Many Anglophone readers will first encounter the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) in the work of another German writer, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In the opening pages of his essay on ‘Das Unheimliche’ [The ‘Uncanny’] (1919), Freud quotes Daniel Sanders (1819–1897) quoting Schelling’s Philosophie der Mythologie (1842), in an effort to define the concept of the ‘uncanny ’: ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (GW 12: 234; SE 17: 224). This partial and edited quotation, taken out of context from Schelling’s lectures, turns into the leitmotif in Freud’s essay for the return of the repressed. 1 It offers an opportune point at which to begin thinking about Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British literature, in which the name of Schelling is also a kind of uncanny presence.
The situation of this passage is taken doubly out of context, first by Sanders and then by Freud. Schelling is dealing with the Homeric hymns , which he figures as the moment of the emergence of ‘civilised’ life out of the realm of myth:
That clear sky which hovers above the Homeric poems, that ether which arches over Homer’s world, could not have covered Greece until the dark and darkening force of that uncanny principle that dominated earlier religions had been reduced to the Mysteries (all things are called uncanny which should have remained secret, hidden and latent, but which have come to light). (SW II.2, 649; translation Vidler 1992: 26–27)
We recognise here two currents of Victorian classicism, originally borrowed from German hermeneutic traditions: on the one hand, the idea that the Homeric age, or more generally the Greek civilisation this stands for, augurs ‘civilisation’, as it does for a William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) or Matthew Arnold (1822–1888); and on the other, in this ‘dark and darkening force’, the chthonian classicism of a Walter Pater (1839–1894). In this later sense, Schelling suggests that civilisation is undercut by what it represses in order to found itself as such. The foundation is the ground—das Grund—but the uncanny posited here by Schelling is the unground— das Ungrund ; this concept lies at the origin and limit of Schelling’s attempt to reply to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), and to rethink his own earlier philosophy from the Freiheitsschrift (1809) onwards.
Freud ’s brief citation offers both a model and a metaphor for Schelling’s British reception. The model is of the partial encounter, itself deferred, which encompasses not only our own engagements with Schelling, but also many of the encounters during the nineteenth century. While he was widely read by a number of influential thinkers during the period, Schelling was less frequently named openly in published British literature from the 1830s onwards. As a consequence, we find that Schelling’s influence is often discerned diffusely. The model therefore also gives us a metaphor: the name ‘Schelling’ is itself unheimlich , since what is deferred (the open and direct statement of ‘obligations’ or influence) is a presence eluding presence, so that the explicit situation of later nineteenth century thought in relation to Schelling as its precursor is displaced. This book will show the way in which the name of Schelling reverberates throughout the nineteenth century, discovered in unhomely and occasionally untimely situations, and often displaced onto other more familiar figures. As such, this book is about not only the reception of Schelling, but the sense in which such a reception is often heard as a kind of uncanny echo.
Uncanny Coincidences: Reading Coleridge Reading Schelling
This book proposes do for Schelling what René Wellek (1903–1995) did for Kant : establish a central place in the history of nineteenth-century British intellectual life. While the importance of the role played by Schelling in Samuel Taylor Coleridge ’s (1772–1834) intellectual development has long been acknowledged, no book has yet examined Schelling’s reception throughout the period of the nineteenth century. But in order to speak about Schelling’s British reception, it is important, from the outset, to understand the privileged place of Coleridge, and specifically his Biographia Literaria (1817), in this narrative. 2 In this next section, I plan to read the passages of the Biographia in which he discusses Schelling slowly and patiently, in order to follow closely the rhetorical moves through which Coleridge sought to position himself in relation to his German precursor.
It was in the Biographia Literaria that Coleridge made clear the intellectual ‘obligations’ he owed, or felt he owed, towards Schelling. It was a move that served to promote the name of Schelling to the attention of a wider British public. Although the Biographia did not, in fact, mark Schelling’s first naming in British literature, and while Coleridge was not, chronologically speaking, the first British writer to feel his influence (as we shall see in Chapter 2), the text nevertheless remains an essential starting point for thinking through Schelling’s reception in nineteenth-century British literature. It is so for two reasons: firstly, owing to Coleridge’s immense importance as a ‘transmitter’ of Schelling’s ideas; secondly, owing to the later notoriety of Schelling’s misuse in the text itself. This latter point refers to the text’s afterlife: in 1834, a few months after Coleridge’s death, Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) published an essay outing Coleridge’s extensive ‘borrowing’ from Schelling: ‘This was a barefaced plagiarism , which could in prudence have been risked only by relying too much upon the slight knowledge of German literature in this country, and especially of that section of German literature’ (2003: 292). The ensuing controversy (dealt with in Chapter 4) would lend to the name of Schelling a notoriety that in some way came to frame many of the subsequent British engagements across the century. Thus, Coleridge’s text may be characterised as the Urszene , the primal scene for thinking through Schelling’s British reception; it was primal, both in the sense that it became originary for much of the British literary imaginary that followed, and in the sense of it being a scene of repression. From this point onwards, Schelling necessarily comes to figure as an uncanny presence.
The name ‘Schelling’ first enters in Chapter 9 of the Biographia , which describes Coleridge ’s influences from the German idealist tradition. Naming Schelling, Coleridge remarks that when reading his texts for the first time he discovered a ‘genial coincidence’ of their thoughts (1984: 1: 160). But in point of fact, at this, the moment of his first naming, Schelling is already uncanny , a figure of return. Six paragraphs earlier, he had appeared in the text, as ‘a contemporary writer of the Continent’ (1984: 1: 147). Moreover, in point of fact, even this unnamed figure was a revenant, since he had been introduced even before this in the headnote to Chapter 9, announcing that what followed would deal with Coleridge’s ‘obligations to Schelling’ (1984: 1: 140). The headnote, a kind of parergonal supplement to the text, not only assists the reader in navigating the body of the argument, but prefaces it, directing the reader towards a ‘proper’ reading of the text. In this sense, Schelling’s introduction in the body of the text as ‘a contemporary writer of the Continent’ is all the more remarkable: such a nomination is virtual anonymity given the plethora of names it could refer to, and so the fact that Coleridge refuses Schelling’s name is to some degree a refusal, perhaps even a kind of wilful denial, a Verneinung [negation] of the ‘obligation’ owed. This ‘obligation’, a ‘binding’ (OED, ‘obligation’, n.), is a question of debt, originating from legal lexicon (from Latin ligāre). And all of this must also be contextualised alongside the fact that while the headnote constitutes Schelling’s first naming, it does not constitute his first appearance in the text; approximately forty percent of the preceding chapter, in which Schelling himself does not appear as such, was an unacknowledged translation from his System des transcendentalen Idealismus [System of Transcendental Idealism] (1800).
Three spectres of Schelling before we arrive at Schelling himself. Let us proceed, however, with the penultimate penumbra, and Coleridge’s introduct...