Recent Schelling scholarship has suggested that there is something ‘monstrous’ about Schelling’s Absolute. As Theodore George notes, Schelling identifies tragedy as the highest art because of its ability to ‘remedy the shortcomings of philosophy’ through its capacity to capture both the conflict between the reasoning subject and the objective world and their ultimate unity. Tragedy, George points out, represents a unity ‘marked much more by strife, contradiction, and incompleteness than anything else’.25 It is this monstrous dimension of the Schellingian Absolute that Poe taps into in his horror stories – stories that consummate the Schellingian reunion of subject and object through disgust, an affect predicated on contradiction and the precariousness of boundaries.
Poe’s debts to Schelling are better understood if we consider Poe’s incorporation of certain metaphysical ideas into his poetry, specifically Eureka (1848), and look for a moment at the direct correspondences between the writing of Schelling and Poe. As previously noted, in all likelihood Poe derived much of his knowledge of Schelling’s philosophy from British Romantic writers such as Coleridge, who praises Schelling effusively: he describes the German thinker as responsible for a veritable ‘revolution in philosophy’. Biographia Literaria contains a number of distinctly Schellingian passages, including near plagiaristic paraphrases of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism:
Now the sum of all that is merely objective we will henceforth call nature, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is subjective, we may comprehend in the name of the self or intelligence.26
Like Schelling, Coleridge maintains that ‘during the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs’, and that they therefore become ‘coinstantaneous and one’ in an ‘intimate coalition’. Like Schelling he searches for absolute truth, ‘self-grounded, unconditional, and known by its own light’. He thus seeks to combine idealism with ‘the truest and most binding realism’ in order to avoid exile to what he calls ‘a land of shadows’ that ‘surrounds us with apparitions’, just as Schelling unites nature-philosophy and transcendental philosophy.27
Poe singles out Schelling in his ‘Exordium’ in the 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine, describing Schelling as one of several German authors worthy of respect for their ‘more careful elaboration, their greater thoroughness, their more profound analysis’ than their British counterparts.28 Poe’s own metaphysical views can be slippery, but what he discloses is consistent with the sort of universe that Schelling and Coleridge describe. Perhaps the closest Poe comes to espousing his metaphysics in detail is the long, often opaque prose poem Eureka, which expresses various ideas strongly reminiscent of Schelling’s Absolute and which evinces the very mystical character Poe criticises elsewhere. In Eureka, Poe writes that the universe began with an ‘Original Unity of the First Thing’ and that its seeming diversity or heterogeneity disguises the ‘sublimity of its oneness’.29 He stresses the difficulty of capturing certain ideas, noting that the idea of ‘infinity’ cannot actually lead a mind to grasp infinity, but rather constitutes ‘the representative but of the thought of a thought’ (p. 22). Poe thus hopes that his poem will function as a kind of ‘mental gyration of the heel’ (p. 9), turning readers on the summit of a figurative Mount Ætna in a kaleidoscopic blurring-together of the seemingly differentiated universe. It is back into this ‘original Unity’ (p. 141), Poe claims at the poem’s end, that the tendency towards collapse will inevitably pull the universe till everything is drawn into ‘a final agglomeration of all things’ (p. 132).
The agglomeration into which, Poe suggests, everything will converge possesses a pantheistic quality that resembles the Absolute of Schelling or the immanent, pantheistic God of Spinoza, since in it ‘the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness’ (p. 143). What we call ‘The Universe’, Poe writes, is in fact but the ‘present expansive existence’ of a ‘Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion’ – all organisms, all life and, indeed, everything in the universe, even those things we might ‘deny life for no better reason than that [we] do not behold it in operation… are really but infinite individualizations of Himself’ (p. 142). God may currently be individualised into diverse manifestations, ‘the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe’ (p. 141), but this differentiation is an illusion which the spiritual and physical gravitational collapse of everything into itself will banish. Poe’s vision of this apocalyptic future, in which everything is drawn back together, is described in terms of the unthinkable. He writes of ‘unfathomable abysses’, from which ‘unimaginable suns’ will glare, and describes the entire process, the universe’s ‘appetite for oneness’, as an ‘inevitable catastrophe’ (p. 136), even while at the same time this sinking ‘into Nothingness’ and ‘Material Nihility’ (p. 139) will also give way to a throbbing ‘Heart Divine’ (p. 139) and the renewal of the universe.
Eureka’s status within Poe’s critical framework is difficult to discern, but he offers the poem ‘not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truths’ (p. 5), closely linking metaphysical truth and the aesthetic in a way one might not expect from the curmudgeonly advocate of art for art’s sake. It is given ‘to those who feel rather than to those who think’ (p. 5), suggesting that affect and feeling, here, are superseding rational inquiry. Early in the text, Poe offers an account of intuition that specifically touches on a two-worlds metaphysics, describing two philosophers, Aries and Hog. Aries, using a priori philosophy, Poe directly associates with noumena, while Hog’s system ‘depended on phenomena’ (p. 11). But so great is the admiration of all for Hog, Poe writes, ‘that a virtual stop was put to all thinking, properly so called’, and ‘no man dared utter a truth for which he felt himself indebted to his soul alone’ (p. 12), with anyone who defied this ban being branded a ‘theorist’ and ignored (p. 13). By ‘cultivating the natural sciences to the exclusion of Metaphysics’ (p. 14), Poe suggests, we neglect the power of intuition, of speculation and imagination. Godhead, the primal unity, may seem at first beyond our comprehension, since ‘in order to comprehend what he is, we should have to be God ourselves’ (p. 28), but of course, for Poe – and for Schelling, as for Spinoza before him – ultimately, we are.
If we take Eureka as an earnest description of Poe’s metaphysical views, or at least a tentative one, we can see a resemblance between the universe he envisions and the one that Schelling’s philosophy describes. Poe’s cosmos is fundamentally monist, and his Divine Being, like Schelling’s Absolute, suffuses what seem like individual subjects and the non-human world, ultimately collapsing the two into one another. Poe’s description of the forces of ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ as matter itself (p. 138) closely accords with Schelling’s insistence that even seemingly dead or inert matter consists of ‘a space limited by attractive and occupied by repulsive forces’.30