The Dark Ground of Spirit

Schelling and the Unconscious

S. J. McGrath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415492096
• eBook ISBN: 9781136481581
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and influential of German philosophers. In this book, S. J. McGrath not only makes Schelling's ideas accessible to a general audience, he uncovers the romantic philosopher's seminal role as the creator of a concept which shaped and defined late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology: the concept of the unconscious.

McGrath shows how the unconscious originally functioned in Schelling's philosophy as a bridge between nature and spirit. Before Freud revised the concept to fit his psychopathology, the unconscious was understood largely along Schellingian lines as primarily a source of creative power. Schelling's life-long effort to understand intuitive and non-reflective forms of intelligence in nature, humankind and the divine has been revitalised by Jungians, as well as by archetypal and trans-personal psychologists. With the new interest in the unconscious today, Schelling's ideas have never been more relevant.

The Dark Ground of Spirit will therefore be essential reading for those involved in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and philosophy, as well as anyone with an interest in the history of ideas.

Chapter 1

Introduction

“Someday we shall be able to see by what torturous paths modern psychology has made its way from the dingy laboratories of the alchemists, via mesmerism and magnetism … to the philosophical anticipations of Schopenhauer, Carus and von Hartmann” (Jung, CW 4: 748). This remark by Carl Jung reveals both the breadth of his understanding of the lineage of the unconscious and an important oversight. Missing from the genealogy is German Idealism, most notably, F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), who is, we will argue, the philosopher with the greatest claim to being the original theoretician of the unconscious. And behind him stands the massively underrated figure of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), whom Hegel called “the first German philosopher” (Hegel, 1896: 188), but whom we could just as accurately describe as the first depth psychologist. Prototypes for three of the major models of the unconscious in the twentieth century, the Freudian bio-personal unconscious, the Jungian collective unconscious, and the Lacanian semiotic unconscious, can be traced back to Schelling. Unlike Jacques Lacan, neither Sigmund Freud nor Jung read the German Idealists carefully, but they did not need to: by the end of the nineteenth century, German Idealism had infiltrated most fields of German academic life, either negatively, inspiring materialist reactions in logic, metaphysics, and natural science, or positively, influencing historiography, hermeneutics, and the burgeoning science of dynamic psychiatry. Late nineteenth-century psychologists no longer speculated about demons, spirits of the dead or mysterious invisible fluids to explain non-rational psychological phenomena; they had their theoretical model, the unconscious psyche, handed to them on a platter so to speak, not only theoretically well developed, but to some degree over-developed in hugely popular studies such as Eduard von Hartmann’s 1869 Philosophy of the Unconscious (a bricolage of Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, which everybody seems to have read). Jung singles out Schopenhauer’s “anticipations” of psychoanalysis without reflecting on the relative lateness of Schopenhauer’s contribution or showing any sense that Schelling might be the missing link he seeks. The historical claim of this book is that Jacob Boehme’s alchemico-theosophical psychology, modified and given metaphysical grounding by Schelling, is the origin of the psychodynamic notion of the unconscious.

The unity of Schelling’s thought

The interpreter of Schelling faces a particularly difficult hermeneutical challenge: as soon as Schelling had developed a workable theoretical frame (say nature-philosophy or identity-philosophy), he seems to have abandoned it. Schelling appears to have been repulsed by the prospect of settling down into a system, as though the real always beckoned to him from the far side of whatever set of categories were recommending themselves, compelling him to leave for others the frame he had constructed while he continued his restless search for the logical and historical relation between the infinite and the finite. For Heidegger, Schelling’s flagrant neglect of the canons of consistency and coherence is not a sign of the weakness of his thought, but exactly the opposite: thinking, according to Heidegger, never enjoys arrival, certainty, or stability (Heidegger, 1971). Schelling, whose philosophy was always underway, is the quintessential Heideggerian thinker.¹

Schelling’s inconsistencies notwithstanding, we can discern a set of recurring concerns in Schelling’s collected works, leitmotifs, which do not a system make, but constitute a style of philosophizing which we can call Schellingian. First in appearance is a theme most characteristic of Schelling’s nature-philosophy, but which also plays a central role in the philosophy of freedom and returns in the Trinitarian metaphysics of the late lectures: the notion of polarity. Schelling remains convinced, from his earliest treatises to his last lectures, that all intelligible structure, mental or material, physical or metaphysical, finite or divine, is characterized by polarity, opposition, and the creative and dynamic tension between incommensurables, a tension which must not be abrogated in a spurious logic that presumes to deny the principle of contradiction (Hegel’s). The production of being in Schellingian ontology is not by means of Hegel’s qualitative differentiation, the collapse of the identical into the play of contradictories and the subsequent negation of and re-inscription of difference into a higher standpoint, but by means of quantitative intensification of power, generation of difference within an essential identical being through progressive potentization, which renders the latent power of anything available. For Schelling, contradictories are never fused, and the opposition between them highlights the primacy of will over thought, for in the face of incommensurable options, thinking can go no further until the will decides. However, Schelling is not Kierkegaard: all polarities are undergirded by a concealed commonality, a deep ground of unity that makes the opposites possible, for only that which is in secret alliance, according to Schelling, can be truly opposed. Thus the other-side of Schellingian polarity is the crucial notion of teleology: polarity is never something that just happens to be; it is always something that has come to be for the sake of a higher development, be it life, consciousness, the personalization of God, or the production of love. The one divides into two so that it might give birth to a one that knows itself as such and can be lovingly related to others.

The second recurring theme in Schellingian thought is the finitude of human experience, which is, for Schelling, neither a dogmatic assertion nor romantic Schwärmerei, but an experience of the crucifixion of thought against the real. The sense for finitude draws the middle Schelling to theosophy, but the late Schelling will re-consider this move, distancing himself from theosophy because the theosophist’s enthusiasm for the non-rational is too cheaply purchased. For Schelling, the understanding must go the distance with thought, concept, and logic, a distance which cannot be measured a priori but must be traversed to be known. The late Schelling stages a critique of “negative philosophy,” rationalist idealism, which he more or less invented and Hegel perfected, but he nonetheless insists that the passage to “positive philosophy,” the philosophy of existence, is only by means of negative philosophy. We cannot deduce existence from concepts but neither can we understand existence without concepts.² Carried as far as it goes, the understanding discovers unsurpassable limits, whether this be the subject–object identity of the early Schelling, the contingencies of history of the middle period, or, in the later Schelling, the existence of reason itself, but these are not concepts (Hegel is thus far correct, concepts represent no real limit to thought); they are, rather, existential realities. For the early Schelling, an anticipation of the real shows itself in the symbolic and aesthetic patterns of experience, which always disclose more than reflective reason can ever comprehend; in the late Schelling, the real is not only an aesthetic experience, it is a religious experience, a revelation. The resistance of the real to idealization is at the heart of Schelling’s dispute with Hegel. To make the rational coextensive with the world, that is, to correlate logic or the symbolic with the whole of nature and culture, may in fact be an inevitable move for philosophy, which finds intelligibility everywhere it looks, structure that appears to be little more than an expression or exteriorization of the implicit logic of reason itself. But Hegel’s absolute idealism explains nothing, for the whole of the rational is not intelligible in terms of itself, it does not explain itself; as the brute fact of intelligibility, it is as absurd as it is meaningful.³ In the light of this fundamental antinomy of the existence of reason, the late Schelling regards logic as “negative,” a non-knowledge, a play of concepts, the significance of which remains opaque to philosophy.

The third Schellingian theme is contingency: the teleology of spirit is undergirded, qualified, and to some degree undercut by the formlessness of matter: older than order is accident, more basic than necessity is freedom. About this proto-existentialist/proto-materialist/proto-Marxist Schelling, much has been said.⁴ Schelling’s “irrationalism” can be overstated: without order and necessity, thought cannot exist, for the ordered, the ruled, and the necessary constitute the proper medium of thought, the warp and woof of the ideal. From his earliest rebellion against subjectivistic interpretations of transcendental philosophy, to his re-evaluation of negative philosophy at the end of his career, Schelling rejects any suggestion that ideality, however insufficiently explanatory, is illusion, virtual, a merely subjective synthesis. Ideality is one face of the absolute; it is not the whole, but neither is it merely reflective of “the hard-wiring” of the mind. The absolute manifests itself in the ideal to some degree and therefore order and necessity are undeniable on a certain level of experience. In the maximum reach of the understanding, every order is revealed to be in fact contingent, grounded in something “ruleless,” something out of which order has been brought but which is not itself ordered.

We see these three motifs, polarity, finitude, and contingency, in the early Schelling, especially in the nature-philosophy; we also see them at play in the middle Schelling, in the dialectic of ground and existence and the combustive interaction of the three potencies; and in the late Schelling, the motifs come to mature expression in the last version of the doctrine of the potencies and the distinction between negative and positive philosophy. That said, Schelling’s work can hardly be described as a continuous evolution of thought: a sea-change separates the later from the early Schelling. Schelling’s thought was transformed when he moved to Munich in 1806, whether this be because he came to a new appreciation for the Catholic Middle Ages (Laughland, 2007), or discovered the significance of Jacob Boehme for the question concerning nature (Fuhrmans, 1954; Brown, 1977), or had a religious experience (Horn, 1954/1997), or perhaps all three. But what does remain consistent between the later and the early Schelling is the refusal to follow the trajectory of early modernity and split spirit from nature. It is in this historical context that we must read the Freedom essay: Schelling attempts to resolve the modern philosophical problem of freedom by moving the discussion to a deeper level of analysis in which both freedom and determinism can be understood as essential moments in freedom’s experience of itself.

The early notion of nature as “visible spirit” (Schelling, 1797: 202) becomes, in the middle Schelling, “ground,” God’s dark other, which leaves its trace in the impenetrable and inexplicable reality of things, “the irreducible remainder” (der nie aufgehende Rest), never to be subsumed into a concept and frustrating reason’s every attempt at system (Schelling, 1809: 29). The Freedom essay is a continuation of nature-philosophy by other means: Schelling’s impulse – to bring freedom and nature within one comprehensive view – remains the same as in his first explorations of post-Fichtian metaphysics. For the middle Schelling, the opposition between freedom and nature is overcome when nature is no longer understood positivistically as a substance or a network of substances, but rather onto-dynamically as difference, non-being, potency, desire: “Nature in general is everything that lies beyond the absolute being of absolute identity” (Schelling, 1809: 28). Essential to this naturalization of freedom is the middle Schelling’s replacement of the Kantian notion of existence (position in space and time) with the neo-Oetingerian notion of life as spontaneous self-revelation.⁵ Freedom is the potentization of organic life, just as organism is the potentization of non-organic life, a perfection of the power of internal causality that is latent in the non-organic and first manifest in the lowest living organism. The archetype of both human freedom and organic life is the self-actualizing freedom of God.⁶ As image of God, nature is no mechanism but an evolving, self-moving life, the pinnacle of which is reached in man, who not only moves according to internal principles, but brings the dynamic of self-movement to its highest expression by authoring himself.

Although the absolute in itself, the unground, lacks nothing, the middle Schelling sometimes speaks of it as though it did, for what is brought about by the unground’s decision – creation, difference, consciousness – is understood after the 1809 personalist turn as a real increase in being. By the late philosophy of mythology and revelation, Schelling will change his view yet again and insist that God as a free and personal creator lacks nothing and does not depend upon creation to become personal. This is where we would do well to emphasize the tension (not the split) between Schelling’s identity-philosophy, which explores the impersonal and eternal self-sufficiency of the absolute, and the 1809 philosophy of freedom, with its breakthrough to the concept of personality. Identity-philosophy argues that, from the vantage point of the absolute, multiplicity, consciousness, and history are appearances produced by deficiencies in knowledge, degrees of separation from intellectual intuition: “All that is is, to the extent that it is, One: namely, it is the eternally self-same identity, the One that alone exists, and that therefore is all that can be known” (Schelling, 1804a: 153). In his middle period, Schelling argues, to the contrary, that difference is not an imperfection: the absolute is in process, giving birth to itself as a divine personality by means of duality, multiplicity, and history. The late Schelling returns to the assumption of the divine aseity characteristic of the identity-philosophy and corrects his theological “error” of ascribing historical development to God; in the same moment Schelling’s theology becomes less psychologically relevant. If we suspend the theological problems resulting from a God who begins imperfect and creates the world to perfect himself and, for a moment, follow Žižek in interpreting the theogony of the middle Schelling as a metapsychology, or better, a speculative psychology, a metaphysical analysis of the structure of personality by means of a projection of these structures onto a model of the absolute personality – for whatever else the middle Schelling is doing he is clearly also writing a psychology of the unconscious – we discover a narrative that anticipates not only Lacan and the resolution of the Oedipal complex in psychoanalysis but also the birth of the hero in analytical psychology: a being that begins in unconscious unity with the system that produces and initially sustains it, achieves personal consciousness, individuality, and freedom by dissociating from that system and establishing a conscious relationship to it.

Historical immanentism

German Idealism is often identified with the thesis of historical immanentism, the metanarrative that describes the history of being as a dialectical process through which God achieves consciousness of himself. The thesis is essential to the genesis of the notion of the unconscious, for it offered thinkers like Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann (among others less known) a speculative tableau upon which they could sketch a history of mind, which psychoanalysis and analytical psychology later “discover” coincides to a significant degree with the development of the human personality. We call the thesis “historical” because it breaks with modern (pre-Kantian) a-historical metaphysics and insists on the inclusion in philosophy of the material and cultural reality of world-history: not all times and places are metaphysically equivalent, for being itself has a history, which coincides with man’s changing understanding of it. We call the thesis “immanentist” because it subsumes God into history: God does not begin conscious, he becomes conscious of himself through the developing consciousness of man, which presupposes the entire trajectory of natural and cultural evolution. Historical immanentism identifies the divine and the human mind through the medium of history, which could either mean that philosophy now finds a metaphysical way of expressing the Christian dogma, that God becomes man, or, that God as the transcendent origin and destiny of being does not in fact exist – what Christianity means by God is nothing other than man, as Feuerbach puts it.

Historical immanentism is arguably the young Schelling’s invention (even though Hegel deserves full credit for developing the thesis into a working system), an invention which came to haunt Schelling, for as Hegel makes clear, it implies that there are no real contingencies in the world just as there are no real limits to reason.⁷ The late Schelling breaks with the thesis: the freedom of the individual, the real contingency of material and cultural history, and the finitude of reason, not only in the face of matter, but in the light of revealed religion, strike him as too high a price to pay for a system of nature and history. And yet historical immanentism (re-conceived as “negative philosophy”) remains for Schelling to the end of his career the only adequate system of philosophy – its inadequacy to reality grants him the decisive impetus he needs to transcend the boundary between philosophy and religion in the Philosophy of Revelation.

The thesis of historical immanentism is founded upon the presumption that a system must comprehend all things as a unity, not simply a collection; rather, everything in the system must be demonstrated to be necessary to the dramatic unfolding of the logical pattern. The unity of being cannot be static – this was the mistake of Spinozism – it must have the character of an event: all things, material, cultural, spiritual, must be conceived as moments in a developmental process. History cannot be merely a theatre of accidents and arbitrary acts of will; it can only be a logical development, a movement from a lower or primitive ontological position to a higher standpoint, which includes the lower within itself even as it overpasses it. The significance of the existence of the individual being as such disappears behind its mediating role in bringing the whole of being into actuality: the ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Tending the dark fire: the Boehmian notion of drive
• 3. The night-side of nature: the early Schellingian unconscious
• 4. The speculative psychology of dissociation: the later Schellingian unconscious
• 5. Schellingian libido theory
• Appendix A: The metaphysical foundations of Schellingian psychology
• Appendix B: The anthropology of Schelling’s Stuttgart seminars
• Bibliography
• Index