Open Journals at Memorial University
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The Origami Fold: Nature as Organism in Schelling’s Later Identity Philosophy
No full textFrom 1801–1807 Schelling continued to refine his early attempts at Naturphilosophie in the metaphysical framework of a transcendental Spinozism that he initially called Identity Philosophy. While mathematics and geometry provided the model for identity and its quantitative differentiation in early versions of identity theory, from 1804–1807, logic and theory of language offered a model of identity capable of unknotting persistent Spinozistic puzzles such as the connection between natura naturans and natura naturata—the absolute and its potencies—and the ontological status of the individual. Schelling’s initial concepts of identity as “indifference” or “the identity of identity and difference,” themselves the offshoot of meditations on polarity and repeating structure in the philosophy of nature, make way for logical concepts such as “expression” or “affirmation” and the propositional operator “bond” or “Position” found in the copula. The new essays approach ultimate reality through Spinoza’s disjunction of God or nature, or productive and produced nature; so in addition to identity theory, a general metaphysics of nature prefaces treatments of specific natural phenomena. These dual metaphysics of God and nature inject a dynamic or expressive movement into identity that is not yet the unfolding of identity as grounding-and-division that Schelling will articulate in the 1809 Freedom Essay, but it carries a sense of motion and differentiation—or evolution and unfolding—not found in his earlier attempts. The entire identity philosophy period is best viewed as a step in Schelling’s lifelong project of reworking Spinoza by adding life and spirit to nature
F.W.J. Schelling’s Monument to Jacobi’s Work on the Divine Things (1812) (excerpts)
No full textThe text offered here in translation is extracted from Schelling’s Monument to Jacobi’s Work on the Divine Things (1812), his last major work published during his lifetime. Written in under two months, the book is a response to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s On the Divine Things and their Revelation (1811). Schelling’s cutting rejoinder appeared only a few weeks after Jacobi’s book, resulting inwhat came to be known as the “controversy concerning the divine things"
The Cave of Whiteness: Du Bois, Baldwin, and Wright Recast Plato’s Imagery
No full textThis paper seeks to locate a means for counteracting the philosophical canon by re-reading Plato’s allegory of the cave with three Black thinkers – W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. Rather than direct argumentation or strict historical analysis, my strategy attends to the images, allegories, and metaphors in Plato to unleash their conceptual force and meaning. Attuning to these nonargumentative elements of thinking is great strength of Black thought, one underappreciated by the discipline of philosophy. Doing this will teach draw images: (1) Leisure or Crisis?, (2) The Examined Life, (3) Twilight Philosophy. Next I put these lessons into practice through Richard Wright’s posthumously published The Man Who Lived Underground, and then conclude by clarifying my general strategy, aligning it with Christina Sharpe’s reading of “the wake,” and finally reducing it into a simple argument
The Translator's (In)visibility in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”
No full textJulio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Woman in Paris” (1951), a short story written in the form of a letter that the narrator, a translator, leaves for Andrea, the owner of the apartment he has moved into while she is in Paris, is a commentary on the in(visibility) of the translator. The protagonist of the story, a nameless translator (signifying the marginalized role of translators), relinquishes control over the apartment / text that he temporally inhabits. The translator expresses his anxiety over his unsettling visibility in the apartment/text, where he anticipates staying for a maximum of four months, “perhaps with luck three” (43), the estimated time, arguably, required to finish his translation project. Arrojo points out that the story reveals “the translator’s gripping narrative of his failure to protect the author’s textual space from his agency and relentless creativity” (7). The story, we contend, is a metaphor for translation, a word mentioned twice in the story (46-47) pondering the translator’s impossibility to shield the absent author’s textual space from his inevitable manipulation and destructive creativity
