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The question concerning metaphysics:a Schellingian intervention in analyticalpsychologySean McGratha

a Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NLA1C 5S7, CanadaPublished online: 12 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Sean McGrath (2014) The question concerning metaphysics: a Schellingianintervention in analytical psychology, International Journal of Jungian Studies, 6:1, 23-51, DOI:10.1080/19409052.2013.795183

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The question concerning metaphysics: a Schellingian intervention inanalytical psychology

Sean McGrath*

Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL A1C 5S7, Canada

(Received 28 August 2012; final version received 22 March 2013)

Schelling is the least understood of the major German philosophers. His work hasa clearly demonstrable influence on the late nineteenth-century psychologies ofthe unconscious that were a decisive influence on both Freud and Jung. Where themature Freudian metapsychology is a systematic effort to de-Romanticize theunconscious, purging it of the characteristic Schellingian themes of transcen-dence, teleology, and theology, Jung goes in the opposite direction: toward apsychology of transcendence, with cosmological and religious implications. Thismakes Schellingian psychology a natural ally to analytical psychology. But toexploit this hitherto neglected resource, Jungians must overcome Jung’s antipathyfor metaphysics.

Keywords: Schelling; analytical psychology; German Idealism; metaphysics;philosophy; Giegerich; Hegel

It is surprising that the work of Friedrich Schelling (1775�1854) is not better known

to scholars of analytical psychology.1 The early Schelling went further than any other

post-Kantian thinker in conceiving mind and matter as two sides of one absolute

reality � in other words, as unus mundus. For Schelling, mind and matter are

alternative manifestations of a single, ultimately ineffable, reality. The absolute is

unknowable, not because we can only know phenomena (Schelling, like Fichte and

Hegel, rejects the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction), but because it

transcends human comprehension. What we do know about it � through introspec-

tion, metaphysics, science, and, for the early Schelling, art, for the later Schelling,

mythology and revelation � can never be fully elaborated in concepts or in a single

definitive system. In the context of developing this theory, which had an enormous

impact on his generation (it was the younger Hegel’s decisive influence), Schelling

formulated a concept of the unconscious that became a source for the dynamic

psychologies of C.G. Carus and Gustav Fechner, and through them, a foundation for

Freud and Jung.

No doubt inspired by his intense Pietist upbringing, particularly the ‘speculative

Pietist’ idea of creation as theophany, the self-manifestation of the divine,2 the young

Schelling fused neo-Platonic cosmology with transcendental philosophy and

formulated a holistic and dynamic ontology of nature in which subjectivity is not

sundered from physical nature: subjectivity is rather an experience of nature become

conscious of itself. Consequently, a stratum of unconsciousness remains as the

*Email: sjoseph.mcgrath@gmail.com

International Journal of Jungian Studies, 2014

Vol. 6, No. 1, 23�51, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2013.795183

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foundation of the conscious life of the subject, a natural ground that connects the life

of the soul with the soul of the world (anima mundi), and through the latter, with the

inner life of non-human nature. The counter-polar drives that are responsible for

physical manifestation as such � an infinite drive toward self-expansion held in check

by a centripetal, egoistical drive toward individuation � are also at the heart of

subjectivity; thus the early Schelling’s theory of how nature can be infinitely

productive is also a theory of consciousness. The later Schelling moved more directlyinto psychodynamic terrain, developing a theory of personality as the product of

contesting drives: at the foundation of the personality is a will to isolation, interiority

and egoism (der dunkle Grund), which contracts into itself and makes possible an

expansive will to communion, exteriority and altruism (der Verstand). Several

scholars of German Idealism have shown the genealogical connection between

Schelling’s ideas and psychoanalysis.3 And yet until very recently, researchers of

analytical psychology have overlooked Schelling and his relation to Jung.4

In the following paper, I claim that Schelling’s speculative empiricism better

preserves certain Jungian ‘values’ than does Hegel’s dialectical idealism � a claim in

open tension with Wolfgang Giegerich’s ‘psychology as the discipline of interiority’.

This resonance is not only because of Schelling’s indirect but no less powerful

historical influence on Jung (through figures such as C.G. Carus, Schelling’s student,

Victor Cousin, who was a decisive influence on Pierre Janet, and Eduard van

Hartmann). In many places in his Collected Works, Jung displays what I call a

Schellingian style of thinking: a qualified respect for reason that is alwayscounterbalanced by a lively feeling for the mystery at the heart of all things, a

principled affirmation of the irreducible uniqueness of the individual human soul,

and a sense for nature as excessively meaningful, in no way proportionate to our

conceptual schemata. The organic affinity between Schellingian thought and Jung is

the reason for a certain dissonance between analytical psychology and Hegel, a

dissonance that comes to expression in Slavoj Zizek’s critical remarks about Jung

(Zizek being a left-Hegelian and a Lacanian)5 and Giegerich’s polemics with classical

Jungianism (Giegerich being a right-Hegelian and a post-Jungian).6

To put it more directly, a Schellingian reading of Jung preserves the sense for

transcendence that is suggested in certain passages of Jung, an exteriority to psychic

life and therefore to psychology as such which Giegerich has explicitly denied.7 The

transcendent dimension, which I will order under the headings the natural, the

personal, and the divine (three ecstasies at the core of Schellingian thought), is not so

much proven or demonstrated by Jung as left open by the antinomian nature of

Jung’s doctrine of the opposites. Schelling helps us to see that non-dialectical

polarity, a doctrine of real opposition (Platonic rather than Hegelian polarity), isnecessary to maintaining a living sense for transcendence, exteriority and infinity. In

short, aporia � unresolved paradox, or real polarity � is not necessarily a problem

that calls for a logical solution.

A thorough treatment of the topic of Schelling and Jung, however, is the subject

for a monograph. In this paper, I can only give a general overview of basic tendencies

in Schellingian thought that are of relevance for analytical psychology, reserving for

a later paper a more specific elaboration of the psychoanalytical significance of

Schelling’s speculative empiricism. This somewhat non-systematic way of proceeding

is dictated by the nature of the texts in question. Unlike Hegel, Schelling never

created a grand system; in fact, he created at least four systems, with ambiguous if

not contradictory relations among them.8 One ought not to speak of Schelling’s

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philosophy, but rather of a Schellingian style of philosophizing.9 Approached in this

schematic way, Schelling’s relevance for contemporary psychoanalysis comes into

sharp focus around a set of basic approaches Schelling takes to certain central

philosophical problems in German Idealism.There is, first of all, Schelling’s revisionist and fallibilist approach to metaphysics.

Breaking with the one-sidedness and foundationalism of modern philosophy, and

rejecting the false dichotomy of either continental rationalism or English empiricism,

Schelling approaches metaphysics as a fusion of a priori speculation and experience.

Schellingian metaphysics ventures the most coherent, the most complete, and the

most aesthetically satisfying account of reality in the light of those puzzling features

of experience which the thinker decides are most in need of an explanation.10 The

requirements of logic and rational coherence are held in check by the alwayssurprising nature of the real. A non-foundational, exploratory, and fallibilist

metaphysics goes some way toward addressing Jung’s hesitancy to risk metaphysical

answers to the undeniably metaphysical questions he not infrequently raises.

Secondly, there is Schelling’s sense for what Levinas calls ‘infinity’ � the otherness

of the real, which forever disrupts the sameness of the ideal. From 1804 on, after

experimenting with a thorough-going apriorism in philosophy (the system of

Identitatsphilosophie), which he soon found wanting, Schelling insisted on the

absolute exteriority of the real to the ideal � an exteriority that renders any closedsystem of philosophy (even his own early attempts at the same) suspect, merely

negative, open to disruption by the real, whether this be ‘the irreducible remainder’

of the material density of existing things, which is never subsumed by our concepts

(the exteriority of nature), or the ethical confrontation with the alterity of the existing

individual human being (the exteriority of the person), or the wholly unfathomable

revelations of God in history (the exteriority of the divine).

This speculative empiricism is the heart of Schelling’s critique of Hegel, whom

Schelling believed had achieved totality and systematicity at the expense of the real.In Hegel, reason idealizes the real, replaces the messy domain of facts with an

ordered series of essences and sacrifices adequacy for coherence. Negative

philosophy is not, however, arbitrary: in it reason follows its own immanent logic,

but for all that remains no less inured to the real. Only the fearless advance of

metaphysical questioning, the refusal to silence the question, Why is there something

rather than nothing? Why is there reason and logic in the first place? � only this

could open reason to the outside upon which it depended. That the task of

metaphysics cannot reach a definitive end (there will always be something outside thesystem which eludes explanation) is no reason not to venture it. The third

characteristic of Schellingian style, then, is the refusal to accept any limitation on

the reach of questioning, even if the attainment of answers is uncertain.

What follows is neither a fully developed exposition of Schelling’s contribution to

psychology nor a systematic critique of Giegerich, but a Schellingian intervention in

recent discussions concerning Jung and German philosophy. But first, and by way of

introduction, let us look briefly at one of Jung’s rare references to Schelling.

1. Jung on Schelling

Although Schelling is by far the most significant theoretician of the unconscious

among the classical German philosophers, Jung’s references to Schelling are far fewer

than his references to Kant, Schopenhauer or even Hegel.11 Jung acknowledged the

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significance of the early Schelling for psychology in a series of lectures on the history

of modern psychology he gave at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH)

in Zurich in the 30s (Jung, 1934a). Jung, at the height of his career, relates his own

understanding of psychology to the philosophical history of the unconscious. Jung

begins with the interesting remark that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

philosophers of the unconscious (Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Hegel) were ‘almost

without exception Protestant’ (Jung, 1934a, p. 12). Only with the break with the

symbol-system of Catholicism, it seems, could modern psychology begin. ‘The

Protestant is the natural seeker in the field of psychological research, for he no longer

has a symbol in which he can express himself’ (Jung, 1934a, p. 12). Dynamic

psychology is a therapy for the disenchanted, a lost road to the soul in a positivist

and reductionist era. The Catholic does not need psychoanalysis because he still lives

in a mytho-theological order and possesses his own indigenous methods of soul-care

(confession, Eucharist, spiritual direction). The Protestant is the Christian in the

modern era, a Christian in an epoch of scientific reductionism, nominalism, and

historical-critical theology. The interesting point here is the connection drawn

between psychoanalysis and the pre-modern symbolic. One can draw two opposite

conclusions from this: (1) psychoanalysis is the negation of the pre-modern symbolic,

substituting a more scientifically adequate method of soul-care for the mythological

soul-care of the past; or (2) psychoanalysis is the heir of the pre-modern symbolic, an

expression of a perennial Western spirituality that takes a variety of forms in a variety

of cultures. Jung’s terse remarks do not allow us to decide the matter. Indeed, Jung’s

ambivalence about modernism is one of the causes of the bifurcation of Jungians into

hyper-modern and anti-modern camps.

There follows a review of the notion of ‘little perceptions’ in Leibniz (petites

perceptions) and ‘dark-representations’ in Kant (dunkle Vorstellungen). Leibniz’s idea

that some perceptions fail to emerge into the light of consciousness is located as the

modern inception of the notion of the unconscious (a conventional history, which

can be found among Freudians as well).12 Following upon Descartes’ assumption

that the soul exists only insofar as it thinks, Leibniz argued that the soul is always

mentally active � at all times mirroring the universe, even during sleep. The difference

between the ‘little perceptions’ beneath the threshold of consciousness, and

conscious perceptions, is one of degree, not of kind.13 Jung points out Kant’s

related notion of an indeterminate extension of unconscious representations, within

which consciousness appears as a small island, as a major breakthrough. Kant

describes an ‘immeasurable . . . field of sensuous intuitions and sensations of which

we are not conscious, even though we can undoubtedly conclude that we have

them . . . only a few places on the vast map of our mind are illuminated’ (Kant, 1798,

pp. 23�24). Curiously, Jung has nothing to say about mesmerism or animal

magnetism in the ETH lectures.

Hegel is dealt with in a single sentence. ‘Although he expressed some essential

psychological ideas’, his philosophy is ‘full of projected psychology’ (Jung, 1934a, p.

15). Schelling is also a metaphysical speculator guilty of projecting psychology unto

an unknowable realm of being, but he has something important to contribute:

Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775�1854) has a more positive attitude towards theunconscious and a certain insight. He was able to formulate the idea thatthe unconscious is the absolute foundation of consciousness. He speaks of ‘the eternalunconscious, which as it were like the sun in the realm of the spirit, hides itself through

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its own unclouded light’. He [Schelling] goes on to say: ‘And although the unconsciousnever becomes the object, yet it stamps its identity on all free actions, being the same forall intelligences; it is the invisible root of which all intelligences are only the potentials,and is the eternal mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and theobjective or contemplator, it is at once the basis of lawfulness in freedom and of freedomin lawfulness’. We see that Schelling puts the accent altogether on the unconscious. Hemakes a most important statement when he says: ‘It is the same for all intelligences’; theprimeval foundation is not differentiated, but universal. (Jung, 1934a, p. 15)

In this passage, Jung cites Schelling’s early work, the 1800 System of Transcendental

Idealism (Schelling, 1800, p. 209).14 Between the Leibnizian-Kantian tradition of

subliminal perceptions and the Schellingian concept of a dark ground of conscious-

ness, a sea change has occurred in the thinking of the unconscious. Leibniz and Kant

describe the limitations of consciousness and the reality of pre-reflective perceptions

and affects that are not illuminated by reflection; Schelling posits an essentially

unconscious, unrepresentable, collective origin of consciousness, which is not

beneath consciousness, not a deficient mode of perception, but above it. Noteworthy

in this passage is Schelling’s characteristic neo-Platonic approach to the unconscious:

the unconscious is like the sun ‘in the realm of spirit’ � a play on Plato’s sun analogy.

The light by which all things are rendered visible is not itself visible; the ground of

understanding is not itself comprehensible.15 The unconscious in the Schelling

passage is not personal, not the reservoir of memories and repressed experiences

thematized by Freud, but collective, or better, ontological. It is neither subjective nor

objective � always, as it were, behind the subject, the condition of the possibility of

knowledge of the object, which cannot itself be objectively known.Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism is his most Kantian work: at this

point in Schelling’s career, the unconscious is conceived as the ineffable ground of the

subjective synthesis that we call ‘the world’ � that is, the order of intelligibility known

in science and willed in ethics. Kant claimed that subjectivity in itself could not be

known; Schelling pointed out that Kant’s transcendental analysis of the a priori

forms by which subjectivity generates for itself a world of ethical law and intelligible

matter is nothing other than an analysis of subjectivity in itself. One need only grasp

that the subjectivity which Kant analyzes is not a conscious but an unconscious

subject � that is, one free of the dualities it generates (subject/object, freedom/

necessity, ideality/reality, mind/matter) to see that transcendental idealism had

already broken through to the absolute, only it had not yet recognized that it had

done so.16 The unconscious as the ground of the ‘lawfulness in freedom and of

freedom in lawfulness’ touches on one of the basic themes of Schelling’s System of

Transcendental Idealism: the identity of freedom and necessity. Where Kant posited

freedom as the exclusion of necessity, Schelling argued that freedom and necessity,

the ideal and the real, are two sides of one absolute reality, which can neither be

exclusively identified with the free nor with the necessary, but which is indifferent to

both and so can generate, on the one side, an ethical-cultural order, whose

presupposition is freedom (moral law), and on the other side, a natural order,

whose presupposition is necessity (natural law).

While at this stage of his career, Schelling had not yet broken through to

speculative empiricism (he would later describe this phase of his thought as ‘negative

philosophy’, thereby closely associating it with Hegel’s), one can nonetheless see in

the young Schelling a decidedly different emphasis than is found in Kant, Fichte or

Hegel. The synthesis of the ideal and the real that Schelling posits in the absolute is

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never a secure possession of conceptual thinking: on the contrary, the absolute is

basically outside philosophy. The artist, not the philosopher, is the one who is

adequate to the ‘intellectual intuition’ of the absolute, and he cannot explain what he

‘knows’: rather he performs it, unconsciously producing the synthesis in such a way

as to surprise himself, not unlike a clairvoyant or a mystic who can only divine the

truth of things to the degree that they are ‘out of’ their mind. Philosophy is bounded

by an outside and gestures toward it as that which renders its own interiority amerely finite perspective.17

Jung comments that Schelling, like Hegel, is guilty of betraying his psychological

insights by leaving the empirically verifiable behind. ‘Psychology . . . is bound to

confine itself to description of facts as observed by common sense’ � a typical

Jungian disclaimer, which in fact does not in the least describe Jung’s method (Jung,

1934a, p. 15). There follows a brief account of Romantic psychiatry, highlighting the

contributions of Carus and Fechner. The latter is praised for defending ‘a universal

psycho-physical parallelism’: the psyche is ‘the inner manifestation’ and the body,

‘the outer manifestation’, of one undivided reality. Fechner’s understanding of the

modern relevance of the world-soul is also noted. Fechner ‘speaks of mother earth

for instance, as being alive and as possessing a soul’. Jung seems to be unaware that

the source of Fechner’s psycho-physical parallelism is largely Schelling (Heidelberger,

2004, pp. 112�115). Carus is correctly situated in Schelling’s lineage (Jung, 1934a,

p. 22). But once again, ignorance of Schelling betrays itself. Carus, we are told, ‘is the

first to call the universal soul the unconscious’ (Jung, 1934a, p. 22). Not true: it wasSchelling who was the first to identify the unconscious with the world-soul, in a book

of the same name, as well as in scattered remarks connecting the unconscious with

Renaissance neo-Platonic cosmology (Grant, 2010; Schelling, 1798; Schelling, 1815,

p. 37). Justinus Kerner’s The Seeress of Prevorst (1829) occupies the rest of the

lectures of 1933. Kerner was a friend and follower of Franz von Baader (Schelling’s

colleague and close friend) and Schelling’s disciple Gothilfe von Schubert. Through

Baader and Schubert, if not by more direct means, Kerner was introduced to

Schellingian metaphysics, which he references in the introduction to the Seeress

(Kerner, 1829, p. 7). In Jung’s unpublished lectures on modern psychology, it seems

all roads lead through Schelling.

This, then, is the Schelling who most engages Jung: Schelling the transcendental

idealist and philosopher of nature.18 Jung is interested in Schelling’s early notion of

the unconscious, which was meant to re-inscribe the soul into the natural order, to

heal the rift between subjectivity and being opened up by modernity and restore the

natural ground of the psyche. By contrast to Freud’s notion of the unconscious, the

Schellingian unconscious is not reactive but productive. Schelling recounts a goal-oriented organic emergence of consciousness from the unconscious, a teleological

evolution of self-conscious mind from material nature; nature should therefore be

understood not as the negative of mind, but as slumbering mind, an unconscious

mode of spirit, which as primordial origin remains in a certain way sovereign

over what originates from it. The early Schellingian unconscious is the great mother,

the dark ground undergirding conscious and unconscious life, a fountain of

creative energies that enliven and make possible self-reflection, even as they infinitely

exceed it.

By the time of the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human

Freedom (widely regarded as Schelling’s masterpiece [Schelling, 1809]), Schelling had

moved well beyond his early naturalistic approach to unconscious teleology into a

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psychology of drives, but he remained no less committed to the notion of the

unconscious as the unfathomable source of life and understanding. See, for example,

the description of the primordial origin of being in the Freedom essay:

All birth is from darkness into light; the seed kernel must be sunk into the earth and diein darkness so that the more beautiful shape of light may lift and unfold itself in theradiance of the sun. Man is formed in the maternal body; and only from the obscurity ofthat which is without understanding (from feeling, yearning, the sovereign mother ofknowledge) grow luminous thoughts. Thus we must imagine the original yearning as itdirects itself to the understanding, though still not recognizing it, just as we in ouryearning seek out unknown and nameless good, and as it moves, divining itself, like awave-wound, whirling sea, akin to Plato’s matter, following dark, uncertain law.(Schelling, 1809, pp. 29�30)

Schelling’s teleological unconscious was the decisive influence on Carus, Hartmann,

Fechner, Peirce, and countless minor players in the history of dynamic psychology.

The concept capitulated to the almost universal rejection of final causality in natural

science at the turn of the century, which culminated in the ascendency of the

Darwinian school of evolutionary theory as a general explanatory framework for

anthropology, biology, and psychology. The victory of Freud’s reactive and

dysteleological theory of the unconscious over the early Schellingian model was

part of a widespread resurgence of scientific reductionism after the heady days of

Romantic science. Freud’s star ascended as the teleological cosmologies of the

Romantics finally fell before the Darwinian denial of telos and order in nature. It is

not often noted that Jung’s notion of psychic teleology was not so much an

innovation on Freud as a return to an older model of the unconscious that Freud had

demolished. At stake here were not competing empirical hypotheses, but competing

metaphysics.

2. Unbracketing analytical psychology

The first obstacle to be overcome in a Schellingian intervention in analytical

psychology is Jung’s bracketing or suspension of metaphysics; whether in the

putative interest of ‘empirical science’, or because of a Kantian assumption of the

‘limits of reason’, or the apparent impossibility of attaining certainty in metaphysical

discussions � all reasons which Jung offers in various places in his Collected Works to

justify his exclusion of metaphysics from psychology. We are immediately at

loggerheads with Schelling, the metaphysical thinker par excellence. Principal among

those basic tendencies that we describe as Schellingian is an adventurous approach to

speculation: the impossibility of definitively settling metaphysical questions is no

reason to leave them unasked. On the contrary, metaphysics thrives in the situation

of uncertainty which is our lot in life: precisely because the issues are not obvious we

are forbidden to leave them uninvestigated. Nothing about speculative empiricism is

foundational in the typical sense: it begins with a value decision about what aspect of

the empirical world is in need of explanation and what is not, ventures a speculative

account of the whole which could explain the existence of that empirical datum, and

confirms or falsifies the account with further reference to the empirical. Such a

metaphysics is not an overreaching of the limits of reason, but is in fact quite close to

what physicists (or depth psychologists for that matter) actually do. Metaphysics in

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this sense is a speculative inquiry into the basic concepts, without which we are not

able to explain anything that needs explaining.

From this perspective, Jung himself emerges as a bit of a speculative empiricist

metaphysician. Contrary to Jung’s assertions, the method of analytical psychology is

not an induction from particular facts to general law. To be sure, there is an empirical

component to analytical psychology but Jung’s method is, for the most part,abductive, not inductive; that is, it does not generalize on the basis of facts, but rather

explains facts on the basis of a general explanatory account of the nature of psyche.19

The explanatory account itself is not deduced from the empirical facts: its sources are

varied: the history of mythology, religion, and philosophy, as well as Jung’s own not

infrequent flights of a priori speculation. Abduction ‘leads away’ (ab-decure) from the

empirical facts to be explained and constructs, on the basis of logical, imaginative,

and intuitive moves, a speculative account of how those facts could be possible. The

account is not infallible: it remains to be tested on the empirical. A new fact that

cannot be explained by means of the account demolishes the hypothesis.

Jung’s recurrent ‘Kantian’ claim � that reason has certain limits because psyche

always only deals with a representation of reality, not with reality in itself � is never

deeply explored or defended, and appears to be a leftover from a youthful immersion

in Kant and Schopenhauer. An argument from authority (‘Kant says that

metaphysics oversteps the limits of reason’) could hardly be binding: Jung’s

representationalism or phenomenalism must either be argued for psychologically �that is, on purely psychological grounds � or else an epistemologico-metaphysical

detour in psychology must be permitted. But what psychological grounds could we

offer for proving that the world as we know it is a mere representation to

consciousness of something that in itself always eludes us? Representationalism is

a theory of knowledge bound up with the denial of the reality of universals, late

medieval nominalism and Descartes’ revolution in philosophy. It is not shared by

early medieval thinkers or most ancient philosophers, and has been routinely

attacked by contemporary philosophers. One recurring problem with representa-

tionalism concerns verification. If what I know is a mere representation of something

else, a doubling of the known, then how could I know that? I would need a further

representation of the relation between the first representation and the represented

(since presumably thinking always only deals with representations, never directly

with things) � a line of argument that plainly issues in an infinite regress. In any case,

a psychology committed to representationalism would have to take a position outside

of psychology in order to justify the claim; that is, psychology would have to take a

philosophical detour. And if a philosophical detour is permitted, then metaphysical

considerations are ipso facto permitted in psychology (indeed, they are alreadythere).

Jung typically invokes the Kantian assumption of the phenomenal nature of

human knowledge when theological problems emerge in his investigations. Since we

have no access to the thing as it is, but only insofar as it leaves an impression or

image in the psyche, we cannot decide about metaphysical and theological issues.20

Not infrequently, the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena is a

strategy for silencing metaphysics and theology (Jung, 1936, para. 247). Schopen-

hauer committed ‘the deadly sin of hypostatizing a metaphysical assertion’ (Jung,

1963, p. 70). The idea has now become a formula in Jung studies: psychology deals

with the world as it is appears to us in the psyche, colored by our anticipations,

complexes and projections; it cannot say anything about the world in itself. One can

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argue forever about metaphysics, Jung concludes. The concepts of analytic

psychology, on the other hand, are ostensibly not metaphysical. They are concepts

with sensuous content. The archetypes are like Kantian categories: they are

subjective a priori patterns that organize our perception, and which therefore, admit

of no transcendence � since we see through them, we cannot objectively describe

them (Jung, 1919, par. 270). The notion of the anima (the female face of the male

psyche), for example, is an a priori psychological pattern that is filled out by a man’sexperience of real women. But Kantianism is itself a metaphysical position. If it is to

be used as an explanatory tool in analytical psychology, it must be justified. The only

way to justify it is metaphysically; and insofar as Jung has no intention of so

justifying it, his reliance upon it as an epistemological model is no better than

Freud’s biologism.21

Questions of empirical method, the limits of reason, and the problem of certainty

were foremost concerns of the young Schelling, who rocketed to international fame

in his early 20s with a series of highly influential treatises on the philosophy of nature

(Naturphilosophie).22 For Schelling, the limits of discursive reason are in no way the

limits of thought, for the simple reason that the one who demarcates such limits must

plainly have already surpassed them. The perspective of the one who sets limits to

discursivity interests Schelling deeply. What are we doing when we set limits to

reason? Is this delimitation itself a discursive act, or does it presuppose a non-

discursive access to the matter to be considered (Schelling, 1803, 171)? Schelling

concludes the latter: we experience the limits of reason in the intellectual intuition ofabsolute identity, an abiding experience of non-duality at the ground of subjectivity,

which can never be adequately defined or conceptualized but which comes to

outward manifestation in the work of art (Schelling, 1800, pp. 219�33). Later,

Schelling argues that a more quotidian experience of the limits of reason occurs in

the intuitively grasped singularities of history � that is, in the experience of finite

being as such (Schelling, 1804, pp. 27�30). More significantly for psychology, reason

comes up to its limit in the unfathomability of subjectivity to itself (Schelling, 1809,

75). In the Freedom essay, the ground of the personality is described as the

‘irreducible remainder’, that which is always left out of reflection and never

conceptualized or defined (Schelling, 1809, 29). When consciousness draws close

to the limits of reason, it experiences something simultaneously horrifying and

seductive � what Rudolf Otto later defined as ‘the numinous’. The world of reason/

consciousness/ideality and its familiar terrain of concepts and conceptually under-

standable experiences is only one side of the absolute. The dark ground, the real, is as

undeniable a feature of life as the light. Ultimately, the human being’s own

experience of herself is dark because the will, the ground of existence, is never fully

subsumable by the understanding. The human being is not a prisoner of discursivereason, but a hybrid, who is in fact ‘at home’ in both the dark and the light.

Schelling’s early work is a scientifically informed objection to Kantian

phenomenalism (with emphasis on the then bourgeoning fields of chemistry,

electricity, and magnetism). Phenomenalism, in Schelling’s view, either severs our

connection with nature or reduces nature to a projection of the subject. In both cases,

subjectivity is relegated to an existence without a natural ground. Phenomenalism

reduces the otherness of the world, the other person, the wholly other (the divine), to

the sameness of what ‘appears’ to subjectivity.23 The phenomenalist is no longer

dynamically engaged with nature, with the other person, or with the real God. All

experience becomes a monologue of the soul with itself. The view abolishes

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difference, retreats from the strangeness of the world into a narcissism that cannot

receive, cannot be surprised, and cannot be transformed by the real.

3. Hegel or Schelling?

Any contemporary discussion of Jung and philosophy must confront the formidable

achievement of Wolfgang Giegerich. Giegerich has gone further than any other

Jungian in the direction of developing a robust, conceptually rigorous metapsychol-

ogy (something that classical Jungianism notably lacks). His work raises many

crucial questions. For example, the relationship between Giegerich’s neo-Hegelian

‘animus psychology’ and the widespread appropriation of Hegel by Freudians � not

only Zizek’s Lacanian psychoanalysis, but also the more orthodox Freudianism ofJon Mills (Mills, 2002) � remains to be elaborated. At first glance, it would seem that

Giegerich and the Freudians agree (against Jung) that the concretely determinate

concept is the perfection of the symbol or imago (it cancels and preserves it � the

classic Hegelian notion of Aufhebung). For Freud, the psychic imago is described as a

sign of a concealed referent, a repressed thought or representation, which the

psychoanalyst conceptually expresses in the analytical process. The ambiguity is not

in the referent, but in the distorted mode of signaling it. Similarly, for Hegel, the

symbol is an inchoate concept, and the reduction of its ambiguity to determinatenessis a strictly logical process. Hence, Hegelian philosophy trumps art and religion �literally declares them over, outmoded historical stages of spirit � by taking up their

content in a more conceptually adequate form.24

The Hegelian always knows better than the theologian, the mystic and the poet,

even if he does not know otherwise. This ‘clout and kiss’ approach to discourses

other than philosophy is the source of the curious blend of domination and inclusion

characteristic of Hegelian thought: Hegel in fact dominates a discourse by including

it in his own, as a sublated moment in the emergence of the true philosophy (his).Related to this is the Hegelian claim � endorsed by Giegerich and Zizek, albeit in

different ways � that modernity is the end of history.25 The essence of the modern lies

in the assumption that the technological age has overcome ‘nature’. On a pre-modern

view, the natural order transcends the human as the container transcends the

contained; the proper attitude to it is not one of mastery, but reverential

participation. Modernity begins when this belief, common to ancient Greeks,

medieval Latins, traditional Hindu and Chinese civilizations, and indeed, virtually

every indigenous culture on the planet � a position that Giegerich describes as‘inness’ � is negated by the modern, rejected in favor of the ethos of critique,

calculation, and control.26 This means that the modern has no home in the cosmos, is

not ‘in’ anything at all; everything is rather ‘in’ him � Giegerich would say ‘in soul’, I

would say in the human’s calculative and controlling grasp. Naturally, this creates a

special kind of anxiety, a fear of nothingness wholly unique to the modern: for if the

cosmos is in my hands, then I am held by no one. In many ways Giegerich’s

psychology (like Lacan’s) is a therapy for this modern anxiety. Any nostalgia for pre-

modern systems of meaning � such as Native American spirituality, shamanism, theRenaissance universe of correspondences � is a regression, a flight from the

disturbing reality of the present into a more consoling past.

For Zizek, such neo-Romantic tendencies riddle the contemporary Zeitgeist,

from James Cameron’s Avatar to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, from Jungian

psychology to environmentalism, which Zizek describes as the new opiate of the

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people. Zizek’s Lacanian lens can only see these planetary sites of nostalgia for the

lost universe of meaning as evidence that in the face of the real the constitutively

neurotic human subject invariably prefers fantasy. And the real is not some excess of

truth, not a divine other, but the disquieting truth that our symbolic is merely virtual,

a necessary lie. For Giegerich, the turn to the pre-modern, so prevalent in analytical

psychology, is the paradigmatic cultural neurosis of our time. Situating his critique

squarely on Jung’s notion of neurosis as lagging behind one’s present reality,Giegerich sees the neo-Romantic tendency of contemporary culture as the neurotic

expression of an age still deeply uncomfortable with its conquest of external nature.27

One notices the convergence of the two Hegelian positions here outlined: the concept

(concretely universal) is to the imago as the modern is to the pre-modern and the

human subject is to nature: a necessary negation.

The question remains: to what degree is analytical psychology committed to the

modernist project? Jung cannot answer this question for us, for one finds both

tendencies � the anti-modern and the hyper-modern � side by side in his writings. On

the one hand, there is the diagnosis of modern man as having lost his soul, needing a

new myth, etc., which Jung tries to facilitate by turning to alchemy, the myth just

beneath the surface of modern consciousness, and re-awakening mytho-poetic

expressions appropriate to the Western soul. On the other hand, there is Jung’s

modernist commitment to natural scientific progress, his insistence on skeptical

empirical suspension of religious beliefs and metaphysics, and his call for a universal

psychology that could undergird and direct research in the natural and humansciences. It would seem that Jung has left us an undecidable aporia; and this, I will

argue is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that the ‘solution’ will have to come

from outside psychology as such, from the ethical-metaphysical orientation of the

psychologist � or, better, from a decision of the person.

Giegerich’s solution to the aporia tends to conceal its philosophical commitments

behind breathtaking dialectical moves and superb readings of fairy tales. The core of

his position can be summed up under three headings: (1) animus psychology; (2)

psychological absolutism; and (3) psychological difference. A brief word on each of

these will have to suffice here.28 But first we must address Giegerich’s disclaimer that

he is not a Hegelian or that his project is not in continuity with Hegel’s. In what

follows, we assume the opposite and apply Schelling’s critique of Hegel to Giegerich’s

revision of analytical psychology on the presupposition that Giegerich can be read

philosophically and Schelling can be read psychologically. Giegerich will no doubt

balk at this point in the discussion and insist: he is not a philosopher, his concern is

not with truth in any metaphysical sense, and so to embroil him in a philosophical

debate between two giants of modern metaphysics is to misread him. Conversely,Schelling and Hegel are pre-psychological: they are not talking about the phenomena

engaged by Jung and Giegerich. Giegerich insists on remaining within the brackets

proposed by Jung, the psychological epoche, where the question concerning the truth,

reality, and value of psychic images is not asked. We are arguing that such an epoche

is untenable, that the psychological discourse, indeed every discourse whatsoever, is

always already infected by metaphysical and axiological concerns (two sides of the

same coin). What this means for the practice of psychoanalysis is yet a further

question. It certainly means that one can no longer practice Jungian or Freudian or

Lacanian psychoanalysis under the pretense of leaving the analysands’ metaphysical,

religious and ethical commitments untouched, or that one’s own metaphysical,

religious, and ethical commitments (to the degree that one confesses to possessing

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such) are not part of the analysis, are not applied to the analysand’s situation, and

have not already determined one’s choice of psychoanalytical school. Metaphysics is

always already at work, either implicitly or explicitly. Any traditional Catholic who

has entered Jungian analysis and been confronted by the Jungian account of evil

(‘the dark side of God’) knows that it is simply not true that Jungian psychology

leaves metaphysics, religion, and ethics as they were.To some degree Giegerich has already addressed the Schellingian objection to his

psychology. At the 2012 Berlin conference of the International School of Psychology

as the Discipline of Interiority (ISDPI), Mark Saban read a paper entitled, ‘‘The

Tautegorical Imperative: Mythos and Logos in Jung and Giegerich, Hegel and

Schelling.’’ In this unpublished work, Saban ventures a tentative critique of Giegerich

loosely inspired by the late Schelling, particularly Schelling’s rejection of Hegel’s

account of sublation, the related Schellingian doctrine of the ‘‘indivisible remainder,

and Schelling’s lifelong refusal to subordinate mythic image and overdetermined

symbol to determinate philosophical concepts. An online discussion between Saban

and Giegerich ensued on the ISDPI website culminating in Giegerich’s posting of a

35 page response to Saban (Giegerich, 2012).

Giegerich accuses Saban of misreading him and misreading Hegel, and more

cuttingly, of not having the right attitude for psychoanalysis (Saban is a practicing

analyst), in short, of missing the point entirely. The core of Giegerich’s response is

targeted at Saban’s recourse to strong doctrines of transcendence, which Giegerichcharacterizes as merely ‘‘negative’’ and ‘‘literal’’ concepts of externality/alterity. In

his effort to stage an objection to what he sees as Giegerich’s totalizing method,

Saban references Derrida, Levinas, as well as Schelling. Giegerich responds first by

dismissing the critique. Saban’s concern for alterity is nothing but an expression of

Saban’s own personal difficulties with ‘‘an internal other that he wants to avoid’’

(Giegerich, 2012, p. 2). Saban labors under ‘‘an imperialistic expansionist fantasy,’’

which causes him to shirk in fear from psychology as the discipline of interiority and

makes it all but impossible for him to understand philosophy and psychoanalysis, let

alone Giegerich (Giegerich, 2012, p. 11). We should coin a new logical fallacy to

describe the structure of Giegerich’s argument here, a fallacy which one also sees

frequently in Freud and Jung: the psychological ad hominem. So and so is wrong

because their argument is merely an expression of their unreflected psychological

difficulties. From a philosophical perspective, Saban’s psychological attitude has

nothing to do with the validity or invalidity of his argument for transcendence.

Amazingly Giegerich holds that Derrida, Levinas, and Heidegger*without

question the greatest critics of Hegel and German Idealism in the 20th century*areincapable of thinking the thought that Hegel thought, and which presumably

Giegerich is thinking (Giegerich, 2012, p. 10). The question of externality, of

transcendence, is central to Hegel’s dialectical philosophy: one first bumps up against

the appearance of an outside before one reflects on the dialectical relationship, the

interpenetration, of interiority and exteriority which is ‘‘the logical notion.’’ Any text

of Hegel will do as a reference point here: The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Logic,

indeed the whole three volume Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences describe

just this process of spirit finding itself in its other. The point is repeated by Giegerich

throughout the paper. ‘‘Alternatives [for Saban]. . . logically exist side by side, the way

things exist in space, neatly separated, without being intrinsically related and

connected to each other. Their only relation is the external superficial one of their

otherness’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 2). Saban is incapable of conceiving ‘‘something

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external that is nevertheless actually internal, and something internal that in fact

appears only from outside,’’ for such a thought ‘‘does not make any sense to our

everyday commonsensical understanding’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 3).

Giegerich has yoked the Hegelian dialectic of self and other to Jung’s notion of

psychological immanence, and to be fair, the fit is pretty good. Psychology, Giegerich

repeats verbatim from Jung, deals only with things that are immanent to psyche, and

indeed what is not immanent to psyche? ‘‘Our envelopment in psychic images, and

this means in logos, is inescapable. No exit*as long as we exist as soul and mind.

Even the very fiction of something outside of logos is a logos fiction, and what is

allegedly ‘unassimilable’ has ipso facto already been assimilated, namely as some-

thing unassimilable’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 29). The psychology of exteriority ‘‘is just

as childish as it is absurd’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 29). Saban’s ‘‘insistence on brute

alterity is absolutely counter to the main line of Jung’s thinking and his deepest

concern. Jung is anything but a thinker of the totally unassimilable. . . . From a

Levinas-inspired Other no bridge leads back to Jung. . . The idea of a ‘brute,

unassimilable alterity’ can have a place only in a brutish, not really ‘human’

(humanized), psychology’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 31).

In short, ‘‘An out-and-out other does not exist for mind’’ (Hegel, 1830, p. 2), or

for ‘‘soul,’’ as the case maybe. After this vigorous defense of Hegel’s position on

transcendence, Giegerich then accuses Saban of conflating his position with Hegel’s!

‘‘It is silly to put these two authors into the same sentence and connect them with

‘and’ as if they were on the same level and of the same rank’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 12).

Despite the fact that Giegerich himself proceeds over many pages to repeatedly put

Hegel’s and his name together in the same sentences (for example, pp. 13, 15, 16), we

are to believe that Hegel and Giegerich are doing totally different things. In fact,

nothing of what Giegerich describes over the course of this article, on alterity, on

myth, on history, on modernity, departs in any significant sense from Hegel. One

could pass this text to a trained Hegelian without any knowledge of Jung or the

psychoanalytical context and I venture that they would understand it quite

accurately. Giegerich can only mean that all of this Hegelianism is now psychology,

not metaphysics. This is the different ‘‘level’’ he refers to.

What the term [unprethinkable being] may mean in Schelling and what its philosophicallegitimacy, as well as the legitimacy of Schelling’s arguments against Hegel, may or maynot be with his own philosophy is of no concern for us. . . . The same applies to Hegel.This is also why I never considered or presented myself as a Hegelian, all the less so as Ithink it is impossible today to return to Hegel’s (or Schelling’s) philosophy. It liesirretrievably behind us as moderns (Giegerich, 2012, pp. 27-8).

As a mere psychologist (not such a modest enterprise when one considers that

psychology has supplanted metaphysics and philosophy forever), Giegerich’s

psychology is presumably not about the truth. ‘‘The right way to look at the world

is not our concern. It is a philosophical, not psychological concern’’ (Giegerich,

2012, p. 5). There, in a sentence, is the psychological epoche which Giegerich carries

forward from Jung. Crucial to note here is that Giegerich’s absolute psychology does

not leave a space open for a philosophical discussion of the truth, for a debate about

‘‘the right way to look at the world,’’ modestly confining psychology to a relatively

immanent or phenomenological sphere. Giegerich is presenting psychology as a

doctrine of absolute immanence. When one follows how Giegerich speaks of truth

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later in the paper, one sees plainly that a) truth is indeed at issue in psychology, and

b) the only kind of truth that could be at issue for us ‘‘moderns’’ is psychological

truth. ‘‘But for PDI, it is not only a question of whether one wants it or not. It is

above all a question of whether one is able to see what it is about in the first place or

not’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 8); ‘‘Truth goes through a historical process, passes through

different stages, appears as different truths, according to the statuses of conscious-ness and the actual modes of being-in-the-world’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 12);

‘‘[Psychology] is in the business of being responsive to a prime matter (whatever

this may be in each case, of reflecting and refining it, of reconstructing its inner

logical life so at to release it into its truth (its disclosedness, unconcealedness)

(Giegerich, 2012, p. 23). There is no place for a post-psychological metaphysics, or a

post-psychological ethics or religion for that matter. Hence, by default, psychology

inherits the mantle of the metaphysician and the ‘‘right way to look at the world’’ is

indeed determined by psychological debate and practice. This becomes even clearer

in Giegerich’s remarks concerning God.

In the last part of his paper, Giegerich dips into the late Schelling and finds that

Saban has not read him carefully. ‘‘Schelling and Hegel are much close together than

suggested’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 33). But there is no real reading of Schelling here

because the late Schelling’s distinction between essence and existence, between the

ideal and the real, which underwrites his late philosophy of alterity, is not engaged,

let alone the middle Schelling’s astonishing Freedom essay, in which the mostprofound thinking of psychological disruption is articulated and the psychologies of

the unconscious that will follow in Schelling’s wake are anticipated. Presumably these

ideas belong to the archive of antiquate metaphysics. Giegerich sums up his response

to Saban with a brief psychoanalyzing of the argument for transcendence. Those who

insist on alterity, whether psychologically (Saban), ethically (Levinas), or metaphy-

sically (Schelling), are giving symptomatic expression to their own neurosis. They

have refused to enter into the alchemical vas where the inside/outside distinction is

transmuted. Insisting on consciousness’s separation from the object, they reify the

‘‘aloofness’’ of consciousness (Giegerich, 2012, p. 31). This resistance ‘‘logically

cements the ordinary existing naturalistic position (based on the opposition of

consciousness: subject*object) and protects you from the necessity to have to give

yourself over to the phenomena at hand and to go under in what you study or work

upon’’ (Giegerich, 2012, p. 31). Thus far, we are not far from Hegel’s response to his

contemporary critics, for example Freidrich Jacobi: those who refuse the movement

of the dialect, Hegel argues, do not so much reject a philosophical position as resistthe dialectical transformation of appearance, which is logically necessary to the

development of consciousness. But then, Giegerich ventures some interesting claims

on the psychology of religion. When psyche resists the natural dissolution of

subject*object, the repressed returns like a fantastic numinous figure of otherness.

‘‘The radical Other represents, as it were, the (residual) Real the way it appears from

that psychological position that refused to get committedly involved in it. . . . It is the

utterly abstract, emaciated remainder of the Real, its zero-stage, completely non-

descript*just ‘other’ (whatever that may be), in other words, the ghosts of the Real’’

(Giegerich, 2102, p. 32). The result is a ‘‘nihilist’’ last stand of God, a God about

whom nothing can be said other than that he is other. Philosophers of alterity

thematize divine transcendence because they refuse the movement into interiority to

which we are all now called at this moment in history, the movement into a culturally

existence without a God, without nature, without transcendence, a historical epoch

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which, in another essay, Giegerich calls ‘‘the Birth of Man’’ (Giegerich, 2010, pp.

189�283). The Lacanian overtones are significant here, only Giegerich, unlike Lacan,

believes that we can get along fine without the projection of the Big Other.

The decisive question is this: is Giegerich simply following through with the

internal logic of analytical psychology, as he says? Or is he transforming analytical

psychology from within, transforming it into something quite new, on the basis of adeconstruction of Jung’s own images and tropes (alchemy, psychological immanence,

etc.)? If Giegerich is correct, then the non-systematic development of psychoanalysis

out of the 19th century philosophy of the unconscious confirms in essence Hegel’s

vision. What one witnesses in the history of psychology, then, is a logical progression

from Hegel through the psychology of the unconscious to psychology as the

discipline of interiority.

Before we address this question, and indeed, the best we can hope to do in this

paper is prepare for an address to this question, let us return to Giegerich’s

overarching system to get a sense for how this position developed and entrenched

itself on the fertile terrain of late post-Jungian psychology.

Animus psychology. Perhaps the most important critique Giegerich has made of

analytical psychology is that Jungians habitually confuse the thinking function with

intellectual work. Because thinking is only one of four psychological functions, and

because it is overemphasized in our contemporary scientistic age (Jungian claims thatGiegerich does not contest), Jungians downplay or deny outright the importance of

theory and intellectual work in psychology. But the intellectual life is not reducible to

a psychological function; if it were, we would have to deny that Jung’s achievement

was to an important degree an intellectual work, or deny that Goethe was an

intellectual, or that any number of non-thinking types in the history of philosophy

were intellectuals (Nietzsche, for example; or Schelling himself, whom I suspect was

an introverted intuitive). This would clearly be nonsensical. But how else are we to

explain the anti-intellectualism, the paucity of theory, and the proliferation of

merely popular writings in Jungian psychology than as a confusion of the thinking

function with intellect life? Endeavoring to correct the overemphasis on the thinking

function in the age of scientism, Jungians vilify the intellectual life in general, and

neglect the work that is most needed in their own field: theoretical work. Giegerich

has hit his target here, and if his movement accomplishes nothing more than a

rehabilitation of the intellectual dimension of analytical psychology, it will be a great

advance.29

However, animus psychology goes much further than simply revivifying Jung’sflagging intellectual and theoretical enterprise. Animus psychology is founded upon

an assumed dialectical (in Hegel’s sense) relationship of imago to conceptus, non-

discursive modes of cognition to conceptual thinking, immediate experience to

mediated thought, in other words, anima to animus. In each case, an appearance is

taken for reality, a negativity masks itself as a positivity (respectively image, non-

discursive cognition, immediate experience) and the task of animus psychology is to

sublate (cancel and preserve) the appearance into a more adequate mode of

expression. The goal of Giegerichian analysis is not the description of primordial

psychic images or the expression of hidden and inarticulate feelings, but the

thematizing of determinate concepts, implicit in symbols as their inner logic, that

cancel and preserve on a new level the soul’s spontaneous images and feelings

(Giegerich, 1994, pp. 35, 41). The aim of analysis is ‘the self-sublation of immediate

psychology to psychology as the logic of the soul’ (Giegerich, 1998, p. 165). Jungians,

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Giegerich argues, are stuck at the level of the mythos, the immediate pre-verbal life of

the soul, and need to follow the logic of soul, which cancels the one-sided truth of the

imago (with its attendant immediacy and non-discursivity) while ‘raising it up’ into

the richer reality of the concretely universal concept.30 Psychologically, this amounts

to an ordering of the relationship of anima to animus: rather than thinking the two

as equals, two complementary opposites that face off as irreducibly other to one

another, i.e., as feminine to masculine, Giegerich insists that animus is higher thananima for it contains the truth of the ‘feeling toned’ image, which is the anima’s

domain, the truth that the imago in itself has no truth; it is nothing but a moment in

the development of animus. Anima must be negated by animus in the ‘syzygy’ that

produces concrete and determinate soul (Giegerich, 1994, pp. 39�51).

The negation of the Jungian fetishizing of feeling, anima and inarticulate

imagination brings us back to Hegel’s famous critique of the Romantic overturning

of the Enlightenment. Hegel took his time, but when he was ready (1807, with the

publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit) he critiqued his Romantic colleagues

(Holderlin, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers) for their obscurantism and

sentimentalism, which he thought bordered on irrationality. Hegel does not deny the

Romantic emphasis on imago, mythos and feeling as an important corrective of

eighteenth-century rationalism. But the Romantic must pass through its own

negation en route to a more adequate expression of spirit. Hegel gives Romantic

feeling a subordinate place in an ontology that inevitably moves from mythos to logos,

from imago to conceptus. In the Hegelian view, the feeling toned mythos has no truthin itself; it is the ‘matter’ of a necessary mediation by critically self-reflective logos.

On this point, Hegel is quite clear: ‘Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull

stirring, the inarticulate breathing of the spirit through its unconscious and

unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still ‘immediate’ � neither

subjectively developed in its content nor set in distinction as object to subject, but

treated as belonging to its most special, its natural peculiarity. But feeling and heart

is not the form by which anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, etc.,

and an appeal to heart and feeling, either means nothing or means something bad’

(Hegel, 1830, pp. 73�74).

Psychological absolutism refers on the one hand to Giegerich’s rejection of any

delimitation of psychology over and against, for example, theoretical physics,

metaphysics or theology. For Giegerich psychology has no outside; it is a purely

self-sufficient discourse immanently directed by its own logic. ‘Psychology is sublated

science, sublated religion, sublated medicine’ (Giegerich, 1998, p. 193).31 The results

of psychology are not positive data to be ranged alongside the fruits of other

sciences; rather, psychology now takes the place traditionally occupied by speculativeor metaphysical philosophy, for it offers an exhaustive and comprehensive account of

the structure of psychic reality, and outside the psyche � so argues Giegerich � there

is no reality. On the other hand, psychological absolutism refers to the untenability of

an inside/outside distinction in psychology. The soul is not ‘in’ the human being, nor

is the world ‘outside’ the soul: from the perspective of Jung’s psychology, with its

pivotal breakthrough to ‘objective psyche’, and its return to the symbolism of

alchemy (the presupposition of the work is ‘the hermetic seal’, the airtight vessel or

vas), talk of inside and outside is hopelessly inadequate to the reality of soul.32

Giegerich is not simply a Hegelian: he has plainly rejected Hegel’s claim to have

at last articulated an absolute philosophical position, containing within it the truths

of logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, psychology, history, and religion.

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Taking a cue from Jung’s diagnosis of Hegel’s philosophy as a fantastic projection

(Jung 1946/1954, para. 360), Giegerich has recast ‘the system’ as a psychology �albeit a psychology every bit as absolute as Hegel’s idealism. Just as Hegel claimed

to have arrived at a position that could only be critique from ‘outside’ by a critic

who failed to recognize the degree to which his or her own position is already a

presupposition of Hegel’s, so too has Giegerich created a psychology that has nooutside, for any exteriority presumed by a would-be critic � for example, a critique on

the basis of metaphysics, or ethics, or religion � has patently missed Giegerich’s

point: metaphysics, ethics, and religion are all sublated moments of soul coming into

its own: stages in the development of absolute psychology. There is no question that

Giegerich’s position is rooted in certain statements of Jung, for example (Jung, 1946/

1954, para. 429): ‘Psychology actualizes the unconscious urge to consciousness. It is,

in fact, the coming to consciousness of the psychic process, but it is not, in the deeper

sense, an explanation of this process, for no explanation can be anything other than

the living process of the psyche itself. Psychology is doomed to cancel itself out as a

science and therein precisely it reaches its scientific goal. Every other science has so

to speak an outside; not so psychology, whose object is the inside subject of all

science’. Psychology as a particular science, then, is the expression of something that

is more than mere psychology. One might ask, what is the product of psychology’s

self-cancellation? Is it a new level of psychology, i.e., ‘psychology as the discipline of

interiority’? Or is it something else entirely?We are to understand that otherness is mere appearance of difference, that to find

oneself in one’s other (Hegel’s preferred formulation of the absolute notion) is

‘freedom’ and freedom is reason.33 We are to concede, albeit on psychological rather

than metaphysical grounds, that the rational is real and the real is the rational, as

Hegel puts it famously in the preface to his Philosophy of Law. At this point,

someone trained in the history of philosophy, especially so called ‘continental

philosophy’ must cry ‘foul’. One cannot say such things today, without at least

acknowledging that the totalizing denial of otherness has been contested by no less

psychologically astute thinkers than Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or more recently,

Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy, not to mention their armies of followers.

One might want to reflect on why, after fascism, after the Holocaust, this massive

cultural reaction to totalizing systems of thought occurred; or at least to acknowl-

edge that it did, before entrenching oneself in the older position. But this is neither

here nor there. A Schellingian objection (and somehow, all the philosophers of

difference just mentioned owe their inception to Schelling’s critique of Hegel on justthis point) will argue that, yes, without an inside, there is no outside, and yes,

thinking tends toward the absolute annulling of the outside, total domestication of

the real. This is what Schelling calls ‘negative philosophy’, and it is the presupposi-

tion for ‘positive philosophy’ or the philosophy of transcendence. Indeed, negative

philosophy is an inevitable production of reason � the young Schelling himself

perfected the system that has no outside; but unlike Hegel, he showed it be absurd �that is, reason could only be a perfect system (with no outside) if there was no such

thing as history. The next step is to see through negative philosophy to the positivity

that it excludes. What is substituted for the real is revealed to be so laced with holes,

so derivative, so bereft of real relations to beings and to other persons, that reason

itself, if it is fully reasonable, will limit itself, will refuse totality, will enjoin upon itself

a healthy skepticism (Socratic rather than Pyrrhonian) � but we get ahead of

ourselves. We will return to this crucial point later.

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We come now to Giegerich’s master notion of psychological difference. Briefly

put, the object of psychology is not the individual soul and its struggle to individuate,

but soul itself. Giegerich distinguishes soul from souls: while soul is never found

without a soul, it is not itself a soul. Souls are particular and personal; soul is

impersonal and (concretely) universal. To fail to recognize the psychological

difference is to lapse into ‘ego-psychology’ and a merely subjective psychology.34

Hence Giegerich’s impersonal approach to analysis, his critique of ‘egoistic’ readingsof fairy tales and his objective approach to dreams (no associations please, it

interferes with the logic of the dream). Giegerich is nothing if not consistent. In

analytical work, we are not interpreting the subjective experience of a soul

discovering its personal myth, but rather, the objective process of impersonal soul

becoming concretely determinate in an individual’s psychic life. In fairy tales, we do

not read of the intra-psychic journey of a soul, but a mytho-poetic dramatization of

the principles of soul, which are common to all men and women. In dream analysis,

we do not, via a network of personal associations, unravel the personal myth of the

analysand as it manifests itself in his or her dreams; rather, we come to see how the

analysand’s dream life mediates ‘the soul’s logical life’.

Psychological difference, while certainly consistent with Hegel, has an important

relationship to the ontology of the early Heidegger � specifically, the early

Heidegger’s understanding of the ontological difference between being and beings.

Just as the ontological difference allows Heidegger in Being and Time to suspend

ethical, political and theological questions in favor of an ostensibly more primordialinvestigation of that which is presupposed by these ontic inquiries, so does

Giegerich’s psychological difference allow Giegerich to suspend the merely personal

ethical and spiritual concerns of the individual analysand in favor of a deeper

psycho-logic expressing itself in symptoms and dreams. The ontological/ontic

distinction in Heidegger gives rise to two very different ways of examining human

existence, which Heidegger refers to respectively as ‘existential’ and ‘existentiell’

investigations. To the latter belong theology, ethics, and politics; the former alone is

ontological and provides the basic concepts presupposed by all other discourses. An

‘existential’ investigation concerns the being of the human being in a formal sense

rather than in any particular historical, ethical, political, or theological context; it is

the study of existence in abstraction from any particular individual’ existence.

‘Existentiell’ refers to first-person reflection on the ‘the meaning of life’ in a broadly

ethical sense, with a view to deciding how best to live. An existentiell discourse is

deeply personal, the individual’s activity of seeking self-understanding, discerning

how to act in a particular situation, which will necessarily differ from how others

understand themselves and how others ground their actions. An existential

(ontological) analysis, by contrast, concerns not the person in his or her particularethical/spiritual predicament, but being-in-the-world in a formal sense, which in

principle applies to all. Heidegger’s use of the distinction is not unrelated to his

political misdeeds: a philosophy which presumes to leave the ethico-political

undecided, as the ontic subject-matter of a lesser science, is condemned to make

political decisions behind its own back.35

A Schellingian psychoanalysis would be opposed to all three of Giegerich’s claims

� on philosophical grounds. Schelling rejected Hegel’s pretension that philosophy

could be an absolute discourse (sublated science, sublated religion), along with his

own youthful effort at the same, in favor of a realist philosophy of transcendence. For

the late Schelling, who achieves a certain theological insight that does not so much

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break with his early work as fulfill the questions which it raised, the achievement of

idealist and modern rationalist philosophies is merely negative. Idealism consists in

the understanding’s a priori dialogue with its own innate concepts � without any

living connection to the real or the existent. Schelling does not deny that reason

appears to sublate nature, and that concepts seem to penetrate beings to their

intelligible core. But what is reason itself? Whence intelligibility as such? How and

why does reason exist? The question is at least intelligible, for philosophy cannotcoherently deny the existence of reason. ‘Everything can be in the logical Idea

without anything being explained thereby, as, for example, everything in the sensuous

world is grasped in number and measure, which does not thereby mean that

geometry or arithmetic explain the sensuous world. The whole world lies, so to speak,

in the nets of the understanding or of reason, but the question is how exactly it got

into those nets, since there is obviously something other and something more than

mere reason in the world, indeed there is something which strives beyond those

barriers’ (Schelling, 1833, p. 147). This is the essence of Schelling’s critique of Hegel:

insofar as reason, ideality, or for that matter, psychology, cannot explain its own

existence, it cannot claim the completeness which it presupposes.36

Totalizing positions such as Hegel’s or Giegerich’s are philosophies of essence,

and their outside is forever demarcated as existence. The latter cannot be deduced,

transcendentally or dialectically: it can only be know a posteriori, through an

experience that disrupts the ideal. Giegerich, like Hegel, presumes that logic is

adequate to the real; or, expressed psychodynamically, that a logic of soul is adequateto psychological reality. He presumes to be able to move directly from essence to

existence, from the ideal to the real. According to Schelling, the real is always news �any other figure for the real is a substitute, a virtual real. Hence a philosophically

adequate discourse (and, by implication, a psychologically adequate discourse) can

never presume absoluteness; it must always stand open to a revelation of the

transcendent, whether this be the transcendence of the existing being to thought, the

transcendence of the reality of the person to consciousness, or the transcendence of

God to reason. In short, Giegerich’s psychology is idealist and suffers from all the

weaknesses of idealism: coherence at the cost of adequacy, forgetfulness of the real,

and violation, however subtle, of the dignity of the person by valuing the universal,

the conceptual and the logical over the unique, irrepeatable and incommunicable

truth of the existing individual human being.

Concerning the very idea of an animus psychology, Schelling gives us reason to

pause before we agree that Jung’s privileging of feeling and imagination is just so

much regression, or Shwarmerie, as the used to say about Schelling’s own work. For

Schelling, mythos and logos, feeling and thinking, imago and conceptus, universal andindividual, are indeed opposites, but the relationship of opposites to one another is

governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Mythos never ‘turns into’ logos, nor

does the imago ever transform dialectically into a conceptus; in short, the universal is

not identical to the individual: the opposites always remain in tension with one

another, the one acting as a check on the totalizing tendencies of the other. Where for

Hegel and Giegerich, the tension between opposites is resolved when they are shown

not to be truly opposed (incommensurable, mutually exclusive) but hierarchically

arranged in such a fashion that the one is the mediator of a richer determination of

the other, for Schelling, the tension between genuinely incommensurable opposites is

the source of the energy and creative power of life. The tension is not to be

transcended logically, on the level of the ideal, with logical necessity driving them

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both into a hierarchical resolution, one inevitably becoming subordinated to the

other. To put it simply, in terms that will need to be elaborated, for Schelling,

opposites stand over and against each other as mutually exclusive possibilities for

being � two contesting absolutes � until the will decides and a purely personal act (an

act of will, not a logical movement) transcends the contradiction by bringing about

something genuinely new.Finally, and most importantly, Schelling would reject Giegerich’s psychological

difference for the same reason he would reject Heidegger’s ontological difference: the

subordination of the personal to any putative higher structure always produces only

violence. Granted, soul is not a soul; but neither is the person identical with the ego.

Care of the soul is always care for the unique soul-life of the individual person

(something Giegerich would certainly not deny). On a practical level, this means that

biography, context and personal associations are essential to the interpretation of

dreams and psychological symptoms. Otherwise we are dealing with an abstract a

priori logic of the soul that never truly engages the real suffering, the desires and

fears, of the living, individual human being. Analysis should move naturally from a

universal logic of ‘soul’ to the unique logic of an individual’s life. The person faces

our categories as an unanticipatable and unfathomable act that is sui generis, a sacred

singularity, which defies all of our categories and theories, resists all attempts at

assimilation into something that we can call our own and, instead of appropriation,

demands of us recognition.To return to the crucially different way in which Schelling thinks the coincidentia

oppositorum (for it is the heart of the matter): wherever there is life, movement and

development, there must be polarity, a contest between opposing principles or drives.

But Schellingian polarity must be sharply distinguished from Hegelian dialectic.

Hegel’s system is a logic: the dialectically movement between the opposites that

brings about the emergence of consciousness is a necessary and rational development,

directed by the implicit ‘notion’ that unfolds in history. For Schelling, the

development of mind from nature, consciousness from the unconscious, is not a

logical movement, but the expression of a will to manifestation, which struggles

against an opposing tendency toward concealment. Following the seventeenth-

century theosophist Jakob Boehme, Schelling assumes that manifestation presup-

poses a struggle of opposites, a pull within, toward self-enclosement and narcissistic

monism, and a counter-pull outward, toward self-donation, and communality.37 The

development of consciousness out of this conflict of opposing drives is not a rational

or systematic movement, but a drama of freedom: hence genuine ethical principles

are at stake in history. Against Hegel, Schelling argued that will is more primordial

than reason, that history is as much a story of fall and decline as it is of progress anddevelopment, that the movement of freedom cannot be necessary, and finally, and

most importantly for analytical psychology, that the concrete, imagistic symbolism,

which is the primordial language of psyche, is always pregnant with unrealized

possibilities that outstrip our concepts.38

It might be useful here to introduce Schelling’s deep affinity for a certain kind of

Platonism. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates infamously creates confusion by producing

undecidable paradoxes: developing two or more conflicting lines of thought which

cannot be true at the same time. The dialogues end with the situation unresolved and

the interlocutors more puzzled than they were at the beginning. Rather than

imparting knowledge, Socrates takes knowledge away from his interlocutors

(disabusing them of pseudo-knowledge). The undecidable situation, or aporia, is

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not intended to end merely in skeptical stalemate; on the contrary, precisely because

the paradox cannot be resolved on the level of logic alone, because there is no

inconsistency or internal reason for preferring one side over the other, a decision can

no longer be postponed. Socratic aporia forces the interlocutors to move from the

ideal to the real, from the merely theoretical consideration of possibilities, of essence,

to the judgment which is an act of the person, risking himself on whatever he believes

to be the truth of the matter, as Socrates risked all on his belief in immortality (hedied for it). The order of belief, decision, judgment, is the existential order, the

ethico-political order of persons acting in abyssal freedom and dramatizing their

salvation or damnation. Schellingian opposites, the real and the ideal, freedom and

necessity, good and evil, the universal and the individual, like a Socratic aporia, do

not resolve themselves: on the contrary, they create a crisis. The principle of non-

contradiction (inviolable for Schelling) forbids us from settling down in a safe and

inclusive middle point between the two possibilities: rather, the place of contradiction

must be evacuated in a movement into something entirely new, the existential order,

irreducible to the former terms.

The skeptical recognition of the possibility of transcendence the late Schelling

calls ‘the ecstasy of reason’ (Schelling, 1842, p. 203). Here reason is driven by both

internal analysis and external experience to confess its own derivative sufficiency, its

own dependence on that which is not reason. Soul finds itself looking to an outside,

not in need, but in what Levinas calls ‘desire’.39 Let us not make transcendence into a

proven reality � that way lies only onto-theology in its most facile sense. Once again,contemporary French philosophy is helpful in this regard. Clarifying his own figure

for transcendence, ‘saturated phenomena’ � the given which infinitely exceeds every

concept � Jean-Luc Marion writes: ‘The condition of the possibility does not consist

in rendering the [saturated] phenomenon possible by delimiting it a priori from the

impossibilities, but in freeing its possibility by destroying all prerequisite conditions

for phenomenality, therefore by suspending all so-called impossibilities, indeed by

admitting the possibility of certain ones among them’ (Marion, 2002, pp. 235�236) �a deeply Schellingian point. The aporetic structure of Schellingian thinking

preserves, as possibilities, what we have described as the three horizons of

transcendence: the transcendence of consciousness by the ecstatic natural (the

container that exceeds the comprehension of the contained), the transcendence of the

subject by the ecstatic personal (the one who confronts me as irreducibly other), and

the transcendence of the human by the ecstatic divine (the incomprehensible origin

and end of everything). These are not merely conceptual possibilities (though they

are at least that), and emphatically not logical conclusions or deductions. Rather, in

the self-limitation of reason, reason’s acknowledgment that it has created an inside

for itself as a defense from the outside, the possibilities of ecstatic actualities opensup, and, at the same moment, the delimitation of reason by the order of the actual or

the existent is confirmed. For Hegel, by contrast, the opposites are logically resolved

in the third, the concrete universal, the self-mediated notion, which cancels and

preserves every opposition as mediating moments of its own coming into being. The

Hegelian resolution is immanent to the concepts in question, demonstrating precisely

the opposite point to Schelling’s: that there is no outside to reason (‘An out-and-out

Other simply does not exist for Mind’ [Hegel, 1830, p. 1]).

In the end, Schelling saw in Hegel nothing other than the compounding of

instrumental and anthropocentric rationalism. The intuition of a hidden ground

of mind and matter, the displacement of merely human reasonableness in the face of

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something far more sublime, which reveals itself as much in the non-human as in the

human, and above all, the sacred otherness of the person, who is never known on the

order of essence, concept and ideality, who indeed is never really known at all, but

who is recognized in their acts � these are the pillars of Schelling’s thought, and recur

in various forms among Schellingian thinkers. Since the absolute wholly transcends

reason for Schelling, there is no place for a Hegelian apotheosis of ‘the notion’:

merely human rationality always remains infinitely wide of the mark when it comes

to absolute truth. A form of anti-psychiatry announces itself in Schelling avant la

lettre: a refusal to vilify madness on the basis of an overestimation of ordinary

reasonableness. The lifeless understanding of the merely rational man is, in

Schelling’s view, every bit as dangerous as the wild fantasies of the insane.40

Schelling does not hold normal, bourgeois reasonableness in any great esteem. It is

no doubt useful if one wishes to earn a living, but we should not confuse

functionality, the ethics of what Schelling called the Verstandesmensch, with moral

goodness. The good man will necessarily stand apart from his fellows; he will

embody something absolutely unforeseen and unique that will more than likely elicit

the reprobation and scorn of society.41

No doubt, various metapsychologies can be constructed on ‘Jungian’ practice, so

vague and ill-defined are Jung’s theoretical writings. It is not my argument that

among philosophers Jung can only be allied to Schelling. Giegerich’s work is without

question authentically Jungian and perhaps consistent with Jung on the occasions

when Jung himself is consistent. My argument is rather that certain values of Jungian

psychology are best preserved in a Schellingian metapsychology or metaphysics.

After living through the age of idealism (indeed, in many ways, founding it),

Schelling came to the realization that a philosophy that holds itself accountable to

concepts alone is a lifeless and empty fiction. The post-idealist capitulation of reason

before the real, which degenerates in Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche into

a shipwrecking of reason against the absurd, is in Schelling a rational genuflecting

before the sacred mystery of existence. Analytical psychology, insofar as it remains a

dialogue with the unconscious � ‘the unconscious’, which Jung says, ‘is not this thing

or that; it is the Unknown as it immediately affects us’ (Jung, 1916/1957, pref. note),

the unconscious that is not only beneath the ego but also beside and above it (Jung

1946/1954, pp. 403�406), the unconscious that is a site of immediate contact with the

nature within and without us (Jung, 1927, par. 322), and which opens up in analysis

as the abyss between us (Jung, 1954)� such a psychology could indeed be

Schellingian. But to actualize itself as such, analytical psychology must remove the

brackets and risk the question concerning the truth.

Notes

1. J.J. Clarke’s clarification that Jung’s notion of polarity stands in the lineage of Schelling, notHegel, seems to have been, until recently, entirely ignored. See Clarke (1992, pp. 63�64).

2. The key influences on Schelling in this regard were Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702�1782) and Philipp Matthaus Hahn (1793�1790), both central players in the movementknown as ‘speculative Pietism’. On Schelling’s Pietist background, see Matthews (2011,pp. 39�68).

3. See Marquard (1987); Zizek (1996); McGrath (2012).4. See Bishop (2012, p. 343): ‘While Schelling is not a major intellectual source for Jung,

there is nevertheless a distinctively Schellingian dimension to Jung’s thought in generaland to his Red Book in particular’. See also Nicolaus (2012).

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5. See Zizek (1996, pp. 104, 209).6. See Giegerich (1998, pp. 79�102).7. See for example, Jung (1946/54, p. 229).8. The four systems are the Naturphilosophie (1795�1800), the identity system

(Identitatsphilosophie, 1801�1804), the philosophy of freedom (1804�1815), and thephilosophy of mythology and revelation (1820�1854).

9. Without reducing any of them to the status of disciples, and in some cases, in the absenceof clear historical influence, I find Schellingian style in the following twentieth-centurythinkers, some of whom have already been put into discussion with Jung: Berdyaev,Tillich, Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Marion. On Berdyaev on Jung, see Nicolaus (2008).On Tillich and Jung, see Dourley (2008). The best introduction to Schelling in English isDale Snow’s underappreciated Schelling and the End of Idealism (Snow, 1996). For ageneral overview of Schelling’s relevance for dynamic psychology, see McGrath (2010b).

10. The decisional quality to the Schellingian enterprise is crucial and often overlooked inlater speculative empiricist thinkers, such as C.S. Peirce or Alfred North Whitehead.

11. Jung’s scattered references to Schelling have recently been surveyed by Bishop (2012, pp.337�40).

12. See Nicholls and Liebscher (2010, pp. 1�25).13. See Leibniz (1714, par. 20�23): ‘For we experience in ourselves a condition in which we

remember nothing and have no distinguishable perception; as when we fall into a swoon orwhen we are overcome with a profound dreamless sleep . . . it does not follow that in thisstate the simple substance is without any perception. That, indeed, cannot be, for thereasons already given; for it cannot perish, and it cannot continue to exist without beingaffected in some way, and this affection is nothing but its perception. But when there is agreat multitude of little perceptions, in which there is nothing distinct, one is stunned; aswhen one turns continuously round in the same way several times in succession, whencecomes a giddiness which may make us swoon and which keeps us from distinguishinganything . . . . And as, on waking from a stupor, we are conscious of our perceptions, wemust have had perceptions immediately before we awoke, although we are not at allconscious of them’.

14. The passage is also cited by von Hartmann (1893, p. 22), whom Jung claims to have‘read . . .assiduously’ (Jung, 1963, p. 101). Von Hartmann had an excellent knowledge ofSchelling and summarized his position, upon which he himself builds in his Philosophy ofthe Unconscious. Thus Jung’s proximate knowledge of Schelling is likely via vonHartmann. See Bishop (2012, p. 339).

15. See Plato, Republic, Book VI, 507b�509c.16. ‘Such a pre-established harmony of the objective (or law-governed [i.e., nature]) and the

determinant (or free [i.e., subjectivity]) is conceivable only though some higher thing, setover them both, and which is therefore neither intelligence nor free, but rather is thecommon source of the intelligent and likewise of the free. Now if this higher thing benothing else but the ground of identity between the absolutely subjective and theabsolutely objective, the conscious and the unconscious, which part company precisely inorder to appear in the free act, then this higher thing itself can be neither subject norobject, nor both at once, but only the absolute identity, in which is no duality at all, andwhich, precisely because duality is the condition of consciousness, can never attainthereto’ (Schelling, 1800, p. 208).

17. Soon after this period, Schelling will construct another system in which philosophy isdeemed adequate to the absolute (the Identitatsphilosophie), but with the curious effectthat it no longer knows anything about real history. Thus the ideal�real polarity remainsunmediated.

18. A passing reference to Schelling’s late work, ‘Die Philosophie der Mythologie’, inTransformation and Symbols of the Libido, proves that Jung read something of Schelling’slater works as well; see Jung, (1911�1912/1952, p. 29 n). Thanks to Paul Bishop for thereference. In the lectures on the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which occupiedSchelling for the last decade of his career, Schelling develops the thesis, so anticipatory ofanalytical psychology, that the theater of the collective unconscious is the history ofmythology and religion.

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19. See Jung (1946/54, p. 217): ‘That, logically, is also the principle of my own method: it is, atbottom, a purely experiential process in which hit and miss, interpretation and error,theory and speculation, doctor and patient, form a symptosis or a symptoma � and at thesame time are symptoms of a certain process or run of events’. Abductive method wasdefined by C.S. Peirce but its origins are Schellingian. See Peirce (1908); Bradley (2009,p. 59). Cf. Schelling (1842, p. 208). For an example of abductive reasoning in Jung, seeJung (1927, para. 297).

20. See for example Jung (1935, paras. 16, 35); Jung (1920/48 para. 585), note 5.21. It is not even clear how an archetype could in fact function as an a priori category. A

foundational Jungian treatment consists in assisting the client in distinguishing theprojection of the archetypes from the experience of real individuals. By distinguishing thearchetypal from the real, the client learns to withdraw the projection and widen his or hercapacity for reality (Jung, 1938, para. 160). If the archetype is like a Kantian category, thisadjustment cannot happen. If the thing-in-itself is never directly experienced, it cannot becompared with the category. I cannot withdraw the projection of my anima or animusfrom my relationship with my partner if I have no real knowledge of my partner as such bywhich to distinguish what is archetypal and projected from what is a real attribute of theother. Jung would have us at once absolutely encased in our subjectivity and called tobreak through it to reality.

22. For an introduction to Schelling’s voluminous writings on Naturphilosophie, see Schelling(1803), and Schelling (1799, pp. 13�53).

23. This is also the heart of Martin Buber’s ethical-theological objection to Jung. See Buber(1952).

24. Schelling’s sharpest contrast with Hegel concerns the status of the image, the mythic symbol,and the artwork, and their correlative modes of being known: sensation, feeling, andintuition. For Hegel, such ambiguous structures and unclear modes of apprehension must besublated into conceptual thinking � mythology and art are penultimate stages in therealization of absolute knowledge, which occurs only with philosophy. According toSchelling, the ambiguity of the symbol is precisely its advantage over the concept. Byopeningup an indeterminate range of possibilities for thinking, symbols mediate the absolute. ForHegel, the symbol is a primitive form of thought seeking perfection in the concept; accordingto Schelling, we reach up to symbols with our concepts � never replace them. This differencebetween Hegel and Schelling is summed up in their conflict over the significance of art.Where for Hegel art is succeeded by philosophy, which brings explicit intelligibility to the‘picture thinking’ of the artist by explaining it and elevating it to universality, for Schellingart is always above philosophy, suggesting obscure and infinite secrets that forever elude thegrasp of clear thinking (Schelling, 1802�3). Hegel’s position is analogous to Freud’s view thatthe symbol is a condensed and abbreviated thought generated in the psyche when ‘the censor’forecloses the conceptual and linguistic consummation of thinking (Freud, 1900, p. 174�200). Schelling, on the other hand, anticipates Jung’s view that the symbol, as the mediator ofthe unconscious, a ‘known unknown’, can function as ‘the transcendent function’ whichfacilitates the development of soul.

25. See Giegerich (2010, pp. 199�205); Zizek (2007).26. The most concise and coherent account of these two competing visions of nature is

chapter 2 of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. Foucault disabuses us of theassumption that modern reductionist science evolved out of Renaissance hermetic science(alchemy, etc.). To the contrary, Foucault argues that the modern view was acontemporaneous competitor with the hermetic view and had to destroy the latter inorder to get underway with the project of critique, calculation, and control. See Foucault(1966, pp. 17�46). I have developed Foucault’s point in a forthcoming article (McGrath2013).

27. See Giegerich’s debate with Romanyshyn on the psychological significance of globalwarming, which come to a head in Spring 84 (2010).

28. The reader who needs more is directed to Giegerich’s multivolume oeuvre, or, for a quickerfix, the concise and accessible statement of these positions on the website for theInternational Society for Psychology as the Discipline of Interiority (http://www.ispdi.org/). Giegerich’s most systematic presentation of his psychology is his early Germanwork, Animus Psychologie. See Giegerich (1994).

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29. To cite one passage from many possible, see Giegerich (2004, pp. 118�119). ‘Does thoughtstill have a chance in analytical psychology at all? Is thought, is the mind, still the soul ofanalytical psychology, or has our field (which, no doubt, is in the business of selling‘‘soul’’) rather lost its own soul � ‘‘squandered [its] psychological birthright’’? Certainlynot everyone in psychology has to be a serious thinker. One can be a good practitionerwithout being an intellectual. But what does it mean for a field if it does not value theintellect and consider it a foremost concern to bring forth a new generation ofintellectuals? How long can it hold out as a field before it goes to the dogs if it isdepleted of intellectuals? And has analytical psychology not indeed sold out to themarketplace, to popularity? Has it not come down to being no more than a serviceprovider, a provider of health services, on the one hand, and of the gratification ofemotional and ‘‘spiritual’’ needs (the needs of the ego), on the other? If one looks at whatis published by Jungians at large and taught at Jungian training institutes, one isimpressed by the syncretistic mishmash of ideas and techniques stemming from all sorts ofheterogeneous sources. Almost anything seems to go. And anybody who has a license asan analyst feels entitled to voice opinions, free-association like. Where is the field’s innerauthority that would give it its measure and identity, an authority that would be theequivalent of what in an individual’s moral life is called conscience? It seems that there areonly three authorities today ruling in and over the field of analytical psychology, all ofwhich are false ones. There is within the field of analytical psychology the authorityof Jung and what he taught (the dogmatic concept of authority), there is the authority of‘‘what sells’’ (what sells both on the market and in or for the individual Jungianpersonally), and then there is from outside the bureaucratic authority of legal regulationsand the regulations of the professional societies, the authority of mechanical ‘‘qualitymanagement’’ requirements, of mindless evaluation schemes, of peer reviews, of ethicscommittees, and the like. This third form of authority is not restricted to psychology; onthe contrary, its spread is a powerful, even overwhelming, trend in society at large, a trendthat aims at the systematic undermining of personal intellectual and ethical responsibility,on the one hand, and of the respect for the mind, on the other hand, and at replacing bothwith standardized control mechanisms, in other words, at the final victory of fascism, notin its crude literal, but in a refined, sublimated form. Certainly, there is ground for despair’.

30. ‘Concrete universality’ refers to Hegel’s neo-Aristotelian solution to the medieval problemof universals: the dialectic between an ‘empty’ but intelligible universality (an abstractconcept) and a concrete but ineffable particularity (an existing thing) is resolved whenboth are cancelled as moments in the emergence of a concrete universal, a concept thatdoes not float free above the plurality of things, but is mediated and manifest in aparticular thing as the essence or truth of that thing. The first two moments collapse onthemselves � they are inadequate to their own truth. It is not as though an inadequateuniversal is replaced: there is no other mode of universality than universality in and as thetruth of a concrete particular.

31. ‘Sublation’ is the standard English translation of Hegel’s master concept, Aufhebung.Where in ordinary German, aufheben means ‘to abolish’, ‘to annihilate’, ‘to cancel’, Hegelre-thought the concept in the light of the etymology of the word, which literally means ‘toraise up’. Hence we get the classical Hegelian movement of raising something up to ahigher level or mediation by negating its immediate mode of existence. The precisesignificance of Aufhebung divides Hegelians into various camps � some, the happydialecticians, holding that its meaning is primarily positive, for what is cancelled andabolished is originally negative: limitation, one-sidedness, etc. Others, the cynicaldialecticians, hold that the meaning of Aufhebung is that the negative has primacy overthe positive; negativity drives development and is indelibly inscribed into the structure ofbeing. Giegerich belongs among the former, Zizek, the latter. See Giegerich (1998, p. 193):‘The concept of sublation implies that kind of overcoming or superseding that is at thesame time a retention of what is being superseded’.

32. A few citations from Giegerich trenchantly make the point: ‘Only if psychology succeedsin truly freeing itself from the other altogether, truly freeing itself from it so completelythat it is no longer bothered by it and does not have to keep it out, not even be vigilant andself-defensive with respect to it, will it come into existence’ Giegerich (2008, pp. 3�4). ‘But

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for psychology there is no Other. Or the Other that is there is ‘‘the soul’s’’ own other, itsinternal other, that is to say, itself as other’ Giegerich, Miller, & Mogenson (2005, p. 26).

33. See Hegel (1830, p. 2): ‘Mind [Geist] is, therefore, in its every act only apprehending itself,and the aim of all genuine science is just this, that mind shall recognize itself in everythingin heaven and on earth. An out-and-out Other simply does not exist for mind’.

34. See Giegerich (1994, pp. 27�8; 1998, pp. 129�130, 133).35. See McGrath (2008, pp. 37�8).36. See Bowie (1993, p. 128): ‘The basic issue [separating Schelling and Hegel] is whether the

aim of German Idealism, the grounding of reason by itself, may not be a form ofphilosophical narcissism, in which reason admires its reflection in being without being ableto give a validable account of its relationship to that reflection’.

37. See McGrath (2012, chapter 2).38. Compare in this regard Hegel’s most complete account of psychology, the first subsection

of the third part of The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Hegel, 1830, pp. 25�152), with one of Schelling’s more elaborated psychological reflections, the 1810 ‘StuttgartPrivate Lectures’ (Schelling, 1810, pp. 229�243).

39. See Levinas (1969, p. 103): ‘Alongside of needs whose satisfaction amounts to filling avoid, Plato catches sight also of aspirations that are not preceded by suffering and lack,and in which we recognize the pattern of Desire: the need of him who lacks nothing, theaspiration of him who possesses his being entirely, who goes beyond his plenitude, who hasthe idea of Infinity’.

40. See Schelling (1810a, p. 233): ‘What, then, is the foundation [die Basis] of the human spiritin the proper sense of the word foundation? Answer: the irrational [das Verstandlose]. . . .The most profound essence of the human spirit � nota bene: only when considered inseparation from the soul and thus from God � is madness [der Wahnsinn]. Hence madnessdoes not originate but merely surfaces when what is properly nonbeing (i.e., the irrational)becomes an actuality and seeks to attain an essence and existence. In short, it is theirrational itself that constitutes the very foundation of our understanding. Consequently,madness is a necessary element, albeit one that is not supposed to manifest itself orbecome an actuality. What we call the understanding, if it is to be an actual, living, andactive understanding, is therefore properly nothing other than a coordinated madness[geregelter Wahnsinn]. The understanding can manifest itself and can become visible onlyin its opposite, that is, in the irrational. Human beings devoid of all madness have but anempty and barren understanding. Here we find the source for the inverted proverb: nullummagnum ingenium sine quadam dementia [attributed by Seneca to Aristotle: ‘no greatgenius has ever existed without some touch of madness’], as well as for the divine madnessalluded to by Plato and the poets. That is, when madness is ruled by the influence of thesoul [durch Einfluss der Seele beherrscht ist], it is a truly divine madness, and it proves thefoundation of enthusiasm and efficacy in general. More generally, the understanding, ifonly it is a vigorous, living one, is properly speaking but a controlled, restrained, andcoordinated madness [beherrschter, gehaltener, geordneter Wahnsinn]’.

41. Cf. Jung (1946/1954, par. 344): ‘We can say that individuals are equal only in so far as theyare in large measure unconscious � unconscious, that is, of their actual differences. Themore unconscious a man is, the more he will conform to the general canon of psychicbehaviour. But the more conscious he becomes of his individuality, the more pronouncedwill be his difference from other subjects and the less he will come up to commonexpectations. Further, his reactions are much less predictable. This is due to the fact thatan individual consciousness is always more highly differentiated and more extensive. Butthe more extensive it becomes the more differences it will perceive and the more it willemancipate itself from the collective values’.

Notes on contributor

S.J. McGrath, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland, researches,

teaches and writes in the areas of German Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and the Philosophy of Religion.

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