In The Dark Ground of Spirit, S.J. McGrath aims to explain how Schelling's philosophy produces a concept of the unconscious that both resonates with various strands of twentieth-century psychoanalysis and deviates from these modern theories in significant ways. The book is a unique contribution to the fields of philosophy, religious studies, and the history of psychology, as McGrath seamlessly manoeuvres between speculative metaphysics, esoteric theology, and psychodynamic theory in order to argue that Schelling is a singular thinker of the chaotic ground of human and divine personality.

In order to unearth the conception of the unconscious from Schelling's writings, McGrath approaches Schelling as a philosopher who, despite never settling on one coherent system, consistently philosophises according to certain logics and with an emphasis on particular concepts. Thus, McGrath sees in Schelling: a habitual fascination with polarity, finitude, and contingency (2–4), a utilisation of Neoplatonic logic, which distinguishes him from Hegel, Lacan, and Žižek (25) and an abiding desire to understand the ground of consciousness in a manner that would exceed the explanations offered by transcendental philosophy. This does not mean that McGrath ignores the changes Schelling's thought undergoes; on the contrary, he interprets these changes as genuine developments, such that Schelling is depicted not as indecisive but rather committed to the tortuous task of conceptualising pre-conscious spirit.

In his introductory chapter, McGrath argues that ‘Jacob Boehme's alchemico-theosophical psychology, modified and given metaphysical grounding by Schelling, is the origin of the psychodynamic notion of the unconscious’ (1–2). McGrath acknowledges that the Leibnizian and Kantian contributions to psychoanalytic theory are significant (viz. the role of petites perceptions and ‘dark representations’ in the constitution of conscious understanding). Yet in his view, these contributions do not intimate what is the more interesting idea, namely, the notion that mind depends upon a fundamental and obscure drive (44). According to McGrath, Schelling inherits the idea of a volitional dimension of unconscious mental activity from Boehme and is the first of the German idealists to emphasise this dimension.

Chapter 2 deals explicitly with the Boehmean theosophy that motivates significant aspects of Schelling's middle period and plays a significant background role throughout Schelling's career. McGrath argues that Boehme's essential idea is the thought of God's intrinsic duplicity that follows from God's desire to reveal himself, to differentiate himself from himself in order to become reunited in revelation (49). What makes this thought so groundbreaking is that the desire to be revealed is understood as a drive that precedes existence. Moreover, this self-duplicating/self-revealing activity is not imposed by some necessity either external or internal to God. Rather, God freely decides to become dual and thereby revealed, and, McGrath argues, this distinguishes Boehme's theosophy from the Hegelian and early Schellingian perspectives that understand God's self-alienation and subsequent reconciliation in terms of an immanent, logical necessity. With a vision of divine freedom at its heart, this is a theology that exalts material nature and the personality of God, avoiding both the gnostic dismissal of the mundane in favor of transcendent immateriality and the impersonal divinity of immanentist pantheism.

McGrath begins his sustained reading of Schelling's work in the third chapter, where he considers the nature and identity philosophies. He locates the seeds of Schelling's conception of the unconscious in the subjective dimension of nature, the pre-rational spirit that permeates all matter: ‘It is the spirit in nature, or better, the spirit of nature, nature spiritualised and given subjectivity, but of an impersonal quality, like the subjectivity of a plant or an irrational animal’ (82). The volitional aspect of this unconscious spirit is prefigured in Schelling's use of the ancient concept of the world soul, which acts for Schelling as the unifying principle that binds the forces of attraction and repulsion constitutive of material being (90). In his discussion of the identity philosophy, McGrath again highlights an implicit notion of the unconscious, here in the pre-subjective intellectual intuition that precedes consciousness (99–105). More importantly, however, the identity philosophy, which takes all difference, multiplicity, and individuation to be mere appearance, provides Schelling with the necessary insight that will operate as the departure point for the philosophy of freedom: ‘if there had not been a breach in the absolute, there would be no things, no finite reality, and no philosophers who could search for knowledge of the absolute’ (105). The philosophy of freedom will, therefore, attend to this originary ontological breach responsible for bringing a finite world into being.

Chapter 3 ends with a reading of the Clara fragment, which McGrath follows Steinkamp in dating to 1810, the same year Schelling delivered the ‘Stuttgart Seminars’.Footnote ¹ The Clara, a dialogical meditation on melancholy, reveals Schelling's second insight essential to the philosophy of freedom: beings have their being, beings are, thanks to an irreducible longing. This brings Schelling explicitly into the conceptual terrain of Boehme, such that drive is now the fundamental concept employed to answer the question about the originary breach in being:

Since this third chapter deals with the Weltseele as well as the nature-spirit-soul triad presented in the Clara, it is especially helpful in addressing the relation between psychology and pneumatology by articulating the specific place of psyche in Schelling's thought. The inclusion of the Clara interpretation is made all the more fruitful, since McGrath expertly discusses Schelling's predilection for the soul without shying away from the occult elements of the dialogue.

Similarly, McGrath does not attempt to circumvent the theological dimensions of the Freedom essay or the Ages of the World drafts. These texts occupy McGrath's fourth chapter. McGrath is careful to distinguish his reading of Schelling's middle period from those of Hogrebe and Gabriel who see in the philosophy of freedom a logic of predication that accounts for the necessarily withdrawing ground of pronominal being. On McGrath's reading, such an interpretation is too formalistic and fails to engage with the intrinsically theological force of these works (122–124). The aim of Chapter 4 is to elucidate Schelling's ‘speculative psychology of dissociation’. McGrath tells us that what is crucial for all dissociationist psychologies—from animal magnetism to Freud's topographic model of mind—is that personality ‘is not monolithic but plural, a network of relations among alternative centers of cognition and desire’ (120–121). For the middle Schelling, this dissociationist psychology comes by way of the realisation that God's ground must be distinct from his existence, that God must become plural insofar as his ground withdraws from and gives rise to his existence, and that this accounts for the originary difference within the absolute and thus for the genesis of finite beings. The concept of dissociation is significant, since it is by way of dissociating from his ground that God—and, in turn, human consciousness—becomes manifest.

McGrath examines the implications of this thought in regard to the human person by considering how Schelling radicalises Kant's conception of the transcendental origin of good and evil. In Schelling's Freedom essay, this origin is articulated as an explicitly unconscious decision that determines one's character or disposition (Gesinnung):

McGrath reads the Ages of the World in terms of the same radical freedom of unconscious decision but focuses on the macrocosmic level of God's free decision to dissociate from himself and thereby become a person. Here we encounter a reading of Schelling's algebraic ‘formula of the world’ (Weltformel), which, according to McGrath, is at play throughout the last thirty-five years of Schelling's thought (141). The logic of this formula is considerably difficult to grasp, and McGrath's contribution in this regard is invaluable.

In detailing the logic of the Weltformel, McGrath shows that the transitions from first to second potency and from second to third potency are not dialectical in a Hegelian fashion. According to McGrath, ‘the doctrine of potencies is crafted as an alternative to Hegelian dialectics, which Schelling believed violated the freedom of the absolute, the principle of contradiction, and the contingency of the real’ (146). McGrath distinguishes this ‘logic of potentisation’ from Hegel's dialectical logic in at least three ways. First, McGrath says, in Schelling the potencies are not moments that either slide into one another or express the latent truth of their others. Rather, they remain the one-sided potencies that they are (146). Second, the formula does not begin with abstraction or immediacy but with a determinate will—a dark will to nothing. Finally—and this is perhaps the most important distinction—the logic of potencies is set into motion thanks to an illogical (or, at least, pre-logical) act of freedom—a freedom free from necessity (146).

However, the way McGrath follows Schelling's self-understanding on this point—and this method of treating Hegel from a late Schellingian standpoint is pursued throughout the book—might overshadow important resonances between Hegelian and Schellingian dialectics. If, as McGrath writes, the formula of the world ‘illustrates the containment of the lower potencies in the higher’, then the supposedly strict opposition between potencies is undermined by something quite similar to a movement or power of sublation (149). Indeed, since the first potency A = B (ground/ipseity) and the second potency A² (existence/alterity) are unified in the third potency A³ (personality/love), A = B and A² do not remain in a simplistic, perpetual struggle with one another, but their struggle is rather productively negotiated in A³ which is both self- and other-affirming. In other words, the third potency, containing the first and second, is a potency of genuine reconciliation. Furthermore, the third potency does not cancel the others without remainder, but rather lets them struggle in their opposition (at least at the lower levels of potentisation). To be sure, there is an irreducible difference between a reconciliatory moment and a reconciliatory potency, and McGrath, following Edward Beach, rightly distinguishes Schellingian Erzeugung from Hegelian Aufhebung. But even taking these differences into account, it might have been beneficial had McGrath dwelled on Schelling and Hegel's shared defence of love as the ontological concept which unifies ipseity and alterity. For this unifying concept may be seen as the decisive idealist gesture that makes Schelling and Hegel two of the most provocative philosophers for our time.

But whatever similarities can be seen between Schelling and Hegel at the level of the potencies (and A³ in particular), McGrath is certainly convincing on the main point: the notion of the unground (B), absolutely detached from the logic of potentisation, is fundamental to Schelling's originality. Indeed, what most acutely differentiates the formula of the world from speculative logic is the answer to the question, ‘Why are there beings rather than nothing?’ Whereas for Hegel the ontological slipperiness of being and nothing necessitates their becoming-determinate being, for Schelling the decision ‘to be or not to be’ is wholly dependent upon an act of groundless freedom. The dialectical logic of potentisation follows necessarily from an absolutely unnecessary and irrational decision on the part of God: ‘God freely introduces lack into being and sets the sequence of potencies into self-actualisation. The contingency, anarchy, and spontaneity of the actualisation of first potency undergirds the logical necessity of each of the successive potencies’ (146).

Chapter 4 concludes with a section on Schelling's late philosophies of mythology and Christianity. Here McGrath maps the logic of the potencies onto Schelling's understanding of the Trinitarian God, and he sees a proto-Jungian conception of the collective unconscious in Schelling's analysis of polytheism. Taking chapters 3 and 4 together, we see that McGrath tackles a vast range of texts, from the nature philosophy of the late 1790s to the philosophies of mythology and revelation. And although McGrath's emphasis throughout this study is on the middle period, which exhibits Schelling's most theosophically-inspired texts, these final passages on the late philosophy are in no way superfluous. Rather, McGrath reads in Schelling's transition from a historical immanentism to a more traditional conception of a transcendent God the fulfillment of the middle Schelling's regard for God's personality:

Throughout the book, McGrath draws the reader's attention to various differences between Schelling and twentieth century psychoanalysis, often in an effort to wrest the Schellingian unconscious from Žižek's influential interpretation. The most compelling of these arguments occurs in Chapter 3, where McGrath distinguishes the Freudian death drive from the negative force of individuation in Schelling's nature philosophy (91–95). But McGrath's most explicit engagement with twentieth-century psychology is postponed until the last chapter of the book. This fifth and by far shortest chapter acts as a conclusion in which McGrath draws upon his hermeneutic analyses in the previous chapters in order to sketch a Schellingian metapsychology that would differ from those of Freud, Jung, and Lacan.

Jung's place in McGrath's book is particularly interesting, given that the German idealist-psychoanalytic nexus is typically engaged from a Freudo-Lacanian perspective. The Dark Ground of Spirit begins with a quotation from Jung, and McGrath's Schelling seems to have far more in common with Jungian analysis than he does with either Freud or Lacan. Often when McGrath is distinguishing Schelling from Freud, for example, Jung is brought in as a twentieth-century proponent of the pre-sexual libidinal metaphysics found in Schelling (cf. 93–95). But McGrath also wants to affirm Schelling's singularity in relation to analytical psychology, which he sees as too optimistic in regard to the fate of psychical life (186). Perhaps more importantly, for McGrath, the telos of Schellingian libido is absent in Jung. Whereas the Jungian drive to existence finds its end in individuation, drive goes further in Schelling, dialectically becoming love for others (182). Unfortunately, much of this comparative analysis seems cursory, and these essential differences are not fleshed out as they could have been had this concluding chapter been longer.

This leads to a more general problem with the concluding chapter. McGrath maintains that Schelling's philosophy of personality is ‘a theory of libido in its own right, one, we might add, that has never developed into a practice of psychotherapy, although there is no reason why it could not’ (181). But McGrath has already shown that Schelling's thought of the unconscious branches out in multifarious, at times incompatible, directions. Indeed, the fact that Schelling resonates so strongly with Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, while differing from them in essential ways, implies not so much that Schelling is one theoretician of the psyche amongst others, as that his philosophy is pregnant with myriad possibilities for thinking psyche, none of which crystalises as the Schellingian conception of psychical life. This does not make for a smooth transition to a clinical psychology, and I am not convinced that such a Schellingian psychoanalysis is a real world possibility.

As a whole, however, this book is undoubtedly a welcome contribution to Schelling studies. McGrath writes, ‘We have said that our intention in this book is not to systematise Schelling's oeuvre through the notion of the unconscious’ (179), but despite his modest claim, McGrath does precisely this. The Dark Ground of Spirit does not systematise Schelling's thoughts on the unconscious in the sense of closing off the potential for novel readings, but it gathers together Schelling's various attempts at systematicity by following the evolution of this central concept. During a resurgence of Schelling interpretation that generally aims to justify Schelling as a modern thinker freed from his perpetual mischaracterisation as an irrationalist, McGrath forces the reader to reckon with the mystical heritage inherent in some of Schelling's most influential thoughts. That is not to say McGrath defends an irrationalist reading of Schelling, but rather that he delves into Schelling's esotericism and demands that a proper understanding of the philosopher attend to his theological inspirations. In connecting Schelling's thought to Boehme, Lurianic Kabbalah, Paracelsian alchemy, and animal magnetism, McGrath rightly, and in a most commendable manner, demands that we consider how we read the esoteric inscribed in the Schellingian text.