Fichte and Schelling

March 15, 2017 — 5 Comments

I’m sharing below another in my series of quick micro-takes on German idealist philosophers. This one tracks Schelling’s break with Fichte. (See my post on Kant and Fichte here.) This break in mind, it’s plain enough to see why Schelling has become such a rallying point in the Continental scene as of late. Not only because of the resurgence of speculative philosophy, mind you, but also because of related trends, such as the ongoing movement towards an environmental (or ecological) humanities. In many ways, Schelling’s problems are still our own, even if our empirical details are more numerous.

As Frederick Beiser tells it, “Schelling’s break with Fichte is largely a tale about the development of his Naturphilosophie” (483). The development of the Naturphilosophie can in turn be read as Schelling’s answer to the failure of epistemology to finally secure and describe the interaction between the mental and physical, the subjective and objective, the ideal and real, the representation and its object. In addressing the question, How do we know that our concepts correspond to the world? Schelling would break not only with Fichte but with many of the suppositions of philosophy after Descartes. As Beiser notes, “Schelling became convinced that rather than providing a presuppositionless starting point [in the Cogito, the Transcendental Ego, and so on], epistemology had some dubious presuppositions all its own” (471) such that “he recognized that the solution to the fundamental problems of epistemology requires nothing less than metaphysics” (466). Continue reading

Skills of Perception

March 11, 2017 — 14 Comments

I’ve been suggesting that the basic constituents of experience are neither ideas nor representations but activities of thought capable of generating ideas and representations. On this view, it follows that perception is grounded in the actions of the person; it is a skill of combining the manifold of sensibility into the semantically hued diorama of meaningful experience that all people experience as they navigate the world. As a skill of perception, experience can be said to consist in various levels of detail and nuance; it is shot through with skillful means at the ground level, means trainable and plastic in nature. Indeed, if one takes the position that philosophy is an activity that intervenes upon the initial order of skilled perception, then it becomes clear that philosophy is a means for acting upon action. Philosophical practice on this view is itself something like a somatic or practical activity, one that makes contemplation—in the sense of marking out a space for observation—its own kind of skilled action, executed in an environment. Continue reading

Practices of Perception

October 21, 2016 — 5 Comments

In my dissertation summary, I linked the works of Evan Thompson, Pierre Hadot, Peter Sloterdijk, and Michel Foucault in terms of each philosopher’s emphasis on what we could call skills of perception and action, each suggesting a view of philosophy as practice. In Pierre Hadot’s work What is Ancient Philosophy?, for example, we find a view of the history of philosophy as a history of practices of self-transformation and self-overcoming (up to and including considerations of just who the “self” is that is overcome).

Despite the implications of his title, Hadot sees the emphasis on practice as also prevalent in modern philosophical figures, including Descartes, Kant, and Montaigne. In principle, we could take a practice view of any tradition of philosophical thought, as many of Hadot’s commentators have done. This is largely the same approach that Peter Sloterdijk takes. In The Art of Philosophy, Sloterdijk introduces us to his method of reading the history of art and science (and philosophy, as the work will show): Continue reading

Multispecies Epistemes

March 23, 2015 — 7 Comments

The epistemic import of camouflage vis-a-vis notions of realism is an under researched area of inquiry. CAqkfZBUUAAZIiw

Camouflaged critters bring to mind not just the intersubjective character of perception but also its interspecies reality.

Different organisms hide not just from us humans but also from a wide variety of other species, playing on appearances.

This means that we humans encounter phenomena in terms of specific perceptual capacities, but not in a way entirely alien to other species.

The point is not to efface differences across species but to explore multispecies entanglements in perception. CAqlAs8UYAAX4z_

Because the aesthetic play of appearances can be life or death in multispecies epistemes.

Histories of Lived Experience

August 8, 2014 — 14 Comments

[Image: Edward Burtynsky]

Earlier today I delivered a talk on ethology, ecology, and aesthetics as part of a panel on Cosmopolitics at the International Big History Conference held in San Rafael, CA. I am posting my talk below, which you can also find in .pdf form here.

Histories of Lived Experience: Intertwining Ethology, Ecology, And Aesthetics

Adam Robbert, San Francisco, CA

Paper presented at the International Big History Conference, Dominican University, San Rafael, CA, August 8.

What is the significance of meaning in Big History? There is a great diversity of opinion on this issue. For example, Eric Chaisson, one of the original board members of the IBHA, holds that Big History must let go of concepts such as intentionality, subjectivity, and, presumably, meaning, in order to understand evolution objectively.[1] Conversely, the focus of my talk is that an understanding of meaning is necessary for an understanding of evolution at its most fundamental level. A central claim of my talk is that we have to understand that which is meaningful to organisms if ever we hope to comprehend the history of evolution on Earth. My talk thus offers a non-anthropocentric and aesthetic account of meaning in the context of geological history. Ecology from this view is an ongoing entanglement of meanings, concerns, and decisions, and it marks the space where the division between matter and meaning breaks down. Continue reading

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