Abstract
This chapter tracks the development of the idea of the unconscious as it emerges from the tensions between Hegel’s and Schelling’s speculative philosophies. It then focuses on Schelling’s speculative unconscious as a precursor of psychological dissociationism and tracks its evolution, via Jung, into the post-structuralism of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
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Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 24.
- 2.
Ibid., 25.
- 3.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace, rev. Michael Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5.
- 4.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1.
- 5.
Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. 1, trans. William Coupland (London: Routledge, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1931), 28. Tilottama Rajan also points out the importance of German Idealism to the genesis of psychoanalysis: “[T]he history of nature in German idealism is the site where concepts such as inhibition, drive, archetype, ‘crisis,’ the primal scene of trauma, and the (im)possibility of remembering and working through this trauma to enlightenment, receive their earliest expression” (“‘The Abyss of the Past’: Psychoanalysis in Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815),” Romantic Circles (2008): https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/psychoanalysis/rajan/rajan.html).
- 6.
G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, Part I: Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 46.
- 7.
See, for example, Günter Gödde, “The Unconscious in the German Philosophy and Psychology of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Alison Stone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher, “Introduction,” in Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, ed. Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4ff.
- 8.
For these reasons, while I can only make brief references to psychoanalytic thinkers here I shall focus more on Jung, about whom much less has been written. For Jung’s importance to Deleuze—who placed Jung firmly in the tradition of the “differential unconscious” (Deleuze, “Leibniz Seminar” (29 April 1980): https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/54)—see Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2007); Gilbert Simondon also significantly develops Jung’s idea of individuation and credits him with discovering “affectivo-emotive themes” in myths, whose “quantum nature” fundamentally organizes human beings as higher organisms (Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, vol. 1, trans. Taylor Adkins [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020], 274). Jung could be seen as a “Romantic” thinker within a territory comprised of Romantic and Idealist thinking on the one hand, and on the other a psychology which culminates in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical potentiation of non-Freudian psychoanalysis. That Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of Jung did not fully understand his metapsychology is beyond my scope here, but merits serious study. I explore the Schelling-Jung connection(s) in my Romantic Metasubjectivity through Schelling and Jung: Rethinking the Romantic Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). By Jung’s “therapeutics of presence” I mean his tendency to render archetypes as ontotheologically self-present entities (Shadow, Anima-Animus, Wise Old Woman, etc.) in the interests of helping his patients (ibid., 18).
- 9.
F. A. Mesmer, Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans. George Bloch (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1980), 68.
- 10.
Ibid., 44, 101.
- 11.
Ibid., 56.
- 12.
Ibid., 81.
- 13.
Ibid., 46.
- 14.
Ibid., 67ff.
- 15.
Ibid., 124.
- 16.
Ibid., 103–4.
- 17.
Ibid., 112.
- 18.
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 51.
- 19.
Ibid., 39. For more detail see ibid., chap. 3.
- 20.
Ibid., 47.
- 21.
Ibid., 41.
- 22.
Ibid., 50–1 (my italics).
- 23.
Ibid., 44.
- 24.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 24.
- 25.
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 274.
- 26.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 129.
- 27.
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 77.
- 28.
Tilottama Rajan, “(In)digestible Material: Illness and Dialectic in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” in Cultures of Taste, Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 220.
- 29.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 303.
- 30.
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 17.
- 31.
David Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 195 n. 2.
- 32.
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 3 (trans. mod.).
- 33.
Ibid., 23 (trans. mod.; my italics).
- 34.
Ibid., 416.
- 35.
Ibid., 433.
- 36.
Rajan, “(In)digestible Material,” 231.
- 37.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 9–10.
- 38.
Ibid., 12, 15.
- 39.
Ibid., 12 (my italics).
- 40.
This is extended to Hegel’s discussion of the European mind, whose “self-conscious reason” “invades everything [alles antastet] in order to become present to itself therein” in the interests of mastering the world (Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 43). Antasten means to touch or contact but also to violate, offend, or impinge upon something. Petry, Wallace, and Miller sanitize this verb, but Inwood retains the word’s invasive nature.
- 41.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 102.
- 42.
Ibid., 35, 29–30 (my italics).
- 43.
Ibid., 36.
- 44.
Ibid., 84.
- 45.
Ibid., 85.
- 46.
Ibid., 88 (trans. mod.; my italics).
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid., 84.
- 49.
Ibid., 90.
- 50.
Ibid. This repressed writing, closely aligned with what comes to light through sickness, is analogous to what Jung articulates as the general economy of archetypal forces in the psyche. Despite his desire to construct an archetypal taxonomy of Shadow, Anima/Animus, etc., Jung ultimately admits there are “an indefinite number of archetypes representing situations” (C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966], 110; trans. mod.). “You will never be able to disentangle an archetype. It is always interwoven in a carpet of related ideas, which lead ever further toward other archetypal formations, which constantly overlap” (C.G. Jung, Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936–1941, trans. Ernst Falzeder [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014], 237). Jung goes further, describing archetypes as paradoxically both producers and products of experience (Jung, Two Essays, 95 n. 3), which lays the groundwork for a radically dissociationist, materialist psyche.
- 51.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 90.
- 52.
Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 304.
- 53.
Ibid., 276.
- 54.
Ibid., 314.
- 55.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 94. Almost without exception, in this text Hegel uses bewußtlosigkeit (“without consciousness,” unconscious in the sense that one is knocked out or in a coma) to describe the unconscious in terms of a lack of consciousness. Conversely, unbewußt denotes what is both more primordial and inaccessible to conscious processes.
- 56.
Ibid., 90.
- 57.
Ibid., 95.
- 58.
Ibid., 96.
- 59.
F. W. J. Schelling, “On the Nature of Philosophy as Science,” trans. Marcus Weigelt, in German Idealist Philosophy, ed. Rüdiger Bubner (London: Penguin, 1997), 210.
- 60.
Ibid., 215.
- 61.
F. W. J. Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 28.
- 62.
F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153ff.
- 63.
Fred Rush, “Schelling’s Critique of Hegel,” in Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays, ed. Lara Ostaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 224–5.
- 64.
Schelling, First Outline, 14.
- 65.
Just as Naturphilosophie is Schelling’s philosophical unconscious that “challenges systems to reveal what they eliminate,” the same is true for Hegel. See Iain Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), 21.
- 66.
Jason Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 17.
- 67.
Schelling, First Outline, 6.
- 68.
Ibid., 21n.
- 69.
Ibid., 28.
- 70.
Inhibition (Hemmung) is Schelling’s term for Nature’s self-limiting of its productivity and an expression of “[the] original diremption in Nature itself… that original antithesis in the heart of Nature, which does not… itself appear.” See Schelling, First Outline, 6, 205.
- 71.
Ibid., 16, 43n.
- 72.
For Jung, “the unconscious is Nature, which never deceives” (Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967], 62).
- 73.
C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 182 (trans. mod.).
- 74.
Schelling, First Outline, 35.
- 75.
Ibid., 24.
- 76.
F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 14.
- 77.
Ibid., 2.
- 78.
Ibid., 25–7.
- 79.
Ibid., 204.
- 80.
Ibid.
- 81.
Ibid., 27.
- 82.
Ibid.
- 83.
Ibid., 22. This uneasy bond between identical and synthetic propositions, of course, recapitulates the tenuous connection between idealism and the Naturphilosophie.
- 84.
Ibid., 232.
- 85.
Ibid., 233.
- 86.
Indeed, roughly twenty years later, in “On the Nature of Philosophy as Science” (1821), Schelling recasts the System’s intellectual intuition as ecstasy: a fundamentally dissociative experience of the absolute subject as the organizational principle of knowledge. In this ecstatic state, the ego “is placed outside itself… [It must] give up its place, it must be placed outside itself, as something that no longer exists” (“On the Nature,” 228).
- 87.
F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 62.
- 88.
Ibid., 28.
- 89.
Ibid.
- 90.
Ibid., 51.
- 91.
Ibid., 59.
- 92.
Schelling writes that “All evolution presupposes involution.” F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 83.
- 93.
Against the dynamic of this tension, Peter Dews rightly criticizes Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Schelling in The Indivisible Remainder (1996), which interpolates an inescapable distance between an “impenetrable-inert” ground and an essentially separated subject. This reading misses the Ungrund’s role as a fundamentally unknowable substratum that allows for the reconciliatory horizon of the Freedom essay (and which Schelling explains elsewhere as copular logic). See Peter Dews, “The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Žižek’s Misreading of Schelling,” in After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Michael O’Driscoll (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 186–8.
- 94.
Schelling, Ages, x.
- 95.
Unavailable to Freud and Lacan, this cosmologization is finely expressed by the Jungian unconscious. We have seen that Jung understands the unconscious as consubstantial with Nature, and his later (post-WWII) thinking about the archetype develops its specifically nonhuman material, or “psychoid” aspect. Using the analogy of a light spectrum, the archetype exists on both a physiological “psychic infra-red” pole (in which it recedes into the “chemical and physical conditions” of the organism) and a “psychic ultra-violet,” or a pole that manifests psychically but cannot be designated with certainty as psychic (Jung, Structure and Dynamics, 215f.). Jung’s analogy between the archetype’s formation and “the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystal formation in the mother liquid without having a material existence of its own” (C. G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], 79) is particularly illuminating.
- 96.
Sean McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 141.
- 97.
Rajan, “‘The Abyss of the Past’.”
- 98.
Schelling, Ages, 2, 71–2.
- 99.
Schelling’s dialectic is not Hegelian dialectic. Edward Beach distinguishes between Aufhebungsdialektik (Hegelian sublation as a logical progression of the Concept) and Erzeugungsdialektik (a Schellingian dialectic of production that explores the will underpinning rational thought, based on experience beyond abstract logic). See Edward Beach, The Potencies of God(s): Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 84–5.
- 100.
Schelling, Ages, xxxvi.
- 101.
Ibid.
- 102.
Ibid., 32.
- 103.
Ibid., 9.
- 104.
Ibid., 34.
- 105.
Ibid., 56.
- 106.
Ibid., 59.
- 107.
Ibid., 36.
- 108.
Ibid., 28.
- 109.
Ibid., 69f.
- 110.
Ibid., 70.
- 111.
Ibid., xxxvi.
- 112.
Although Jung was ambivalent about countertransference and its possible outcomes, this dynamic is nevertheless integral to what Jung called the transcendent function, or the energic tension between analyst and analysand that creates new knowledge. See Jung, Structure and Dynamics, 90.
- 113.
Schelling, On the History, 153.
- 114.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69.
- 115.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 362.
- 116.
Deleuze, however, read and cited Schelling extensively in his own work; for example, in Difference and Repetition, contra Hegel, he credits Schelling with being a true thinker of powers—one who, with the Potenzenlehre, “brings difference out of the night of the Identical, and with finer, more varied and more terrifying flashes of lightning than those of contradiction: with progressivity” in the form of a “differential calculus adequate to the dialectic” (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994]), 191.
- 117.
Schelling, On the History, 144.
- 118.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 139.
- 119.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx.
- 120.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 292.
- 121.
Here Deleuze and Guattari are much closer not only to Jungian libido as “neutral energy” but also to Jung’s conception of a non-mechanistic, energic libido based on the dynamic relations between substances (Jung, Structure and Dynamics, 4). Yet where Jung designates libido as psychic energy and (problematically) resists its physicalization (ibid., 7), Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines traverse the organic and inorganic domains: “We are in fluxes, we are not people facing objects” (“Interview on Anti-Oedipus with Raymond Bellour,” in Gilles Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, trans. Ames Hodges [South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2020], 201).
- 122.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 26–7.
- 123.
See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 108, 317 n. 17.
- 124.
Jung, Two Essays, 128.
- 125.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 75.
- 126.
Ibid., 88.
- 127.
Ibid., 73.
- 128.
Ibid., 345.
- 129.
Ibid., 9, 11.
- 130.
Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 31.
- 131.
Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 32–3.
- 132.
“So far I have found no fixed or precisely determined center in the unconscious, and I do not believe such a thing exists… Like Nature, so man strives to express himself, and the self fulfils this dream of wholeness. It is therefore a purely ideal center” (C.G. Jung, “Talks with Miguel Serrano: 1959,” in C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, ed. William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 394 [trans. mod.; my italics]).
- 133.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 109.
- 134.
Ibid., 351.
- 135.
Ibid., 308.
- 136.
Ibid., 54.
- 137.
Ibid., 5.
- 138.
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Grant (London: Continuum, 2004), 104.
- 139.
Ibid., 19, 94.
- 140.
Ibid., 18, 28.
- 141.
Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 13.
- 142.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, rev. ed., trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 102.
- 143.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.
- 144.
Ibid., 63.
- 145.
Ibid., 22, 85.
- 146.
“Is it not highly likely that [our minds are] to some extent, perhaps a large extent, influenced by hyperobjects?” (Ibid., 85). This said, it is nothing short of puzzling that Morton insists on positioning Freud—a consummately anthropocentric thinker—as a “humiliator of the human following Copernicus and Darwin” who “displaces the human from the very center of psychic activity” (ibid., 16).
- 147.
Ibid., 2.
- 148.
“The Oldest Program Toward a System in German Idealism,” trans. David Krell, in The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 25–6.
- 149.
See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations, 26 (trans. mod.).
- 150.
C. Jung and W. Pauli, Atom and Archetype: The Jung/Pauli Letters, 1932–1958, ed. C.A. Meier (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 87.
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Barentsen, G. (2023). Psychoanalysis. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_11
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