Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung

Rethinking the Romantic Subject

Gord Barentsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367439293
• eBook ISBN: 9781000047127
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject explores the remarkable intellectual isomorphism between the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling and Carl Jung's analytical psychology in order to offer a crucial and original corrective to the "reflection theory" of subjectivity.

Arguing that the reflection theory of the subject does not do justice to the full compass of Romantic thinking about the human being, Romantic Metasubjectivity sees human identity as neither discursive aftereffect nor centred around a self-transparent "I" but rather as constellated around the centripetal force of what Novalis calls "The Self of one's self." The author begins with a unique reading of Schelling's early Naturphilosophie as primal site rather than Freudian scene, thinking this site through his Philosophical Inquiries Into the Nature of Human Freedom to The Ages of the World. Reading Jungian metapsychology and its core concepts as therapeutic amplifications of Schelling, the author articulates an intellectual counter-transference in which Schelling and Jung contemporise each other. The book then demonstrates how Romantic metasubjectivity operates in the libidinal matrix of Romantic poetry through readings of William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The book concludes with a discussion of the hit TV series Breaking Bad as a "case study" of the challenges Romantic metasubjectivity raises for fundamental ethical dilemmas which confront us in the twenty-first century.

Romantic Metasubjectivity is a highly original work of scholarship and will appeal to students and scholars in German Idealism, Romanticism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, theory, Jung studies, and those with an interest in contemporary theories of the subject.

Chapter 1

A first outline of Romantic metasubjectivity

Contemporary scholarship (Grant, McGrath, ffytche) has recognised not only the multivalency of Schelling’s oeuvre as a whole, but also the centrality of the Naturphilosophie he developed in the final years of the eighteenth century. Throughout his philosophical career Schelling returns to the Naturphilosophie’s core dynamics, remaining productively entangled in it to the extent that Iain Hamilton Grant writes: “Schellingianism is naturephilosophy throughout” (Philosophies 5). Ellenberger suggests that Naturphilosophie is an important basis for twentieth-century depth psychology: he writes that “there is hardly a single concept of Freud or Jung that had not been anticipated by the philosophy of nature” (205) but leaves this avenue unexplored. The “quasi-mythological nature” of metabiology in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) leads Paul Ricoeur to argue for a defining relationship between Goethe’s Naturphilosophie and Freud’s libido theory as a whole (312f),1 but this is where Freud’s relationship to Naturphilosophie ends. For the nature of Naturphilosophie as a speculative physics positing fundamentally nonmolar, (de)composable forces behind the construction of matter itself is a concern far beyond Freud, who is at pains to distinguish his scientific project from the “mysticism” of nature philosophy (“Introductory Lectures” 20 & n. 1). In contrast to this, Romantic metasubjectivity marks affinities between Naturphilosophie and Jungian metapsychology which extend far beyond the personalist mechanisms of psychoanalysis. To elucidate this connection, this chapter frames the Naturphilosophie of Schelling’s First Outline as a metaphysical site for the disciplinary agon between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, reading Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and Jung’s contemporaneous Zofingia lectures (1896–1899)2 as engagements with the quasi-subjective space of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. These texts predate and prefigure the Freud-Jung schism, and in their wake I touch on other works as post-schismatic theoretical articulations. Freud’s A Phylogenetic Fantasy (1915) is an early foray into the pre-human dimensions of libido which anticipates his extension of germ and cell theory into the speculative phylogenesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which I read in part as an engagement with the spectre of Jung.3 Similarly, Jung’s early critique of the hegemony of rational-empirical science prefigures his formulation of analytical psychology as he considers it in relation to the creation of world views [Weltanschauungen]. This formulation, which deconstructs other disciplines as a Foucauldian counter-science, culminates in Symbols of Transformation (1911–1912/1952) as the psychoanalytically heretical text which underwrites analytical psychology as a whole.4

Against this backdrop of Naturphilosophie, I also want to revisit the key issue in the Freud-Jung schism – the theory of libido – as the site of emergence for what I have described as Thanatopoiesis, the regressive-progressive, systolic-diastolic movement powering Romantic metasubjectivity. Thanatopoiesis reads Thanatos away from the yearning for inorganicity: libido is driven back to past experiences and the interiority of memory, but it is also impelled by present circumstances toward a horizon of self-development, a futurity that is always undecided and incomplete. In the words of Schelling’s 1815 Ages, “all evolution presupposes involution” (83) – regression and progression entangled in a rhythm that can be intuited but which is never an object of knowledge. Indeed, the specifically Romantic quality of this bifurcated rhythm informs the ontopoetics of Schlegel’s progressive universal poetry, which unfolds in precisely this manner as “capable of the highest and most variegated refinement, not only from within outwards, but also from without inwards” (AF #116). And the “progressive” nature of this universal poetry should be read not as a teleological progression but instead as a perpetual unfolding akin to Schelling’s Nature; indeed, for Schlegel this poetry “should forever be becoming and never be perfected” (AF #116). The speculative physics of the 1799 Naturphilosophie thus allows one to trace the Romantic genealogy of Thanatopoiesis through Schlegel’s progressive universal poetry to analytical psychology. Indeed, I will show that Thanatopoiesis establishes analytical psychology as a Naturphilosophie après la lettre, supplementing Freud’s death instinct with a futurity marking the fundamental drive of Romantic metasubjectivity.

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie: inhibition and “unnatural nature”

Tilottama Rajan judiciously reminds us that Schelling’s First Outline “is not yet part of a history [and thus] brackets or re-idealises its more deconstructive insights” (“First Outline” 312). In a similar vein, Sean McGrath writes:

The early Schellingian unconscious, developed in the nature-philosophy […] is impersonal and immanent. It is not yet the dark side of God unveiled in the Freedom essay, not the underside of the personality of the Stuttgart Seminars […] rather, it is the collective intelligence running through all of matter, and insofar as we too are material, running through us as well. [It is] the spirit of nature, nature spiritualized and given subjectivity, but of an impersonal quality. (Dark Ground 82)

This “collective intelligence” is, to use Lancelot Whyte’s phrase, “potential mind” (116) not yet experientialised as psyche. It is Naturphilosophie’s version of the absolute subject (Peterson xxviii), and its dynamics are not yet part of the uniquely human history of suffering. It attempts to become object to itself as an abstract (if provisional) goal of Nature’s infinite productivity. But although Schelling’s unfolding “drama of a struggle between form and the formless” (FO 28) lacks dramatis personae, it is nevertheless linked to the forces of magnetism, gravity, and chemistry which occur in a temporal, historicised Being (albeit one bracketing time and space as markers of human history). Thus, Naturphilosophie’s dynamic unfolds not in a pre- or non-history but in a quasi-subjective space between world and psyche as it were, where the latter is driven to emerge as part of what David Krell calls Nature’s tormented Idealism (Contagion 73ff). It is because of this emphasis on “thisness,” the sheer facticity of Being and the attempt to think its emergence in Naturphilosophie, that neither Freud’s personalist psyche nor his adherence to a Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics can adequately articulate the First Outline’s protopsychology.5

In contrast to Freud’s desire to conceive psychoanalysis as a natural science, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, as a dynamic “science of nature,” is the foundation of a meta-physics – what he calls a “speculative” physics meant to discover the dynamic forces and drives behind Nature’s infinite productivity. That is, Naturphilosophie “assumes that the sum of phenomena is not a mere world, but of necessity a Nature (that is, that this whole is not merely a product, but at the same time productive)” (FO 197). As such, Naturphilosophie unfolds in a register of process, drive, and compulsion: in the Introduction, Schelling writes that “Nature can produce nothing but what shows regularity and purpose, and Nature is compelled to produce it” (194). This Nature is one of “absolute activity,” which is marked by “the drive [Trieb] to an infinite development” (18).6 As necessity, Nature is also compelled, through this productive drive, to produce organic and inorganic natural products as part of a general economy of infinitely productive relations. And like Nature itself, the organism self-organises according to principles irreducible to a logical system, and the fact that each natural product performs within itself Nature’s infinite productivity anticipates a mind-Nature parallelism with prototherapeutic properties which are taken up by Jung’s model of the psyche. So even in the Naturphilosophie, this repetition of infinite production in the individual opens Nature to the bidirectionality of Thanatopoiesis. As Robert Richards writes, “[Naturphilosophie] suggested that nature might furnish a path back to the self […] the exploration of nature might even be regarded as a necessary propaedeutic to the development of the self” (134). Nature is a Deleuzian fold, entangling interiority and exteriority: one finds oneself through Nature, but in going back “through” Nature one can move “forward” in self-development through Nature’s “exploration.”

Schelling’s particular formulation of Naturphilosophie evolves from the broader field of German nature philosophy which encompasses Romantic biology and other disciplines. Writing that “all Romantic biologists were Naturphilosophen, but not all Naturphilosophen were Romantics,” Richards argues that Naturphilosophie not only shifts away from eighteenth-century mechanist philosophy but also marks Schelling’s move away from Kant within Naturphilosophie itself (8ff). The early Naturphilosophen included Kant, who conceived the archetypes of species as transcendental entities of an ideal reality. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, however, begins with natural (real) existence instead of (ideal) consciousness: “the ideal must arise out of the real and admit of explanation from it” (FO 194). Schelling moves against Kant’s noumenal-phenomenal bifurcation of Being as well as Fichte’s “absolute I,” which makes nature an epiphenomenon of subjective consciousness. In the architectonic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the whole is subservient to the operations of its component parts; Kant’s organicism is a regulative idea that denies Nature any genuinely aleatory force. In contrast, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, as “an a priori study of the ‘Idea’ of nature,” holds that Nature “is not a mechanical system but a series of basic ‘forces’ or ‘impulses’ that mirror at the basic level the same kind of determinations that are operative in us at the level of freedom. [Thus Naturphilosophie] must construct an account of nature that is continuous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: a word to the “Why”s
• 1. A first outline of Romantic metasubjectivity
• 2. The Romantic metasubjective unconscious: dissociation, historicity, trauma
• 3. Romantic metasubjectivity: experience
• 4. Romantic metasubjectivity: individuation
• 5. Romantic myth-subjectivity: Wordsworth and Shelley
• 6. Conclusion: Romantic meth-subjectivity
• Appendix A: Disentangling Romantic metasubjectivity
• Appendix B: Situating Romantic metasubjectivity
• Appendix C: Self and archetype
• Bibliography
• Index