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WIRTH, Jason M. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 290 pp. Cloth, $71.50; paper, $23.95-Jason Wirth aims to resurrect interest in Schelling's philosophy in order to effect a transformation of our relationship to nature. Wirth believes that we do violence to nature because we mistakenly understand it mechanistically. He would thus like to overcome the mechanistic conception of nature in the hopes that this will transform our instrumental violence into a love of all beings. His book is intended to contribute to this revolution by offering "eight meditations on different ways of entering into the thinking of Schelling" (p. 2).
The first meditation emphasizes the priority that Schelling accords to the good over the true. This priority entails avoiding the mistake of attempting "to make too much sense of the Good," and instead allowing "reason [to grow] silent before the mystery of its origin" (p. 15). Attempting to make sense of the good would be a mistake, Wirth contends, because "positive existents are nonsubstitutable events, not just concrete instantiations of abstract positions. Their concretude . . . defies the abstraction that would sublimate them" (p. 21). Consequently, a rational science of beings should be forsaken and replaced...