Abstract
As the number of recent studies – some of which have been reviewed in the pages of JES – suggests, a revival of interest in the German Romantic philosopher Schelling is taking place. Among others, Andrew Bowie and Slavoj Žižek have made a strong case for a link between Schelling’s thought and the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis. Despite work by Frederick Beiser, Terry Pinkard and Karl Ameriks to advance our understanding of German idealism, however, there has been relatively little progress in the historiography of psychology. (Indeed, thanks to Sonu Shamdasani, Jung has in this respect fared better than Freud.) But now, building on approaches found in Odo Marquard and Michel Foucault, Matt ffytche has published a major study of Schelling’s contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. His book demonstrates how, to borrow a phrase, Schellingian thought constitutes the unconscious of the unconscious.
The starting point of ffytche’s account is Schelling’s predecessor, Fichte, who (in The Vocation of Man (1800)) described the will as ‘ly[ing] hidden from all mortal eyes in the secret darkness of [the] heart’ (cf. p. 63). Fichte’s account of the Ich marks the birth of modern self-conscious interiority, as Dieter Henrich has extensively contended (p. 68). Yet the very hiddenness of the will, and the failure of Fichte’s philosophy to make transparent the transcendental subject, served as a spur to Schelling to resolve the questions of human identity and freedom by developing, between 1797 and 1806, a philosophy of nature (p. 78). In Schelling’s Naturphilosophie the contradictions of Fichte’s thinking re-emerge in the paradox of its vision of human spirit as ‘striv[ing] to make itself free, to disentangle itself from the fetters of Nature and her guardianship’, as Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797/1803) put it (cf. p. 89), while at the same time art, not philosophy, is advanced as the apogee of human achievement. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), the conjunction of freedom and identity remains ‘an eternal unknown which, like the everlasting sun in the realm of spirits, conceals itself behind its own unclouded light’ (cf. p. 92). In the project on which he worked between 1811 and 1815, The Ages of the World, Schelling’s reflections on nature and subjectivity turned into a speculative investigation into the experience of time and the origin of everything.
More clearly than hitherto, the Weltalter texts provide evidence of Schelling’s indebtedness to Neoplatonic thought, and his conception of the absolute reveals equal inspiration from the tradition of negative theology arising from Meister Eckhart, notably the mystical writings of Jacob Boehme, Johannes Tauler, and Angelus Silesius. As Schelling undertook to retrace ‘the long path of developments from the present back into the deepest night of the past’ (cf. pp. 137, 142), so his argument that the beginning must not be thought turned into the claim that, for experience to be historical, some aspects of the past cannot be remembered (p. 137). More specifically, when Schelling, in his lecture on Homer in his series devoted to the Philosophy of Mythology (1842), introduced the notion of ‘the uncanny’ (das Unheimliche) and glossed it as ‘what one calls everything that should have stayed secret, hidden, latent, but has come to the fore’ (cf. p. 160), this term was later, for obvious reasons, to catch the attention of Freud.
In addition to Fichte, this study pays close attention to such other key figures as Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert and Carl Gustav Carus, while it also acknowledges the role of Eduard von Hartmann in awakening renewed interest in Schellingian thought in the late nineteenth century. Its scholarship is enriched by references to Hegel, Coleridge, Heidegger, Benjamin, Derrida, Habermas, Jean-Luc Nancy and D. W. Winnicott: almost every page is illuminated by a fresh insight, much as Schelling himself saw the divine at work in the material world, ‘the flash of light concealed in the hard stone’ (cf. p. 162). In the final chapters of his monograph, ffytche broadens his discussion yet further, offering a subtle discussion of the problems of freedom and autonomy in Freud’s model of the psyche, and examining the political dimensions of the crisis of authority it inaugurated. So while this book does not track a specific ‘line of influence’ from Schelling to Freud, it does not try to (p. 9); its goal is not, like Schelling’s, to ground history in (the) unconscious(ness), but to give the unconscious a history (p. 294). Although, as ffytche readily concedes, The Ages of the World is not itself a ‘psychoanalytic’ text (p. 210), Schelling’s works in his mature phase all speak to the issue of how, in Jung’s words, ‘individuation or becoming a self is not only a spiritual problem, it is the problem of all life’ (cf. pp. 134, 224). In short, Schelling’s thought has its roots in an age characterized by a concern for the psyche, reflected in J. C. Reil’s coinage of the term Psychotherapie, Karl Philipp Moritz’s Magazine for Empirical Psychology, and his own editorial involvement in the Yearbook of Medicine as Science. In this important and masterful study, Schelling emerges from ‘the context of a trend of “dark” Romanticism … in which even idealism succumbs to a certain fascination with the gothic, the magical and the mysterious’ (p. 99), to claim his rightful place: not simply in the history of psychoanalysis, but in the nascent field of Medical Humanities.