The abominable absolute
To read Poe metaphysically is not to deny that he can also be read psychologically or sociopolitically, or to privilege a metaphysical reading over these other, perfectly viable accounts, but rather to tease out a particular version of Poe’s fiction that would become extremely important for later authors of weird fiction. Such authors look back to Poe as an important precursor to their own often more overt efforts to speculatively uncover some version of ultimate reality. For Lovecraft in particular, Poe is the ‘opener of artistic vistas’, which reveal ‘the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss’. For the likes of Lovecraft, then, Poe is a visionary whose fiction possesses a cosmic dimension, one of ‘festering horror’ and ‘horrible half-knowledge’, of a non-human, mind-independent reality which presses close upon us but from which we are normally cut off.12
The full extent of Poe’s familiarity with German philosophy has been subject to scholarly debate, but there is a growing understanding of Poe as receptive to some of Schelling’s ideas. Certainly, Germanic elements and references permeate Poe’s work both explicitly and stylistically: Charles Baudelaire called Poe’s mind at once ‘profoundly Germanic’ and ‘sometimes deeply Oriental’.13 Poe himself was sometimes ambivalent about his ‘Germanic’ influences, insisting that the horror of his tales was fundamentally of the soul rather than of Germany per se.14 He likely derived some of his knowledge of German philosophy (including Schelling) in translation and second-hand, through sources such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Thomas de Quincey, and various periodicals including The Dial and Blackwood’s Magazine. Recent reassessments of Poe and Schelling have taken care not to attribute to Poe an expertise with German culture and philosophy that did not exist. Rather, as Sean Moreland and Devin Zane Shaw argue, ‘Poe’s reception, or misprision of Schelling’s ideas had a much more vital influence on his thought and writing’ than has been previously suggested.15
Aspasia Stephanou argues that Poe’s stories reflect some of Schelling’s philosophy. Stephanou suggests that Poe’s stories of dying women intertwine nineteenth-century medical discourses around consumption with Schellingian philosophy, reflecting what she calls a ‘dark vitalism’. Stephanou argues that Poe’s interpretation of the metaphysics of unity diverges substantially from the account of the transcendentalists. While the transcendentalists sought to ‘elevate spirituality’, Poe rather sought to expose what Stephanou calls ‘the dark life writhing behind the mask of spiritualism and theological mysticism’.16 In other words, Poe perceives in the Schellingian Absolute something disturbing rather than uplifting. The approaches of scholars such as Moreland, Shaw and Stephanou have built a foundation for a metaphysical Poe, but none of these critics has considered the relationship between Poe’s writing, Schellingian metaphysics and the affect of disgust, which I argue is the key to the ways that Poe’s texts convey the unthinkable. My intervention in the study of Poe is not simply to link Poe with Schelling but to explicate the ways that disgust specifically, when approached using a cognitivist aesthetics, enables a kind of metaphysical speculation – even if this is not, strictly speaking, part of Poe’s primary authorial intention. My contention in this chapter is that Poe’s tales – intentionally or otherwise – create aesthetic encounters with the Absolute.
Schelling has recently undergone something of a philosophical reappraisal, inspiring speculative realists such as Iain Hamilton Grant, who in Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (2006) uses Schelling as his philosophical foundation for thinking through a new naturphilosophie that moves beyond correlationism, or what Grant calls a ‘two-worlds metaphysics’, accommodating our modern world of climatic disaster, energy shortages and the other assorted apocalypses unleashed by the Anthropocene. As Grant puts it, Schelling is, in a sense, a ‘contemporary philosopher’ precisely because he ‘provides a rare instance of the as yet mostly untried consequences of exiting the Kantian framework which has held nature in its analogical grasp for the two hundred years since its inception’.17 Quite apart from Poe’s own interest in Schelling, then, or the body of scholarship that has begun to link the two, Schelling would be relevant to a metaphysical reading of weird fiction for his own contributions to philosophising about the Absolute.
What, then, is the Absolute for Schelling? Put most simply, the Absolute is ‘the coincidence of an objective with a subjective’ as Schelling writes in System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). The ‘objective’ is the world of nature, the ‘subjective… on the contrary, the self, or the intelligence’. As Schelling observes, these two concepts are ‘mutually opposed’, and it seems difficult to imagine a system that does not grant one or the other a kind of primacy over its opposite: we must either ‘make an intelligence out of nature, or a nature out of intelligence’.18 It is Schelling’s goal to solve this contradiction, a contradiction with implications for what Grant calls Kant’s two-worlds metaphysics. As Thacker writes of Schelling’s philosophy: ‘for Schelling, the key intuition was that the self that thinks about the world is also part of the world, and it is a mistake to presume that there is first a separately existing self that then turns towards and reflects on the world as an object’.19
Like the other German idealists – most notably Fichte and Hegel – Schelling’s philosophy builds on Kant’s, but where Kant maintains a staunch separation between phenomena and noumena, the German idealists approach this split as a crisis to be solved. Schelling is committed to a kind of monism in which everything – human beings, objects, nature – is ultimately part of a single whole, and in which there is ‘identity’, in the philosophical sense, between the knowing subject and the object of thought. As Schelling succinctly puts it in the second edition of Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1803): ‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.’20 Unlike Fichte, whose system does away with things-in-themselves altogether and posits the subject itself as producing the world, Schelling attempts to incorporate elements of Spinoza’s pantheistic philosophy into his own thinking, noting that Spinoza was ‘the first who, with complete clarity, saw mind and matter as one, thought and extension simply as modifications of the same principle’ – or, as Schelling puts it in his later, unfinished work, The Ages of the World (1815), Spinoza was the most cognisant of ‘a dark feeling of… primordial time’, a unity which heals the wound made by Descartes when he ‘lacerated the world into body and spirit’.21 Schelling recuperates the supposedly ‘dogmatic’ philosopher’s idea of a single, monist nature – Spinoza’s pantheistic God – while taking pains to avoid some of the potentially deterministic consequences he sees in Spinozist monism. In this sense, Schelling is neither an idealist in the subjective, immaterialist meaning of the term as attributed to philosophers like George Berkeley, nor a Fichtean transcendental idealist making the subject the centre of his philosophy at the expense of the world-in-itself. He is trying, rather, to unite on the one hand what he calls a ‘transcendental