“Here I was Obliged to Leave Off”: The Unfinished Business of Shelleyan Thought and the Errors of Completion

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the philosophical fragments of Percy Bysshe Shelley that have come to be called, after Mary Shelley’s posthumous designation, the “Speculations on Metaphysics,” Percy Shelley attempts to pursue an examination of metaphysics “as the science of all that we know, feel, remember and believe.” Shelley’s discussion, however, precipitately devolves into a harried, even haunted, encounter with a succession of intractable ideas. As Anthony Howe suggests in reading Shelley’s fragmentary essays, Shelley’s thought may begin “with a set of identifiable philosophical procedures,” but it soon ventures “beyond the point where reason and language can claim effective control.” Yet a propensity toward poetic, fractured thought like that identified by Howe cannot wholly account for the fragmentation of Shelley’s philosophical prose. This essay examines the unfinishedness of Shelleyan metaphysics as the first episode in a ghostly turn that was to overtake nineteenth-century poetic thought by mid-century. The aesthetic critic David Masson imagines the creative mind as peopled by ghostly senses, and the aesthetic philosopher E. S. Dallas further abstracts the ghostliness of Shelleyan thought in making artistic objects themselves the repositories of an unknowable, unfinished act of impartation. Shelley’s unfinished thought both invites and foils completion by mid-century aestheticians reimagining his phantasmal metaphysics.