Angus Nicholls

Anglo-German mythologics: the Australian Aborigines and modern theories of myth in the work of Baldwin Spencer and Carl Strehlow:

This article examines the respective interpretations of the Arrernte tribe of central Australian Aborigines adopted by the English biologist Baldwin Spencer and the German missionary Carl Strehlow. These interpretations are explored in relation to the broader theoretical debates in the theory of myth that took place in England and Germany in the latter half of the 19th century. In Britain, these debates were initially shaped by the comparative philology of F. Max Müller, before being transformed by the evolutionism of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer. The article shows how the research of Spencer and Strehlow was both influenced by and exerted an influence upon these theoretical debates, before assessing their research findings in relation to the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the theories of myth offered by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Hans Blumenberg.

Introduction: thinking the unconscious

© Cambridge University Press 2010. In the entire world one does not speak of the unconscious since, according to its essence, it is unknown; only in Berlin does one speak of and know something about it, and explain to us what actually sets it apart. So wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1873, as part of his ironic response to the success of the Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869), written by the Berlin philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. If the influence of a concept can be gauged by the way in which it is received by the public at large, if not in academic circles, then Hartmanns volume, which ran to some eleven editions during his lifetime alone and was seen by some as introducing an entirely new Weltanschauung, might be regarded as marking one of the pinnacles of the career of das Unbewusste (the unconscious) during the nineteenth century. Although Hartmanns understanding of the unconscious was, like Freuds, subjected to a scathing critique at the hands of academic philosophy and psychology, it nevertheless took some half a century or so for Freud to supersede Hartmanns public role as the chief theorist and interpreter of the unconscious for the German-speaking public. Today the concept of the unconscious is arguably still first and foremost associated with Freud and with his successors such as Carl Gustav Jung and Jacques Lacan; in short: with psychoanalysis in general.

“The Core of this Dark Continent”: Ludwig Leichhardt’s Australian Explorations

As the German economy underwent rapid processes of industrialisation during the second half of the nineteenth century, the need for this type of economic emigration waned. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans were the largest non-English-speaking migrant group in Australia. Immigration agents, supported by the bounty schemes provided by the colonial governments, could make a good living by attracting Germans to Australia, a situation that led to promotional publications such as Karl Ludwig Wilhelm Kirchners Australien und seine Vortheile fur Auswanderer . In Leichhardts last letter to Schmalfuss written on European soil, he remarks that while the Australian coast is a known and settled region, the Australian interior still rests in complete darkness. Continuing in this vein, Leichhardt proclaims that this interior, this core of the dark continent is my goal, and I will never relent until I have reached it.. Keywords:Australia; dark continent; German; immigration agents; nineteenth century; Schmalfuss; Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt

Friedrich Max Müller: The Career and Intellectual Trajectory of a German Philologist in Victorian Britain

The Oxford-based German comparative philologist, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), ignored for much of the time since his death, attracted renewed scholarly interest in the last few decades of the twentieth century. This article summarizes some of the existing research on Müller, while also reintroducing him as the most influential comparative philologist in Victorian Britain. Subjects examined include Müller’s early life and education, his focus on Sanskrit studies, his career in Oxford, his role as the first President of the English Goethe Society, his debates with Darwin and others on the origin and nature of language, and his broader influence on anthropological and religious questions in Victorian intellectual life.

Rethinking the Unconscious

Since the publication of Thinking the Unconscious (2010), something that we already suspected when we began planning the book has been confirmed: namely, that to publish a book on the unconscious means addressing a variety of academic audiences with often entirely different expectations. In our introduction to the volume we maintained, contra the position of Henri F. Ellenberger in his Discovery of the Unconscious, that one cannot assume that the unconscious is a pre-existing phenomenon that was ‘discovered’, and that theories of the unconscious set out to elucidate by way of description. It is equally likely, we argue, that theories of the unconscious invent the ‘objects’ that they go on to describe: this, indeed, is what our title Thinking the Unconsciousmeans (3). It also of course means that different theories of the unconscious – elaborated by writers with differing philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, academic or even religious orientations and agendas – will create different ‘objects’, which will in turn require different descriptions. In short: the intellectual tradition to which one belongs will shape what one takes ‘the unconscious’ to be and what a book on this subject should do. The reception of our book has in fact proven this to be the case. To date it has received nine reviews, which have appeared in journals devoted to intellectual history and the philosophy of science, to sociology, to German studies and to psychoanalysis. We have been delighted with the range and depth of these reviews, which have – at least up until the most recent case, that of Wouter J. Hanegraaff in this journal – been generally positive and appreciative but also critical in constructive ways. Of particular interest have been the various subjects that reviewers have seen our book as failing to consider. Brett A. Fulkerson Smith, writing in HOPOS, expected a paper on Johann Gottlieb Fichte (168–9); Ulrich Plass’s review in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association saw our book as neglecting ‘the oedipal tensions and ruptures that constitute all tradition’ and wanted more emphasis on Freud and his influences, but agreed

Between Natural and Human Science: Scientifi c Method in Goethe's 'Noten und Abhandlungen zum West-östlichen Divan'

Abstract This paper offers a new reading of Goethes Noten by considering them in relation to contemporary debates in comparative literature, as well as in terms of recent attempts in literary theory to formulate a form of crosscultural literary studies along natural scientific lines. Goethes Noten, it is argued, emerged from his work on natural scientific morphology, in that they seek to define universal genres or literary types, while also endeavouring to retain an emphasis on the cultural specificity of literary works. This attempt at a cross-cultural literary theory is seen as constituting Goethes essentially positive contribution to German Orientalism.

In the embrace of the swan : Anglo-German mythologies in literature, the visual arts and cultural theory

Myths determine the way cultures understand themselves. The papers in this volume examine culturally specific myths in Britain and the German-speaking world, and compare approaches to the theory of myth, together with the ways in which mythological formations operate in literature, aesthetics and politics - with a focus on the period around 1800. They enquire into the consequences of myth-oriented discourses for the way in which these two cultures understand each other, and in this way make a significant contribution to a more profound approach to intercultural research.

Review Symposium: The Fremdling of Teleology, or: On Roger Smith’s Being Human Roger Smith, Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. viii + 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-7190-7498-1

Roger Smith’s Being Human is, when considered against the backdrop of Anglo-German intellectual history, an important and timely book. In the Anglo-German context, its central and significant achievement is to reconsider debates in the philosophy of science that seemed to have played themselves out in the 19th century, and to show that these debates continue to have important implications both for the human sciences and for the natural sciences – indeed for the academy in general. It would be reductive to suggest that the debates to which I am referring, and of which I will give a brief account in a moment, were exclusively ‘Anglo-German’; they were in fact European in the broadest sense, although admittedly dominated by British, German and French contributions. Yet the central dualism which underlay these debates – positivism versus hermeneutics, or, to use the language of Dilthey, mechanistic or causal explanation [erklären] versus interpretative understanding [verstehen] – arose to a large extent from a confrontation between British (and to some degree French) empiricism on the one hand and German Idealism on the other. Here one also needs to take into account Roger Smith’s own hermeneutical position as a British researcher who has spent his career in Britain working on something resembling the project from which this journal takes its name: the History of the Human Sciences (see, for example, Smith, 1997). As an Anglophone researcher, Smith is situated in a culture in which the meaning of ‘science’ has (at least since the middle to late 19th century) been

The inadequacy of life: observations on Adorno: Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. ISBN 0 7456 3108 8 (hbk), 667 pp

. . . unfailingly boil down to mere repetition, whether of what was there beforehand or of categorical forms, then the thought which, for the sake of the relation to its object, forgoes the full transparency of its logical genesis, will always incur a certain guilt. It breaks the promise presupposed by the very form of judgement. This inadequacy resembles that of life, which describes a wavering, deviating line, disappointing by comparison with its premises, and yet which only in this actual course, always less than it should be, is able, under given conditions of existence, to represent an unregimented one. If a life fulfilled its vocation directly, it would miss it. (Adorno, 2005: 81)