Introduction

Why are Romanticism, Schelling's philosophy, and Jung's analytical psychology crucial to developing Romantic metasubjectivity? The Introduction addresses these foundational questions by articulating the fundamental distinction between Idealism's drive for systemic closure and Romanticism's insistence that neither consciousness nor systemic knowledge can ever be made fully transparent to itself. This focus on the productive incompletion of systemic knowledge is reflected in Romanticism's focus on the fragment genre (Schlegel, Novalis) as a literary expression of the tension between system and freedom in any body of knowledge. It is also reflected in Romanticism's influence on modern language as a force which unworks disciplines of knowledge. This tension between system and freedom is ultimately the basis for what Schelling calls the absolute subject: a nonmolar force organising knowledge without being reduced to that knowledge. This organisational force, which Novalis called “The Self of one's self,” is at the heart of Romantic metasubjectivity. The Introduction then reads Romanticism's systemic (in)completion forward to the dissociationist tradition in psychology, of which Schelling was an important precursor and Jung is the most prominent twentieth century figure. The Introduction ends with a necessary propaedeutic of Jung's relationship to Freud and the core concepts of analytical psychology, as well a discussion of Jungian thought's embattled relationship to contemporary theory, which Romantic metasubjectivity hopes to improve.