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The Foundation of the Unconscious
- Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche
- Matt Ffytche
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- 05 December 2011
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- 10 November 2011
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The unconscious, cornerstone of psychoanalysis, was a key twentieth-century concept and retains an enormous influence on psychological and cultural theory. Yet there is a surprising lack of investigation into its roots in the critical philosophy and Romantic psychology of the early nineteenth century, long before Freud. Why did the unconscious emerge as such a powerful idea? And why at that point? This interdisciplinary study traces the emergence of the unconscious through the work of philosopher Friedrich Schelling, examining his association with Romantic psychologists, anthropologists and theorists of nature. It sets out the beginnings of a neglected tradition of the unconscious psyche and proposes a compelling new argument: that the unconscious develops from the modern need to theorise individual independence. The book assesses the impact of this tradition on psychoanalysis itself, re-reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in the light of broader post-Enlightenment attempts to theorise individuality.
1 - A general science of the I: Fichte and the crisis of self-identification
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- The Foundation of the Unconscious
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- 10 November 2011, pp 37-74
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Summary
‘Gentlemen’ he would say, ‘collect your thoughts and enter into yourselves. We are not at all concerned now with anything external, but only with ourselves.’ And, just as he requested, his listeners really seemed to be concentrating upon themselves. Some of them shifted their position and sat up straight, while others slumped with downcast eyes. But it was obvious that they were all waiting with great suspense for what was supposed to come next. Then Fichte would continue: ‘Gentlemen, think about the wall.’ And as I saw, they really did think about the wall, and everyone seemed able to do so with success. ‘Have you thought about the wall?’ Fichte would ask. ‘Now, gentlemen, think about whoever it was that thought about the wall.’ The obvious confusion and embarrassment provoked by this request was extraordinary. In fact, many of the listeners seemed quite unable to discover anywhere whoever it was that had thought about the wall. I now understood how young men who had stumbled in such a memorable manner over their first attempt at speculation might have fallen into a very dangerous frame of mind as a result of their further efforts in this direction.
The question now is whether a freedom such as I wish is even thinkable.
There is a certain appeal in beginning this investigation into the languages of modern subjectivity, individuality and the unconscious, with the German radical idealist philosopher Fichte. Though the grounds of most of Fichte’s ideas – the problems he wrestled with and developed – lie, as for many Germans of his generation, in the terrain opened up by Kant’s new critical philosophy, it was Fichte who sought to pull the various elements of the Kantian system into shape around a theory of the ‘I’ (Ich). Kant had famously left his system divided between very well-defined, but ultimately separate component investigations into how the self knows, how it acts morally and what the conditions of judgement are, and had sought, for reasons I will discuss below, to fend off any ultimate attempt to delineate the nature or coherence of the human subject as a whole. Following the lead of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the most important early interpreter and populariser of Kant’s critical philosophy, Fichte sought very explicitly to close the gaps in the system, and to give a full moral and intellectual account of the foundations of selves. Not only this, but he translated Kant’s concern with the technical constitution of knowledge, of the knowing subject, into a much grander theory of the ‘I’ and the production of its freedom and self-determination.
For this reason, various contemporary Fichte commentators have wanted to claim for his work a foundational status in relation to modern conceptions of the self. Most conspicuously, for Dieter Henrich, ‘anyone seeking a suitable concept of “self-consciousness” must go back to Fichte’; for Neuhouser, Fichte’s goal was to develop an account of the nature of subjecthood; and La Vopa finds Fichte’s modern relevance in his capacity to ‘conceptualise the inner sanctum of selfhood’. This renewal of Fichte’s fortunes has filtered through into the margins of psychoanalytic studies. For David E. Leary, it was on to Fichte’s voluntarist interpretation of Kant, corroborated by insights from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, that Freud grafted his evolutionary and dynamic conceptions of the psyche. Frie and Reis, following Henrich, cite Fichte as being the first to demonstrate that the reflection model of self-consciousness is ‘insufficient for explaining the knowledge we have of ourselves’; while for Andrew Bowie, the questions Fichte explores are a mirror image of the difficulties Freud encountered in his attempt to give an account of the overall structure of the psyche in his New Introductory Lectures. Such attributions of continuity are lent force by the fact that Fichte in the 1790s was working with some of the same terms that Freud would later use in his metapsychology – for instance, Ich (I/ego) and Trieb (drive).
Frontmatter
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- The Foundation of the Unconscious
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- 10 November 2011, pp i-v
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5 - Post-idealism and the Romantic psyche
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- The Foundation of the Unconscious
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- 10 November 2011, pp 178-214
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Summary
Pathologies of the idea
I have looked at four very different currents of late German Romantic thought – speculations about primordial history; the rediscovery of negative theology; a science of myth and revelation; and theories concerned with transfigurative states of development. Together, they show the breadth of Schelling’s conceptual turn to the unconscious, and the forms in which this unconscious could be identified in cultural and historical theory. Each of these discourses, as well as centring the self in relation to an unconscious past, also constructs that foundational relation through the psyche. The psychic bonds linking the individual to its unconscious past are of various kinds. They appear in one case as a magical or oracular relation to truth; in another as a loss of consciousness that paradoxically founds the self; in yet another as an inner madness which the self seeks to escape; and lastly as a crisis in self-experience which produces a view into the ‘inner’. These discourses are not entirely separate, and are always capable of evoking each other. Schelling’s Munich lectures of 1827–28 on the ‘System of the Ages of the World’ characteristically skip from one trope to another, circling around a principle of unconsciousness which is constantly surmised, rather than directly, psychologically, investigated.
The intimations of the psyche here are never fully integrated by Schelling into a complete theory of psychic life, and the vocabulary through which he constructs the psyche as a medium of the self is constantly shifting. What remains constant, however, is that the psychic opens up aspects of self-experience which are more directly involved (than normal consciousness) in the ‘essence’ or foundation of the person as individual. From these co-ordinates, as we have seen, there developed a remarkable series of psychoanalytic notions avant la lettre – the unconscious, repression, forgetting, the self’s duality and historicity, an uncanny relation to the past, and the potentiation of the self. It now remains to examine how these various strategies for describing and conceptualising the individuality of the self and its unconscious grounds were integrated with the field of Romantic psychiatry and psychology itself. It is here that the philosophy of the I completes its conversion into a psychology of the unconscious; at the same time these terms of ‘crisis’ and ‘concealed grounds’, dual identities and obscure origins, begin to function concretely within a new, Romantic science of the soul.
Index
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 306-310
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Part I - The subject before the unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 35-36
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Bibliography
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 289-305
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Part III - The psychoanalytic unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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Contents
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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3 - Divining the individual: towards a metaphysics of the unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 99-137
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Summary
One conceives the God outside of oneself with the God within oneself. One cannot know God except through a divine principle.
C’est un ‘dieu’ (il est vrai, un dieu mortel).
By common agreement 1809, the year which saw the publication of Schelling’s essay on Human Freedom, marks a point of no return in Schelling’s intellectual development. It is his last major philosophical publication until the philosophy of mythology of the 1840s, and so brings to a close the phase of his youthful academic brilliance and inaugurates a new period of withdrawal and obscurity. It also marks the inception of a different kind of obscurity – it is the point at which Schelling’s thought becomes overtly mystical, and thus for a long time it has defined the limit of a certain kind of philosophical interest in Schelling the idealist.
This change of direction in Schelling’s work has been associated with a number of different factors. In the first place, and most broadly, it can be set in the context of a trend of ‘dark’ Romanticism affecting German literary and intellectual culture in the early nineteenth century, in which even idealism succumbs to a certain fascination with the gothic, the magical and the mysterious. In terms of Schelling’s own work, the shift follows his move to Bavaria and the Catholic South in 1806. Initially, this was as a member of the Academy of Sciences, but an oration delivered before the Academy in 1807 so impressed the Crown Prince Ludwig (in whose honour it had been given) that Schelling soon attained a relatively independent position as General Secretary of the newly founded Academy of Arts in Munich in 1808. The Munich circle brought Schelling into contact with a very different intellectual culture from that of Jena, an example being his close alliance with Franz von Baader, the quasi-Catholic philosopher, superintendent of the Bavarian mines and (from 1826) professor of theology at the University of Munich, who twinned interests in Naturphilosophie and anthropology with researches into Kabbalism. François Marquet suggests Schelling’s most consequential contact with mysticism happened during the first years of his stay in Munich, while the distinguished Schelling scholar and editor Horst Fuhrmans understood Munich as initiating a ‘great turn’ in his thinking: ‘Into the place of a Goethean world, filled with divinities, shining with beauty, whose centre was a Nature penetrated by Spirit, steps the abyssal world of Böhme reaching deep into the irrational and the dynamics of Night-hood.’
Conclusion
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 274-288
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While psychology always denotes some bondage of the individual, it also presupposes freedom in the sense of a certain self-sufficiency and autonomy of the individual.
Freud released us all to be continually mysterious to ourselves and others.
My goal in this book has not been, like Schelling’s, to ground history in unconsciousness, but to give the unconscious a history. The conventional view of Freud is that he overturned the theory of selfhood, so that the I is no longer master in its own house; but this gesture had already been made many times throughout the nineteenth century, at the very least by Schelling, Schopenhauer, Carus and von Hartmann. For Schelling and Carus this ‘overturning’ of consciousness, self or I paradoxically served the purpose of preserving the notional autonomy of the individual. Much of the work of this book has been directed towards shifting our understanding of the unconscious, backwards from the epoch of psychoanalysis, to encompass this earlier history in which the concept is rooted, and its connections to German Romantic and idealist precursors. This has meant tracing the way the unconscious became an increasingly central term, and finally an explicit principle, in the post-Kantian philosophy of the subject. At the same time I have wanted to establish how unconsciousness and its correlates become inscribed more broadly within the early nineteenth-century human sciences, and specifically in the technical descriptions of the psyche in Romantic psychology.
In this account of the movement of the unconscious between philosophy and psychology, from a theory of the subject to a theory of the psyche, it has transpired that the unconscious is both an object of empirical enquiry and a solution to the dilemmas of describing the ontology of the individual. It is ambiguously both part of the experience of selfhood and, theoretically, a way of representing the autonomy of selfhood, a building block within modern theories of human identity. Perhaps for this reason, the drive towards the theorisation of autonomous selves in modern culture has placed an increasing weight of attention on the self’s unconscious interior – ‘our ownmost and most genuine nature’; ‘the inward forces which make [human nature] a living thing’; the ‘heart of our being’.
Acknowledgements
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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6 - Freud: the Geist in the machine
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 217-254
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The barriers suddenly lifted, the veils dropped, and everything became transparent … Everything seemed to fall into place, the cogs meshed, I had the impression that the thing now really was a machine that shortly would function on its own.
[Y]ears afterwards, they create the repetition in their dreams, but in their dreams they leave out the hands that held them, so that now they hover and fall freely.
The last three chapters have shown how a particular set of ideas constellate around Schelling’s project of grounding the identity of the individual. His drift away from the terms of an absolute idealism, in search of concepts with which to underpin the autonomous nature of the self, led him to forge a new philosophical vocabulary centring on the psyche, the unconscious, a tension over the past and forgetting, and the enigma of (ontological) birth. If an omnipotent God or an absolute structure of reason threatened to make the individual into a posterior effect of a prior set of determining causes, the unconscious indicated to Romantic philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists ‘precisely our ownmost and most genuine nature’. What does it mean, then, when these terms from the post-idealist philosophy of freedom re-emerge in the project of psychoanalysis? Do they still function in the same way? Not only does psychoanalysis stake out its own ground for a science of the soul, but Freud undoubtedly also centred his account of the person on a similar constellation of terms: the unconscious, the past and a traumatic relation to origins. Ellenberger suggests that Freudian psychoanalysis is in any case ‘a late offshoot of Romanticism’, while for Odo Marquard ‘psychoanalysis is a disenchanted Romantic Naturphilosophie, that’s why it thinks in the manner of this Naturphilosophie’. In order to understand the hold psychoanalysis gained over the human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century, should we be setting it not in the context of the 1900s, but in the much wider frame of problems emerging already in the 1800s? What would psychoanalysis look like viewed from this perspective?
Alternatively one could argue that looking backwards may give us ‘background’ histories of the significance of such notions – the unconscious, the trauma of individuality – before they become established as psychoanalytic ones. But in psychoanalysis they are given new functions and new points of reference and we may usefully draw a line in the history of the topic dividing the 1890s from the 1810s. Far from having any power to elucidate the psychoanalytic theory of the psyche, the relationship is now reversed and idealist forebears are more likely to crop up as case studies in neurosis. Ronald Britton, former president of the British Psychoanalytical Association, relates the case of Miss A, who ‘was imprisoned in a subjective monistic world exactly like that envisaged by such philosophers as Schelling, in his “Transcendental Idealism”’. Not only has Schelling’s complex labour to introduce tension and freedom into absolute notions of system been reduced to a caricature of the kinds of position he eventually found untenable, but all sense of Schelling’s connection with the development of the unconscious itself has been effaced. Such retranscriptions of the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis are not a late twentieth-century development; they go back to the early years of the movement. Alfred von Winterstein, in the second issue of Imago, noted that ‘every consistently developed idealism leads to a solipsism, to which even non-psychoanalysts have to ascribe a pathological character. Despite the importance of his ideas, an idealist system such as Fichte’s lies on this path’.
Introduction: the historiography of the unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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We want to make the I into the object of this investigation, our most personal I. But can one do that?
The historiography of psychoanalysis needs radical revision. This book poses the question: where does psychoanalysis begin? Which is to ask both when can we begin with it historically, and how exactly does it emerge? The conventional answer to those questions has, for many decades, been the one provided by Freud himself: that it begins in Vienna, out of a combination of Freud’s private clinical work with neurotics, his collaboration with Josef Breuer in the treatment of hysteria, and the period of depression which inaugurates his own self-analysis in the 1890s, all of which fed into the genesis of the Interpretation of Dreams – the work which for many marks the opening of the ‘Freudian’ century. More recent scholarship has greatly extended our knowledge of Freud’s formative contexts, including the publication of his correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, and studies of the intellectual ambience of the Viennese medical school and Freud’s earliest work on neuro-anatomy, as well as the crucial impact of his period of study with Charcot in Paris. Psychoanalysis, evidently, has broader roots than Freud’s own self-investigation. Two reassessments, George Makari’s Revolution in Mind and Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul, both draw on such revisions in psychoanalytic scholarship and shift the focus of study away from Freud’s own biography and towards colleagues, collaborators and the broader cultural climate. Even so, there remains a seemingly unshaken consensus that psychoanalysis is born out of the melting pot of late nineteenth-century Viennese modernity. According to Zaretsky, ‘we have still not historicized psychoanalysis’, but he takes this to mean exploring the breadth of its appeal and its contradictory impact on twentieth-century culture. Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is, for Zaretsky, still the greatest attempt to ‘grasp psychoanalysis historically’. Equally, for Makari, what is needed is a lateral broadening of the frame of inquiry in order to identify the many different fields from which Freud ‘pulled together new ideas and evidence… to fashion a new discipline’. None of these works, with the exception of Sonu Shamdasani’s ground-breaking reassessment of the work of C. G. Jung, pay any attention to the longer-range history of the ‘unconscious psyche’, or tie Freud’s work back into the earlier nineteenth century’s fascination with the obscure tiers, functions and forces at work below the level of consciousness, the secret histories of the self. It is as if these notions emerge wholly unannounced in the 1890s.
7 - The liberal unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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What has been manifesting itself as either a structural instability over genetic sequence in the psyche, or equally an ambivalence over the nature of unconscious wishes, wears a different face if we simply ask: how clearly defined are the general features of selfhood for Freud at this stage? Immediately we are confronted with a polyphony of voices – and I mean not the eventual subdivision of ‘internal’ voices within the psyche into id, ego and superego, but the multiple versions of the self which emerge from the conflicting interpretations of Ich and Ich-heit. Straight off, we can identify at least one major dichotomy in the ‘I’, which is the way it refers in The Interpretation of Dreams to both that principle which is identified with rational consciousness, but also to what we might call the selfhood of the self as an independently motivated being. The first of these covers a range of different assumptions: the Ich can imply for Freud an abstract ‘reality principle’, a kind of objectivity we might say, though one grounded in general experience. It is this association that emerges from Freud’s description of the primary and secondary processes which he will elaborate further in a paper of 1911, ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’. With a slightly different kind of emphasis it can refer to the civilised aspect of consciousness. Bruno Bettelheim suggests that ‘when Freud names the reasonable, conscious aspects of our mind the I, we feel subtly flattered that our real I is what we value most highly in ourselves’. More strongly than this it can imply rationalism: a specific adherence to transparency and logic in conscious thinking, contrasted with the anti-logic of the unconscious. Eric Fromm, for instance, draws this implication out when illustrating Freud’s model of mind: ‘If all that is real were conscious, then indeed man would be a rational being; for his rational thought follows the laws of logic.’ But these comprise only one set of meanings for the I, all of which are to some extent related to each other.
Part II - The Romantic unconscious
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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2 - Natural autonomy: Schelling and the divisions of freedom
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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Every organic product carries the reason of its existence in itself, for it is cause and effect of itself.
There are no native sons of freedom.
As with Fichte, the issue of freedom cuts across the whole of Schelling’s work and its innumerable frames of reference. The Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (originally published in 1797, hereafter Ideas) begins with the statement, ‘Philosophy is throughout a work of freedom’; his more Fichtean work The System of Transcendental Idealism early on asserts that ‘freedom is the one principle on which everything is supported’; in 1809 he published his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom; and, according to Michael Vater, all of Schelling’s later work, from the 1815 Ages of the World to the lectures on mythology and religion of the 1840s to 1850s, show him to be ‘in search of a principle of freedom and actuality not confined to and determined by reality as merely conceived’.
In this light, the long-standing Anglo-American tendency to associate Schelling primarily with the philosophy of art or a poetic vision of nature, wrongly separates him from the ideological anxieties of liberalism and nineteenth-century social philosophy. As with Fichte, the question that plagued Schelling was once more how to fit individuality and unity, freedom and structure together into a convincing post-Enlightenment philosophy of man. As his biographer Gustav Plitt noted, ‘the goal of his whole life’s work was the ethical renewal of the people’. When Schelling received a summons to Berlin in the 1840sto take up the chair of philosophy which Hegel had occupied at his death ten years earlier, the Prussian government hoped he would be able to stem the threatening rise of Hegelianism amongst the Berlin students. However, the announcement of his lecture course on ‘The Philosophy of Revelation’, for all its orthodox and Christian overtones, in fact sent out a message to the youthful intelligentsia of Europe that Schelling had something epoch-making to reveal. He now promised to unveil the ‘positive’ philosophy of actuality, which the previous phases of idealism had only transcendentally critiqued. It was this expectation that drew a spectacular array of auditors, including the young Kierkegaard, Friedrich Engels, Jakob Burkhardt and Mikhail Bakunin, all of them hoping to hear how idealism’s philosophy of freedom could be made real.
4 - The historical unconscious: the psyche in the Romantic human sciences
- Matt Ffytche, University of Essex
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- 10 November 2011, pp 138-177
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We will now enter the way of times …
[T]he true in history is not in the present …
The last chapter concentrated on Schelling the metaphysician. It explored the way in which he wrestled with notions of the system, of ‘wholeness’ and the ‘absolute’, in an attempt to make them permeable or even subservient to ideas of selfhood, individuality and freedom. Ultimately, in order to secure these terms of freedom and self-development, he shifted decisively away from idealist apprehensions of objectivity and casual connection, towards a paradigm in which the ‘absolute’ was necessarily and foundationally displaced from presence (though somehow also operative within it) being either latent within the world or obscurely beyond it. This move effectively establishes an idealism of the unconscious. But in the Ages of the World, the latent and the beyond are also both modes of the book’s explicit subject, time: latency as the past or as the future still to arrive. The opening of the text itself attempts to make a new start in metaphysics by revealing it to be a mode of historical inquiry: ‘Why … has it been impossible until now that philosophy – which is history with respect to its name and content [that is, ‘history’ from Greek ιστορια, knowing by inquiry] – be history with respect to its form as well?’
If Schelling’s interest in the genesis of life proved to have ulterior motives, so his concern with the past and history is not historical in the usual sense of the term. Schelling was not interested in gathering historical information about either the progress of civilisation or the organic differences between civilisations and epochs, and though his later philosophy of the 1840s centred on a structural investigation of classical and pre-classical mythology, its motive, as we shall see, was not strictly historiographical. Indeed, the psychiatrist and existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, in his major study of Schelling, gave a shortlist of methodological implications of the term ‘history’ which were absent from Schelling’s work. These include ‘historical knowing of the world’ and ‘the possibility that something that becomes historically lost, can become present again’.