Romantic Metasubjectivity Through Schelling and Jung

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Titles in this series:

Humanizing Evil
Psychoanalytic, philosophical and clinical perspectives
Edited by Ronald C Naso and Jon Mills

Inventing God
Psychology of belief and the rise of secular spirituality
Jon Mills

Jung’s Ethics
Moral psychology and his cure of souls
Dan Merkur, Edited by Jon Mills

Temporality and Shame

Perspectives from psychoanalysis and philosophy
Edited by Ladson Hinton and Hessel Willemsen

Progress in Psychoanalysis
Envisioning the future of the profession
Edited by Steven D. Axelrod, Ronald C. Naso and Larry M. Rosenberg

Lacan on Psychosis
From theory to praxis
Edited by Jon Mills and David L. Downing

Ethics and Attachment

How we make moral judgments
Aner Govrin

Jung and Philosophy

Edited by Jon Mills

Innovations in Psychoanalysis:
Originality, development, progress
Edited by Aner Govrin and Jon Mills

Holism
Possibilities and problems
Edited by Christian McMillan, Roderick Main and David Henderson
Romantic Metasubjectivity
through Schelling and Jung

Rethinking the Romantic Subject

Gord Barentsen
First published 2020
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Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of abbreviations xi

Introduction: a word to the “Why”s 1

Why Romanticism? 3
Why Schelling? The absolute subject, or the logic of the third 10
Why Jung? Anatomy of a difference 16
Jung and the resistance to theory 27

1 A first outline of Romantic metasubjectivity 41

Schelling’s Naturphilosophie: inhibition and “unnatural nature” 43
Freud and Jung: borders and border zones 50
Freud: the pleasure principle…and beyond 57
Inter-section: Deleuze’s perversion of libido 62
Jung: analytical psychology, Weltanschauung,
and the fluidity of Being 65

2 The Romantic metasubjective unconscious: dissociation,

historicity, trauma 79
Schelling’s actant: derangement, drive, disease 85
Jung’s archetype: dissociation 91
The grammatology of Being 100

3 Romantic metasubjectivity: experience 109

On the “nature” of “philosophy” as “science” 112
The System of Transcendental Idealism:
self-consciousness and its discontent 121
Jung and synchronicity 130
viii Contents

4 Romantic metasubjectivity: individuation 143

Schelling’s Freedom essay: the Ungrund
and the emergence of personality 147
Evil and the dialectic of production 150
Excursus: Hölderlin and the rhythm of Romantic ontology 156
Schelling’s Ages of the World (1815): the work of yearning 161
The movement of the potencies 165
Jung, individuation and the self 172

5 Romantic myth-subjectivity: Wordsworth and Shelley 189

The 1799 Prelude: potency, amplification 193
The 1805 Prelude: the burden of the unnatural self 201
Prometheus Unbound: the traumatic awakening
of Romantic metasubjectivity 215

6 Conclusion: Romantic meth-subjectivity 239

Answer to Job: even God must individuate 241
The darkness of obligation 248
Breaking Bad: crystal clear morality 252

Appendix A: Disentangling Romantic metasubjectivity 261

Appendix B: Situating Romantic metasubjectivity 265
Appendix C: Self and archetype 269
Bibliography 271
Index 289
Acknowledgements

I begin as Schelling and Jung both have done – by returning to the past. At
York University, I thank Ian Balfour for stoking a strong enthusiasm for
Romanticism many moons ago. Ted Goossen’s honesty and encouragement
at an early stage helped build my momentum toward graduate school (even
though I didn’t specialise in Asian religions and learn Sanskrit). At Western
University, first and foremost, I must thank my supervisors Joel Faflak
and Tilottama Rajan – scholars, colleagues, and friends who demonstrated
to me time and again integrity, understanding, and seemingly infinite
patience – sometimes in the face of the very worst from others. Their
generosity and shared sense of intellectual adventure put them in a class
of their own. Steven Bruhm and Kim Solga also deserve mention as two
enthusiastic and talented lecturers who helped me develop personally and
professionally. Colleagues Jeff King and Christopher Bundock provided
me with guidance and friendship during arduous periods of writing. I also
express my gratitude to the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges, and
Universities, which awarded me two Ontario Graduate Scholarships, and
to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities for awarding me a Mary Routledge
Fellowship.
Other scholars and writers deserve mention for their generosity. Iain
Hamilton Grant provided me with a copy of his unpublished translation
of Schelling’s On The World Soul; Jung’s grandson Andreas Jung lent me
his personal copy of Jung’s Bibliothek-Katalog for my research; and Joan
Steigerwald made her draft work on degeneration available to me. Joe
Hughes and Justin Clemens gave me a very warm welcome in Melbourne,
Australia, for which I am also deeply grateful.
On the family side of things, I am deeply grateful for the support of
my brother David Barentsen; this book is also dedicated to Willem (Bill)
x Acknowledgements

and Corre Barentsen, as well as my parents Nona and Stan, all four of
whom understood the value of a good education and would have been
proud. In Australia, Seven reminded me at all the right times – and as
only a feline can – of the importance of nonhuman communication.
And last, but absolutely farthest from least…this is for my wife Carolyn,
whose understanding, encouragement, patience, and love are the closest of
anything in this world to the unconditioned.

Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muß man erhinken.

List of abbreviations

Full information for abbreviated works can be found in the Bibliography.

AF: Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments (in Philosophical Fragments

[1798–1800])
Ages: Schelling, Ages of the World (1815)
Beyond: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
CF: Schlegel, Critical Fragments (in Philosophical Fragments
[1798–1800])
DR: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968)
FO: Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature
(1799)
Freedom: Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of
Human Freedom (1809)
GPP: Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin
Lectures (1841)
HCI: Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy
of Mythology (1842)
Ideas: Schlegel, Ideas (in Philosophical Fragments [1798–1800])
Notes: Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia (1798–1799)
“NPS”: Schelling, “On the Nature of Philosophy as Science” (1821)
STI: Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800)
Symbols: Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1911–1912/1952)
Introduction
A word to the “Why”s

There is a poetry whose essence is the relation between ideal and

real, and which should therefore, following philosophical language,
be called transcendental poetry. […] [T]his poetry should describe
itself, and be always and everywhere poetry and the poetry of poetry.
(Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment #238; my trans.)

The highest task of education is […] to be at the same time the Self of
one’s self. Accordingly, the less strange is our lack of full understanding
and feeling for others. (Novalis, Miscellaneous Remarks #28; my trans.)

This book develops Romantic metasubjectivity as a model of identity

more faithful to the full compass of Romantic thinking about the nature
of the human being than what currently prevails in criticism. This body of
Romantic criticism tends to be dominated on the one hand by psychoanalysis,
from which it cherry-picks some concepts and ignores others; on the other
hand, it often takes up both deconstruction and poststructuralist theory
to articulate the Romantic subject as either a linguistic phenomenon or
simply a locus of difference without a unified “I.” One prime example
of this paradigm is the Lacanian mirror-stage whereby the child “self-
alienates,” identifying with an image of itself “seemingly predestined” to
“primordially” inaugurate its membership in the Symbolic order (“The
Mirror Stage” 76). But this does not account for how the child recognises
the image as its own so as to self-alienate. How does one not know oneself
unless one “has oneself” on some level as a basis of comparison? One
cannot self-alienate without a prior acquaintance with something as “self”
before the event of alienation. In contrast, Romantic metasubjectivity
conceives human identity as neither an after-effect of discourse or the
2 Introduction

movements of difference, nor as an essentialised “I” that is or can be made

fully present to itself. That is, Romantic metasubjectivity points directly to
the logical impossibility of the merely discursive construction of selfhood
while offering a more sophisticated alternative to this model.
Romantic metasubjectivity is predicated on what I call the silent
intellectual partnership between the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling
(1775–1854) and the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–
1961).1 Jung likely understood Schelling mostly second-hand from Eduard
von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), which profoundly
influenced many psychologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (Jung, Memories 101). However, Jung’s Bibliothek-Katalog, a
list of his library contents at the time of his death in 1961, indicates that
Jung owned two later volumes of Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke on the
Philosophy of Mythology (1856–1857) and the Treatise on the Deities of
Samothrace (1815), which points to an interest in Schelling’s later thinking
on mythology (whose specific connections with analytical psychology merit
an independent study). Irrespective of Jung’s scant first-hand knowledge
of Schelling, the remarkable detail with which Schellingian philosophy
and analytical psychology articulate the same dynamics suggests that
their affinities are arguably far more significant than the oft-repeated
connections to Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer which constitute
much orthodox Jungian intellectual history (indeed, that Jung did not see
Schelling as particularly influential in his own work lends weight to what
Jung might have called a shared archetypal constellation of thought). Thus,
I conceive this silent partnership as an intellectual countertransference
between metaphysics and metapsychology wherein one often addresses the
blindness of the other; to use a Schellingian phrase I will explore below,
Schelling and Jung are questioning and answering beings to each other.
In this sense, Romantic metasubjectivity takes up Henri Ellenberger’s
compelling but uncorroborated position that “Romantic philosophy and
the Philosophy of Nature” are among Jung’s most important intellectual
sources, as well as Werner Leibbrand’s provocative but hitherto largely
unexplored argument that “Jung’s system cannot be conceived without
Schelling’s philosophy” (qtd. in Ellenberger 728).
It is an irony of intellectual history that both Schelling (who was
often seen as little more than a footnote in a history of German Idealism
venerating Fichte and Hegel) and Jung (who for many years remained in
the shadow of Freud) ultimately have more to tell us about Romanticism’s
 Introduction 3

thinking on the human being than their counterparts. Ironic, too, that both
Schelling and Jung suffered from the slings and arrows of political (mis)
fortune which favoured their intellectual foils. Hegel’s 1818 appointment to
the University of Berlin sidelined Schelling’s thought, cementing Hegelian
philosophy in Prussia until at least 1841 (Beiser, Hegel 307ff), when
Schelling was finally called in to fill in the chair left vacant by Hegel’s
death in 1831 (although Schelling’s lectures made far less of an impact
than his predecessor’s). Jung fared worse: all too successfully smeared by
Freud’s inner circle and variously accused of mysticism, anti-Semitism, and
Nazism, after his “defection” from psychoanalysis circa 1912 a tradition
of intellectual ostracism began which would see his works shunned (if
not slandered) by Derrida, Roudinesco, and many others in the Tel Quel
years after World War Two.2 Ironically, those who claimed to be sensitive
to the nuances of language and close reading of theoretical works served
an oppressive intellectual politics which prevented them from applying the
same balanced scrutiny to Jung, whose thought has been largely denied
the sensitive, intelligent engagement which psychoanalysis has enjoyed for
decades.3 And when David Simpson writes that “the psychoanalytic model
is both a symptom of and a solution to the dramas of subjectivity and self-
consciousness that figure so prominently in Romantic writing” (19), he is
referring to the critical hegemony of psychoanalysis in Romantic criticism
which has persisted largely unchallenged until relatively recently. Such a
momentous partnership between Schelling and Jung is bound to raise some
eyebrows and pose some important first questions, which are the focus of
this Introduction: why focus on Romanticism as the territory for this model
of human identity? Why is Schelling such an important precursor? And
why is Jung so crucial to developing its specifically psychological valency?

Why Romanticism?
German Romanticism’s emergence from, and challenges to, German
Idealism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries form a rich
and complicated intellectual history; significant debate exists over the
exact nature of their relationship, and particularly over the significance
of philosophies of subjectivity at different points in Romanticism’s
development. Nevertheless, it can be argued as a general principle of
Romanticism that, contrary to Idealism’s foundationalist desire for first
principles, subjectivity was considered “a derivative phenomenon that
4 Introduction

only becomes accessible to itself under a condition or presupposition […]

beyond its control. […] [S]elf-consciousness manifests an identity that it
cannot represent as such” (Frank, “What Is Early German Romanticism?”
18, 19). Andrew Bowie expands on this crucial distinction:

The division that can be made between Idealist and Romantic thinking
depends upon the extent to which each thinks it possible to restore
unity to what the modern world increasingly separates. In the main
the Idealist response to the divisions in modernity is to seek new
philosophical foundations on the basis of the Cartesian and Kantian
conception of the founding role of self-consciousness. For Idealism,
what philosophy can analyse in the activity of consciousness is a higher
form of the intelligibility present in nature, so that the task of philosophy
is to show how our thinking is the key to the inherent intelligibility of
things. The essence of the Romantic response, on the other hand, is a
realization that, while it must play a vital role in a modern conception
of philosophy, the activity of consciousness is never fully transparent to
itself. It can therefore never be finally incorporated into a philosophical
system, because what we can consciously know of ourselves does not
exhaust what we are. (Aesthetics and Subjectivity 63)

As Tilottama Rajan puts it, Idealism “denotes a specifically philosophical

movement committed to dialectical totalisation, identity, and system” where
Romanticism is “the larger literary-cum-philosophical context within
which Idealism emerges as no more than an ‘idea’ continually put under
erasure by the exposure of Spirit to its body” (“Introduction” 14 n. 9). Of
course, beyond this fundamental difference there are nuanced differences
within Romanticism: for example, Rajan points out the ways in which
German Romantic thought puts English Romantic thinking and poetry
under theoretical analysis to “[reveal] a far greater uneasiness about the
limits of poetic Idealism than might appear from the theoretical statements
of the [English] poets themselves” (Dark Interpreter 28–29). Reading the
breadth of Schelling’s and Jung’s thinking discerns a liminality between
these two paradigms which makes them neither “Idealist” nor “Romantic”
thinkers; to do justice to the multivalence of these complicated thinkers,
one must read the different Idealist or Romantic intensities existing at
different moments in their oeuvres. Idealism and Romanticism are not in
place but in play (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 122) through a constitutive