined by technical mastery and expert knowledge.

When Emmanuel Levinas writes (in the preface of Totality and Infinity) that Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung is “a work too often present in this book to be cited,” he effectively names his debt to F. W. J. Schelling as well, for Rosenzweig’s work was a sustained attempt to carry to completion Schelling’s great philosophical fragment, the Weltalter. Scholars of Levinas have explored Levinas’s relationship to Schelling, but I confess that, as a Schelling scholar, I knew nothing of this connection until rather recently. I credit above all the energetic work of Jason Wirth for helping me see its importance — and more generally the importance of reading Schelling in the context of recent work in continental philosophy. None of this has been easy. The very thing that Schelling and Levinas have in common, their resistance to the implicit solipsism of overcoming mystery with clarity, make them poor candidates for quick appropriation and comparison. Indeed, Schelling anticipated Nietzsche by openly mocking the scholars who make it their business to “appropriate and compare.” Mockery and ridicule is, ofcourse, not Levinas’s way of going about things. Even so, he too is so relentless in his polemic against the totalizing desire to know that he forces his reader to pause and question just what a proper scholarly response to his work might be. As such, the very first result of taking up the question of Schelling and Levinas might be that we are forced to set aside the scholarly mask, testimony of one’s acquiescence to the order of the same, in order to step forth as the human beings that we are. Whether this is an act of humility or of arrogance is not at all clear. Dispensing with the pretense of knowledge takes a kind of boldness on our part — for what but knowledge might give us a claim to the attention of others?

This paper explores Schelling's life-long fascination with Spinoza. Through moments of ambivalence and enthusiasm, one aspect of the latter's thought remains central for Schelling: the intellectual intuition of God/Nature. While he consistently emphasizes the non-objectifiable nature of the intuition (as constituting the ground of freedom), the influence of Spinoza is still apparent in what Schelling calls the Ullvordellklichkeit des Seills. Freedom is a response to an ungroundable necessity that consciousness lives out of, but behind which it can never penetrate. This insight provokes a reading of Spinoza that departs from the conventional rationalist interpretation and gestures to an a-theological, yet mystical, understanding, which awakens a feeling not only for the sublime in nature, but for the sublime that lies at "the heart of what is." In the ensuing silence of the self, substance reveals itself as living spirit. Through this interpretation, the Neoplatonic truth of Spinoza becomes visible.

Toshihiko Izutzu's Ishiki to Honshitsu, recently translated into German under the title of Bewusstsein und Wesen, represents a Zen-inspired clarification of a deep underlying tension that characterizes the figure of Socrates: on the one hand a commitment to a fully public form of discourse (thus the central role of defining one's terms) and on the other hand a recognition of the elusively private dimension of language (the insistence that one's interlocutor say what he means). Izutzu (the father of Islamic studies in Japan) lets his philosophical encounter between East and West find its focal point in that tradition of Persian Sufism which culminates in the thought of Mulla Sadra. It is here that Wesen (essence) takes on flesh. Remarkably enough, Plato too had his Persian encounter, as can be inferred from the "Myth of the True Earth" that comes at the end of the Phaedo and represents the last recorded words of Socrates. The ancient Persian legend of Hūrqalyā, the Celestial Earth of emerald cities that Henri Corbin recounted a generation ago, is almost certainly Plato's source. The resurrection world it depicts is a world of Wesen that can be cognitively appropriated only through the kind of direct intuition that is the goal of Zen meditation.

Environmental philosophers tend to be particularly wary of the language of “transcendence.” From Heidegger to contemporary feminism, we find the idea that the failure to respect nature is grounded in Platonism and Abrahamic religion. The denial of earth began, we are told, with the separation of the intelligible form from the actual thing, or, even worse, of the creator from the created. From this point of view what we need is a restored pantheistic sense, a new and revitalized paganism. I counter this assertion by a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus that shows that respect itself is grounded in the recognition of transcendence. With the Bookof Job, I maintain that the voice of the transcendent God is what enables Job not only to see past his sufferings but for the first time to encounter the beauty of nature. Overcoming anthropocentrism requires a relationship to transcendence as such.

The philosophy of Schelling has for too long been lost in the shadows of Fichte and Hegel. While one might dispute Martin Heidegger’s judgment that Schelling was actually the most creative and far-reaching thinker of German Idealism, it betrays both ignorance and intellectual indolence to simply deny his importance. Schelling was not only a significant co-author of “Hegelian” idealism, he was also its first and perhaps most penetrating critic. He outlived Hegel by over 20 years and, as Manfred Frank demonstrates in one of the following essays, developed the arguments against Hegel that were subsequently taken up by Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard.

The metaphysics of presence has led not only to the closure of rationalized systems that define modernity, but also to what can appear as its opposite, the freely flowing movement of information (and of capital) characteristic of the post-modern “de-centered” world. Ideas, after all, require a depth dimension that ultimately proves irreconcilable with the one-dimensionality of the purely present. It is for this reason that the rejection of metaphysics (which is only the final consequence of the metaphysics of presence) fails to solve our dilemma. An alternative strategy is to attempt the recovery of the living heart of metaphysics, its open and ecstatic gaze, rather than its final consequence, the constrictive will to closure, determination, and power. This is the genuinely Socratic possibility, a metaphysics not of presence but of radical transcendence. To clarify that possibility, it is necessary to show how Socrates himself was characterized less by practical and political concerns than by a metaphysical vision directed not to presence but to the unknowable region that opens with death. Socrates’ irony and courage have the same source, what I call a metaphysics of “silence.”